are, however, with a beyond within ourselves, the fact of mutability and mortality has occasioned a transformation of our entire estimate of life and has led us by the hand to a Pisgah view which we should never have got if there had been no invasion of death into our world. “It is a venerable commonplace,” as Professor Schiller of Oxford has said, “that among the melancholy prerogatives which distinguish man from the other animals and bestow a deeper significance on human life is the fact that man alone is aware of the doom that terminates his earthly existence, and on this account lives a more spiritual life, in the ineffable consciousness of the ‘sword of Damocles’ which overshadows him and weights his lightest action with gigantic import. Nay, more; stimulated by the ineluctable necessity of facing death, and of living so as to face it with fortitude, man has not abandoned himself to nerveless inaction, to pusillanimous despair; he has conceived the thought, he has cherished the hope, he has embraced the belief, of a life beyond the grave, and opened his soul to the religions which baulk the king of terrors of his victims and defraud him of his victory. Thus, the fear of death has been redeemed, and ennobled by the consoling belief in immortality, a belief from which none are base enough to withhold their moral homage, even though the debility of mortal knowledge may debar a few from a full acceptance of its promise.”[4] The early animistic views of survival, which were the first forecasts of a life beyond, were due not so much to the consciousness of the moral grandeur of life as to _actual experiences_ which gave to primitive man a confident assurance of some form of life after the death of the body. Dreams had an important part in leading man to this naïve and yet momentous discovery. In a world which had no established criterion of “reality,” the experiences of vivid dreams were taken to be as real as any other experiences, and in these dreams the dreamer often found his dead ancestors and friends and tribesmen once more present with him, active in the chase or the fight and as real as ever they were in life. Trance, hallucination, telepathy, mediumship, possession, are not new phenomena; they are very primitive and ancient. These things are as old as smiling and weeping. These psychic experiences had their part to play also in giving the early races their belief that the dead person still existed though in an altered and attenuated form as an _animus_ or “spirit” or “shade.” This empirical view of survival, built on actual experiences, was more or less incapable of advance. No further knowledge could be acquired and the constructions fashioned by imagination, in reference to “the scenery and circumstance” of the departed soul, could satisfy only an uncritical mind. These constructions were, too, often crude and bizarre, and tended, in the hands of priests, to hamper man’s moral development rather than to further it.