Volume 2

Primitive culture : researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art and custom / by Edward B. Tylor.

  • Tylor, Edward B. (Edward Burnett), 1832-1917.
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Primitive culture : researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art and custom / by Edward B. Tylor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    philosopher’s fancy of transferred souls offered something like an explanation of the likeness between beast and man. This comes more clearly into view among the more civilized races who have worked out the idea of transmigration into ethical schemes of retribution, where the appropriateness of the creatures chosen is almost as manifest to the modern critic as it could have been to the ancient believer. Per¬ haps the most graphic restoration of the state of mind in which the theological doctrine of metempsychosis was worked out in long-past ages, may be found in the writings of a modern theologian whose spiritualism often follows to the extreme the intellectual tracks of the lower races. In the spiritual world, says Emanuel Swedenborg, such persons as have opened themselves for the admission of the devil and acquired the nature of beasts, becoming foxes in cunning, &c., appear also at a distance in the proper shape of such beasts as they represent in disposition.1 Lastly, one of the most notable points about the theory of transmigration is its close bearing upon a thought which lies very deep in the history of philosophy, the development-theory of organic life in successive stages. An elevation from the vegetable to the lower animal life, and thence onward through the higher animals to man, to say nothing of superhuman beings, does not here require even a succession of distinct individuals, but is brought by the theory of metempsy¬ chosis within the compass of the successive vegetable and animal lives of a single being. Here a few words may be said on a subject which cannot be left out of sight, connecting as it does the two great branches of the doctrine of future existence, but wffiich it is difficult to handle in definite terms, and much more to trace historically by comparing the views of lower and higher races. This is the doctrine of a bodily renewal or 1 Swedenborg, ‘The True Christian Religion,’ 13. Compare the notion attributed to the followers of Basilides /the Gnostic, of men whose souls are alfected by spirits or dispositions as of wolf, ape, lion, or bear, wherefore their souls bear the properties of these, and imitate their deeds (Clem. Alex. Stromat. ii. c. 20).