Lecture III. The Imperishable Part Of Man
And The Other World.
It has sometimes been asserted by travellers and ethnologists,
that tribes exist who are absolutely without any idea of God.
It will usually be found that such assertions mean little more
than that they are without any idea of what we mean by God:
even the Zulus, who saw in a reed the creator of the world,^17
nevertheless believed that the world had been created by a power
outside themselves. Modern research goes to show that no race
of man, so far as is known, has been without a belief in a power
of the kind, or in a world which is separate from the visible world
around us; statements to the contrary generally rest on ignorance
or misconception. The very fact that the savage dreams, and
gives to his dreams the reality of his waking moments, brings
with it a belief in what, for the want of a better term, I will call
“another world.”
This other world, it must be remembered, is material, as
material as the“heavenly Jerusalem”to which so many good
Christians have looked forward even in our own day. The savage
has no experience of anything else than material existence, and
he cannot, therefore, rise to the conception of what we mean by
the spiritual, even if he were capable of forming so abstract an
idea. His spiritual world is necessarily materialistic, not only to [047]
be interpreted and apprehended through sensuous symbols, but
identical with those sensuous symbols themselves. The Latin
animameant“breath”before it meant“the soul.”
This sensuous materialistic conception of the spiritual has
lingered long in the human mind; indeed, it is questionable
whether, as long as we are human, we shall ever shake ourselves
wholly free from it. The greater is naturally its dominance the
(^17) Callaway,Unkulunkulu; or, the Tradition of the Creation as existing among
the Amazulu and other Tribes of South Africa, pt. i. pp. 2, 7, 8.