But side by side with this naïve belief in the continued existence of the body after death, which survives into the inhumational stage of evolution, goes another and apparently irreconcilable belief in a future resurrection. Strictly speaking, of course, if the body is still alive, there is no need for any such special revivification. But religious thought, as we all know, does not always pride itself upon the temporal virtues of logic or consistency; and the savage in particular is not in the least staggered at being asked to conceive of one and the same subject in two opposite and contradictory manners. He does not bring the two incongruities into thought together; he thinks them alternately, sometimes one, sometimes the other. Even Christian systematists are quite accustomed to combine the incongruous beliefs in a future resurrection and in the continued existence of the soul after death, by supposing that the soul remains meanwhile in some nondescript limbo, apart from its body--some uncertain Sheol, some dim hades or purgatory or “place of departed spirits.” The savage is scarcely likely to be more exacting in this matter than our doctors of divinity. It is the common belief of the second or inhumational stage, then, that there will be at some time or other a “General Resurrection.” No doubt this General Resurrection has been slowly developed out of the belief in and expectation of many partial resurrections. It is understood that each individual corpse will, or may, resurge at some time: therefore it is believed that all corpses together will resurge at a single particular moment. So long as burial persists, the belief in the Resurrection persists beside it, {061}and forms a main feature in the current conception of the future life among the people who practise it. How, then, do we progress from this second or inhumational stage to the third stage with its practice of burning, and its correlated dogma of the Immortality of the Soul?