lly in
joint acts of worship, internally in the feeling that the worshippers
are bound together by it and united with the object of their worship.
This feeling of communion is not a mere article of intellectual belief,
nor is it imposed upon the members; it is what they themselves desire.
{44} Hoeffding states the truth when he says that in its most
rudimentary form we encounter "religion under the guise of desire"; but
in saying so he omits the essence of the truth, that essence without
which the truth that he partially enunciates may become wholly
misleading,--he omits to say, and I think he fails to see, that the
desire which alone can claim to be considered as religious is the
desire of the community, not of the individual as such, and the desire
of the community as united in common worship. The idea of religion as
a bond of spiritual communion is implicit from the first, even though a
long process of evolution be necessary to disentangle it and set it
forth self-consciously. Now, it is precisely this spiritual communion
of which man becomes conscious in his craving after reunion or
continued communion with those who have departed this life. And it is
with the history of his attempts to harmonise this desire with what he
knows and demands of the universe otherwise, that we are here and now
concerned.

So strong is that desire, so inconceivable is the idea that death ends
all, and divorces from us forever those we have loved and lost awhile,
that the lower races of mankind have been pretty generally driven {45}
to the conclusion that death is a mistake or due to a mistake. It is
widely held that there is no such thing as a natural death. Men do of
course die, they may be killed; but it is not an ordinance of nature
that a man must be killed; and, if he is killed, his death is not
natural. So strong is this feeling that when a man dies and his death
is not obviously a case of murder, the inference which the savage
prefers to draw is that the death is really a case of murder, but that
the murder has been worked by witchcraft or magic. Amongst the
Australian black fellows, as we are told by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen,
"no such thing as natural death is realised by the native; a man who
dies has of necessity been killed by some other man or perhaps even by
a woman, and sooner or later that man or woman will be attacked;"
consequently, "in very many cases there takes place what the white man,
not seeing beneath th