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The Destiny of the Soul
William Rounseville Alger
CHAPTER III.
GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE.
IT is the purpose of the following chapter to describe the originating supports of the common belief in a future life; not to probe the depth and test the value of the various grounds out of which the doctrine grows, but only to give a descriptive sketch of what they are, and a view of the process of growth. The objections urged by unbelievers belong to an open discussion of the question of immortality, not to an illustrative statement of the suggesting grounds on which the popular belief rests. When, after sufficient investigation, we ask ourselves from what causes the almost universal expectation of another life springs, and by what influences it is nourished, we shall not find adequate answer in less than four words: feeling, imagination, faith, and reflection. The doctrine of a future life for man has been created by the combined force of instinctive desire, analogical observation, prescriptive authority, and philosophical speculation. These are the four pillars on which the soul builds the temple of its hopes; or the four glasses through which it looks to see its eternal heritage.
First, it is obvious that man is endowed at once with foreknowledge of death and with a powerful love of life. It is not a love of being here; for he often loathes the scene around him. It is a love of self possessed existence; a love of his own soul in its central consciousness and bounded royalty. This is an inseparable element of his very entity. Crowned with free will, walking on the crest of the world, enfeoffed with individual faculties, served by vassal nature with tributes of various joy, he cannot bear the thought of losing himself, of sliding into the general abyss of matter. His interior consciousness is permeated with a self preserving instinct, and shudders at every glimpse of danger or hint of death. The soul, pervaded with a guardian instinct of life, and seeing death's steady approach to destroy the body, necessitates the conception of an escape into another state of existence. Fancy and reason, thus set at work, speedily construct a thousand theories filled with details. Desire first fathers thought, and then thought woos belief.
Secondly, man, holding his conscious being precious beyond all things, and shrinking with pervasive anxieties from the moment of destined dissolution, looks around through the realms of nature, with thoughtful eye, in search of parallel phenomena further developed, significant sequels in other creatures' fates, whose evolution and fulfilment may haply throw light on his own. With eager vision and heart prompted imagination he scrutinizes whatever appears related to his object. Seeing the snake cast its old slough and glide forth renewed, he conceives, so in death man but sheds his fleshly exuvia, while the spirit emerges, regenerate. He beholds the beetle break from its filthy sepulchre and commence its summer work; and straightway he hangs a golden scarsbaus in his temples as an emblem of a future life. After vegetation's wintry deaths, hailing the returning spring that brings resurrection and life to the graves of the sod, he dreams of some far off spring of Humanity, yet to come, when the frosts of man's untoward doom shall relent, and all the costly seeds sown through ages in the great earth tomb shall shoot up in celestial shapes. On the moaning sea shore, weeping some dear friend, he perceives, now ascending in the dawn, the planet which he lately saw declining in the dusk; and he is cheered by the thought that
"As sinks the day star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky, So Lycidas, sunk low, shall mount on high."
Some traveller or poet tells him fabulous tales of a bird which, grown aged, fills its nest with spices, and, spontaneously burning, soars from the aromatic fire, rejuvenescent for a thousand years; and he cannot but take the phoenix for a miraculous type of his own soul springing, free and eternal, from the ashes of his corpse. Having watched the silkworm, as it wove its cocoon and lay down in its oblong grave apparently dead, until at length it struggles forth, glittering with rainbow colors, a winged moth, endowed with new faculties and living a new life in a new sphere, he conceives that so the human soul may, in the fulness of time, disentangle itself from the imprisoning meshes of this world of larva, a thing of spirit beauty, to sail through heavenly airs; and henceforth he engraves a butterfly on the tombstone in vivid prophecy of immortality. Thus a moralizing observation of natural similitudes teaches man to hope for an existence beyond death.
Thirdly, the prevailing belief in a future life is spread and upheld by the influence of authority. The doctrine of the soul's survival and transference to another world, where its experience depends on conditions observed or violated here, conditions somewhat within the control of a select class of men here, such a doctrine is the very hiding place of the power of priest craft, a vast engine of interest and sway which the shrewd insight of priesthoods has often devised and the cunning policy of states subsidized. In most cases of this kind the asserted doctrine is placed on the basis of a divine revelation, and must be implicitly received. God proclaims it through his anointed ministers: therefore, to doubt it or logically criticize it is a crime. History bears witness to such a procedure wherever an organized priesthood has flourished, from primeval pagan India to modern papal Rome. It is traceable from the dark Osirian shrines of Egypt and the initiating temple at Eleusis to the funeral fires of Gaul and the Druidic conclave in the oak groves of Mona; from the reeking altars of Mexico in the time of Montezuma to the masses for souls in Purgatory said this day in half the churches of Christendom. Much of the popular faith in immortality which has prevailed in all ages has been owing to the authority of its promulgators, a deep and honest trust on the part of the people in the authoritative dicta of their religious teachers.
