Still later, in the Talmud, the conception of a future life is clothed with details. Paradise is depicted as a region filled with sweet odours, while hell is an unclean place, thick with mire and smoke. According to the Talmud, in the life beyond the grave, “there is neither eating nor drinking; the good sit there with crowns on their heads and see God in bliss.”[169] At the date of the Cabalistic philosophy, the Jews had embraced the doctrine of transmigration of souls, and had come to believe that the spirit of Adam had entered David and would pass on to the Messiah. Some human souls passed into the bodies of animals, into the leaves of trees, or even into stones. It is plain that the idea of a future life was a part of the Jewish religion. It has been said, also, that the idea of a future life was absent from the religions of the Chinese. Büchner,[170] for instance, who came to be almost the official representative of the materialism of the second half of last century, asserts that “Buddhism, that famous religion, the most widespread and one of the most ancient, which counts among its followers nearly a third of the inhabitants of the earth, ignores completely the immortality of the soul.” Haeckel, also, in the “Riddle of the Universe,” a volume that sums up the materialism of the end of the last century, makes a similar statement. “The higher oriental religions include no belief whatever in the immortality of the soul; it is not found in Buddhism, the religion that dominates 30 per cent. of the entire human race; it is not found in the ancient popular religion of the Chinese, nor in the reformed religion of Confucius which succeeded it.”[171] This question demands a somewhat closer investigation. It has been thoroughly proved that the basis of the ancient religion of the Chinese was no more than an extreme development of ancestor-worship. Every important event in family affairs was accomplished “in the presence of the ancestors.” It was a bond with relatives beyond the grave. As in other cases of animism and ancestor-worship, meats were offered to the dead, and objects were buried with them to be of service to them. According to A. Réville,[172] the Chinese as a whole “fully recognised the conception of personal survival after death; if there were no other reason for stating this, it would be enough to point out that offerings of real food would be incomprehensible, if made to persons supposed to be non-existent or reduced to complete unconsciousness.” As they offer to the dead, food and clothing and precious things, it is plain that the Chinese think of life beyond the grave as not very different from this life. “The dead maintain their interest in the affairs and persons and food that was familiar to them.”