Produced by Edmund Dejowski
THE DESTINY OF THE SOUL.
A CRITICAL HISTORY
OF THE
DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE,
BY
WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER.
TENTH EDITION,
WITH SIX NEW CHAPTERS, AND
A Complete Bibliography of the Subject.
[Note: bibliography not included here]
COMPRISING 4977 BOOKS RELATING TO THE NATURE, ORIGIN, AND
DESTINY OF THE SOUL. THE TITLES CLASSIFIED AND ARRANGED
CHRONOLOGICALLY, WITH NOTES, AND INDEXES OF THE AUTHORS AND
SUBJECTS.
BY EZRA ABBOT,
PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION IN
THE DIVINITY SCHOOL OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1880
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860, by
WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United
States for the District of Massachusetts.
Copyright 1878, W.R. Alger
ELECTROTYPED BY JOHNSON & CO., PHILADA.
University Press: John Wilson & Son,
Cambridge.
PREFACE TO THE TENTH EDITION.
THIS work has passed through nine editions, and has been out of
print now for nearly a year. During the twenty years which have
elapsed since it was written, the question of immortality, the
faith and opinions of men and the drift of criticism and doubt
concerning it, have been a subject of dominant interest to me, and
have occupied a large space in my reading and reflection.
Accordingly, now that my publisher, moved by the constant demand
for the volume, urges the preparation of a new edition introducing
such additional materials as my continued researches have gathered
or constructed, I gladly comply with his request.
The present work is not only historic but it is also polemic;
polemic, however, not in the spirit or interest of any party or
conventicle, but in the spirit and interest of science and
humanity. Orthodoxy insists on doctrines whose irrationality in
their current forms is such that they can never be a basis for the
union of all men. Therefore, to discredit these, in preparation
for more reasonable and auspicious views, is a service to the
whole human race. This is my justification for the controversial
quality which may frequently strike the reader.
Looking back over his pages, after nearly a quarter of a century
more of investigation and experience, the author is grateful that
he finds nothing to retract or expunge. He has but to add such
thoughts and illustrations as have occurred to him in the course
of his subsequent studies. He hopes that the supplementary
chapters now published will be found more suggestive and mature
than the preceding ones, while the same in aim and tone. For he
still believes, as he did in his earlier time, that there is much
of error and superstition, bigotry and cruelty, to be purged out
of the prevailing theological creed and sentiment of Christendom.
And he still hopes, as he did then, to contribute something of
good influence in this direction. The large circulation of the
work, the many letters of thanks for it received by the author
from laymen and clergymen of different denominations, the numerous
avowed and unavowed quotations from it in recent publications,
all show that it has not been produced in vain, but has borne
fruit in missionary service for reason, liberty, and charity.
This ventilating and illumining function of fearless and
reverential critical thought will need to be fulfilled much longer
in many quarters. The doctrine of a future life has been made so
frightful by the preponderance in it of the elements of material
torture and sectarian narrowness, that a natural revulsion of
generous sentiment joins with the impulse of materialistic science
to produce a growing disbelief in any life at all beyond the
grave. Nothing else will do so much to renew and extend faith in
God and immortality as a noble and beautiful doctrine of God and
immortality, freed from disfiguring terror, selfishness, and
favoritism.
The most popular preacher in England has recently asked his
fellow believers, "Can we go to our beds and sleep while China,
India, Japan, and other nations are being damned?" The proprietor
of a great foundry in Germany, while he talked one day with a
workman who was feeding a furnace, accidentally stepped back, and
fell headlong into a vat of molten iron. The thought of what
happened then horrifies the imagination. Yet it was all over in
two or three seconds. Multiply the individual instance by
unnumbered millions, stretch the agony to temporal infinity, and
we confront the orthodox idea of hell!
Protesting human nature hurls off such a belief with indignant
disdain, except in those instances where the very form and
vibration of its nervous pulp have been perverted by the hardening
animus of a dogmatic drill transmitted through generations. To
trace the origin of such notions, expose their baselessness,
obliterate their sway, and replace them with conceptions of a more
rational and benignant order, is a task which still needs to be
done, and to be done in many forms, over and over, again and
again. Though each repetition tell but slightly, it tells.
Every sound argument is instantly crowned with universal victory
in the sight of God, and therefore must at last be so in the sight
of mankind. However slowly the logic of events limps after the
logic of thoughts, it always follows. Let the mind of one man
perceive the true meaning of the doctrine of the general
resurrection and judgment and eternal life, as a natural evolution
of history from within, and it will spread to the minds of all
men; and the misinterpretation of that doctrine so long prevalent,
as a preternatural irruption of power from without, will be set
aside forever. For there is a providential plan of God, not
injected by arbitrary miracle, but inhering in the order of the
world, centred in the propulsive heart of humanity, which beats
throb by throb along the web of events, removing obstacles and
clearing the way for the revelation of the completed pattern. When
it is done no trumpets may be blown, no rocks rent, no graves
opened. But all immortal spirits will be at their goals, and the
universe will be full of music.
