The Destiny of the Soul
William Rounseville Alger

CHAPTER VIII.

CRITICAL HISTORY OF DISBELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE.

IF the first men were conscious spirits who, at the command of God, dropped from the skies into organic forms of matter, or who were created here on an exalted plane of insight and communion far above any thing now experienced by us, then the destination of man to a life after death may originally have been a fact of direct knowledge, universally seen and grasped without any obscuring peradventure. From that state it gradually declined into dubious dimness as successive generations grew sinful, sensual, hardened, immersed and bound in affairs of passion and earth. It became remoter, assumed a questionable aspect, gave rise to discussions and doubts, and here and there to positive disbelief and open denial. Thus, beginning as a clear reality within the vision of all, it sank into a matter of uncertain debate among individuals.

But if the first men were called up into being from the earth, by the creative energy of God, as the distinct climax of the other species, then the early generations of our race, during the long ages of their wild and slowly ameliorating state, were totally ignorant of any conscious sequel to the fate seemingly closed in death. They were too animal and rude yet to conceive a spiritual existence outside of the flesh and the earth. Among the accumulating trophies of their progressive intellectual conquests hung up by mankind in the historic hall of experience, this marvellous achievement is one of the sublimest. What a day was that for all humanity forever after, when for the first time, on some climbing brain, dawned from the great Sun of the spirit world the idea of a personal immortality! It was announced. It dawned separately wherever there were prepared persons. It spread from soul to soul, and became the common faith of the world. Still, among every people there were pertinacious individuals, who swore not by the judge and went not with the multitude, persons of less credulous hearts and more skeptical faculties, who demurred at the great doctrine, challenged it in many particulars, gainsaid it on various grounds, disbelieved it from different motives, and fought it with numerous weapons.

Whichever of the foregoing suppositions be adopted, that the doctrine of a future life subsided from universal acceptance into party contention, or that it arose at length from personal perception and authority into common credit, the fact remains equally prominent and interesting that throughout the traceable history of human opinion there is a line of dissenters who have thought death the finality of man, and the next world an illusion. The history of this special department of thought opens a wide and fertile subject. To gain a comprehensive survey of its boundaries and a compact epitome of its contents, it will be well to consider it in these two lights and divisions, all the time trying to see, step by step, what justice, and what injustice, is done: first, the dominant motive forces animating the disbelievers; secondly, the methods and materials they have employed.

At first thought it would appear difficult to tell what impulses could move persons to undertake, as many constantly have undertaken, a crusade against a faith so dear to man, so ennobling to his nature. Peruse the pages of philosophical history with careful reflection, and the mystery is scattered, and various groups of disbelievers stand revealed, with earnest voices and gestures assailing the doctrine of a future life.1

One company, having their representatives in every age, reject it as a protest in behalf of the right of private judgment against the tyranny of authority. The doctrine has been inculcated by priesthoods, embodied in sacred books, and wrought into the organic social life of states; and acceptance of it has been commanded as a duty, and expected as a decent and respectable thing. To deny it has required courage, implied independent opinions, and conferred singularity. To cast off the yoke of tradition, undermine the basis of power supporting a galling religious tyranny, and be marked as a rebellious freethinker in a generation of slavish conformists, this motive could scarcely fail to exhibit results. Some of the radical revolutionists of the present time say that the doctrine of the divine right of kings and the infallible authority of the priesthood is the living core of the power of tyranny in the world. They therefore deny God and futurity in order to overthrow their oppressors, who reign over them and prey upon them in the name of God and the pretended interests of a future life.2 The true way to secure the real desideratum corruptly indicated in this movement is not by denying the reality of a future life, but by removing the adjustment of its conditions and the administration of its rewards and penalties out of the hands of every clique of priests and rulers. A righteously and benignly ordered immortality, based in truth and adjudicated by the sole sovereignty of God, is no engine of oppression, though a doctrine of heaven and hell irresponsibly managed by an Orphic association, the guardians of a Delphic tripod, the owners of a secret confessional, or the interpreters of an exclusive creed, may be. In a matter of such grave importance, that searching and decisive discrimination, so rare when the passions get enlisted, is especially needed. Because a doctrine is abused by selfish tyrants is no reason for supposing the doctrine itself either false or injurious.

No little injury has been done to the common faith in a future life, great disbelief has been provoked unwittingly, by writers who have sought to magnify the importance of revealed religion at the expense of natural religion. Many such persons have labored to show that all the scientific, philosophical, and moral arguments for immortality are worthless, the teachings and resurrection of Christ, the revealed word of God, alone possessing any validity to establish that great truth. An accomplished author says, in a recent work, "The immortality of the soul cannot be proved without the aid of revelation." 3 Bishop Courtenay published, a few years since, a most deliberate and unrelenting attack upon the arguments for the deathlessness of the soul, seeking with persevering remorselessness to demolish every one of them, and to prove that man totally perishes, but will be restored to life at the second coming of Christ.4 There can scarcely be a question that such statements usually awaken and confirm a deep skepticism as to a future life, instead of enhancing a grateful estimate of the gospel.

1 J. A. Luther, Recensetur numerus eorum, qui immortalitatem inficiati sunt.

2 Schmidt, Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, band iii. kap. iv.: Der philosophische Radicalismus.

3 Bowen, Metaphysical and Ethical Science, part ii. ch. ix. The Future States: Their Evidences and Nature considered on Principles Physical, Moral, and Scriptural, with the Design of Showing the Value of the Gospel Revelation.

If man is once annihilated, it is hardly credible that he will be identically restored. Such a stupendous and arbitrary miracle clashes with the continuity of the universe, and staggers rather than steadies faith. We should beg such volunteers however sincere and good their intentions to withhold the impoverishing gift of their service. And when kindred reasonings are advanced by such men as the unbelieving Hume, we feel tempted to say, in the language of a distinguished divine speaking on this very point, "Ah, gentlemen, we understand you: you belong to the sappers and miners in the army of the aliens!"

Another party of disbelievers have repudiated the whole conception of a future state as a protest against the nonsense and cruelty associated with it in the prevailing superstitions and dogmatisms of their time. From the beginning of history in most nations, the details of another existence and its conditions have been furnished to the eager credulity of the people by the lawless fancies of poets, the fine spinning brains of metaphysicians, and the cold blooded calculations or hot headed zeal of sectarian leaders. Of course a mass of absurdities would grow up around the central germ and a multitude of horrors sprout forth. While the common throng would unquestioningly receive all these ridiculous and revolting particulars, they could not but provoke doubt, satire, flat rejection, from the bolder and keener wits. So we find it was in Greece. The fables about the under world the ferriage over the Styx, poor Tantalus so torturingly mocked, the daughters of Danaus drawing water in sieves all were accredited by the general crowd on one extreme.5 On the other extreme the whole scheme, root and branch, was flung away with scorn. The following epitaph on an unbeliever is attributed to Callimachus. "O Charidas, what are the things below? Vast darkness. And what the returns to earth? A falsehood. And Pluto? A fable. We have perished: this is my true speech to you; but, if you want the flattering style, the Pellaan's great ox is in the shades."6 Meanwhile, a few judicious mediators, neither swallowing the whole gross draught at a gulp, nor throwing the whole away with utter disgust, drank through the strainer of a discriminative interpretation. Because caprice, hatred, and favoritism are embalmed in some perverse doctrine of future punishment is no defensible reason for denying a righteous retribution. Because heaven has been located on a hill top, and its sublime denizens made to eat ambrosia and sometimes to fall out among themselves, is no adequate reason for rejecting the idea of a heavenly life. Puerilities of fancy and monstrosities of passion arbitrarily connected with principles claiming to be eternal truths should be carefully separated, and not the whole be despised and trodden on together.

5 Plutarch, De Superstition. The reality of the popular credulity and terror in later Rome clearly appears from the fact that Marcus Aurelius had a law passed condemning to banishment "those who do any thing through which men's excitable minds are alarmed by a superstitious fear of the Deity." Nero, after murdering his mother, haunted by her ghost and tortured by the Furies, attempted by magical rites to bring up her shade from below, and soften her vindictive wrath Suetonius, Vita Neronis, cap. xxxiv.

6 Epigram. XIV.

From lack of this analysis and discrimination, in the presence of abnormal excrescences and offensive secretions dislike and disbelief have often flourished where, if judicial thought and conscience had cut off the imposed deformitiesand dispelled the discoloring vengeance, faith and love would have been confirmed in contemplating the pure and harmonious form of doctrine left exposed in the beauty of benignant truth. The aim ostensibly proposed by Lucretius, in his elaborate and masterly exposition of the Epicurean philosophy, is to free men from their absurd belief in childish legends and their painful fears of death and hell. As far as merely this purpose is concerned, he might have accomplished it as effectually, perhaps, and more directly, by exposing the adventitious errors without assailing the great doctrine around which they had been gathered. Bion the Borysthenite is reported by Diogenes Laertius to have said, with a sharp humor, that the souls below would be more punished by carrying water in whole buckets than in such as had been bored! A soul may pass into the unseen state though there be no Plutonian wherry, suffer woe though there be no river Pyriphlegethon, enjoy bliss though there be no cup of nectar borne by Hebe. But to fly to rash extremes and build positive conclusions on mere ignorance has always been natural to man, not only as a believer, but also as an iconoclastic denier.

A third set of disbelievers in a future life consists of those who advocate the "emancipation of the flesh" and assert the sufficiency of this life when fully enjoyed. They attack the dogma of immortality as the essential germ of asceticism, and abjure it as a protest against that superstitious distrust and gloom which put a ban on the pleasures of the world. These are the earthlings who would fain displace the stern law of self denial with the bland permission of self indulgence, rehabilitate the senses, feed every appetite full, and, when satiated of the banquet of existence, fall asleep under the table of the earth. The countenance of Duty, severe daughter of God, looks commands upon them to turn from dallying ease and luxury, to sacrifice the meaner inclinations, to gird themselves for an arduous race through difficulties, to labor and aspire evermore towards the highest and the best. They prefer to install in her stead Aphrodite crowned with Paphian roses, her eyes aglow with the light of misleading stars, her charms bewitching them with fatal enchantments and melting them in softest joys. The pale face of Death, with mournful eyes, lurks at the bottom of every winecup and looks out from behind every garland; therefore brim the purple beaker higher and hide the unwelcome intruder under more flowers. We are a cunning mixture of sense and dust, and life is a fair but swift opportunity. Make haste to get the utmost pleasure out of it ere it has gone, scorning every pretended bond by which sour ascetics would restrain you and turn your days into penitential scourges. This gospel of the senses had a swarm of apostles in the last century in France, when the chief gates of the cemetery in Paris bore the inscription, "Death is an eternal sleep." It has had more in Germany in this century; and voices of enervating music are not wanting in our own literature to swell its siren chorus.7

7 Pierer, Universal Lexikon, dritte Auflage, Deutsche Literatur, sect. 42. Schmidt, Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur im neuntzehnten Jahrhundert, band iii: kap. i.: Das junge Deutschland.

