n the journey is ended. A
vision is to him an instance of the same thing. He sees a friend,
who, he afterwards learns, was far from him at the time, and he
judges that it was the spirit of his friend which visited him. Thus
there arises in his mind the conception of a human spirit which is
able to leave the body and dwell at a distance from it. It is called
by various names,--the shade, the image, the heart, as perhaps when
Elisha says his heart went with Gehazi when he went to meet Naaman
the Syrian (2 Kings v. 26), the breath, the soul. When the breath or
spirit goes away and stays away (in spite of efforts made to bring it
back) the man dies. But the spirit is not dead. It has gone away and
is staying somewhere else. The spirit resembles the body in shape,
but it is of a thin and light consistence, and is able to move about
and to pass through the smallest openings, to make unpleasant noises,
and to cause its presence to be felt in a variety of ways. In the
very earliest times, the savage regards the spirit which has left the
house as an enemy, and uses a variety of precautions to keep it from
coming back to trouble him (vampires, ghosts, _lemures_). Whether
from such fear or from more liberal motives, much is done to please
the spirits of the departed and to increase their comfort in the
abodes to which they have gone. At their burial or cremation all they
may be supposed to want where they are going, _i.e._ the things they
used on earth, are made to accompany them; food and weapons are
placed beside them; servants are killed whose spirits are to wait on
them, even a wife, voluntarily or without being asked, gives up her
earthly life to accompany her husband. Offerings of food and drink
are made to them afterwards, prayers are addressed to them, memorials
of them, of various kinds, are preserved in the houses they occupied.

It was the universal belief of the early world that the person
continued to exist after the death of the body; and this furnished
the materials for a religion which was more widely prevalent in
antiquity than the worship of any god. In some forms of it, indeed,
the spirit appears to have been treated as an enemy, and this worship
might be judged to fall short of religion, which is the cultivation,
not the avoidance, of intercourse with higher powers. The savage has
no hope from the spirit, and does not seek his intercourse. But in
most forms of the belief in the continued life of the departed, o