d to both sexes: The women they buried; but the
men they wrapped in a hide; and hung up in the air by a chain. This
practice among the Colchians is referred to a religious cause. The
principal objects of their worship were the Earth and the Air; and it is
supposed that, in consequence of some superstitious notion, they devoted
their dead to both.[92] Whether the natives of Otaheite had any notion
of the same kind, we were never able certainly to determine; but we soon
discovered, that the repositories of their dead were also places of
worship. Upon this occasion it may be observed, that nothing can be more
absurd than the notion that the happiness or misery of a future life
depends, in any degree, upon the disposition of the body when the state
of probation is past; yet that nothing is more general than a solicitude
about it. However cheap we may hold any funeral rites which custom has
not familiarized, or superstition rendered sacred, most men gravely
deliberate how to prevent their body from being broken by the mattock
and devoured by the worm, when it is no longer capable of sensation; and
purchase a place for it in holy ground, when they believe the lot of its
future existence to be irrevocably determined. So strong is the
association of pleasing or painful ideas with certain opinions and
actions which affect us while we live, that we involuntarily act as if
it was equally certain that they would affect us in the same manner when
we are dead, though this is an opinion that nobody will maintain. Thus
it happens, that the desire of preserving from reproach even the name
that we leave behind us, or of procuring it honour, is one of the most
powerful principles of action, among the inhabitants of the most
speculative and enlightened nations. Posthumous reputation, upon every
principle, must be acknowledged to have no influence upon the dead; yet
the desire or obtaining and securing it, no force of reason, no habits
of thinking can subdue, except in those whom habitual baseness and guilt
have rendered indifferent to honour and shame while they lived. This
indeed seems to be among the happy imperfections of our nature, upon
which the general good of society in a certain measure depends; for as
some crimes are supposed to be prevented by hanging the body of the
criminal in chains after he is dead, so, in consequence of the same
association of ideas, much good is procured to society, and much evil
prevented, by a desire of pr