Perhaps the greatest prophet it has had was Heine, whose pages reek with a fragrance of pleasure through which sighs, like a fading wail from the solitary string of a deserted harp struck by a lonesome breeze, the perpetual refrain of death! death! death! His motto seems to be, "Quick! let meenjoy what there is; for I must die. Oh, the gusty relish of life! Oh, the speechless mystery, the infinite reality, of death!" He says himself, comparing the degradation of his later experience with the soaring enthusiasm of his youth, "It is as if a star had fallen from heaven upon a hillock of muck, and swine were gnawing at it!"

These men think that the doctrine of a future life, like a great magnet, has drawn the needle of human activity out of its true direction; that the dominant tendency of the present age is, and of right ought to be, towards the attainment of material well being, in a total forgetfulness to lay up treasures in heaven. The end is enjoyment; the obstacle, asceticism; the means to secure the end, the destruction of faith in immortality, so that man, having nothing left but this world, will set himself to improve and enjoy it. The monkish severity of a morbid and erroneous theology, darkening the present and prescribing pain in it to brighten the future and increase its pleasures, legitimates an earnest reaction. But that reaction should be wise, measured by truth. It should rectify, not demolish, the prevailing faith. For the desired end is most likely to be reached by perceiving, not that all terminates in the grave, but that the greatest enjoyment flows from a self controlling devotedness to noble ends, that the claims of another life are in perfect unison with the interests of this life, that the lawful fruition of every function of human nature, each lower faculty being subordinated to each higher one, and the highest always reigning, at once yields the most immediate pleasure and makes the completest preparation for the hereafter. In the absence of the all irradiating sun of immortality, these disbelievers, exulting over the pale taper of sensual pleasure, remind us of a parcel of apes gathered around a cold glow worm and rejoicing that they have found a fire in the damp, chilly night.

Besides the freethinkers, who will not yield to authority, but insist upon standing apart from the crowd, and the satirists, who level their shafts undiscriminatingly against what they perceive associated with absurdity, and the worldlings, who prefer the pleasures of time to the imaginarily contrasted goods of eternity, there is a fourth class of men who oppose the doctrine of a personal immortality as a protest against the burdensome miseries of individuality. The Gipseys exclaimed to Borrow, "What! is it not enough to have borne the wretchedness of this life, that we must also endure another?" 8 A feeling of the necessary limitations and suffering exposures of a finite form of being has for untold ages harassed the great nations of the East with painful unrest and wondrous longing. Pantheistic absorption to lose all imprisoning bounds, and blend in that ecstatic flood of Deity which, forever full, never ebbs on any coast has been equally the metaphysical speculation, the imaginative dream, and the passionate desire, of the Hindu mind. It is the basis and motive of the most extensive disbelief of individual immortality the world has known. "The violence of fruition in these foul puddles of flesh and blood presently glutteth with satiety," and the mortal circuits of earth and time are a round of griefs and pangs from which they would escape into the impersonal Godhead. Sheerly against this lofty strain of poetic souls is that grovelling life of ignorance which, dominated by selfish instincts, crawling on brutish grounds,

8 The Zincali, part ii. ch. i.

cannot awaken the creative force of spiritual wants slumbering within, nor lift its head high enough out of the dust to see the stars of a deathless destiny; and a fifth group of disbelievers deny immortality because their degraded experience does not prophesy it. Many a man might say, with Autolycus, "For the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it." A mind holy and loving, communing with God and an ideal world, "lighted up as a spar grot" with pure feelings and divine truths, is mirrored full of incorporeal shapes of angels, and aware of their immaterial disentanglement and eternity. A brain surcharged with fires of hatred, drowsed with filthy drugs, and drenched with drunkenness, will teem, on the contrary, with vermin writhing in the meshes of decaying matter. Cleaving to evanescent things, men feel that they are passing away like leaves on waves; filled with convictions rooted and breathing in eternity, they feel that they shall abide in serene survival, like stars above tempests. Turn from every obscene sight, curb every base propensity, obey every heavenly vision by assimilation of immortal things, sacred self denials and toils, disinterested sympathies and hopes, accumulate divine treasures and kindle the mounting flame of a divine life, and at the same time consciousness will crave and faith behold an illimitable destiny. Experiences worthy of being eternal generate faith in their own eternity. But the ignorant and selfish sensualist, whose total experience is of the earth earthy, who has no realization of pure truth, goodness, beauty, is incapable of sincere faith in immortal life. The dormancy of his higher powers excludes the necessary conditions of such a faith. His ignoble bodily life does not furnish the conscious basis and prophecy of a glorious spiritual life, but shudderingly proclaims the cessation of all his experience with the destruction of his senses. The termination of all the functions he knows, what else can it be but his virtual annihilation? When to the privative degradations of an uncultivated and earthy experience, naturally accompanied by a passive unbelief in immortality, are added the positive coarseness and guilt of a thick insensibility and a wicked life, aggressive disbelief is quite likely to arise, the essay of an uneasy conscience to slay what it feels would be a foe, and strangle the worm that never dies. The denial springing from such sources is refuted when it is explained. Its motive should never by any man be yielded to, much less be willingly nourished. It should be resisted by a devout culture courting the smiles of God, by rising into the loftier airs of meditation and duty, by imaginative sentiment and practical philanthropy, until the eternal instinct, long smothered under sluggish loads of sense and sin, reached by a soliciting warmth from heaven, stirs with demonstrating vitality.

The last and largest assemblage of dissenters from the prevailing opinion on this subject comprises those who utter their disbelief in a future existence out of simple loyalty to seeming truth, as a protest against what they think a false doctrine, and against the sophistical and defective arguments by which it has been propped. It may be granted that the five previously named classes are equally sincere in their convictions, honest assailants of error and adherents of truth; but they are actuated by animating motives of a various moral character. In the present case, the ruling motive is purely a determination, as Buchner says, to stand by the facts and to establish the correct doctrine. The directest and clearest way of giving a descriptive account of the active philosophical history of this class of disbelievers will be to follow on the lines of their tracks with statements and criticisms of their procedures.9 Disbelief in the doctrine of a future life for man has planted itself upon bold affirmation, and fortified itself with arguments which may most conveniently be considered under five distinct heads.

First is the sensational Argument from Appearance. In death the visible functions cease, the organism dissolves, the mind disappears; there is apparently a total scattering and end of the individual. That these phenomena should suggest the thought of annihilation is inevitable; to suppose that they prove the fact is absurd. It is an arrant begging of the question; for the very problem is, Does not an invisible spiritual entity survive the visible material disintegration? Among the unsound and superstitious attempts to prove the fact of a future life is that founded on narratives of ghosts, appearances and visions of the dead. Dr. Tafel published at Tubingen in 1853 a volume aiming to demonstrate the immortality and personal identity of the soul by citation of ninety cases of supernatural appearances, extending from the history of the ghost whose address to Curtius Rufus is recorded by Tacitus, to the wonderful story told by Renatus Luderitz in 1837. Such efforts are worse than vain. Their data are so explicable in many cases, and so inconclusive in all, that they quite naturally provoke deeper disbelief and produce telling retorts. While here and there a credulous person is convinced of a future life by the asserted appearance of a spirit, the well informed psychologist refers the argument to the laws of insanity and illusions, and the skeptic adds as a finality his belief that there is no future life, because no ghost has ever come back to reveal and certify it. The argument on both sides is equally futile, and removed from the true requisitions of the problem.

To the philosophical thinker a mere appearance is scarcely a presumption in favor of a conclusion in accordance with it. Science and experience are full of examples exposing the nullity or the falsity of appearances. The sun seems to move around the earth; but truth contradicts it. We seem to discern distances and the forms of bodies by direct sight; but the truth is we see nothing but shades and colors: all beyond is inference based on acquired experience. The first darkness would seem to the trembling contemplator absolutely to blot out the universe; but in truth it only prevented him from seeing it. The first thorough unconscious sleep would seem to be the hopeless destruction of the soul in its perfect oblivion. Death is forever for the first time, shrouded in the misleading obscurities of an unknown novelty. Appearances are often deceitful, yielding obvious clews only to mistakes and falsehoods. They are always superficial, furnishing no reliable evidence of the reality.

"Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal'd
Within thy beams, O Sun! Or who could find,
Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood reveal'd,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind?
Why then do we shun death with anxious strife?
If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life?"

9 Spazier, Antiphadon, oder Prufung einiger Hauptbeweise fur die Einfachheit und Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele.

When the body dies, the mind is no longer manifested through it. That is all we immediately know by perception. The inference that the mind has therefore ceased to be at all, is a mere supposition. It may still live and act, independently of the body. An outside phenomenon can prove nothing here. We must by some psychological probe pierce to the core of the being and discern, as there concealed, the central interpretation of truth, or else, in want of this, turn from these surface shadows and seek the solution in some other province. Millions of appearances being opposed to the truth or inadequate to hint it, we must never implicitly trust their suggestions. What microscope can reveal the organic life in a kernel of corn, and show that through the decay of that kernel a stalk will spring up and bear a thousand kernels more? But if a new mental life emerges from the dying form of man, it lies in a spiritual realm whereinto we have no instruments to gaze. Every existent thing has its metes and limits. In fact, the only final weapon and fort of a thing is its environing limitation. It goes into nothing if that be taken down, the atheist says; into infinity, the mystic says. The mistake and difficulty lie in discerning what the last wall around the essence is. "The universe is the body of our body." The boundary of our life is boundless life. Schlegel has somewhere asked the question, "Is life in us, or are we in life?" Because man appears to be wholly extinguished in death, we have no right whatever in reason to conclude that he really is so. The star which seemed to set in the western grave of aged and benighted time, we, soon coming round east to the true spirit sky, may discern bright in the morning forehead of eternity. There can be no safe reasoning from the outmost husk and phenomenon of a thing to its inmost essence and result. And, in spite of any possible amount of appearance, man himself may pass distinct and whole into another sphere of being when his flesh falls to dust. That science should search in vain with her finest glasses to discern a royal occupant reigning in the purple chambered palace of the heart, or to trace any such mysterious tenant departing in sudden horror from the crushed and bleeding house of life, belongs to the necessary conditions of the subject; for spirit can only be spiritually discerned. As well might you seek to smell a color, or taste a sound, tie a knot of water, or braid a cord of wind.

Next comes the abstract Argument from Speculative Philosophy. Under this head are to be included all those theories which deny the soul to be a spiritual entity, but reduce it to an atomic arrangement, or a dependent attribute, or a process of action. Heracleitus held that the soul was fire: of course, when the fuel was exhausted the fire would go out. Thales taught that it was water: this might all evaporate away. Anaximenes affirmed that it was air, of which all things were formed by rarefaction and condensation: on such a supposition it could have no permanent personal identity. Critias said it was blood: this might degenerate and lose its nature, or be poured out on the ground. Leucippus maintained that it was a peculiar concourse of atoms: as these came together, so they might fly apart and there be an end of what they formed. The followers of Aristotle asserted that it was a fifth unknown substance, with properties of its own, unlike those of fire, air, water, and earth. This might be mortal or immortal: there was nothing decisive in the conception or the defining terms to prove which it was. Accordingly, the Peripatetic school has always been divided on the question of the immortality of the soul, from the time of its founder's immediate disciples to this day. It cannot be clearly shown what the mighty Stagyrite's own opinion really was.

