With this purpose in view, the teachers of religion have changed the
original conception of the soul and have added to it the attribute of
absolute immortality and eternal duration, an attribute which is in no
way connected by people in a low state of development with their
conception of the soul.
At the present time among the religions of all civilized people the
undying soul plays an extraordinarily important part.
I start from the position that no doctrine can receive a general
acceptation among men which does not depend on a truth of nature. The
various religions agree on one point, and this is the doctrine of the
immortal soul. Such a point of universal agreement, I am convinced,
cannot have been entirely derived from the air. It must have had some
foundation in fact, and the question arises, What was this foundation?
Dreams and phantasms, as Spencer believes? No; there must have been
something real and genuine, and the path we have entered upon to find
traces of this true foundation of the conception of the soul cannot be
distrusted.
We must compare the conception of the soul as held by various related
religions, and strip off from it all those attributes which are not
common to all.
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