The Historical group now brings very clearly and certainly before us the striking non-universality, the startling lateness, and the generally strange fitfulness and apparent unreasonableness characterizing the earliest stage of belief in the soul’s heightened, or at least equivalent, consciousness after death. (1) Now with respect to the Non-Universality of the doctrine, it is true that, in China, Confucianism is full of care for the dead. “Throughout the Empire, the authorities are obliged to hold three annual sacrifices for the refreshment and rest of the souls of the dead in general.” “It is hardly doubtful that the cultus of Ancestors formed the chief institution in classical Confucianism, and constituted the very centre of religion for the people. Even now ancestor-worship is the only form of religion for which rules, applicable to the various classes among the Emperor’s subjects, are laid down in the Dynastic Statutes.” And Professor De Groot, from whom I am quoting, gives an interesting conspectus of the numberless ways in which the religious service of the dead penetrates Chinese life.[191]--Yet we hear of Kong-Tse (Confucius) himself (551-478 B.C.), that, though he insisted upon the most scrupulous execution of the three hundred rules of the then extant temple-ceremonial, which were no doubt largely busy with the dead, and though he said that one should sacrifice to the spirits as if they were present, he designated, in several of his sayings, occupation with theological problems as useless: “as long as we do not know men, how shall we know spirits? As long as we do not understand life, how should we fathom death?” And to questions relative to the spirits and the dead, he would give evasive answers.[192] Thus the founder of the most characteristic of the Chinese religions was without any clear and consistent conviction on the point in question. In India we find, for Brahmanic religion, certain unmistakable Immortality-Doctrines (in the sense of the survival of the soul’s self-consciousness), expressed in the hymns of the _Rig-Veda_.--But already, in the philosophizings of the _Upanishads_, we get a world-soul, and this soul’s exclusive permanence: “to attain to true unity, the very duality of subject and object is to disappear. The terms Atman and Brahman here express the true Being which vivifies all beings and appearances, and with which cognizing man reunites himself whilst losing his individual existence.”[193]