Speculative conceptions as to the nature of the soul like the foregoing, when advanced as arguments to establish its proper mortality, are destitute of force, because they are gratuitous assumptions. They are not generalizations based on careful induction of facts; they are only arbitrary hypotheses. Furthermore, they are inconsistent both with the facts and phenomena of experience. Mind cannot fairly be brought into the category of the material elements; for it has properties and performs functions emphatically distinguishing it from every thing else, placing it in a rank by itself, with exclusive predicates of its own. Can fire think? Can water will? Can air feel? Can blood see? Can a mathematical number tell the difference between good and evil? Can earth be jealous of a rival and loyal to a duty? Can a ganglion solve a problem in Euclid or understand the Theodicee of Leibnitz? It is absurd to confound things so distinct. Mind is mind, and matter is matter; and though we are now consciously acquainted with them only in their correlation, yet there is as much reason for supposing that the former survives the close of that correlation as for supposing that the latter does. True, we perceive the material remaining and do not perceive the spirit. Yes; but the differentiation of the two is exactly this, that one is appreciable by the senses, while the other transcends and baffles them. It is absolutely inconceivable in imagination, wholly incredible to reason, intrinsically nonsensical every way, that a shifting concourse of atoms, a plastic arrangement of particles, a regular succession of galvanic shocks, a continuous series of nervous currents, or any thing of the sort, should constitute the reality of a human soul, the process of a human life, the accumulated treasures of a human experience, all preserved at command and traversed by the moral lines of personal identity. The things lie in different spheres and are full of incommunicable contrasts. However numerously and intimately correlated the physical and psychical constituents of man are, yet, so far as we can know any thing about them, they are steeply opposed to each other both in essence and function. Otherwise consciousness is mendacious and language is unmeaning. A recent able author speaks of "that congeries of organs whose union forms the brain and whose action constitutes the mind." 10 The mind, then, is an action! Can an action love and hate, choose and resolve, rejoice and grieve, remember, repent, and pray? Is not an agent necessary for an action? All such speculative conceptions as to the nature of soul as make it purely phenomenal are to be offset, if they can be, by the view which exhibits the personal ego or conscious selfhood of the soul, not as an empty spot in which a swarm of relations centre as their goal point, but as an indestructible monad, the innermost and substantial essence and cause of the organization, the self apprehending and unchangeable axis of all thinking and acting. Some of the most free, acute, learned, wise, and powerful thinkers of the world have been champions of this doctrine; especially among the moderns may be named Leibnitz, Herbart, Goethe, and Hartenstein. Jacobi most earnestly maintained it both against Mendelssohn and against Fichte.

10 Bucknill and Tuke, Psychological Medicine, p. 371.

That the mind is a substantial entity, and therefore may be conceived as immortal, that it is not a mere functional operation accompanying the organic life, a phantom procession of conscious states filing off on the stage of the cerebrum "in a dead march of mere effects," that it is not, as old Aristoxenus dreamed, merely a harmony resulting from the form and nature of the body in the same way that a tune springs from the consenting motions of a musical instrument, seems to be shown by facts of which we have direct knowledge in consciousness. We think that the mind is an independent force, dealing with intellectual products, weighing opposing motives, estimating moral qualities, resisting some tendencies, strengthening others, forming resolves, deciding upon its own course of action and carrying out its chosen designs accordingly. If the soul were a mere process, it could not pause in mid career, select from the mass of possible considerations those adapted to suppress a base passion or to kindle a generous sentiment, deliberately balance rival solicitations, and, when fully satisfied, proceed. Yet all this it is constantly doing. So, if the soul were but a harmony, it would give no sounds contrary to the affections of the lyre it comes from. But actually it resists the parts of the instrument from which they say it subsists, exercising dominion over them, punishing some, persuading others, and ruling the desires, angers, and fears, as if itself of a different nature.11 Until an organ is seen to blow its own bellows, mend its shattered keys, move its pedals, and play, with no foreign aid, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," or a violin tunes up its discordant strings and wields its bow in a spontaneous performance of the Carnival, showing us every Cremona as its own Paganini, we may, despite the conceits of speculative disbelief, hold that the mind is a dynamic personal entity. That thought is the very "latch string of a new world's wicket."

Thirdly, we have the fanciful Argument from Analogy. The keen champions of disbelief, with their athletic agility of dialectics, have made terrible havoc among the troops of poetic arguments from resemblance, drawn up to sustain the doctrine of immortality. They have exposed the feebleness of the argument for our immortality from the wonderful workmanship and costliness of human nature, on the ground that what requires the most pains and displays the most skill and genius in its production is the most lovingly preserved. For God organizes the mind of a man just as easily as he constructs the geometry of a diamond. His omnipotent attributes are no more enlisted in the creation of the intelligence of an elephant or the gratitude of a soul than they are in the fabrication of the wing of a gnat or the fragrance of a flower. Infinite wisdom and power are equally implied in each and in all. They have shown the gross defectiveness of the comparison of the butterfly and psyche. The butterfly, lying in the caterpillar neatly folded up like a flower in the bud, in due time comes forth. It is a material development, open to the senses, a common demonstration tosensible experience. The disengagement of a spirit from a fleshly encasement, on the other hand, is a pure hypothesis wholly removed from sensible apprehension. There is no parallel in the cases. So the ridiculousness has been made evident of Plato's famous analogical argument that by a general law of nature all things are produced contraries from contraries; warmth dies into the

11 Plato, Phado, 98.

life of cold, and lives out of the death of cold; night is born from the death of day, and day is born from the death of night; and thus everywhere death springs from life, and life from death.12 The whole comparison, considered as evidence of human immortality, is baseless and full of astonishing sophistry. When one hemisphere of the earth is turned away from the sun, it is night there; when it is turned towards the sun, it is day again. To this state of facts this revolving succession there is obviously no parallelism whatever in the two phenomenal phases of man, life and death, whereof one finishes its course and then the other seems fixed forever. In like manner, when Jeremy Taylor,13 after the example of many others, especially of old Licetus, argues soberly, as he does in a letter to Evelyn, for the immortality of the soul from the analogy of lamps burning in tombs for centuries with no waste of matter, there is no apposite and valid similarity, even if the instances were not a childish fable. An equally baseless argument for the existence of an independent spiritual body within the material body, to be extricated from the flesh at death and to survive in the same form and dimensions, we recollect having seen in a work by a Swedenborgian author.14 He reasons that when a person who has suffered amputation feels the lost limb as vividly as ever before, the phenomenon is palpable proof of a spirit limb remaining while the fleshly one is gone! Of course, the simple physiological explanation is that the mind instinctively refers the sensations brought in by the severed nerves to the points where, by inveterate custom, it has hitherto learned to trace their origination. The report being the same, it is naturally attributed to the same source.

But those skeptics who have mercilessly exposed these fallacious arguments from analogy have themselves reasoned in the same way as fallaciously and as often. When individual life leaves the physical man, say they, cosmical life immediately enters the corpse and restores it to the general stock of nature; so when personal consciousness deserts the psychical man, the universal spirit resumes the dissolving soul. When certain conditions meet, a human soul is formed, a gyrating current of thought, or a vortex of force: soon some accident or a spent impulse breaks the eddy, and the individual subsides like a whirl in the air or a water spout in the sea. When the spirit fuel of life is exhausted, man goes out as an extinguished candle. He ceases like a tone from a broken harp string. All these analogies are vitiated by radical unlikeness between the things compared. As arguments they are perfectly worthless, being spoiled by essential differences in the cases. Wherein there is a similarity it falls short of the vital point. There is no justice in the conception of man as a momentary gyre of individual consciousness drawn from the universal sea by a sun burst of the Spirit. He is a self ruling intelligence, using a dependent organism for his own ends, comprehending his own destiny, successively developing its conditions and acquiring the materials for occupying and improving them, with a prevision of eternity.

12 Crawford, On the Phadon of Plato.

13 Heber's Life and Works of Jeremy Taylor, vol. i. p. 69.

14 Dee Guays, True System of Religious Philosophy, Letter V.

A flower may just as well perish as live, a musical sound cease as continue, a lamp be put out as burn on: they know not the difference. Not so with the soul of man. We here overpass a discrete degree and enter upon a subjectwithin another circle of categories. Let the rash reasoner who madly tries conclusions on a matter of such infinite pith and moment, with data so inapt and poor, pause in sacred horror before, having first "Put out the light, he then puts out THE LIGHT!"

There are peculiarities in the soul removing it out of the range of physical combinations and making a distinct destiny fairly predicable of it. When we reflect on the nature of a self contained will, intelligent of immaterial verities and perhaps transcendent of space and time, how burlesque is the terror of the ancient corpuscular theorists lest the feebly cohering soul, on leaving the body, especially if death happened during a storm, would be blown in pieces all abroad! Socrates, in the Phado, has a hearty laugh over this; but Lucretius seriously urges it.15 The answer to the skeptical reasoning from analogy is double. First, the lines of partial correspondence which visibly terminate within our tangible reach can teach nothing as to the termination of other lines which lead out of sight and disappear in a spiritual region. An organized material form for instance, a tree is fatally limited: else it would finally fill and exhaust the earth. But no such limiting necessity can be predicated of mind. Secondly, as far as there is genuine analogy, its implications are much stronger in favor of immortality than against it. Matter, whose essence is materiality, survives all apprehensible changes; spirit, whose essence is spirituality, should do the same.

Another attack on the doctrine of a future life is masked in the negative Argument from Ignorance. We do not know how we shall live again; we are unable to construct the conditions and explain the details of a spiritual state of existence; and therefore, it is said, we should of right conclude that there is no such thing. The proposition is not usually stated so blankly; but it really amounts to that. The Epicureans say, as a tree cannot exist in the sky, nor clouds in the ocean, nor fishes in the meadow, nor water in stone, thus the mind cannot exist apart from the nerves and the blood. This style of reasoning is a bold begging of the question. Our present experience is vacant of any specific knowledge of the conditions, methods, and contents of a life it has not yet experienced: therefore there is no such life. Innumerable millions of facts beyond our present knowledge unquestionably exist. It is not in any way difficult to conceive that innumerable millions of experiences and problems now defying and eluding our utmost powers may hereafter fall within our comprehension and be easily solved. Will you accept the horizon of your mind as the limit of the universe? In the present, experience must be confined within its own boundaries by the necessity of the case. If an embryo were endowed with a developed reasoning consciousness, it could not construct any intelligible theory of the world and life into which it was destined soon to emerge. But it would surely be bad logic to infer, because the embryo could not, from want of materials within its experience, ascertain the how, the when, the where, and the what, of the life awaiting it, that there was no other life reserved for it.