In all the leading nations of the earth, the doctrine of a future life is a tradition handed down from immemorial antiquity, embalmed in sacred books which are regarded as infallible revelations from God. Of course the thoughtless never think of questioning it; the reverent piously embrace it; all are educated to receive it. In addition to the proclamation of a future life by the sacred books and by the priestly hierarchies, it has also been affirmed by countless individual saints, philosophers, and prophets. Most persons readily accept it on trust from them as a demonstrated theory or an inspired knowledge of theirs. It is natural for modest unspeculative minds, busied with worldly cares, to say, These learned sages, these theosophic seers, so much more gifted, educated, and intimate with the divine counsels and plan than we are, with so much deeper experience and purer insight than we have, must know the truth: we cannot in any other way do so well as to follow their guidance and confide in their assertions. Accordingly, multitudes receive the belief in a life to come on the authority of the world's intellectual and religious leaders.
Fourthly, the belief in a future life results from philosophical meditation, and is sustained by rational proofs.1 For the completion of the present outline, it now remains to give a brief exposition of these arguments. For the sake of convenience and clearness, we must arrange these reasonings in five classes; namely, the physiological, the analogical, the psychological, the theological, and the moral.
There is a group of considerations drawn from the phenomena of our bodily organization, life and death, which compose the physiological argument for the separate existence of the soul. In the first place, it is contended that the human organization, so wondrously vitalized, developed, and ruled, could not have grown up out of mere matter, but implies a pre existent mental entity, a spiritual force or idea, which constituted the primeval impulse, grouped around itself the organic conditions of our existence, and constrained the material elements to the subsequent processes and results, according to a prearranged plan.2 This dynamic agent, this ontological cause, may naturally survive when the fleshly organization which it has built around itself dissolves. Its independence before the body began involves its independence after the body is ended. Stahl has especially illustrated in physiology this idea of an independent soul monad.
Secondly, as some potential being must have preceded our birth, to assimilate and construct the physical system, so the great phenomena attending our conscious life necessitate, both to our instinctive apprehension and in our philosophical conviction, the distinctive division of man into body and soul, tabernacle and tenant. The illustrious Boerhaave wrote a valuable dissertation on the distinction of the mind from the body, which is to be found among his works. Every man knows that he dwells in the flesh but is not flesh. He is a free, personal mind, occupying and using a material body, but not identified with it. Ideas and passions of purely immaterial origin pervade every nerve with terrific intensity, and shake his encasing corporeity like an earthquake. A thought, a sentiment, a fancy, may prostrate him as effectually as a blow on his brain from a hammer. He wills to move a palsied limb: the soul is unaffected by the paralysis, but the muscles refuse to obey his volition: the distinction between the person willing and the instrument to be wielded is unavoidable.
Thirdly, the fact of death itself irresistibly suggests the duality of flesh and spirit. It is the removal of the energizing mind that leaves the frame so empty and meaningless. Think of the undreaming sleep of a corpse which dissolution is winding in its chemical embrace.
1 Wohlfarth, Triumph des Glaubens an Unsterblichkeit und Wiedersehen uber jeden Zweifel. Oporinus, Historia Critica Doctrina de Immortalitate Mortalium.
2 Muller, Elements of Physiology, book vi. sect. i. ch. 1.
A moment ago that hand was uplifted to clasp yours, intelligent accents were vocal on those lips, the light of love beamed in that eye. One shuddering sigh, and how cold, vacant, forceless, dead, lies the heap of clay! It is impossible to prevent the conviction that an invisible power has been liberated; that the flight of an animating principle has produced this awful change. Why may not that untraceable something which has gone still exist? Its vanishing from our sensible cognizance is no proof of its perishing. Not a shadow of genuine evidence has ever been afforded that the real life powers of any creature are destroyed.3 In the absence of that proof, a multitude of considerations urge us to infer the contrary. Surely there is room enough for the contrary to be true; for, as Jacobi profoundly observes, "life is not a form of body; but body is one form of life." Therefore the soul which now exists in this form, not appearing to be destroyed on its departure hence, must be supposed to live hereafter in some other form.4
A second series of observations and reflections, gathered from partial similarities elsewhere in the world, are combined to make the analogical argument for a future life. For many centuries, in the literature of many nations, a standard illustration of the thought that the soul survives the decay of its earthy investiture has been drawn from the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly.5 This world is the scene of our grub state. The body is but a chrysalis of soul. When the preliminary experience and stages are finished and the transformation is complete, the spirit emerges from its cast off cocoon and broken cell into the more ethereal air and sunnier light of a higher world's eternal day. The emblematic correspondence is striking, and the inference is obvious and beautiful. Nor is the change, the gain in endowments and privileges, greater in the supposed case of man than it is from the slow and loathsome worm on the leaf to the swift and glittering insect in the air.
