The hope of immortality is an essential feature of practically all modern religions. Even those oriental religions which lack its clear presence postulate a dim kind of personal continuity. Buddhism has always been a puzzle to the optimistic Westerner who is in love with himself and does all his thinking in terms of personality and personal relations. The idea of re-birth in accordance with a rigid moral law is alien to his traditions; while the impersonalism of the whole process leaves him cold. It is not untrue to the facts to call Buddhism an atheistic religion. Yet it is a religion because it postulates the objective efficacy of moral categories. Freedom from the wheel of re-birth is gained by the Eightfold Path of right beliefs and right acts. Enough of the idea of a soul and enough of the idea of immortality exists even in this religion to make these assumptions important. But what have modern science and philosophy to say about these age-old ideas? Is the soul any longer in favor? Here, again, an historical approach is worth while, because it gives the proper perspective. If we can understand why people in the past developed and fostered these ideas, we can judge their reasons pretty objectively, even though we realize that we have been strongly affected by the beliefs erected upon them. {139} Destroy the roots of a tree and the foliage will wither before long. Has science dug so sharply around the roots of these old beliefs that they are bound to decay? The subject is an extremely interesting one. A belief in some sort of an after-life is wide-spread. It is common knowledge that the American Indians spoke of a happy hunting-ground in the West, in which the soul of the warrior would rejoice in abundance of game. Other peoples thought of the abode of the dead as in the East where the sun arises. Still others taught that it was in the sun or the other heavenly bodies, or underneath the earth in a subterranean region. We are seldom able to determine the motives which led to these varying locations. All sorts of beliefs flourished in the Mediterranean basin a few centuries before our era; but the drift of religious thought was moving rapidly toward a passionate acceptance of another life somewhere in the heavens. Immortality was taking on a more vivid coloring and was being transformed from a passive survival to an event of marked religious significance. New ethical motives were attaching themselves to an old tendency and modifying it almost beyond recognition. The sentiments and rituals built up around the ideas of sin and salvation were reflected into the next world and created the vision of a heaven and hell. What a rich field this was for the mythopeic imagination to exploit! And what an interesting sociological fact is it that the human imagination has always been more fertile in its descriptions of hell than in its descriptions of paradise!