15 Lib. iii. ll. 503-508.

An acorn buried and sprouting in the dark mould, if endowed with intelligent consciousness, could not know any definite particulars of its maturer life yet to be in the upper light and air, with cattle in its shade andsinging birds in its branches. Ignorance is not a ground of argument, only of modest suspense. We can only reason from what we know. And the wondrous mysteries or natural miracles with which science abounds, myriads of truths transcending all fictions, melt and remove from the path of faith every supposed difficulty. Any quantity of facts have been scientifically established as real which are intrinsically far more strange and baffling to belief than the assertion of our immortality is. Indeed, "there is no more mystery in the mind living forever in the future than in its having been kept out of life through a past eternity. The authentic wonder is the fact of the transition having been made from the one to the other; and it is far more incredible that, from not having been, we are, than that, from actual being, we shall continue to be." 16

The unbounded possibilities of life suggested by science and open to imagination furnish sufficient reply to the objection that we cannot conceive the precise causes and modes of a future state. Had one little partitular been different in the structure of the eye, or in the radiation and media of light, we should never have seen the stars! We should have supposed this globe the whole of creation. So some slightest integument or hindering condition may now be hiding from us the sublime reality and arrangements of immortality which in death's disenveloping hour are to burst into our vision as the stellar hemisphere through the night. Shut up now to one form of being and one method of experience, how can we expect an exhaustive knowledge of other and future forms and methods of being and experience? It is a contradiction to ask it. But the soul is warranted in having faith, like a buried mustard seed which shall yet mount into its future life. A sevenfold denser mystery and a seven times narrower ignorance would bring no real argument against the survival of the soul. For in an omnipotent infinitude of possibilities one line of ignorance cannot exhaust the avenues and capacities of being. Escaping the flesh, we may soar into heaven

"Upon ethereal wings, whose way
Lies through an element so fraught
With living Mind that, as they play,
Their every movement is a thought."

Ignorance of the scientific method avails nothing against moral proofs of the fact. The physiologist studying the coats of the stomach, the anatomist dissecting the convolutions of the brain, could never tell that man is capable of sentiment, faith, and logic. No stethoscope can discern the sound of an expectation, and no scalpel can lay bare a dream; yet there are expectations and dreams. No metaphysical glass can detect, no prognosis foresee, the death of the soul with the dissolution of its organs: on empirical grounds, the assertion of it is therefore unwarranted. But though no amount of obscurity enveloping the subject, no extent of ignorance disabling us now to grasp the secret, is a legitimate basis of disbelief, yet actually, there can be no doubt, in multitudes of instances, the effectual cause of disbelief in immortality is the impossibility of vividly conceiving its conditions and scenery; "for," as one of the subtlest of thinkers has remarked, "however far faith may go beyond experience, it

16 Martineau, Sermon on Immortality, in Endeavors after the Christian Life.

must always be chained down by it at a distance." But if there are good grounds for anticipating another life, then man should confide in it, no matter how incompetent he is to construct its theatre and foresee its career. A hundred years ago, one might have scouted the statement that the most fearful surgical operations would be performed without inflicting pain, because it was impossible to see how it could be done. Or if a person had been informed that two men, one in Europe and one in America, should converse in lightning athwart the bed of the Atlantic, he might have rejected it as an absurdity, because he could not conceive the mode. If destined to a future life, all we could reasonably expect to know of it now would be through hinting germs and mystic presentiments of it. And there we do experience to the fullest extent: their ceaseless prophecies are everywhere with us,

"Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realized."

The last weapon of disbelief in a future life is the Scientific Argument from Materialism. Lucretius says, "There is nothing in the universe but bodies and the properties of bodies." This is a characteristic example of the method of the materialists: to assume, as an unquestionable postulate, the very point in debate, and that, too, in defiance of the intelligent instincts of consciousness which compel every unsophisticated person to acknowledge the simultaneous existence of mind and matter as two correlated yet distinct realities. The better statement would be, There is nothing in the universe but forces and the relations of forces. For, while we know ourselves in immediate self consciousness, as personal intelligences perceiving, willing, and acting, all we know of an outward world is the effects produced on us by its forces. Certainly the powers of the universe can never be lost from the universe. Therefore if our souls are, as consciousness declares, causes, and not mere phenomena, they are immortal. To ignore either factor in the problem of life, the material substratum or the dynamic agent, is mere narrowness and blindness.

But the unbelieving naturalist argues that the total man is a product of organization, and therefore that with the dissolution of the living combination of organs all is over. Matter is the marriage bed and grave of soul. Priestley says, "The principle of thought no more belongs to substance distinct from body than the principle of sound belongs to substance distinct from bell." There is no relevancy in the comparison, because the things are wholly unlike. Thought is not, as Hartley's theory avowed it was, a vibration of a cerebral nerve, as sound is a vibration of a sonorous body; for how could these vibrations be accumulated in memory as our mental experiences are? When a material vibration ends, it has gone forever; but thoughts are stored up and preserved. A hypothetical simile, like that just cited from Priestley, is not a cogent argument. It is false science thus to limit the modes of being to what lies within our present empirical knowledge. Is it not pure presumptuousness to affirm that the creative power of Almighty God is shut up so that intelligent creatures can only exist in forms of flesh? When a recent materialist makes the assertion, "The thinking man is the sum of his senses," it is manifest that he goes beyond the data, assuming what should be proved, and confounding the instruments and material with the workman. It is as if one should say, "A working cotton manufactory is the sum of its machines," excluding the persons by whose guiding oversight all is done. Plainly, it may be granted that all which man knows is brought in through the door of the senses, without allowing the same of all that man is. We have no warrant for pronouncing the identical coextensiveness of what man learns to know and what he is created to be. The very proposition, man knows something, presupposes three things, a subject, an act, and an object. Whether the three exist and perish together or not is matter for discussion, and not fairly to be settled by forcibly lumping the heterogeneous three into homogeneous unity.

In the present state of science it must be confessed that all kinds of physical force whether mechanical, chemical, vital, or nervous are drawn more or less directly from the sun, the material reservoir of power for our solar system. This must be admitted, although some recent materialists have pushed the doctrine so far that they may be called the Parsees of the West. Whenever the proper conditions for an animate being are furnished, a force derived from the sun lifts matter from its stable equilibrium to the level of organic existence. In due season, from its wavering life struggle there, it decays back to the deep rest of insensate earth.17 This is a truth throughout the organic realm, from the bulb of a sea weed to the brain of a Casar. So much cannot be denied. Every organism constantly receives from the universe food and force, and as constantly restores in other forms the material and dynamical equivalents of what it receives, and finally itself goes to the sources whence it came. But the affirmation of this for all within the physical realm is not the admission of it for what subsists in an immeasurably higher rank and totally different realm. Entering the psychical sphere, where we deal with a new, distinct order of realities, not impenetrability, weight, extension, but thought, affection, will, why may not this province contain eternities, even though the other holds only mortalities? It is a question to be examined on its own grounds, not to be put aside with a foregone conclusion. In nature the cause endures under all evanescent changes, and survives all phenomenal beginnings and endings: so in spirit the causal personality, if there be one, may outlast all the shifting currents of the outward phenomena in endless persistence. Of course, the manifestation of the mind through the senses must cease when the senses no longer remain. The essence of the controversy, then, is exactly this: Is the mind an entity? or is it a collection of functions? If the soul be a substantial force, it is immortal. If it be a phenomenal resultant, it ceases at death.

A reductio ad absurdum immediately occurs. If the psychical totality of man consists of states of feeling, modes of volition, and powers of thought, not necessitating any spiritual entity in which they inhere, then, by parity of reasoning, the physical totality of man consists of states of nutrition, modes of absorption, and powers of change, implying no body in which these processes are effectuated! Qualities cannot exist without a subject: and just as physical attributes involve a body, spiritual attributes involve a mind. And, if a mental entity be admitted, its death or cessation with that of its outer dress or case is not a fair inference, but needs appropriate evidence.

The soul of a man has been defined as the sum of his ideas, an idea being a state of the consciousness. But the essence of mind must be the common ground and element of all

17 Moleschott, Licht and Leben.

different states of consciousness. What is that common ground and element but the presence of a percipient volitional force, whether manifested or unmanifested, still there? That is the germinal core of our mental being, integrating and holding in continuous identity all the phenomenal fluctuations of consciousness. It is clear that any other representation seems inconsistent with the most central and vivid facts of our knowledge. In illustration of this, let us see how every materialistic exposition omits utterly, or fails to account for, the most essential element, the solitary and crowning peculiarity, of the case. For example, it is said that thought or consciousness is a phenomenal process of changes sustained in the brain by a correlation of forces, just as the rainbow appears, but has no ontological subsistence of its own: the continuous spectrum hangs steady on the ceaselessly renewed substratum of the moving mist rack and the falling rain. But the comparison is absolutely inapplicable, because the deepest ground principle of the mind is wanting in the rainbow, namely, conscious and continuous identity holding in each present moment all the changes of the past moments. If the rainbow were gifted with consciousness, it could not preserve its personal identity, but merely its phenomenal identity, for any two successive moments, since its whole being would consist of an untied succession of states.

Traversing the body from its extreme tissues to the gray vesicular substance composing the spinal cord and covering the surface and convolutions of the brain, are two sets of white, fibrous nerves. One set, the afferents, bring in sensation, all kinds of tidings, from the out world of matter. The other set, the efferents, carry out volition, all kinds of decrees, from the in world of mind. Without an afferent nerve no influence of the world can reach the mind; and without an efferent nerve no conclusion of the mind can reach the world. As we are now constituted, this machinery is necessary for the intercommunication of the mind and the material universe. But if there be something in the case besides live machinery and crossing telegrams, if there be a monarch mind inaccessible to the vulgar crowd of things and only conversing with them through the internuncial nerves, that spirit entity may itself be capable of existing forever in an ideal universe and of communing there face to face with its own kingly lineage and brood. And we maintain that the account of the phenomena is grossly defective, and that the phenomena themselves are palpably inexplicable, except upon the supposition of such an entity, which uses the organism but is not the organism itself nor a function of it. "Ideas," one materialist teaches, "are transformed sensations." Yes; but that does not supersede a transforming mind. There must be a force to produce the transformations. "The phenomena of mind," says another, "consist in a succession of states of consciousness." Yes; but what is it that presides over, takes up, and preserves this succession? The phenomena of the mind are not the mind itself. "The actions of the mind are the functions of the cerebrum," adds a third. Yes; but the inquiry is, what is the mind itself? not, what are its acts? The admission of the gray nerve cells of the brain, as the material substratum through which sensations are received and volitions returned, does not exclude the necessity of a dynamical cause for the metamorphosing phenomenon. That cause must be free and intelligent, because the products of its action, as well as its accompanying consciousness, are marked by freedom and intelligence. For example, when a cylindrical and fibrous porter deposits his sensitive burden in the vesicular and cineritious substance, something examines it, tests its import, reflects on what shall be done, forms an intelligent resolution, and commands another porter to bear the dynamic load forth. The reflective and determining something that does this is the mind. Thus, by the fact of an indissoluble dynamic will, is the broad lineal experience of man grasped and kept from dissipating into crumbled psychical states, as when the dead kings of ancient India were burned their corpses were wrapped in asbestos shrouds to hold the ashes together.

