Only people who believe in the transmigration of souls burn their dead--the Hindus and, in Burma, the monks of Buddha. They see no objection to the destruction of the body because the soul is migratory, and has passed into another. What is left after death is but the "empty shell." Therefore do Hindus and Buddhists cremate, whereas Christians and Mahommedans bury. Nor does rejection of creed alter this instinct. Intellectual France boasts of its freedom from religion. But _is_ it free? Has it outgrown the instincts that are the root of religion? One certainly it has not yet done, for secularists are buried just as believers are, usually with the same rites. And even if the funeral be secular, the body is buried, not burnt. Why do they shrink from cremation if reason is to be the only guide? The creed is outworn but the roots of faith are never dead. CHAPTER XXIX. OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. Thus are the heavens of all religions explanations to materialise, as it were, the vague instincts of men's hearts. The Mahommedan's absolutely material garden of the houris, the Christian semi-material heaven, the Buddhist absolutely immaterial Nirvana, are all outcomes of the people's capability of separating soul from body. These heavens are just as the dogmas of Godhead, or Law, or Atonement, but the theory to explain the fact, which is in this case the desire for immortality. And in exactly the same way as the theories of other matters are unsatisfying, so are these theories of heaven. The desire for immortality is there, one of the strongest of all the emotions; but the ideal which the theologian offers to the believer to fulfil his desire has no attraction. The more it is defined the less anyone wants it. Heaven we would all go to, but not _that_ heaven. The instinct is true, but the theory which would materialise the aim of that desire is false. No heaven that has been pictured to any believer is desirable. It is strange to see in this but another instance of the invincible pessimism of the human reason. No matter to what it turns itself it is always the same. I have read all the Utopias, from Plato's New Republic to Bellamy's, from the Anarchist's Paradise to that of the Socialists, and I confess that I have always risen from them with one strong emotion. And that was, the relief and delight that never in my time--never, I am sure, in any time--can any one of them be realised. This world as it exists, as it has existed, may have its drawbacks. There is crime, and misfortune, and unhappiness, more than need be. There are tears far more than enough. But there is sunshine too; and if there be hate there is love, if there is sorrow there is joy. Here there is life. But in these drab Utopias of the reason, what is there? That which is the worst of all to bear--monotony tending towards death.