Secondly, in the material world, so far as we can judge, nothing is ever absolutely destroyed. There is no such thing as annihilation. Things are changed, transformations abound; but essences do not cease to be. Take a given quantity of any kind of matter; divide and subdivide it in ten thousand ways, by mechanical violence, by chemical solvents. Still it exists, as the same quantity of matter, with unchanged qualities as to its essence, and will exist when Nature has manipulated it in all her laboratories for a billion ages. Now, as a solitary exception to this, are minds absolutely destroyed? are will, conscience, thought, and love annihilated? Personal intelligence, affection, identity, are inseparable components of the idea of a soul. And what method is there of crushing or evaporating these out of being? What force is there to compel them into nothing? Death is not a substantive cause working effects. It is itself merely an effect. It is simply a change in the mode of existence. That this change puts an end to existence is an assertion against analogy, and wholly unsupported.
3 Sir Humphry Davy, Proteus or Immortality.
4 Bakewell, Natural Evidence of a Future State.
5 Butler, Analogy, part i. ch. 1.
Thirdly, following the analogy of science and the visible order of being, we are led to the conception of an ascending series of existences rising in regular gradation from coarse to fine, from brutal to mental, from earthly composite to simply spiritual, and thus pointing up the rounds of life's ladder, through all nature, to the angelic ranks of heaven. Then, feeling his kinship and common vocation with supernal beings, man is assured of a loftier condition of of existence reserved for him. There are no such immense, vacantly yawning chasms, as that would be, between our fleshly estate and the Godhead. Nature takes no such enormous jumps. Her scaling advance is by staid and normal steps.
"There's lifeless matter.
Add the power of shaping,
And you've the crystal: add again the organs
Wherewith to subdue sustenance to the form
And manner of one's self, and you've the plant:
Add power of motion, senses, and so forth,
And you've all kinds of beasts: suppose a pig.
To pig add reason, foresight, and such stuff,
Then you have man.
What shall, we add to man
To bring him higher?"
Freedom from the load of clay, emancipation of the spirit into the full range and masterdom of a spirit's powers!
Fourthly, many strong similarities between our entrance into this world and our departure out of it would make us believe that death is but another and higher birth.6 Any one acquainted with the state of an unborn infant deriving its sole nutriment, its very existence, from its vascular connection with its mother could hardly imagine that its separation from its mother would introduce it to a new and independent life. He would rather conclude that it would perish, like a twig wrenched from its parent limb. So it may be in the separation of the soul from the body. Further, as our latent or dimly groping senses were useless while we were developing in embryo, and then implied this life, so we now have, in rudimentary condition, certain powers of reason, imagination, and heart, which prophesy heaven and eternity; and mysterious intimations ever and anon reach us from a diviner sphere,
"Like hints and echoes of the world To spirits folded in the womb."
The Persian poet, Buzurgi, says on this theme,
"What is the soul? The seminal principle from the loins of destiny. This world is the womb: the body, its enveloping membrane: The bitterness of dissolution, dame Fortune's pangs of childbirth. What is death? To be born again, an angel of eternity."
Fifthly, many cultivated thinkers have firmly believed that the soul is not so young as is usually thought, but is an old stager on this globe, having lived through many a previous existence, here or elsewhere.7 They sustain this conclusion by various considerations, either drawn from premises presupposing the necessary eternity of spirits, or resting on dusky reminiscences, "shadowy recollections," of visions and events vanished long ago.
6 Bretschneider, Predigten uber Tod, Unsterblichkeit, und Anferstehung.
7 James Parker, Account of the Divine Goodness concerning the Pre existence of Souls.
Now, if the idea of foregone conscious lives, personal careers oft repeated with unlost being, be admitted, as it frequently has been by such men as Plato and Wordsworth, all the connected analogies of the case carry us to the belief that immortality awaits us. We shall live through the next transition, as we have lived through the past ones.
Sixthly, rejecting the hypothesis of an anterior life, and entertaining the supposition that there is no creating and overruling God, but that all things have arisen by spontaneous development or by chance, still, we are not consistently obliged to expect annihilation as the fate of the soul. Fairly reasoning from the analogy of the past, across the facts of the present, to the impending contingencies of the future, we may say that the next stage in the unfolding processes of nature is not the destruction of our consciousness, but issues in a purer life, elevates us to a spiritual rank. It is just to argue that if mindless law or boundless fortuity made this world and brought us here, it may as well make, or have made, another world, and bear us there. Law or chance excluding God from the question may as easily make us immortal as mortal. Reasoning by analogy, we may affirm that, as life has been given us, so it will be given us again and forever.
