Professor Carpenter's Lecture.

Professor J. Estlin Carpenter of Oxford gave the first of his course of lectures on the "History of Ideas of a Future Life," in Divinity Chapel last evening. After a brief introduction by Professor Everett, Professor Carpenter spoke on "Origins of the Belief" and held the most interested attention of his hearers for over an hour.

One hardly needs to call attention, he said, to the importance of the subject of immortality. It has a touch of humanity about it that must awaken our sympathy. In this course the roots of belief in the soul will be investigated, not through modern psychology but through the early experience of the human race.

History is a record of men's progress in different ways. From these we shall isolate progress in religious ideas, see what sentiments they create, how they affect human institutions, and how dependent they are on the conditions of thought and feeling out of which they arise and in which they exist.

The doctrine of Animism is the name given to the ideas held by the early races of man about souls or spiritual beings. Its wide prevalence is substantiated by many of the relics of the early periods. There is a marked continuity in the ideas on this subject. Animism is an elementary philosophy by which man explains himself and as man has advanced, the group of ideas on this subject at any time have always been appropriate to the state of advancement.

Now where are we to look for the phenomena by which we are to explain man's ideas about himself? Certainly not in language alone, as Max Muller would hold, but in rites, usages, and customs. But here lies the difficulty, that these depend upon the modes of thought, analogies and impressions which we can no longer share.

It used to be said that a strong argument could be found in the intuition which men have of immortality. This is to give up scientific research and abandon ourselves to mystery.

Phenomena which deserve consideration are those of breath, shadow, reflection, sleep, swoon, sickness, wounds and death, Two facts, interesting in their analogies and contrasts, bear upon the subject, namely, the states of waking and sleeping, and those of life and death. In both sleep and death, something seems to go out from the person, the difference being that in death the something that goes out does not return. Furthermore, when the sleeper dreams of the dead, the explanations of dreams and death confirm each other. As to the nature of that which seems to go out, there are several groups of ideas based on two phenomena, the breath and the shadow.

Objections have been raised to this explanation by Dr. Martineau, chiefly on the ground that it is not derived from our own self-consciousness; but observations of death in others must precede its experience by ourselves. At any rate the present validity of the belief is not affected by its origin, or by the process of its historical evolution.