The theme here broached is a vast one, and I hope to pursue it hereafter by describing the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead, as these have been found among the other principal races of the world both in ancient and modern times. Of all the many forms which natural religion has assumed none probably has exerted so deep and far-reaching an influence on human life as the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead; hence an historical survey of this most momentous creed and of the practical consequences which have been deduced from it can hardly fail to be at once instructive and impressive, whether we regard the record with complacency as a noble testimony to the aspiring genius of man, who claims to outlive the sun and the stars, or whether we view it with pity as a melancholy monument of fruitless labour and barren ingenuity expended in prying into that great mystery of which fools profess their knowledge and wise men confess their ignorance. J. G. FRAZER. Cambridge, _9th February 1913._ CONTENTS Dedication Preface Table of Contents Lecture I.--Introduction Natural theology, three modes of handling it, the dogmatic, the philosophical, and the historical, pp. 1 _sq._; the historical method followed in these lectures, 2 _sq._; questions of the truth and moral value of religious beliefs irrelevant in an historical enquiry, 3 _sq._; need of studying the religion of primitive man and possibility of doing so by means of the comparative method, 5 _sq._; urgent need of investigating the native religion of savages before it disappears, 6 _sq._; a portion of savage religion the theme of these lectures, 7 _sq._; the question of a supernatural revelation dismissed, 8 _sq._; theology and religion, their relations, 9; the term God defined, 9 _sqq._; monotheism and polytheism, 11; a natural knowledge of God, if it exists, only possible through experience, 11 _sq._; the nature of experience, 12 _sq._; two kinds of experience, an inward and an outward, 13 _sq._; the conception of God reached historically through both kinds of experience, 14; inward experience or inspiration, 14 _sq._; deification of living men, 16 _sq._; outward experience as a source of the idea of God, 17; the tendency to seek for causes, 17 _sq._; the meaning of cause, 18 _sq._; the savage explains natural processes by the hypothesis of spirits or gods, 19 _sq._; natural processes afterwards explained by hypothetical forces and atoms instead of by hypothetical spirits and gods, 20 _sq._; nature in general still commonly explained by the hypothesis of a deity, 21 _sq._; God an inferential or hypothetical cause, 22 _sq._; the deification of dead men, 23-25; such a deification presupposes the immortality of the human soul or rather its survival for a longer or shorter time after death, 25 _sq._; the conception of human immortality suggested both by inward experience, such as dreams, and by outward experience, such as the resemblances of