Seventhly, faith in immortality is fed by another analogy, not based on reflection, but instinctively felt. Every change of material in our organism, every change of consciousness, is a kind of death. We partially die as often as we leave behind forgotten experiences and lost states of being. We die successively to infancy, childhood, youth, manhood. The past is the dead: but our course is still on, forever on. Having survived so many deaths, we expect to survive all others and to be ourselves eternally.
There is a third cluster of reasonings, deduced from the distinctive nature of spirit, constituting the psychological argument for the existence of the soul independent of the body. In the outset, obviously, if the soul be an immaterial entity, its natural immortality follows; because death and decay can only be supposed to take effect in dissoluble combinations. Several ingenious reasons have been advanced in proof of the soul's immateriality, reasons cogent enough to have convinced a large class of philosophers.8 It is sufficient here to notice the following one. All motion implies a dynamic mover. Matter is dormant. Power is a reality entirely distinct from matter in its nature. But man is essentially an active power, a free will. Consequently there is in him an immaterial principle, since all power is immaterial. That principle is immortal, because subsisting in a sphere of being whose categories exclude the possibility of dissolution.9
Secondly, should we admit the human soul to be material, yet if it be an ultimate monad, an indivisible atom of mind, it is immortal still, defying all the forces of destruction. And that it actually is an uncompounded unit may be thus proved. Consciousness is simple, not collective. Hence the power of consciousness, the central soul, is an absolute integer. For a living perceptive whole cannot be made of dead imperceptive parts. If the soul were composite, each component part would be an individual, a distinguishable consciousness. Such not being the fact, the conclusion results that the soul is one, a simple substance.10
8 Astrue, Dissertation sur l'Immaterialite et l'Immortalite de l'Ame. Broughton, Defence of the Doctrine of the Human Soul as an Immaterial and Naturally Immortal Principle. Marstaller, Von der Unsterblichkeit der Menschlichen Seele.
9 Andrew Baxter, Inquiry into the Nature of the Soul.
10 Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, sect. 150.
Of course it is not liable to death, but is naturally eternal.
Thirdly, the indestructibleness of the soul is a direct inference from its ontological characteristics. Reason, contemplating the elements of the soul, cannot but embrace the conviction of its perpetuity and its essential independence of the fleshly organization. Our life in its innermost substantive essence is best defined as a conscious force. Our present existence is the organic correlation of that personal force with the physical materials of the body, and with other forces. The cessation of that correlation at death by no means involves, so far as we can see, the destruction or the disindividualization of the primal personal force. It is a fact of striking significance, often noticed by psychologists, that we are unable to conceive ourselves as dead. The negation of itself is impossible to consciousness. The reason we have such a dread of death is that we conceive ourselves as still alive, only in the grave, or wandering through horrors and shut out from wonted pleasures. It belongs to material growths to ripen, loosen, decay; but what is there in sensation, reflection, memory, volition, to crumble in pieces and rot away? Why should the power of hope, and joy, and faith, change into inanity and oblivion? What crucible shall burn up the ultimate of force? What material processes shall ever disintegrate the simplicity of spirit? Earth and plant, muscle, nerve, and brain, belong to one sphere, and are subject to the temporal fates that rule there; but reason, imagination, love, will, belong to another, and, immortally fortressed there, laugh to scorn the fretful sieges of decay.
Fourthly, the surviving superiority of the soul, inferred from its contrast of qualities to those of its earthy environment, is further shown by another fact, the mind's dream power, and the ideal realm it freely soars or walks at large in when it pleases.11 This view has often been enlarged upon, especially by Bonnet and Sir Henry Wotton. The unhappy Achilles, exhausted with weeping for his friend, lay, heavily moaning, on the shore of the far sounding sea, in a clear spot where the waves washed in upon the beach, when sleep took possession of him. The ghost of miserable Patroclus calve to him and said, "Sleepest thou and art forgetful of me, O Achilles?" And the son of Peleus cried, "Come nearer: let us embrace each other, though but for a little while." Then he stretched out his friendly hands, but caught him not; for the spirit, shrieking, vanished beneath the earth like smoke.
Astounded, Achilles started up, clasped his hands, and said, dolefully, "Alas! there is then indeed in the subterranean abodes a spirit and image, but there is no body in it."12 The realm of dreams is a world of mystic realities, intangible, yet existent, and all prophetic, through which the soul nightly floats while the gross body slumbers. It is everlasting, because there is nothing in it for corruption to take hold of. The appearances and sounds of that soft inner sphere, veiled so remote from sense, are reflections and echoes from the spirit world. Or are they a direct vision and audience of it? The soul really is native resident in a world of truth, goodness, and beauty, fellow citizen with divine ideas and affections. Through the senses it has knowledge and communion with the hard outer world of matter. When the senses fall away, it is left, imperishable denizen of its own appropriate world of idealities.
