In some such way as this, the persuasion of an independent, continued existence of the soul after the death of its body was developed into a belief in the divinity and immortality of the soul. In all such cases it was almost inevitable that the naive distinction between "body" and "soul", natural to simple-minded peoples and individuals, should harden into an _opposition_ between the two. The descent from the heights where the ecstatic and emancipated soul enjoyed its thrilling delights was too sudden; the body could not but seem a burden and a hindrance, almost an enemy of the heaven-born soul. Disparagement of the ordinary existence of every day, a turning aside from this life--these are the natural results of such an advanced spiritualism, even though it may have no speculative basis, when it influences so profoundly the religious temperament of a people as yet untroubled by the subtleties of a scientific culture. A trace of such a depreciation of the earthly life of mankind in comparison with the joys of a free spirit-existence is to be found in what Herodotos and other narrators tell of certain Thracian tribes[75\8] who receive the new-born among their kinsfolk with mourning, and bury their dead with joyful acclamation, for the latter are now beyond the reach of all pain, and are living "in perfect happiness".[76\8] The cheerfulness with which the Thracians faced death in battle[77\8] was explained by the persuasion which they held that death was only an entrance into a higher life for the soul. They were even credited with a real desire for death, for to them "dying seemed so fair".[78\8] § 5 Further than this the Thracians--who never quite outgrew a sort of semi-animated torpor of the intellect--could not go on the way marked out for them. The seed of a mystical form of religion that existed in the ecstatic dance-orgies of Dionysos-worship never came to fruition. We never feel with them that we are being taken beyond the region of vague unconscious emotion; it is but a passing illumination that for a moment of wild excitement reveals the near presence of overwhelming spirit-forces. Not until the flames of such ecstatic worship were fed and nourished by a people of more independent and developed spiritual life, could fitful suggestions be welded into deep and {266} enduring thought. Reflexion upon the nature of the world and of God, the changing and deceptive flow of appearance with the indestructible One Reality behind it; the conception of a divinity that is One, a single light that, divided into a thousand rays and reflected from everything that is, achieves its unity again in the soul of man; such thoughts as these, allied to the dim half-conscious impulse of an enthusiastic dance-worship, might allow the pure waters of the stream of mysticism to run clear at last, freed from the turbid and unsatisfying enthusiasm of popular religious practices.