I cannot enlarge on this topic, engaging as it is, but here a further question obtrudes itself.  May there not be some connection between the actual immortality of the germ cells, the continuity of their series and the importance of the part they play, and the origin of the idea of an immortal soul?  May not the former have given rise to the latter?

As a matter of fact, the series of reproductive cells possess the essential attributes of the human soul; they are the immortal living part of a man, which contain, in a latent form, his spiritual peculiarities.  The immortality of the reproductive cells is only potential and is essentially different from that absolute eternal life which certain religions ascribe to the soul.

We must not, however, forget that at the time when the conception of a soul arose among men, owing to a defective knowledge of the laws of logic, no clear distinction was made between a potential immortality and an absolute life without end.

Herbert Spencer has pointed out that all religions have their origin in reverence paid to ancestors.  Each religion must have a true foundation, and the deification of our forefathers has this true and natural foundation inasmuch as they belong to the same series of reproductive cells as their descendants.  Of course our barbaric ancestors who initiated the ancestor worship had no idea of this motive for their religion, but that in no way disproves that this and this alone was the causa efficiens of the origin of such religions.  It is indeed typical of a religion that it depends upon facts which are not discerned and which are not fully recognized.

With the origin and development of every religion the origin and development of the conception of the soul progresses step by step.

We find the justification of ancestor worship in the immortality of the reproductive cells, and in the continuity of their series.  This should also take a part in the origin of the conception of the soul.

Spencer derives the conception of the existence of the soul from dreams, and from the imagination of the mentally afflicted.  The savage dreams he is hunting, and wakes up to find himself at home.  In his dream he talks with friends who are not present where he sleeps; he may even in the course of his dream encounter the dead.  From this he draws the conclusions—­(1) that he himself has two persons, one hunting while the other sleeps; (2) that his acquaintances also have a double existence; and, from those cases in which he met with the dead, (3) that they are not only double persons, but that one of the persons is dead while the other continues to live.

Thus, according to Spencer, the idea arises that man consists of two separable thinking parts, and that one of these can survive the other.

When a person faints and recovers, we say he comes to himself.  That is, a part of his person left him and has returned.  But in this case, as in the dream, the body has not divided, so that in a swoon the outgoing portion is not corporeal.