11 Schubert, Die Symbolik des Traumes.
12 Iliad, lib. xxiii. ll. 60 106.
Another assemblage of views, based on the character of God, form the theological argument for the future existence of man.13 Starting with the idea of a God of infinite perfections, the immortality of his children is an immediate deduction from the eternity of his purposes. For whatever purpose God originally gave man being, for the disinterested distribution of happiness, for the increase of his own glory, or whatever else, will he not for that same purpose continue him in being forever? In the absence of any reason to the contrary, we must so conclude. In view of the unlimited perfections of God, the fact of conscious responsible creatures being created is sufficient warrant of their perpetuity. Otherwise God would be fickle. Or, as one has said, he would be a mere drapery painter, nothing within the dress.
Secondly, leaving out of sight this illustration of an eternal purpose in eternal fulfilment, and confining our attention to the analogy of the divine works and the dignity of the divine Worker, we shall be freshly led to the same conclusion. Has God moulded the dead clay of the material universe into gleaming globes and ordered them to fly through the halls of space forever, and has he created, out of his own omnipotence, mental personalities reflecting his own attributes, and doomed them to go out in endless night after basking, poor ephemera, in the sunshine of a momentary life? It is not to be imagined that God ever works in vain. Yet if a single consciousness be extinguished in everlasting nonentity, so far as the production of that consciousness is concerned he has wrought for nothing. His action was in vain, because all is now, to that being, exactly the same as if it had never been. God does nothing in sport or unmeaningly: least of all would he create filial spirits, dignified with the solemn endowments of humanity, without a high and serious end.14 To make men, gifted with such a transcendent largess of powers, wholly mortal, to rot forever in the grave after life's swift day, were work far more unworthy of God than the task was to Michael Angelo set him in mockery by Pietro, the tyrant who succeeded Lorenzo the Magnificent in the dukedom of Florence, that he should scoop up the snow in the Via Larga, and with his highest art mould a statue from it, to dissolve ere night in the glow of the Italian sun.
Thirdly, it is an attribute of Infinite Wisdom to proportion powers to results, to adapt instruments to ends with exact fitness. But if we are utterly to die with the ceasing breath, then there is an amazing want of symmetry between our endowments and our opportunity; our attainments are most superfluously superior to our destiny. Can it be that an earth house of six feet is to imprison forever the intellect of a La Place, whose telescopic eye, piercing the unfenced fields of immensity, systematized more worlds than there are grains of dust in this globe? the heart of a Borromeo, whose seraphic love expanded to the limits of sympathetic being? the soul of a Wycliffe, whose undaunted will, in faithful consecration to duty, faced the fires of martyrdom and never blenched? the genius of a Shakspeare, whose imagination exhausted worlds and then invented new? There is vast incongruity between our faculties and the scope given them here.
13 Aebli, Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele, sechster Brief.
14 Ulrici, Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele aus dem Wesen Gottes erwiesen.
On all it sees below the soul reads "Inadequate," and rises dissatisfied from every feast, craving, with divine hunger and thirst, the ambrosia and nectar of a fetterless and immortal world. Were we fated to perish at the goal of threescore, God would have harmonized our powers with our lot. He would never have set such magnificent conceptions over against such poor possibilities, nor have kindled so insatiable an ambition for so trivial a prize of dust to dust.
Fourthly, one of the weightiest supports of the belief in a future life is that yielded by the benevolence of God. Annihilation is totally irreconcilable with this. That He whose love for his creatures is infinite will absolutely destroy them after their little span of life, when they have just tasted the sweets of existence and begun to know the noble delights of spiritual progress, and while illimitable heights of glory and blessedness are beckoning them, is incredible. We are unable to believe that while his children turn to him with yearning faith and gratitude, with fervent prayer and expectation, he will spurn them into unmitigated night, blotting out those capacities of happiness which he gave them with a virtual promise of endless increase. Will the affectionate God permit humanity, ensconced in the field of being, like a nest of ground sparrows, to be trodden in by the hoof of annihilation? Love watches to preserve life. It were Moloch, not the universal Father, that could crush into death these multitudes of loving souls supplicating him for life, dash into silent fragments these miraculous personal harps of a thousand strings, each capable of vibrating a celestial melody of praise and bliss.
