standpoint of terrestrial experience, there is no more reason for
supposing that consciousness survives the dissolution of the
brain than for supposing that the pungent flavour of table-salt
survives its decomposition into metallic sodium and gaseous
chlorine.

Our answer from this side is thus unequivocal enough. Indeed, so
uniform has been the teaching of experience in this respect that
even in their attempts to depict a life after death, men have
always found themselves obliged to have recourse to materialistic
symbols. To the mind of a savage the future world is a mere
reproduction of the present, with its everlasting huntings and
fightings. The early Christians looked forward to a renovation of
the earth and the bodily resurrection from Sheol of the
righteous. The pictures of hell and purgatory, and even of
paradise, in Dante's great poem, are so intensely materialistic
as to seem grotesque in this more spiritual age. But even to-day
the popular conceptions of heaven are by no means freed from the
notion of matter; and persons of high culture, who realize the
inadequacy of these popular conceptions, are wont to avoid the
difficulty by refraining from putting their hopes and beliefs
into any definite or describable form. Not unfrequently one sees
a smile raised at the assumption of knowledge or insight by
preachers who describe in eloquent terms the joys of a future
state; yet the smile does not necessarily imply any scepticism as
to the abstract probability of the soul's survival. The
scepticism is aimed at the character of the description rather
than at the reality of the thing described. It implies a tacit
agreement, among cultivated people, that the unseen world must be
purely spiritual in constitution. The agreement is not habitually