The flame of a burnt out candle twinkling in the socket is not numerically the same with that which appeared when it was first lighted; nor is a river at any two periods numerically the same. Different particles constantly feed an ever renewed flame or stream, just like the former but never the same. A totally new element appears when we contemplate mind. Here, although the whole molecular substance of the visible organism is in perpetual flux, the same conscious personality persists through all, growing ever richer in an accumulating possession of past experiences still held in living command. The Arethusa of identity threads the blending states of consciousness, and, passing the ocean bed of death, may emerge in some morning fount of immortality. A photographic image impressed on suitable paper and then obliterated is restored by exposure to the fumes of mercury. But if an indefinite number of impressions were superimposed on the same paper, could the fumes of mercury restore any one called for at random? Yet man's memory is a plate with a hundred millions of impressions all cleanly preserved, and he can at will select and evoke the one he wants. No conceivable relationship of materialistic forces can account for the facts of this miraculous daguerreotype plate of experience, and the power of the mind to call out into solitary conspicuousness a desired picture which has forty nine million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine latent pictures lying above it, and fifty millions below it. It has been said that "the impressions on the brain, whether perceptions or intellections, are fixed and retained through the exactness of assimilation. As the mind took cognizance of the change made by the first impression of an object acting on the brain through the sense organs, so afterwards it recognises the likeness of that change in the parts inserted by the nutritive process.18 This passage implies that the mind is an agent, not a phenomenon; and it describes some of the machinery with which the mind works, not the essence of the mind itself. Its doctrine does not destroy nor explain the presiding and elective power which interprets these assimilated and preserved changes, choosing out such of them as it pleases, that unavoided and incomprehensible power, the hiding place of volition and eternity, whose startling call has often been known, in some dread crisis, to effect an instantaneous restoration of the entire bygone life, making all past events troop through the memory, a swiftly awful cavalcade marching along the fibrous pavement of the brain, while each terrified thought rushes to its ashy window to behold.

18 Paget. Surgical Pathology, Lecture II.

We here leave the material realm behind and enter a spiritual province where other predicates and laws hold, and where, "delivered over to a night of pure light, in which no unpurged sight is sharp enough to penetrate the mysterious essence that sprouteth into different persons," we kneel in most pious awe, and cry, with SirThomas Browne, "There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something that was before the elements and owes no homage unto the sun!"

The fatal and invariable mistake of materialism is that it confounds means and steps with causes, processes with sources, organs with ends, predicates with subject.19 Alexander Bain denies that there is any cerebral closet or receptacle of sensation and imagery where impressions are stored to be reproduced at pleasure. He says, the revival of a past impression, instead of being an evocation of it from an inner chamber, is a setting on anew of the current which originally produced it, now to produce it again.20 But this theory does not alter the fact that all past impressions are remembered and can be revived at will by an internal efficiency. The miracle, and the necessity of an unchanging conscious entity to explain it, are implied just as they were on the old theory. "The organs of sense," Sir Isaac Newton writes, "are not for enabling the soul to perceive the species of things in its sensorium, but for conveying them there." 21 Now, as we cannot suppose that God has a brain or needs any material organs, but rather that all infinitude is his Sensorium, so spirits may perceive spiritual realities without any mediating organism. Our physical experience in the present is no limit to the spiritual possibilities of the future. The materialistic argument against immortality fails, because it excludes essential facts. As anterior to our experience in the present state there was a power to organize experiences and to become what we are, so none of the superficial reasonings of a mere earth science can show that there is not now a power to organize experiences in a future state and to become what our faith anticipates we shall be. And this suggests to speculative curiosity the query, Shall we commence our future life, a psychical cell, as we commenced our present life, a physical cell?

It will be well, perhaps, to reply next to some of the aggressive sophistries of disbelief. The following lines by Dr. Beddoes are striking, but, considered as a symbol of life, seem almost wilfully defective:

"The body is but an engine Which draws a mighty stream of spiritual power Out of the world's own soul, and makes it play A while in visible motion."

Man is that miraculous engine which includes not only all the needful machinery, but also fuel, fire, steam, and speed, and then, in climacteric addition to these, an engineer! Does the engineer die when the fire goes out and the locomotive stops? When the engine madly plunges off the embankment or bridge of life, does the engineer perish in the ruin, or nimbly leap off and immortally escape? The theory of despair has no greater plausibility than that of faith.

19 Frauenstadt, Per Materialismus, seine Wahrheit und sein Irrthum, s. 169.

20 The Senses and the Intellect, p. 61.

21 Brodie, Psychological Inquiries, p. 41, 3d edition.

Feuerbach teaches that the memento mori of reason meets us everywhere in the spiritual God's acre of literature. A book is a grave, which buries not the dead remains, but the quickman, not his corpse, but his soul. And so we live on the psychical deposits of our ancestry. Our souls consist of that material which once constituted other souls, as our bodies consist of the material which once constituted other bodies. A thought, it is to be replied, is never excreted from the mind and left behind. Only its existence is indicated by symbols, while itself is added to the eternal stock of the deathless mind. A thought is a spiritual product in the mind from an affection of the cerebral substance. A sentence is a symbol of a thought adapted to create in the contemplator just such a cerebral affection as that from which it sprang, and to deposit in his mind just such a spiritual product as that which it now denotes. Thus are we stimulated and instructed by the transmitted symbols of our ancestors' experiences, but not literally nourished by assimilation of their very psychical substance, as this remorseless prophet of death's ghastly idealism would have us believe. Still, in whatever aspect we regard it, one cannot but shudder before that terrible cineritious substance whose dynamic inhabitants are generated in the meeting of matter's messages with mind's forces, and sent forth in emblems to shake the souls of millions, revolutionize empires, and refashion the world.

Strauss employs an ingenious argument against the belief in a future life, an argument as harmless in reality as it is novel and formidable in appearance. "Whether the nerve spirit be considered as a dependent product, or as the producing principle of the organism, it ends at death: for, in the former case, it can no longer be produced when the organism perishes; in the latter case, that it ceases to sustain the organism is a proof that it has itself decayed."22 In this specious bit of special pleading, unwarranted postulates are assumed and much confusion of thought is displayed. It is covertly taken for granted that every thing seen in a given phenomenon is either product or producer; but something may be an accompanying part, involved in the conditions of the phenomenon, yet not in any way essentially dependent on it, and in fact surviving it. What does Strauss mean by "the nerve spirit"? Is there no mind behind it and above it, making use of it as a servant? Our present life is the result of an actual and regulated harmony of forces. Surely that harmony may end without implying the decay of any of its initial components, without implying the destruction of the central constituent of its intelligence. It is illegitimate logic, passing from pure ignorance to positive affirmation; a saltation of sophistry from a negative premise of blindness to all behind the organic life, to a dogmatic conclusion of denial that there is any thing behind the organic life.

A subtle and vigorous disbeliever has said, "The belief in immortality is not a correct expression of human nature, but rests solely on a misunderstanding of it. The real opinion of human nature is expressed in the universal sorrow and wailing over death." It is obvious to answer that both these expressions are true utterances of human nature. It grieves over the sadness of parting, the appalling change and decay, the close locked mystery of the unseen state. It rejoices in the solace and cheer of a sublime hope springing out of the manifold powerful promises within and without.

22 Charakteristiken und Kritiken, s. 394.

Instead of contemning the idea of a heavenly futurity as an idle dream image of human longing, it were both devouter and more reasonable, fromthat very causal basis of it, to revere it and confide in it as divinely pledged. All the thwarted powers and preparations and affections, too grand, too fine, too sacred, to meet their fit fulfilment here, are a claim for some holier and vaster sphere, a prophecy of a more exalted and serene existence, elsewhere. The unsatisfied and longing soul has created the doctrine of a future life, has it? Very good. If the soul has builded a house in heaven, flown up and made a nest in the breezy boughs of immortality, that house must have tenants, that nest must be occupied. The divinely implanted instincts do not provide and build for naught.

Certain considerations based on the resemblances of men and beasts, their asserted community of origin and fundamental unity of nature, have had great influence in leading to the denial of the immortality of the human soul. It is taken for granted that animals are totally mortal; and then, from the apparent correspondences of phenomena and fate between them and us, the inference is drawn that the cases are parallel throughout, and that our destiny, too, is annihilation. The course of thought on this subject has been extremely curious, illustrating, on the one hand, that "where our egotism begins, there the laws of logic break," and, on the other hand, that often when fancy gets scent of a theory the voice and lash of reason are futile to restrain it until the theory is run into the ground. Des Cartes, and after him Malebranche and a few other writers, gave no slight currency to the notion that brutes are mere machines, moved by prearranged influences and utterly destitute of intelligence, will, or consciousness. This scheme gave rise to many controversies, but has now passed into complete neglect.23 Of late years the tendency has been to assimilate instead of separating man and beast. Touching the outer sphere, we have Oken's homologies of the cranial vertebra. In regard to the inner sphere, we have a score of treatises, like Vogt's Pictures from Brute Life, affirming that there is no qualitative, but merely a quantitative, distinction between the human soul and the brute soul.24 Over this point the conflict is still thick and hot. But, however much of truth there may be in the doctrine of the ground identity of the soul of a man and the soul of a dog, the conclusion that man therefore perishes is a pure piece of sophistry. Such a monstrous assassination of the souls of the human race with the jaw bone of an ass may be legitimately avoided in either of two ways. It is as fair to argue the immortality of animals from their likeness to us, as our annihilation from our likeness to them. The psychological realm has been as much deepened in them by the researches of modern science as the physiological domain has been widened in us. As Agassiz says, we must not lose sight of the mental individuality of animals in an exclusive attention to the bodily side of their nature.25

23 Darmanson, La bete transformee en machine. Ditton, Appendix to Discourse on Resurrection of Christ, showing that brutes are not mere machines, but have immortal souls. Orphal, Sind die Thiere blos sinnliche Geschopfe? Thomasius, De Anima Brutorum, quo asseritur, eam non esse Materialem, contra Cartesianam Opinionem. Winkler, Philosophische Untersuchungen von dem Seyn and Wesen der Seelen der Thiere, von einzelnen Liebhabern der Weltweisheit.

24 Buchner, Kraft und Stoff, kap. 19: Die Thierseele.

25 Essay on Classification, p. 64.

A multitude of able thinkers have held the faith that animals have immaterial and deathless souls. Rightly considered, there is nothing in such a doctrine which a keen reasoner may not credit and a person of the most refined feelings find pleasure in embracing. In their serene catholicity and divine sympathy, science and religion exclude pride and contempt.