Fifthly, the apparent claims of justice afford presumptive proof, hard to be resisted, of a future state wherein there are compensations for the unmerited ills, a complement for the fragmentary experiences, and rectification for the wrongs, of the present life.15 God is just; but he works without impulse or caprice, by laws whose progressive evolution requires time to show their perfect results. Through the brief space of this existence, where the encountering of millions of free intelligences within the fixed conditions of nature causes a seeming medley of good and evil, of discord and harmony, wickedness often triumphs, villany often outreaches and tramples ingenuous nobility and helpless innocence. Some saintly spirits, victims of disease and penury, drag out their years in agony, neglect, and tears. Some bold minions of selfishness, with seared consciences and nerves of iron, pluck the coveted fruits of pleasure, wear the diadems of society, and sweep through the world in pomp. The virtuous suffer undeservedly from the guilty. The idle thrive on the industrious. All these things sometimes happen. In spite of the compensating tendencies which ride on all spiritual laws, in spite of the mysterious Nemesis which is throned in every bosom and saturates the moral atmosphere with influence, the world is full of wrongs, sufferings, and unfinished justice.16 There must be another world, where the remunerating processes interiorly begun here shall be openly consummated. Can it be that Christ and Herod, Paul and Nero, Timour and Fenelon, drop through the blind trap of death into precisely the same condition of unwaking sleep? Not if there be a God!
15 M. Jules Simon, La Religion Naturelle, liv. iii.: l'Immortalite.
16 Dr. Chalmers, Bridgewater Treatise, chap. 10.
There is a final assemblage of thoughts pertaining to the likelihood of another life, which, arranged together, may be styled the moral argument in behalf of that belief.17 These considerations are drawn from the seeming fitness of things, claims of parts beseeching completion, vaticinations of experience. They form a cumulative array of probabilities whose guiding forefingers all indicate one truth, whose consonant voices swell into a powerful strain of promise. First, consider the shrinking from annihilation naturally felt in every breast. If man be not destined for perennial life, why is this dread of non existence woven into the soul's inmost fibres? Attractions are co ordinate with destinies, and every normal desire foretells its own fulfilment. Man fades unwillingly from his natal haunts, still longing for a life of eternal remembrance and love, and confiding in it. All over the world grows this pathetic race of forget me nots. Shall not Heaven pluck and wear them on her bosom? Secondly, an emphatic presumption in favor of a second life arises from the premature mortality prevalent to such a fearful extent in the human family. Nearly one half of our race perish before reaching the age of ten years. In that period they cannot have fulfilled the total purposes of their creation. It is but a part we see, and not the whole. The destinies here seen segmentary will appear full circle beyond the grave.
The argument is hardly met by asserting that this untimely mortality is the punishment for non observance of law; for, denying any further life, would a scheme of existence have been admitted establishing so awful a proportion of violations and penalties? If there be no balancing sphere beyond, then all should pass through the experience of a ripe and rounded life. But there is the most perplexing inequality. At one fell swoop, infant, sage, hero, reveller, martyr, are snatched into the invisible state. There is, as a noble thinker has said, an apparent "caprice in the dispensation of death strongly indicative of a hidden sequel." Immortality unravels the otherwise inscrutable mystery.
Thirdly, the function of conscience furnishes another attestation to the continued existence of man. This vicegerent of God in the breast, arrayed in splendors and terrors, which shakes and illumines the whole circumference of our being with its thunders and lightnings, gives the good man, amidst oppressions and woes, a serene confidence in a future justifying reward, and transfixes the bad man, through all his retinue of guards and panoplied defences, with icy pangs of fear and with a horrid looking for judgment to come. The sublime grandeur of moral freedom, the imperilling dignities of probation, the tremendous responsibilities and hazards of man's felt power and position, are all inconsistent with the supposition that he is merely to cross this petty stage of earth and then wholly expire. Such momentous endowments and exposures imply a corresponding arena and career. After the trial comes the sentence; and that would be as if a palace were built, a prince born, trained, crowned, solely that he might occupy the throne five minutes!
17 Crombie, Natural Theology, Essay IV.: The Arguments for Immortality. Bretschneider, Die Religiose Glaubenslehre, sect. 20-21.
The consecrating, royalizing idea of duty cannot be less than the core of eternal life. Conscience is the sensitive corridor along which the mutual whispers of a divine communion pass and repass. A moral law and a free will are the root by which we grow out of God, and the stem by which we are grafted into him.
