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1914].
JAINA GAZETTE.
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over civilisation during the latter half of last century, and seemed likely, at one time, to engulf all spirituality. That benefit is that religion has learned to adopt the modern weapons of the laboratory to the purposes of its own defence. We must not only believe, but we must be able to justify our belief to
our reagon.
How far can we do so in the case of the fundamental question of personal survival after death? How far can we support our belief by an appeal to reason and to evidential facts ?
The first fact that confronts us is that such belief is universal among primitive races.
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No matter whether we call the belief in survival after death "animism ог "ancestor worship," or anything else, so far as science can help us it exists in man from the very day that he becomes distinguishable from his cousin the ape. In some form or another he believes in a "hereafter," and in his own survival in that hereafter.
It is absolutely unthinkable that man, and especially primitive man, can have invented such a notion.
It cannot have been the creation of his own unaided brain, with nothing in reality corresponding to it. For by no process of reasoning can the human mind excogitate-devise, invent-a notion which has no foundation in reality.
The inevitable deduction is that the universal conception of a hereafter, of a spirit existence, is based on reality-that, in other words, there is a hereafter.
More than this we are forced by the observed facts to conclude that so universal a belief can only be due to a primary instinct or intuition.
Everything that we know, or can learn, of the animate world goes to show that the primary instincts of a species are of fundamental importance to the well-being of that species. We may fairly conclude that this belief in a hereafter is no This could not be exception that it is a necessity to the race.
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