But admitting that there is no surviving psychical entity in the brute, that is in no way a clear postulate for proving that the same fact holds of man. The lower endowments and provinces of man's nature and experience may correspond ever so closely with the being and life of brutes whose existence absolutely ceases at death, and yet he may be immortal. The higher range of his spiritual faculties may elevate him into a realm of universal and eternal principles, extricating his soul from the meshes of decay. He may come into contact with a sphere of truths, grasp and rise into a region of realities, conferring the prerogative of deathlessness, not to be reached by natures gifted in a much lower degree, although of the same kind. Such a distinction is made between men themselves by Spinoza.26 His doctrine of immortality depicts the stupendous boon as contingent, to be acquired by observance of conditions. If the ideas of the soul represent perishable objects, it is itself mortal; if imperishable, it is immortal. Now, brutes, it is probable, never rise to the apprehension of pure and eternal truths; but men do. It was a mean prejudice, founded on selfish ignorance and pride, which first assumed the total destruction of brutes in death, and afterwards, by the grovelling range of considerations in which it fastened and the reaction it naturally provoked, involved man and all his imperial hopes in the same fate. A firm logical discrimination disentangles the human mind from this beastly snarl.27 The difference in data warrants a difference in result. The argument for the immortality of brutes and that for the immortality of men are, in some respects, parallel lines, but they are not coextensive. Beginning together, the latter far outreaches the former. Man, like the animals, eats, drinks, sleeps, builds; unlike them, he adorns an ideal world of the eternal future, lays up treasures in its heavenly kingdom, and waits to migrate into it.

There are two distinct methods of escaping the fatal inference of disbelief usually drawn by materialists. First, by the denial of their philosophical postulates, by the predication of immaterial substance, affirming the soul to be a spaceless point, its life an indivisible moment. The reasonings in behalf of this conception have been manifold, and cogent enough to convince a multitude of accomplished and vigorous thinkers.28 In Herbart's system the soul is an immaterial monad, or real, capable of the permanent formation of states in its interior. Its life consists of a quenchless series of self preservations. These reals, with their relations and aggregations, constitute at once the varying phenomena and the causal substrata of the universe. Mamertius Claudianus, a philosophical priest of Southern Gaul in the fifth century, wrote a treatise "On the Nature of the Soul." He says, "When the soul wills, it is all will; when it recollects or feels, it is all recollection or feeling. Now, will, recollection, and feeling, are not bodies.

26 Jouffroy, Introduction to Ethics: Channing's trans., vol. ii. pp. 189-191.

27 Schaller, Leib und Seele, kap. 13: Der Psychische Unterschied des Menschen vom Thiere.

28 Crombie, Natural Theology, vol. ii.: Essay on the Immortality of the Soul. Brougham, Discourse of Nat. Theol., sect. 5.

Therefore the soul is incorporeal." This makes the conscious man animperishable substantial activity. An old English writer, with quaint eloquence, declares, "There is a proportion between an atom and the universe, because both are quantitative. All this excesse vanisheth into nothing as soon as the lowest substance shineth out of that orbe where they reside that scorn divisibility."

From this brief statement of the position of the immaterialists, without arguing it, we pass to note, in the second place, that nearly all the postulates ordinarily claimed by the materialist may be granted without by any means proving the justice of their disbelief of a future life.29 Admit that there can be no sensation without a nerve, no thought without a brain, no phenomenal manifestation without an organ. Such an admission legitimates the conclusion, on empirical grounds, that our present mode of life must cease with the dissolution of our organism. It does not even empirically prove that we may not survive in some other mode of being, passing perhaps to an inconceivably higher stage and more blessed kind of life. After the entire disintegration of our material organs, we may, by some now unknown means, possess in a refined form the equivalents of what those organs gave us. There may be, interfused throughout the gross mortal body, an immortal body of exquisitely delicate structure invisibly extricating itself from the carious ruins at death. Plattner develops and defends this hypothesis with plausible skill and power.30 The Hindus conceived the soul to be concealed within several successive sheaths, the innermost of which accompanied it through all its transmigrations.31 "The subtile person extends to a small distance over the skull, like the flame of a lamp above its wick." 32 The later Pythagoreans and Platonists seem to have believed that the same numerical ethereal body with which the soul was at first created adhered to it inseparably during all its descents into grosser bodies, a lucid and wingy vehicle, which, purged by diet and catharms, ascends again, bearing the soul to its native seat.33 The doctrine of Swedenborg asserts man to be interiorly an organized form pervading the physical body, an eternal receptacle of life from God. In his terminology, "constant influx of life" supersedes the popular idea of a self contained spiritual existence. But this influx is conditioned by its receiving organ, the undecaying inner body.34 However boldly it may be assailed and rejected as a baseless theory, no materialistic logic can disprove the existence of an ethereal form contained in, animating, and surviving, the visible organism. It is a possibility; although, even if it be a fact, science, by the very conditions of the case, can never unveil or demonstrate it.

When subjected to a certain mode of thought developed recently by Faraday, Drossbach, and others, materialism itself brightens and dissolves into a species of idealism, the universe becomes a glittering congeries of indestructible points of power, and the immortality of the soul is established as a mathematical certainty.35 All bodies, all entities, are but forms of force.36

This has been ably shown by Spiers in his treatise, Ueber das korperliche Bedingtsein der Seelenthatigkeiten.

30 Spes immortalitatis animorum per rationes physiologicas confirmata.

31 Dabistan, vol. ii. p. 177.

32 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 246.

33 Cudworth, Int. Sys., vol. ii. pp. 218-230, Am. ed.

34 On the Intercourse between the Soul and the Body, sect. 9.

35 Lott, Herbarti de animi immortalitate doctrina.

Gravity, cohesion, bitterness, thought, love, recollection, are manifestations of force peculiarly conditioned. Our perceptions are a series of states of consciousness. An attribute or property of a thing is an exercise of force or mode of activity producing a certain state of consciousness in us. The sum of its attributes or properties constitutes the totality of the thing, and is not adventitiously laid upon the thing: you can separate the parts of a thing; but you cannot take away its forces from any part, because they are its essence. Matter is not a limitation or neutralization, but a state and expression, of force. Force itself is not multiplex, but one, all qualities and directions of it lying potentially in each entity, the kinds and amounts which shall be actually manifested depending in each case on the conditions environing it. All matter, all being, therefore, consists of ultimate atoms or monads, each one of which is an inseparable solidarity of activities. The universe is an eternal society of eternal force individuals, all of which are capable of constant changes in groupings, aggregations, developments, relations, but absolutely incapable of annihilation. Every atom possesses potential reason, and comes to self apprehension whenever the appropriate conditions meet. All differences originate from conditions and exist not in essentialities.

According to this theory, the eternity of the soul is sure, but that eternity must be an endless series of mutual transitions between consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death.37 Since all cannot be men at once, they must take their turns. Carus says, a soul enclosing in itself an independent consciousness is inconceivable. When the organism by which consciousness is conditioned and revealed is destroyed in death, consciousness disappears as certainly as the gleaming height of a dome falls in when its foundation is removed. And Drossbach adds, death is the shade side of life. Without shade, light would not be perceptible, nor life without death; for only contrast leads to knowledge. The consciousness of life is realized by interchange with the unconsciousness of death. Mortality is the inevitable attribute of a self conscious being. The immortality of such a being can be nothing else than an everlasting mortality. In this restless alternation between the opposite states of life and death, being holds continuous endurance, but consciousness is successively extinguished and revived, while memory is each time hopelessly lost. Widenmann holds that the periods of death are momentary, the soul being at once born again, retaining no vestiges of its past.38 Drossbach, on the contrary, believes that memory is an indefeasible quality of the soul atom, the reason why we do not remember previous lives being that the present is our first experiment. When all atoms destined to become men have once run the human career, the earliest ones will begin to reappear with full memory of their preceding course. It matters not how long it requires for one circuit of the whole series of souls; for the infinite future is before us, and, as we are unconscious in death, the lapse of ages is nothing. We lie down to sleep, and instantly rise up to a new life.

36 Hickok, Rational Cosmology, ch. ii. sect. 1: Matter is force.

37 Drossbach, Die personliche Unsterblichkeit als Folge der atomistischen Verfaasung der Natur, abschn. iv. kap. ii. sect. 5, 6.

38 Gedanken uber die Unsterblichkeit als Wiederholung des Erdenlebens.

"Death gives to life all its relish, as hunger is the true sauce of food. Death first makes us precious and dear to ourselves. Since it lies in the nature of change that no condition is endless, but morning ever follows night, death cannot be endless. Be unconcerned; thy being shall as little be lost as the grain of dust at thy foot! Because in death thou dost not know that thou art, therefore fearest thou that thou shalt be no more? O pusillanimous! the great events of nature are too vast for thy weak heart. A whole eternity thou hast not been conscious that thou art, and yet thou hast become conscious of it. Every night thou losest thy consciousness, yet art thou conscious again, and shalt be. The loss of consciousness is not necessarily the loss of self. The knowledge of my being is not my being itself, but a peculiar force thereof, which, entering into reciprocal action with other forces, is subject to change. It is its essence to act, and thus to change, yet without surrendering its essence. Goethe's words may be applied to the soul: 'It is; therefore eternally it is.'

Not in cold motionlessness consists eternal life, but in eternal movement, in eternal alteration, in incessant change. These are warranties that no state endures forever, not even the unconscious, death." 39

In this unfolding of the theory there are many arbitrary and fanciful conceptions which may easily be dispensed with. The interspersion of the bright life of the human monads with blank epochs of oblivious darkness, and the confinement of their destiny to an endless repetition of their life course on this globe, are not necessary. In the will of God the free range of the boundless universe may lie open to them and an incessant career in forever novel circumstances await them. It is also conceivable that human souls, leading still recurrent lives on earth with total forgetfulness, may at last acquire sufficient power, in some happy concurrence or sublime exigency, to summon back and retain all their foregone states. But, leaving aside all such incidental speculations, the chief interest of the dynamic atomistic or monad theory, as affording a solid basis for immortality, is in relation to the arrogance of a shallow and conceited materialism. Says the materialist, "Show me a spirit, and I will believe in your heaven." Replies the idealist, "Show me your matter, however small a piece, and I will yield to your argument." Spirit is no phenomenon to be shown, and matter is an inference from thought: thus the counter statements of physical science and ideal philosophy fairly offset each other, and throw their respective advocates back upon the natural ground of unsophisticated faith and observation. Standing there unperverted, man has an invincible reliance on the veracity of his faculties and the normal reports of nature. Through immediate apprehension of his own conscious will and the posited experience of his senses, he has knowledge both of causal forms of being, or free productive force, and of resultant processes and phenomena. And surely sound logic teaches that the latter may alter or disappear without implying the annihilation of the former.