Fourthly, all probable surmisings in favor of a future life, or any other moral doctrine, are based on that primal postulate which, by virtue of our rational and ethical constitution, we are authorized and bound to accept as a commencing axiom, namely, that the scheme of creation is as a whole the best possible one, impelled and controlled by wisdom and benignity. Whatever, then, is an inherent part of the plan of nature cannot be erroneous nor malignant, a mistake nor a curse. Essentially and in the finality, every fundamental portion and element of it must be good and perfect. So far as science and philosophy have penetrated, they confirm by facts this a priori principle, telling us that there is no pure and uncompensated evil in the universe. Now, death is a regular ingredient in the mingled world, an ordered step in the plan of life. If death be absolute, is it not an evil? What can the everlasting deprivation of all good be called but an immense evil to its subject? Such a doom would be without possible solace, standing alone in steep contradiction to the whole parallel moral universe. Then might man utter the most moving and melancholy paradox ever expressed in human speech:
"What good came to my mind I did deplore, Because it perish must, and not live evermore."
Fifthly, the soul, if not outwardly arrested by some hostile agent, seems capable of endless progress without ever exhausting either its own capacity or the perfections of infinitude.18 There are before it unlimited truth, beauty, power, nobleness, to be contemplated, mastered, acquired. With indefatigable alacrity, insatiable faculty and desire, it responds to the infinite call. The obvious inference is that its destiny is unending advancement. Annihilation would be a sequel absurdly incongruous with the facts. True, the body decays, and all manifested energy fails; but that is the fault of the mechanism, not of the spirit. Were we to live many thousands of years, as Martineau suggests, no one supposes new souls, but only new organizations, would be needed. And what period can we imagine to terminate the unimpeded spirit's abilities to learn, to enjoy, to expand? Kant's famous demonstration of man's eternal life on the grounds of practical reason is similar. The related ideas of absolute virtue and a moral being necessarily imply the infinite progress of the latter towards the former. That progress is impossible except on condition of the continued existence of the same being. Therefore the soul is immortal.19
18 Addison, Spectator, Nos. 3 and 210.
19 Jacob, Beweis fur die Unsterblichkeit der Seele aus dem Begriffe der Pflicht.
Sixthly, our whole life here is a steady series of growing preparations for a continued and ascending life hereafter. All the spiritual powers we develop are so much athletic training, all the ideal treasures we accumulate are so many preliminary attainments, for a future life. They have this appearance and superscription. Man alone foreknows his own death and expects a succeeding existence; and that foresight is given to prepare him. There are wondrous impulses in us, constitutional convictions prescient of futurity, like those prevising instincts in birds leading them to take preparatory flights before their actual migration.
Eternity is the stuff of which our love, flying forward, builds its nest in the eaves of the universe. If we saw wings growing out upon a young creature, we should be forced to conclude that he was intended some time to fly. It is so with man. By exploring thoughts, disciplinary sacrifices, supernal prayers, holy toils of disinterestedness, he fledges his soul's pinions, lays up treasures in heaven, and at last migrates to the attracting clime.
"Here sits he, shaping wings to fly: His heart forebodes a mystery; He names the name eternity."
Seventhly, in the degree these preparations are made in obedience to obscure instincts and the developing laws of experience, they are accompanied by significant premonitions, lucid signals of the future state looked to, assuring witnesses of its reality. The more one lives for immortality, the more immortal things he assimilates into his spiritual substance, the more confirming tokens of a deathless inheritance his faith finds. He becomes conscious of his own eternity.20 When hallowed imagination weighs anchor and spreads sail to coast the dim shores of the other world, it hears cheerful voices of welcome from the headlands and discerns beacons burning in the port. When in earnest communion with our inmost selves, solemn meditations of God, mysterious influences shed from unseen spheres, fall on our souls, and many a "strange thought, transcending our wonted themes, into glory peeps." A vague, constraining sense of invisible beings, by whom we are engirt, fills us. We blindly feel that our rank and destination are with them. Lift but one thin veil, we think, and the occult Universe of Spirit would break to vision with cloudy crowds of angels. Thousand "hints chance dropped from nature's sphere," pregnant with friendly tidings, reassure us. "Strange," said a gifted metaphysician once, "that the barrel organ, man, should terminate every tune with the strain of immortality!" Not strange, but divinely natural. It is the tentative prelude to the thrilling music of our eternal bliss written in the score of destiny. When at night we gaze far out into immensity, along the shining vistas of God's abode, and are almost crushed by the overwhelming prospects that sweep upon our vision, do not some pre monitions of our own unfathomed greatness also stir within us? Yes: "the sense of Existence, the ideas of Right and Duty, awful intuitions of God and immortality, these, the grand facts and substance of the spirit, are independent and indestructible. The bases of the Moral Law, they shall stand in every tittle, although the stars should pass away. For their relations and root are in that which upholds the stars, even with worlds unseen from the finite, whose majestic and everlasting arrangements shall burst upon us as the heavens do through the night when the light of this garish life gives place to the solemn splendors of eternity."