NEW YORK, February 22, 1878.
PREFACE.
WHO follows truth carries his star in his brain. Even so bold a
thought is no inappropriate motto for an intellectual workman, if
his heart be filled with loyalty to God, the Author of truth and
the Maker of stars. In this double spirit of independence and
submission it has been my desire to perform the arduous task now
finished and offered to the charitable judgment of the reader. One
may be courageous to handle both the traditions and the novelties
of men, and yet be modest before the solemn mysteries of fate and
nature. He may place no veil before his eyes and no finger on his
lips in presence of popular dogmas, and yet shrink from the
conceit of esteeming his mind a mirror of the universe. Ideas,
like coins, bear the stamp of the age and brain they were struck
in. Many a phantom which ought to have vanished at the first cock
crowing of reason still holds its seat on the oppressed heart of
faith before the terror stricken eyes of the multitude. Every
thoughtful scholar who loves his fellow men must feel it an
obligation to do what he can to remove painful superstitions, and
to spread the peace of a cheerful faith and the wholesome light of
truth. The theories in theological systems being but philosophy,
why should they not be freely subjected to philosophical
criticism? I have endeavored, without virulence, arrogance, or
irreverence towards any thing sacred, to investigate the various
doctrines pertaining to the great subject treated in these pages.
Many persons, of course, will find statements from which they
dissent, sentiments disagreeable to them. But, where thought and
discussion are so free and the press so accessible as with us, no
one but a bigot will esteem this a ground of complaint. May all
such passages be charitably perused, fairly weighed, and, if
unsound, honorably refuted! If the work be not animated with a
mean or false spirit, but be catholic and kindly, if it be not
superficial and pretentious, but be marked by patience and
thoroughness, is it too much to hope that no critic will assail it
with wholesale condemnation simply because in some parts of it
there are opinions which he dislikes? One dispassionate argument
is more valuable than a shower of missile names. The most vehement
revulsion from a doctrine is not inconsistent, in a Christian
mind, with the sweetest kindness of feeling towards the persons
who hold that doctrine. Earnest theological debate may be carried
on without the slightest touch of ungenerous personality. Who but
must feel the pathos and admire the charity of these eloquent
words of Henry Giles?
"Every deep and reflective nature looking intently 'before and
after,' looking above, around, beneath, and finding silence and
mystery to all his questionings of the Infinite, cannot but
conceive of existence as a boundless problem, perhaps an
inevitable darkness between the limitations of man and the
incomprehensibility of God. A nature that so reflects, that
carries into this sublime and boundless obscurity 'the large
discourse of Reason,' will not narrow its concern in the solution
of the problem to its own petty safety, but will brood over it
with an anxiety which throbs for the whole of humanity. Such a
nature must needs be serious; but never will it be arrogant: it
will regard all men with an embracing pity. Strange it should ever
be otherwise in respect to inquiries which belong to infinite
relations, that mean enmities, bitter hatreds, should come into
play in these fathomless searchings of the soul! Bring what
solution we may to this problem of measureless alternatives,
whether by Reason, Scripture, or the Church, faith will never
stand for fact, nor the firmest confidence for actual
consciousness. The man of great and thoughtful nature, therefore,
who grapples in real earnest with this problem, however satisfied
he may be with his own solution of it, however implicit may be his
trust, however assured his convictions, will yet often bow down
before the awful veil that shrouds the endless future, put his
finger on his lips, and weep in silence."
The present work is in a sense, an epitome of the thought of
mankind on the destiny of man. I have striven to add value to it
by comprehensiveness of plan, not confining myself, as most of my
predecessors have confined themselves, to one province or a few
narrow provinces of the subject, but including the entire subject
in one volume; by carefulness of arrangement, not piling the
material together or presenting it in a chaos of facts and dreams,
but grouping it all in its proper relations; by clearness of
explanation, not leaving the curious problems presented wholly in
the dark with a mere statement of them, but as far as possible
tracing the phenomena to their origin and unveiling their purport;
by poetic life of treatment, not handling the different topics
dryly and coldly, but infusing warmth and color into them; by
copiousness of information, not leaving the reader to hunt up
every thing for himself, but referring him to the best sources for
the facts, reasonings, and hints which he may wish; and by
persevering patience of toil, not hastily skimming here and there
and hurrying the task off, but searching and researching in every
available direction, examining and re examining each mooted point,
by the devotion of twelve years of anxious labor. How far my
efforts in these particulars have been successful is submitted to
the public.
To avoid the appearance of pedantry in the multiplication of foot
notes, I have inserted many authorities incidentally in the text
itself, and have omitted all except such as I thought would be
desired by the reader. Every scholar knows how easy it is to
increase the number of references almost indefinitely, and also
how deceptive such an ostensible evidence of wide reading may be.
When the printing of this volume was nearly completed, and I had
in some instances made more references than may now seem needful,
the thought occurred to me that a full list of the books published
up to the present time on the subject of a future life, arranged
according to their definite topics and in chronological order,
would greatly enrich the work and could not fail often to be of
vast service. Accordingly, upon solicitation, a valued friend Mr.
