ival for a longer or shorter time
after death.]

When we ask how it comes about that dead men have so often been raised
to the rank of divinities, the first thing to be observed is that all
such deifications must, if our theory is correct, be inferences drawn
from experience of some sort; they must be hypotheses devised to explain
the unperceived causes of certain phenomena, whether of the human mind
or of external nature. All of them imply, as I have said, a belief that
the conscious human personality, call it the soul, the spirit, or what
you please, can survive the body and continue to exist in a disembodied
state with unabated or even greatly increased powers for good or evil.
This faith in the survival of personality after death may for the sake
of brevity be called a faith in immortality, though the term immortality
is not strictly correct, since it seems to imply eternal duration,
whereas the idea of eternity is hardly intelligible to many primitive
peoples, who nevertheless firmly believe in the continued existence, for
a longer or shorter time, of the human spirit after the dissolution of
the body. Now the faith in the immortality of the soul or, to speak more
correctly, in the continued existence of conscious human personality
after death, is, as I remarked before, exceedingly common among men at
all levels of intellectual evolution from the lowest upwards; certainly
it is not peculiar to adherents of the higher religions, but is held as
an unquestionable truth by at least the great majority of savage and
barbarous peoples as to whose ideas we possess accurate information;
indeed it might be hard to point to any single tribe of men, however
savage, of whom we could say with certainty that the faith is totally
wanting among them.

[Sidenote: The question of immortality is a fundamental problem of
natural theology in the wider sense.]

Hence if we are to explain the deification of dead men, we must first
explain the widespread belief in immortality; we must answer the
question, how does it happen that men in all countries and at all stages
of ignorance or knowledge so commonly suppose that when they die their
consciousness will still persist for an indefinite time after the decay
of the body? To answer that question is one of the fundamental problems
of natural theology, not indeed in the full sense of the word theology,
if we confine the term strictly to a reasoned knowledge of a God; for
the example of Budd