Eighthly, the belief in a life beyond death has virtually prevailed everywhere and always. And the argument from universal consent, as it is termed, has ever been esteemed one of the foremost testimonies, if not indeed the most convincing testimony, to the truth of the doctrine. Unless the belief can be shown to be artificial or sinful, it must seem conclusive. Its innocence is self evident, and its naturalness is evidenced by its universality.
20 Theodore Parker, Sermon of Immortal Life.
The rudest and the most polished, the simplest and the most learned, unite in the expectation, and cling to it through every thing. It is like the ruling presentiment implanted in those insects that are to undergo metamorphosis. This believing instinct, so deeply seated in our consciousness, natural, innocent, universal, whence came it, and why was it given? There is but one fair answer. God and nature deceive not.
Ninthly, the conscious, practical faith of civilized nations, to day, in a future life, unquestionably, in a majority of individuals, rests directly on the basis of authority, trust in a foreign announcement. There are two forms of this authority. The authority of revelation is most prominent and extensive. God has revealed the truth from heaven. It has been exemplified by a miraculous resurrection. It is written in an infallible book, and sealed with authenticating credentials of super natural purport. It is therefore to be accepted with implicit trust. Secondly, with some, the authority of great minds, renowned for scientific knowledge and speculative acumen, goes far. Thousands of such men, ranking among the highest names of history, have positively affirmed the immortality of the soul as a reliable truth. For instance, Goethe says, on occasion of the death of Wieland, "The destruction of such high powers is something which can never, and under no circumstances, even come into question." Such a dogmatic expression of conviction resting on bare philosophical grounds, from a mind so equipped, so acute, and so free, has great weight, and must influence a modest student who hesitates in confessed incompetence.21 The argument is justly powerful when but humanly considered, and when divinely derived, of course, it absolutely forecloses all doubts.
Tenthly, there is another life, because a belief in it is necessary to order this world, necessary as a comfort and an inspiration to man now. A good old author writes, "the very nerves and sinews of religion is hope of immortality." The conviction that there is a retributive life hereafter is the moral cement of the social fabric. Take away this truth, and one great motive of patriots, martyrs, thinkers, saints, is gone. Take it away, and to all low minded men selfishness becomes the law, earthly enjoyment the only good, suffering and death the only evil. Life then is to be supremely coveted and never put in risk for any stake. Self indulgence is to be secured at any hazard, little matter by what means. Abandon all hope of a life to come, and "from that instant there is nothing serious in mortality." In order that the world should be governable, ethical, happy, virtuous, magnanimous, is it possible that it should be necessary for the world to believe in an untruth?
"So, thou hast immortality in mind?
Hast grounds that will not let thee doubt it?
The strongest ground herein I find:
That we could never do without it!"
Finally, the climax of these argumentations is capped by that grand closing consideration which we may entitle the force of congruity, the convincing results of a confluence of harmonious reasons. The hypothesis of immortality accords with the cardinal facts of observation, meets all points of the case, and satisfactorily answers every requirement.
21 Lewis, Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion.
It is the solution of the problem, as the fact of Neptune explained the perturbations of the adjacent planets. Nothing ever gravitates towards nothing; and it must be an unseen orb that so draws our yearning souls. If it be not so, then what terrible contradictions stagger us, and what a chilling doom awaits us! Oh, what mocking irony then runs through the loftiest promises and hopes of the world! Just as the wise and good have learned to live, they disappear amidst the unfeeling waves of oblivion, like snow flakes in the ocean. "The super earthly desires of man are then created in him only, like swallowed diamonds, to cut slowly through his material shell" and destroy him.
The denial of a future life introduces discord, grief, and despair in every direction, and, by making each step of advanced culture the ascent to a wider survey of tantalizing glory and experienced sorrow, as well as the preparation for a greater fall and a sadder loss, turns faithful affection and heroic thought into "blind furies slinging flame." Unless immortality be true, man appears a dark riddle, not made for that of which he is made capable and desirous: every thing is begun, nothing ended; the facts of the present scene are unintelligible; the plainest analogies are violated; the delicately rising scale of existence is broken off abrupt; our best reasonings concerning the character and designs of God, also concerning the implications of our own being and experience, are futile; and the soul's proud faculties tell glorious lies as thick as stars. Such, at least, is the usual way of thinking.
However formidable a front may be presented by the spectral array of doubts and difficulties, seeming impediments to faith in immortality, the faithful servant of God, equipped with philosophical culture and a saintly life, will fearlessly advance upon them, scatter them right and left, and win victorious access to the prize. So the mariner sometimes, off Sicilian shores, sees a wondrous island ahead, apparently stopping his way with its cypress and cedar groves, glittering towers, vine wreathed balconies, and marble stairs sloping to the water's edge. He sails straight forward, and, severing the pillared porticos and green gardens of Fata Morgana, glides far on over a glassy sea smiling in the undeceptive sun.
