individual, the distinction between the soul and the body. Religion now became definitely supernatural, and at last superstitious, in the true sense of the word (superstites, surviving), as far as the cultured class was concerned, since it had gradually lost its old habit of belief in it.
At this stage there arose a conflict not only of belief but also of ethical conceptions; the ceremonies and customs based on the earlier ideas of a nature composed of beings who were all conscious, became meaningless and in many cases repulsive 295 to the advanced minds of the epoch; hence was born a system of esoteric explanation, often embodied in certain secret ceremonials termed Mysteries. These Mysteries were a cultus embodying a practice of the ancient rude ceremonies, treated as revelations to certain privileged persons of this hidden meaning, which could not be understood by the vulgar. That is, people began to assume that the ancient rude and sometimes coarse ceremonies (belief in which directly as explanations of actual events now appeared to them incredible) wrapped up mystical meanings in an allegorical manner; e.g. a simple sun-myth would be turned into an allegory of the soul and the divinity,—their relative dealings with a present and future life. An importance began to be attached to the idea of such future life for the individual soul, which had nothing in common with the old existence of a scarcely broken continuity of life, founded not on any positive doctrine, but on the impossibility of an existing being conceiving of its non-existence. This idea is naively expressed in the burial ceremonies of all 296 early races, in which food, horses, arms, etc., are interred with the dead man as a provision for his journey to the unknown country. Similar notions, and the doctrines and ceremonies embodying them, grow in number and bulk as the stream of history broadens down, till they finally issue in the universal or ethical religions (as opposed to the tribal or nature-religions). Of these religions Buddhism and Christianity are the great historical examples, and in them the original ceremonies and their meanings have become fused with each other, and with the new ethics, which they are supposed to express more or less symbolically. An