The interest of their point of view consists quite as much in the fact that they asked themselves the question as in the answer they worked out for it, for it was the first time, so far as Western History at all events shows us, that man ever did put such a question to himself. That he should have done so then marks off the date and the school and the philosopher, as making a new epoch in the history of human thought. Man took a distinct step upwards, towards the gods and the pure light, when first the question was put forth.

The question itself would suffice to warrant that the answer should claim our interest, even if the answer in itself had no interest. But the answer had an interest, particularly in connection with our present subject, because it is supposed to have been drawn from the notion of those very object souls which primitive man invented to account for his dream visions. It was a notion familiar enough to the philosophers of early Greece. Everywhere in the ancient world we find the custom of burying things, likely to be useful to the deceased, in the grave along with him, kept up long after an active belief that he really would use them had passed away. Sometimes the things were not even useful, but only symbolic. Such were the jewellery that the Etruscans buried with their dead, and the little toys that we dig up from the mummy graves of the Egyptian. It is said that to this day the Esquimaux bury toy canoes with the deceased. The early Christians placed playthings and wearing apparel in a grave, and even now the German and the Irish peasants bury their dead with a coin in the hand or mouth.

The common practice of the English poor of laying coppers on the eyes of the dead may have a like origin, though these serve a practical purpose too.

A question from that very learned and very interesting book (the two do not by any means always go together) Mr. Tylor's Primitive Culture, in which all these things are discussed and instances cited at great length, shows what the custom was in the days - of old Greece. "Lucian,"he writes," is sarcastic, but scarcely unfair, in his comments on the Greek: funeral rites, speaking of those who slew horses and slave - girls and cupbearers, and burned or buried clothes and ornaments" (the burning was a recognised means of sending to the spirit world, and both the burying and the burning were the custom with the Aryan peoples generally) "as for use and service in the world below; of the meat and drink offerings on the tombs which serve to feed the bodiless shades in Hades; of the splendid garments and garlands of the dead, that they might not suffer cold upon the road, or be seen naked by Kerberos." (Perhaps we see some remnant of the custom of garlanding the dead in the wreaths and flowers of the modern English funeral.) "For Kerberos," he goes on "was intended the honey cake deposited with the dead; and the obolus placed in the mouth was the toll for Charon, save at Hermione in Argolis, where men thought there was a short descent to Hades, and therefore provided the dead with no coin for the grim ferryman.

How such ideas could be realised, may be seen in the story of Eukrates, whose dead wife appeared to him to demand one of her golden sandals, which had been dropped underneath the chest, and so not burnt for her with the rest of her wardrobe; or in the story of Periander, whose dead wife, Melissa, refused to give an oracular response, for she was shivering and naked, because the garments buried with her had not been burnt, and so were of no use" (the idea being that the object souls were set free by the burning, to go to the spirit world) "wherefore Periander plundered the Corinthian women of their best clothes, burned them in a great trench, with prayer, and now obtained his answer". Instances might be multiplied without end, but enough is said to show that the notion of the souk of objects was very ready to the hand of Democritus and his school, whatever degree of credence they gave to the religious points involved; and of their notion they made use to form a theory of the manner in which man perceived external objects. The objects, according to the theory on which they answered the question they had suggested to themselves, were continually throwing off likenesses of themselves, souls of themselves, or ideas, according to the term that Democritus used.

These likenesses absorbed the air of the atmosphere, and entering into the soul of the recipient, enabled him to perceive the object.

Fantastical enough, maybe; but whether the answer of Democritus is acceptable in any degree by modern thought, it is certain that modern thought began when he and his fellows posed their great and still not very adequately answered question. The notion, however, that there was some kind of objective reality in the species, some objective reality in our "idea" of an axe, say, survived down to a very late date in the history of human thought, certainly well into the nineteenth century. This notion, though it is perhaps as akin to the idea of Plato as to that of Democritus, certainly owes its origin to the latter philosopher and the theory suggested to him by the prevalent notion of the souls of objects. It is the ultimate triumph of modern thought to realise the idea, or general conception, as something purely abstract, with no material side to it at all, except the subtle changes in the brain cells, and the nerves that communicate with"

One point of some interest that is raised by this ancient custom of burying unburnt the dead man's weapons, wives and so on with him in his grave, is that it obviously implies the notion that the soul, the second self, is not dissevered from the body once and for all at the moment of death. I f this were the belief, there would be no motive in burying the weapons along with a body from which all life had gone and which could never possibly have any use for them. The idea clearly is that the soul or second self may come back, for a time at least, to the terrestrial body, and so have the opportunity of taking the second self or soul of the axes. It is no doubt a notion that has grown from, or been encouraged by, the idea that the soul leaves the body for a while in sleep and in trance and that the severance during death is greater in point of degree rather than kind The idea that the soul hovers over and haunts for a while the spot in the vicinity of which the body is buried is one that has lived on down to times far remote from those of the primitive savage. To our modern ideas, as to Lucian, it seems a little hard to sacrifice the wife and the cupbearers. The custom was not confined to the Greeks. It was common to many nations.