Chapter VIII (1)

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. 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 deformities

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.

and 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 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 me

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.

enjoy 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. 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 subject

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.

within 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. 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 and

15 Lib. iii. ll. 503-508.

singing 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.