Chapter VIII (2)

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. 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 Sir

18 Paget. Surgical Pathology, Lecture II.

Thomas 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.

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 quick

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.

man, 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. Instead of contemning the idea of a heavenly futurity as an idle dream image of human longing, it were both devouter and more reasonable, from

22 Charakteristiken und Kritiken, s. 394.

that 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 A multitude of able thinkers have held the faith that animals have immaterial and deathless souls. Rightly considered, there is nothing in such a

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.

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. Therefore the soul is incorporeal." This makes the conscious man an

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.

imperishable 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

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.

force.36 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. If all material substance, so called, were destroyed, not only would space remain as an infinite indivisible unity, but the equivalents

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

of 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 The utmost possible achievement of a negative criticism is to show the invalidity of the physiological,

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.

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. The ceaseless transformations filling the heights and depths of the creation are pervaded with joy and

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.

clothed 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. 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:"

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

45 Catechism of Positive Religion, Conversation III.

"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.

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

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.

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?