therefore, evidently no intention on the part of the living of taking the remains of the dead with them on their return home;[35\1] and this cannot be the object of cremation. It will be necessary to look for some principle more in accordance with primitive modes of thought than such merely practical considerations. Jakob Grimm[36\1] suggested that the burning of the corpse might have been intended as an offering of the dead man to the gods. Among {21} the Greeks this could only mean the gods of the lower world; but nothing in Greek belief or ritual suggests such a grim intention.[37\1] The real purpose aimed at in cremation is not so far to seek. Since the destruction of the body by fire is supposed to result in the complete separation of the spirit from the land of the living,[38\1] it must be assumed that this result is also _intended_ by the survivors who employ the means in question; and consequently that the complete banishment of the psyche once and for all into the other world is the real purpose and the original occasion of the practice of cremation. Isolated expressions of opinion among the nations that have practised the custom do, as a matter of fact, indicate as its object the speedy and entire separation of soul from body.[39\1] The exact nature of the intention varies with the state of belief about the soul. When the Indians turned from the custom of burying their dead to that of burning them, they were actuated, it appears, by the idea that the sooner and more completely the soul was freed from the body and its limitations, the more easily would it reach the Paradise of the Just.[40\1] Of the purifying effects of the fire implied in this conception, the Greeks knew nothing until the idea was revived in later times.[41\1] The Greeks of the Homeric age, innocent of any such "Kathartic" notion, thought only of the destructive powers of that element to which they entrusted the body of their dead, and of the benefit that they were conferring upon the soul in freeing it by fire from the lifeless body, thus adding their assistance to its own efforts to get free.[42\1] Nothing can destroy the psyche's visible counterpart more quickly than fire. If, then, the body is burnt and the most treasured possessions of the dead man consumed along with it, no tie remains that can detain the soul any longer in the world of the living.