Our training makes us materialists, and puts us a little out of sympathy with those in whom primitive beliefs and emotions survive.

A worthy priest who came to look at our dissecting-room expressed surprise to me that students, thus constantly in the presence of relics of mortality, should be able to think of anything but the resurrection and the life hereafter.

He was a bad psychologist.

There is nothing so dead as a dissecting-room 'subject'; and the contemplation of the human body in the process of being quietly taken to pieces--being resolved into its structural units like a worn-out clock or an old engine in the Mr.Rapper's yard--is certainly not conducive to a vivid realisation of the doctrine of the resurrection." "No; but this absurd anxiety to be buried in some particular place has nothing to do with religious belief; it is mere silly sentiment." "It is sentiment, I admit," said Thorndyke, "but I wouldn't call it silly.

The feeling is so widespread in time and space that we must look on it with respect as something inherent in human nature.