39 Drossbach, Die individuelle Unsterblichkeit vom monadistisch metaphysischen Standpunkte betrachtet.

If all material substance, so called, were destroyed, not only would space remain as an infinite indivisible unity, but the equivalentsof what had been destroyed must remain in some form or other. Who shall say that these equivalents would not be intelligent points of power, capable of organizing aggregate bodies and of reconstituting the universe in the will of God, or of forming from period to period, in endless succession, new kinds of universes, each abounding in hitherto unimagined modes of life and degrees of bliss? To our present faculties, with only our present opportunities and data, the final problem of being is insoluble. We resolve the properties of matter into methods of activity, manifestations of force. But there, covered with alluring awe, a wall of impenetrable mystery confronts us with its baffling "Thus far, and no farther, shall thine explicating gaze read the secrets of destiny." We cannot tell what force is. We can conceive neither its genesis nor its extinction. Over that obscure environment, into the immense empire of possibilities, we must bravely fling the treasures of our love and the colors of our hope, and with a divine impulse in the moment of death leap after, trusting not to sink as nothing into the abyss of nowhere, but, landing safe in some elysium better than we know, to find ourselves still in God.

In dealing with moral problems in the realm of the higher reason, intuitions, mysterious hints, prophetic feelings, instinctive apprehensions of fitness and harmony, may be of more convincing validity than all the formal arguments logic can build.40 "Sentiment," Ancillon says, as quoted by Lewes, "goes further than knowledge: beyond demonstrative proofs there is natural evidence; beyond analysis, inspiration; beyond words, ideas; beyond ideas, emotions; and the sense of the infinite is a primitive fact of the soul." In transcendental mathematics, problems otherwise unapproachable are solved by operating with emblems of the relations of purely imaginary quantities to the facts of the problems. The process is sound and the result valid, notwithstanding the hypothetical and imaginary character of the aids in reaching it.

When for mastering the dim momentous problems of our destiny the given quantities and relations of science are inadequate, the helpful supposititious conditions furnished by faith may equally lead over their airy ways to conclusions of eternal truth.

The disbelievers of a future life have in their investigations applied methods not justly applicable to the subject, and demanded a species of proof impossible for the subject to yield: as if one should use his ear to listen to the symmetries of beauty, and his eye to gaze upon the undulations of music.

It is therefore that the terribly logical onslaughts of Feuerbach are harmless upon most persons. The glittering scimetar of this Saracenic metaphysician flashes swift and sharp, but he fights the air with weapons of air. No blood flows from the severed emptiness of space; no clash of the blows is heard any more than bell strokes would be heard in an exhausted receiver. One may justifiably accept propositions which strict science cannot establish and believe in the existence of a thing which science cannot reveal, as Jacobi has abundantly shown41 and as Wagner has with less ability tried to illustrate.42

40 Abel, Disquisitio omnium tam pro immortalitate quam pro mortalitate argumentandi generum.

41 Von den goutlichen Dingen and ibrer Offenbarung. Wissen und Glauben mit besonderer Beziehung zur Zukunft der Seelen: Fortsetzung der Betrachtungen uber Menschenschopfung und Seelensubstanz.

The utmost possible achievement of a negative criticism is to show the invalidity of the physiological,analogical, and metaphysical arguments to furnish positive proof of a future life for us. But this negation fully admitted is no evidence of our total mortality. Science is impotent to give any proof reaching to such a conclusion. However badly the archery of the sharp eyed and strong armed critics of disbelief has riddled the outer works of ordinary argument, it has not slain the garrison. Scientific criticism therefore leaves us at this point: there may be an immortal soul in us. Then the question whether there actually is an immortal soul in us, rests entirely on moral facts and considerations. Allowing their native force to these moral facts and considerations, the healthy ethical thinker, recognising in himself an innermost self conscious ego which knows itself persistent and identical amidst the multiplex vicissitude of transient conditions, lies down to die expecting immediately to continue his being's journey elsewhere, in some other guise. Leaving out of view these moral facts and considerations, the materialistic naturalist thinker, recognising his consciousness as only a phantom procession of states across the cerebral stage hung in ashy livery and afloat on blood, lies down to expire expecting immediately to be turned into nobody forever. Misinterpreting and undervaluing these moral facts and considerations, the anchorless speculative thinker, recognising his organism as an eye through which the World Spirit beholds itself, or a momentary pulse in which the All feels itself, his consciousness as a part of the infinite Thought, lies down on his death couch expecting immediately to be turned into everybody, eternity, instead of greeting him with an individual kiss, wrapping him in a monistic embrace. The broad drift of human conviction leads to the first conclusion, a persistent personality. The greatest philosophers, from Plato to Pascal, deny the second view, a blotting extinction of the soul, declaring it false in science and incredible in presentation. The third theory a pantheistic absorption the irresistible common sense of mankind repudiates as a morbid dream. Man naturally believes himself immortal but not infinite. Monism is a doctrine utterly foreign to undiseased thinking. Although it be a Fichte, a Schelling, or a Hegel, who says that the soul is a circumscribed yet omnipotent ego, which first radiates the universe, and afterwards beholds it in the mirror of itself, and at length breaks into dead universality, the conception is, to the average apprehension of humanity, as overweening a piece of wild fancy as ever rose in a madman's reveries.43

The ordinary contemplator of the phenomena of the world and the sequel of human life from the materialistic point of view feels disgust and terror at the prospect. The scene seems to him degrading and the fate fearful. The loathing and dismay vulgarly experienced thus, it is true, arise from an exaggerated misapprehension of the basis and meaning of the facts: rightly appreciated, all is rulingly alive, aspirant, beautiful, and benignant.

42 A full discussion of the pantheistic doctrine of immortality will be found in the following works. Richmann, Gemsinfassl. Darstellung und Wurdigung aller gehaltreichen Beweisarten fur Gott und fur Unsterblichkeit der Seele. Unius, Unsterblichkeit. Blanche, Philosophische Unsterblichkeitlehre.

43 Weisse, Die philosophische Geheimlehre von der Unsterblichkeit des menschlichen Individuums. Goschel, Von den Beweisen fur die Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele im Lichte der speculativen Philosophie. Morell, Historical and Critical View of the Speculative Philosophy of Europe in the 19th Century, part ii. ch. v. sect. 2: The German School of the 19th Century. Buchanan, Modern Atheism.

The ceaseless transformations filling the heights and depths of the creation are pervaded with joy andclothed with a noble poetry. There is no real death: what seems so is but a "return or falling home of the fundamental phenomenon to the phenomenal foundation, a dissolution through which nature seeks her ground and strives to renew herself in her principles." Still, in spite of this more profound and genial interpretation of the shifting metamorphoses of nature, the fear of there being no conscious future life for man produces, when first entertained, a horrid constriction around the heart, felt like the ice cold coils of a serpent. The thought of tumbling hopelessly into "The blind cave of eternal night" naturally oppresses the heart of man with sadness and with alarm. To escape the unhappiness thus inflicted, recourse has been had to expedients. Four artificial substitutes for immortality have been devised. Fondly fixing attention upon these, men have tried to find comfort and to absorb their thoughts from the dreaded spectre and the long oblivion. The first is the sentimental phantasm of posthumous fame. The Latin bard, ancient Ennius, sings,

"Nemo me lacrymis decoret, nec funera fletu Faxit. Cur? volito vivu' per ora virum." 44

Shakspeare likewise often expresses the same thought:

"When all the breathers of this world are dead, You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen) Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men."

And again in similar strain:

"My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes."

Napoleon is reported to have said, "My soul will pass into history and the deathless memories of mankind; and thus in glory shall I be immortal." This characteristically French notion forms the essence of Comte's "positivist" doctrine of a future life. Those deemed worthy after their death to be incorporated, by vote of the people, in the Supreme Being, the Grand Etre, a fictitious product of a poetic personification, through the perpetual fame and influence thus secured have an immortal life in the thoughts and feelings of a grateful posterity. Comte says, "Positivism greatly improves immortality and places it on a firmer foundation, by changing it from objective to subjective." Great and eternal Humanity is God.

44 Cicero, Tusc. Quast., lib. i. cap. xv.

45 Catechism of Positive Religion, Conversation III.

The dead who are meritorious are alone remembered, and, thus incorporated into the Divinity, they have a "subjective immortality in the brains of the living." 45 It is a poor shadow of the sublime truth which the soul craves. Leopardi, in his Bruto Minore, expresses this "poor hope of being in the future's breath:""dell' atra morte ultima raggio Conscia future eta." That proud and gifted natures should have seriously stooped to such a toy, to solace themselves with it, is a fact strange and pathetic. With reverential tenderness of sympathy must we yearn towards those whose loving natures, baffled of any solid resource, turn appealingly, ere they fade away, to clasp this substanceless image of an image.

Another scheme is what may be called the "lampada tradunt" 46 theory of a future life. Generations succeed each other, and the course is always full. Eternal life takes up new subjects as fast as its exhausted receptacles perish. Men are the mortal cells of immortal humanity. The individual must comfort himself with the sympathetic reflection that his extinction destroys nothing, since all the elements of his being will be manipulated into the forms of his successors.

Life is a constant renovation, and its sum is forever full and equal on the globe. The only genuine resurrection unto eternal life is an unending re creation of organisms from the same materials to repeat the same physiological and psychological processes.47 There is a gleam of cheer and of nobleness in this representation; but, upon the whole, it is perhaps as ineffectual as the former. It is a vapid consolation, in view of our own annihilation, to think that others will then live and also be annihilated in their turn. It is pleasant to believe that the earth will forever be peopled with throngs of men; but though such a belief might help to reconcile us to our fate, it could not alter the intrinsic sadness of that fate.

A third substitute for the common view of immortality is a scientific perception of the fact that the peculiar force which each man is, the sum of his character and life, is a cause indestructibly mixed with the course of subsequent history, an objective personal immortality, though not a conscious one. What he was, remains and acts forever in the world.

The fourth substitute is an identification of self with the integral scheme of things. I am an inseparable portion of the totality of being, to move eternally in its eternal motion.

"If death seem hanging o'er thy separate soul, Discern thyself a part of life's great whole."

Lose the thought of thy particular evanescence in the thought of the universal permanence. The inverted torch denotes death to a mere inhabitant of the earth: to a citizen of the universe, downward and upward are the same. Perhaps one who rejects the ordinary doctrine of a future life can be solaced and edified by these substitutes in proportion to his fineness, greatness, and nobleness. But to most persons no substitute can atone for the withdrawn truth of immortality itself.

46 Lucretius, De Nat. Rerum, lib. ii. 1. 78.

47 Schultz Schultzenstein, Die Bildung des menschlichen Geistes durch Kultur der Verjungung seines Lebens, ss. 834-847: Die Unsterblichkeitsbegriffe.

