Dissertations on Early Law and Custom
Format: Paperback
ISBN13: 9780217925600
Paperback|9780217925600
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: suffering. . . . The priests pretend to have had revelations from the spirit-world, showing the unfortunate dead to be tortured in Purgatory, and that he can only be extricated by a fresh course of costly services in the house. The price to be paid is fixed at the highest sum they think it possible to extract. It ends in the family raising every possible coin, and even selling their jewels, to procure the necessary sum.' Finally, I will repeat Mr. Tylor's reflections on the whole of this marvellous system of belief and practice (' Primitive Culture, ' ii. 108): 'Interesting problems are opened out to the Western mind by the spectacle of a great people who for thousands of years have been seeking the living among the dead. Nowhere is the connection between parental authority and conservatism more graphically shown. The worship of ancestors, begun during their life, is not interrupted but intensified when death makes them deities. The Chinese, prostrate bodily and mentally before the memorial tablets which contain the souls of his ancestors, little thinks that he is all the while proving to mankind how vast a power unlimited filial obedience, prohibiting change from ancestral institutions, may exert in stopping the advance of civilisation. The thought of the souls of the dead as sharing the glory and happiness of their descendants is one which widely pervades the world; but most such ideas would seem vague and weak to the Chinese, who willtry hard for honours in his competitive examination with the special motive of glorifying his dead ancestors, and whose titles of rank will raise his deceased father and grandfather a grade above him, as though with us Zachary Macaulay or Copley the painter should have viscounts' coronets officially placed on their tombstones. As so often happe...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217925600 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 021792560X |
| Weight | 0.82 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.56 In |
| List Price | $20.68 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 248 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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