make the doctrine of judgment and retribution paramount, spiritualize the conception of the soul and its future life, eliminate geographical definiteness from the soul's abode and corre late the conception Of immortality with a system of religion and ethics.
The In the earliest, known civilization of Egypt, the problems of religion and eschatology were central interests. In the remotest period of their history, the Egyptians believed in an invisible deity or deities and in the future life of the soul. The human soul is of the divine substance, an emanation from Ammon-Ra. At death it passes to the seat of judgment at the gateway of Amenti (the Hel lenic Hades) and there it is adjudged by the 42 assessors (representing the 42 sins of which the soul must be innocent) of the dead, before the supreme tribunal of Osiris. The soul that is proved pure at the judgment returns to its divine origin, while the soul that has led an im pure life is condemned to reincarnation and passes into an animal life to attain purification through probationary metempsychosis. The theor of the future life of the soul amongst the tians is based on the metaphysical view that e soul is an emanation from an original cosmic soul, on the ethical view that the present life is a probationary period, and on the con ception of the moral fitness of the soul for reabsorption into its original source, the sun god Ra — the head-spring of all light and life. See BOOK OF THE DEAD.
Sheol, or the realm of shadows, appears in the early history of the Jews to be an amplification of the idea of the grave, as the dark abode of departed spirits, where souls dwell bodiless, unconscious, without feeling. The references in the early part of the Old Testament Scriptures to a future life are rare and vague, and the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is nowhere explicitly taught in the early books. The rites of necromancy were dis couraged by the prophets and lawgivers of ancient Israel as antagonistic to belief in the God of life, whose realm excluded Sheol (or the realm of the dead), until post-exilic times. Eternal life belongs to God alone, and to those celestial beings who have eaten of the tree of life and live forever. In connection with the Messianic hope and under the influence of Greek and Persian ideas, the later Jews adopted a doctrine of resurrection of the body which made room for belief in the soul's continuous life. The Cabalists took up the doctrine of trans migration (Gilgul, °rolling on° of souls) accord ing to which the soul of Adam passed into David and shall pass into the Messiah, as is mystically set forth in the letters of that name (Ad[a]m). The Platonic doctrine of pre existence is also found in the rabbinical philos ophy. Immortality conjoined with the dogma of the resurrection is the prevailing' conception in the post-exilic literature, the latter (resur rection) becoming fixed in the Mishna and lit urgy. Since the time of Moses Mendelssohn, who rehabilitated the doctrine of Plato in his progressive Judaism tends to lay less emphasis on the resurrection of the body, and greater emphasis on a purely spiritual immor tality, the former dogma being discarded in the Reform rituals.
The The origin of the doctrine of immortality amongst the Greeks is lost in the remotest antiquity. It is found in the early traditions of the Orphic and Dionysiac mys teries, in the poems of Homer and Hesiod, and forms a central tenet in the philosophy of Pythagoras, a contemporary of Buddha-Sid dhattha and Lao-Tze. The view of Pythagoras
includes the doctrine of transmigration, which may have been suggested to him by the theology of the Orphic mysteries or by Pherecydes, rather than by the Egyptians (Zeller, 'Pre-Socratic Philosophy,' Vol. I, pp. 71, 514). The great prob lem of a man's life is moral purification, which he pursues in a divinely governed Cosmos, where his chief end is to become like God. The soul is imprisoned in the body because of sins committed in a pre-existent state, and after i death passes into a superior or inferior state, according as it has served Good or Evil. In the ascending stages of metempsychosis the soul is prepared for moral redemption. Although the belief in some form of immortality prevailed amongst the Greeks throughout their history, and probably came into their philosophy from their religion, it was not until Plato that a philosophic basis was furnished to the doctrine. The Platonic arguments for the immortality of the soul may be summarily stated as follows: (1) The fact that the mind brings to the study of truth a body of interpretative principles and axioms with it, as part of its native endowment, shows that they can be only reminiscential and, therefore, derived from a pre-existent state; (2) The soul is an ultimate unity (i.e., monadic in character) and, therefore, not being composite or divisible, it cannot be disintegrated; (3) The soul ( means the °principle of life,'" having the idea of life essentially immanent in it, and inseparable from it, and therefore it must exclude the opposite idea, death ; (4) The soul is self-moving, deriving its activity from within; consequently its motion and therewith. its life, must be perpetual; (5) The soul as an immaterial reality is essentially related to the immaterial, invisible, eternal idea; and as the former is akin to the latter in nature, so is it also akin in duration ; (6) The superior dignity and value of the soul argue for its survival of the crass body, and even the crass body persists for a time; (7) The cyclical movement of nature shows everywhere the maintenance of life by opposition, as night, day; sleeping, waking; the dying seed, the germinating flower. This is an argument from analogy: out of the decay and death of one living organism, a new life is generated; (8) The instinctive aspiration of the soul toward a future existence shows that the belief is founded in natural law; (9) Things that are destructible are destroyed by their peculiar evil or disease; the peculiar evil of the soul is vice, which corrupts the soul's nature. but does not destroy its existence; (10) The world as a moral and rational world demands a future life of rewards and punishments for the rectification of inequalities in this life, else the wrong would ultimately triumph, as in a bad play. This argument is based on the ethical claim that there must he a final equiva lence between inner worth and external con dition or reward. The views of the Greeks. and especially the views of Plato, have had a pro found, an incalculable influence on Christian thought, on early theological formula: and on the sum of Occidental philosophy. Plato was not Merely a framer of philosophy, an intellec tual interpreter of reality, but still more a man of religion, a seer.