In regard to the eternal preservation of personal consciousness, it were bigoted blindness to deny that there is room for doubts and fears. While the monad soul so to call it lies here beneath the weak glimmer of suns so far off that they are forceless to develop it to a victorious assurance, we cannot but sometimes feel misgivings and be depressed by skeptical surmises. Accordingly, while belief has generally prevailed, disbelief has in every age had its representatives. The ancients had their Dicaarchus, Protagoras, Panatius, Lucan, Epicurus, Casar, Horace, and a long list besides. The moderns have had their Gassendi, Diderot, Condillac, Hobbes, Hume, Paine, Leopardi, Shelley, and now have their Feuerbach, Vogt, Moleschott, and scores of others needless to be named. And although in any argument from authority the company of the great believers would incomparably outshine and a thousand times outweigh the array of deniers, this does not alter the obvious fact that there are certain phenomena which are natural provocatives of doubt and whose troubling influence scarcely any one can always escape. Homer, in giving expression to Hector's confidence of victory over the Greeks, makes him wish that he were but as sure of entering the state of the immortal gods.48 When some one asked Dr. Johnson, "Have we not proof enough of the immortality of the soul?" he replied, "I want more." Davenant of whom Southey says, "I know no other author who has so often expressed his doubts respecting a future state and how burdensome he felt them" writes, "But ask not bodies doom'd to die, To what abode they go: Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy, It is not safe to know."

Charles Lamb writes, "If men would honestly confess their misgivings, (which few men will,) there are times when the strongest Christian of us has reeled under questionings of such staggering obscurity." Many a man, seeing nature hang her veil of shifting glories above the silent tombs of vanished generations, voiceless now forever, entertaining innumerable contradictory queries amidst feelings of decay and sights of corruption, before the darkness of unknown futurity might piteously exclaim, without deserving blame,

"I run the gauntlet of a file of doubts, Each one of which down hurls me to the ground."

Who that has reached maturity of reflection cannot appreciate and sympathize somewhat with these lines of Byron, when he stands before a lifeless form of humanity?

"I gazed, as oft I have gazed the same, To try if I could wrench aught out of death Which should confirm, or shake, or make, a faith; But it was all a mystery. Here we are, And there we go: but where? Five bits of lead, Or three, or two, or one, send very far! And is this blood, then, form'd but to be shed? Can every element our elements mar? Can air, earth, water, fire, live and we dead? We, whose minds comprehend all things? No more."

48 Iliad, lib, viii. Il. 538-540.

Doubt is not sin, but rather a misfortune; for it is to adopt a suggestion from Schaller a cleft in the soul through which thought steals away what the heart desires. The guilt or innocence of doubting depends on the spirit in which it is done. There are two attitudes of mind and moods of feeling before propositions and evidence. One is, "I will not believe unless I see the prints of the nails and lay my finger in the marks of the wounds." The other is, "Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief." In abstract logic or rigid science the former may be appropriate and right. The latter alone can be justifiable in moral and religious things. If a man sorrowfully and humbly doubts, because he cannot help it, he shall not be condemned. When he is proud of his doubts, complacently swells with fancied superiority, plays the fanfaron with his pretentious arguments, and sets up as a propagandist of disbelief, being all the while in reality "Most ignorant of what he is most assured, His glassy essence," his conduct is offensive to every good man, and his spirit must receive the condemnation of God. A missionary of atheism and death, horridly eager to destroy those lofty thoughts which so much help to make us men, is a shocking spectacle. Yet a few such there are, who seem delighted as by their dismal theory they bury mankind in an iron tomb of materialism and inscribe on the irrevocable door the solitary words, Fate and Silence.

The more attentively one dwells on the perishable physical side of life, the more prone he will be to believe in an absolute death; the more prevailingly he ponders the incorruptible psychical side, the more prepared he will be to credit immortality. The chemist who confines his studies exclusively within his own province, when he reflects on the probable sequence of life, will speculatively see himself vanish in his blowpipes and retorts. Whoso devotedly dabbles in organisms, nerves, and bloods may easily become skeptical of spirit; for it everywhere balks his analysis and eludes his search. The objects he deals with are things. They belong to change and dissolution. Mind and its proper home belong to a different category of being. Because no heaven appears at the end of the telescope, and no soul is seen on the edge of the dissecting knife, and no mind is found at the bottom of the crucible, to infer that therefore there is neither heaven, nor soul, nor mind, is as monstrous a non sequitur as it would be to infer the non existence of gravity because it cannot be distilled in any alembic nor discerned with any glass. The man who goes into the dark crimson dripping halls of physiology seeking proofs of immortality, and, failing to find them, abandons his faith in it, is like that hapless traveller who, groping in the catacombs under Rome, was buried by the caving in of the sepulchral roof, and thus lost his life, while all the time, above, the great vault of heaven was stretching, blue and breezy, filled with sunshine and sentient joy!

When we contemplate men in a mass, like a swarm of bees or a hive of ants, we find ourselves doubting their immortality. They melt away, in swiftly confused heaps and generations, into the bosom of nature. On the other hand, when we think of individuals, an almost unavoidable thought of personal identity makes us spontaneously conclude them immortal. It rather requires the effort then to think them otherwise. But obviously the real problem is never of the multitudinous throng, but always of the solitary person. In reference to this question it is sophistry to fix our thoughts on a Chinese city as crowded with nameless and indistinguishable human inhabitants as a decayed cheese is with vermin. Fairness requires that our imaginations and reasonings upon the subject fasten upon an individual, set apart and uplifted, like a king, in the incommunicable distinctness and grandeur of selfhood and responsibility.

From looking about this grave paved star, from painful and degrading contemplations of dead bodies, "the snuff and loathed part of nature which burns itself out," let a man turn away, and send his interior kingly glance aloft into ideal realms, let him summon up the glorious sentiments of freedom, duty, admiration, the noble experiences of self sacrifice, love, and joy, and his soul will extricate itself from the filthy net of material decay, and feel the divine exemption of its own clean prerogatives, dazzling types of eternity, and fragments of blessedness that "Promise, on our Maker's truth, Long morrow to this mortal youth." Martyrdom is demonstration of immortality; for self preservation is the innermost, indestructible instinct of every conscious being. When the soul, in a sacred cause, enthusiastically rushes upon death, or in calm composure awaits death, it is irresistibly convinced that it cannot be hurt, but will be blessed, by the crisis. It knows that in an inexpressibly profound sense whosoever would ignobly save his life loses it, but whosoever would nobly lose his life saves it. Martyrdom demonstrates immortality.

"Life embark'd out at sea, 'mid the wave tumbling roar, The poor ship of my body went down to the floor; But I broke, at the bottom of death, through a door, And, from sinking, began forever to soar."

The most lamentable and pertinacious doubts of immortality sometimes arise from the survey of instances of gross wickedness, sluggishness, and imbecility forced on our attention. But, as these undeniably are palpable violations of the creative intention, it is not just to reason from them. In fairness the argument demands that we select the noblest, healthiest specimens of completed humanity to reason from. Should we not take a case in which God's will is so far plainly fulfilled, in order to trace that will farther and even to its finality? And regarding on his death bed a Newton, a Fenelon, a Washington, is it difficult to conceive him surviving the climax and catastrophe of his somatic cell basis and soaring to a more august range of existence? Remembering that such as these have lived and died, ay, and even the godlike Nazarene, can we believe that man is merely a white interrogation point lifted on the black margin of matter to ask the answerless secret of the universe and be erased?

Such a conclusion charges God with the transcendent crime of infanticide perpetrated in the most deliberate manner and on the most gigantic scale. Who can bear, by thus quenching the hope of another life, to add death to death, and overcast, to every thoughtful eye, the whole sunny field of life with the melancholy shadow of a bier? There is a noble strength and confidence, cheering to the reader, in these words of one of the wisest and boldest of thinkers: "I should be the very last man to be willing to dispense with the faith in a future life: nay, I would say, with Lorenzo de'Medici, that all those are dead, even for the present life, who do not hope for another. I have the firm conviction that our soul is an existence of indestructible nature, whose working is from eternity to eternity. It is like the sun, that seems indeed to set, but really never sets, shining on in unchangeable splendor." 49 Such a view of our destiny incomparably inspires and ennobles us. Man, discovering under all the poor, wretched accidents of earth and sense and hard fortune the immortality of his soul, feels as that king's son who, lost in infancy, and growing up under the care of a forest hind, supposed himself to belong to the rude class among whom he lived; but one day, learning his true parentage, he knew beneath his mean disguise that he was a prince, and immediately claimed his kingdom. These facts of experience show clearly how much it behooves us to cultivate by every honest method this cardinal tenet of religion, how much wiser faith is in listening to the lucid echoes of the sky than despair in listening to the muffled reverberations of the grave. All noble and sweet beliefs grow with the growing nobleness and tenderness of characters sensitive to those fine revealings which pachydermatous souls can never know. In the upper hall of reason, before the high shrine of faith, burn the base doubts begotten in the cellars of sense; and they may serve as tapers to light your tentative way to conviction. If the floating al Sirat between physiology and psychology, earth and heaven, is too slippery and perilous for your footing, where heavy limbed science cannot tread, nerve the wings of faith for a free flight. Or, if every effort to fasten a definite theory on some solid support on the other side of the gulf fails, venture forth on the naked line of limitless desire, as the spider escapes from an unwelcome position by flinging out an exceedingly long and fine thread and going forth upon it sustained by the air.50 Whoever preserves the full intensity of the affections is little likely to lose his trust in God and a future life, even when exposed to lowering and chilling influences from material science and speculative philosophy: the glowing of the heart, as Jean Paul says, relights the extinguished torch in the night of the intellect, as a beast stunned by an electric shock in the head is restored by an electric shock in the breast. Daniel Webster says, in an expression of his faith in Christianity written shortly before his death, "Philosophical argument, especially that drawn from the vastness of the universe in comparison with the apparent insignificance of this globe, has sometimes shaken my reason for the faith which is in me; but my heart has always assured and reassured me."51 Contemplating the stable permanence of nature as it swallows our fleet generations, we may feel that we vanish like sparks in the night; but when we think of the persistent identity of the soul, and of its immeasurable superiority to the brute mass of matter, the aspect of the case changes and the moral inference is reversed. Does not the simple truth of love conquer and trample the world's aggregated lie?

49 Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe.

50 Greenough, An Artist's Creed.

51 Memorial of Daniel Webster from the City of Boston, p. 16.

The man who, with assiduous toil and earnest faith, develops his forces, and disciplines his faculties, and cherishes his aspirations, and accumulates virtue and wisdom, is thus preparing the auspicious stores and conditions of another existence. As he slowly journeys over the mountains of life, aware that there can beno returning, he gathers and carries with him materials to build a ship when he reaches the strand of death. Upon the mist veiled ocean launching then, he will sail where? Whither God orders. Must not that be to the right port?

We remember an old Brahmanic poem brought from the East by Ruckert and sweetly resung in the speech of the West full of encouragement to those who shall die.52 A man wrapped in slumber calmly reclines on the deck of a ship stranded and parting in the breakers. The plank on which he sleeps is borne by a huge wave upon a bank of roses, and he awakes amidst a jubilee of music and a chorus of friendly voices bidding him welcome. So, perhaps, when the body is shattered on the death ledge, the soul will be tossed into the fragrant lap of eternal life on the self identified and dynamic plank of personality.

52 Brahmanische Erzahlungen, s. 5.

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