John Fiske - Life Everlasting

It is not at all unlikely that the savage's notion of ghosts may have originated chiefly in his experience of dreams, and this is the explanation at present most in favour. The sleeping warrior ranges far and wide over the country, while he chases the buffalo and joins in the medicine dance with comrades known to have died yet now as active and as voluble as himself, but suddenly the scene changes and he is back in his familiar hut surrounded by his people who can testify that he has not for a moment left them. It is not unlikely, I say, that the notion of one's conscious self as something which can quit the material body and return to it may have started in such often-repeated humble experiences. It can hardly be doubted, however, that this savage conception of the detachable conscious self is simply the primitive phase of the Christian conception of the conscious soul which dwells within the perishable body and quits it at death. Through many stages of elaboration and refinement the sequence between the two conceptions is unmistakable.

At this point the materialist interposes with an argument which he regards as crushing. He reminds us that if we would estimate the value of an idea, as of a race-horse or a mastiff, it is well to take a look at its pedigree. What, then, is to be said – he scornfully asks – of a doctrine of personal immortality which when reduced to its lowest terms is seen to have started in a savage's misinterpretation of his dreams? What more is needed to prove it unworthy of the serious attention of a scientific student of nature? On the other hand, the student whose mood is truly scientific will feel that one of mankind's cardinal beliefs must not be dismissed too lightly because of the crudeness and error in that primitive stratum of human thought in which it first took root. In his perceptions within certain limits the savage is eminently keen and accurate, but when it comes to intellectual judgments that go at all below the surface of things his mind is a mere farrago of grotesque fancies, wherein, nevertheless, some kernels of truth are here and there embedded. It is a long way from the dragon swallowing the sun to the interposition of the moon's dark body between us and that luminary. The dragon was a figment of fancy, but the eclipse was none the less a fact.

Now if we may take an illustration from the workings of an infant's mind, it is pretty clearly made out that as baby sits propped among his pillows and turns his eyes hither and thither in following his mother's movements to and fro in the room, she seems in coming toward him to enlarge and in going away to diminish in size, like Alice in Wonderland. It is only with the education of the eye and the small muscles which adjust it that the larger area subtended on the retina instantly means comparative nearness and the smaller area comparative remoteness. At first the sensations are interpreted directly, and the impression upon baby's nascent intelligence is a gross error. The mother is not waxing great and small by turns, but only approaching and receding. If, however, we consider that in baby's mind the enlarged retinal spot means more and the diminished spot less of the pleasurable feelings excited by a familiar and gracious presence, the approach of which is greeted with smiles and out-stretched arms, while its departure is bemoaned with cries and tears, we see that as to the essentials of the situation the dawning intelligence is entirely right, although its specific interpretation is quite wrong. Mamma has not really dwindled and vanished like the penny in a conjurer's palm, but has only flitted from the field of vision.

To come back now to our primeval savage, when he sees in a dream his deceased comrade and mistakes the vision for a reality, his error is not concerned with the most fundamental part of the matter. The all-important fact is that this dreaming savage has somehow acquired a mental attitude toward death which is totally different from that of all other animals, and is therefore peculiarly human. Throughout the half-dozen invertebrate branches or sub-kingdoms, where intelligence is manifested only in its lower forms of reflex action and instinct, we find no evidence that any creature has come to know of death. There is a sense, no doubt, in which we may say that the love of life is universal. As a rule, all animals shun danger, and natural selection maintains this rule by the pitiless slaughter of all delinquents, of all in whom the needful inherited tendencies are too weak. But in the lower animal grades and in the vegetal world the courting of life and the shrinking from death go on without conscious intelligence, as the blades of grass in a meadow or the clustering leaves upon a tree compete with one another for the maximum of exposure to sunshine until perhaps stout boughs and stems are warped or twisted in the struggle. Among invertebrates, even when we get so high as lobsters and cuttlefish, the consciousness attendant upon the seizing of prey and the escape from enemies probably does not extend beyond the facts within the immediate sphere of vision. Even among those ants that have marshalled hosts and grand tactics there is doubtless no such thing as meditation of death. Passing to the vertebrates, it is not until we reach the warm-blooded birds and mammals that we find what we are seeking. Among sundry birds and mammals we see indications of a dawning recognition of the presence of death. An early manifestation is the sense of bereavement when the maternal instinct is rudely disturbed, as in the cow mourning for her calf. This feeling goes a little way, but not a great way, beyond the sense of physical discomfort, and is soon relieved by milking. Much more intense and abiding is the feeling of bereavement among birds that mate for life, and among the higher apes, and it reaches its culmination in the dog whose intelligence and affections have been so profoundly modified through his immensely long comradeship with man. Nowhere in literature do we strike upon a deeper note of pathos than in Scott's immortal lines on the dog who starved while watching his young master's lifeless body, alone upon a Highland moor: —

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