Ezra Abbot, Jr., a gentleman remarkable for his varied and
accurate scholarship undertook that laborious task for me; and he
has accomplished it in the most admirable manner. No reader,
however learned, but may find much important information in the
bibliographical appendix which I am thus enabled to add to this
volume. Every student who henceforth wishes to investigate any
branch of the historical or philosophical doctrine of the
immortality of the soul, or of a future life in general, may thank
Mr. Abbot for an invaluable aid.
As I now close this long labor and send forth the result, the
oppressive sense of responsibility which fills me is relieved by
the consciousness that I have herein written nothing as a bigoted
partisan, nothing in a petty spirit of opinionativeness, but have
intended every thought for the furtherance of truth, the honor of
God, the good of man.
The majestic theme of our immortality allures yet baffles us. No
fleshly implement of logic or cunning tact of brain can reach to
the solution. That secret lies in a tissueless realm whereof no
nerve can report beforehand. We must wait a little. Soon we shall
grope and guess no more, but grasp and know. Meanwhile, shall we
not be magnanimous to forgive and help, diligent to study and
achieve, trustful and content to abide the invisible issue? In
some happier age, when the human race shall have forgotten, in
philanthropic ministries and spiritual worship, the bigotries and
dissensions of sentiment and thought, they may recover, in its
all embracing unity, that garment of truth which God made
originally "seamless as the firmament," now for so long a time
torn in shreds by hating schismatics. Oh, when shall we learn that
a loving pity, a filial faith, a patient modesty, best become us
and fit our state? The pedantic sciolist, prating of his clear
explanations of the mysteries of life, is as far from feeling the
truth of the case as an ape, seated on the starry summit of the
dome of night, chattering with glee over the awful prospect of
infinitude. What ordinary tongue shall dare to vociferate
egotistic dogmatisms where an inspired apostle whispers, with
reverential reserve, "We see through a glass darkly"? There are
three things, said an old monkish chronicler, which often make me
sad. First, that I know I must die; second, that I know not when;
third, that I am ignorant where I shall then be.
"Est primum durum quod scio me moriturum: Secundum, timeo quia hoc
nescio quando: Hine tertium, flebo quod nescio ubi manebo."
Man is the lonely and sublime Columbus of the creation, who,
wandering on this cloudy strand of time, sees drifted waifs and
strange portents borne far from an unknown somewhere, causing him
to believe in another world. Comes not death as a means to bear
him thither? Accordingly as hope rests in heaven, fear shudders at
hell, or doubt faces the dark transition, the future life is a
sweet reliance, a terrible certainty, or a pathetic perhaps. But
living in the present in the humble and loving discharge of its
duties, our souls harmonized with its conditions though aspiring
beyond them, why should we ever despair or be troubled overmuch?
Have we not eternity in our thought, infinitude in our view, and
God for our guide?
CONTENTS
Part First.
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL INTRODUCTORY VIEWS.
CHAPTER I.
THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN
CHAPTER II.
HISTORY OF DEATH
CHAPTER III.
GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER IV.
THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION
Part Second.
ETHNIC THOUGHTS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
BARBARIAN NOTIONS OF A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER II.
DRUIDIC DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER III.
SCANDINAVIAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER IV.
ETRUSCAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER V.
EGYPTIAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER VI.
BRAMANIC AND BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER VII.
PERSIAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER VIII.
HEBREW DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER IX.
RABBINICAL DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER X.
GREEK AND DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER XI.
MOHAMMEDAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER XII.
EXPLANATORY SURVEY OF THE FIELD AND ITS MYTHS
Part Third.
NEW TESTAMENT TEACHINGS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
PETER'S DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER II.
DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE IN THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS
CHAPTER III.
DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE IN THE APOCALYPSE
CHAPTER IV.
PAUL'S DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER V.
JOHN'S DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER VI.
CHRIST'S TEACHINGS CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER VII.
RESURRECTION OF CHRIST
CHAPTER VIII.
ESSENTIAL CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF DEATH AND LIFE
Part Fourth.
CHRISTIAN THOUGHTS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
PATRISTIC DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER II.
MEDIAVAL DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER III.
MODERN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
Part Fifth.
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL DISSERTATIONS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE IN THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES
CHAPTER II.
METEMPSYCHOIS; OR, TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS
CHAPTER III.
RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH
CHAPTER IV.
DOCTRINE OF FUTURE PUNISHMENT; OR, CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF
A HELL
CHAPTER V.
THE FIVE THEORETIC MODES OF SALVATION
CHAPTER VI.
RECOGNITION OF FRIENDS IN A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER VII.
LOCAL FATE OF MAN IN THE ASTRONOMIC UNIVERSE
CHAPTER VIII.
CRITICAL HISTORY OF DISBELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE
CHAPTER IX.
MORALITY OF THE DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
Part Sixth.
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTERS.
CHAPTER I.
THE END OF THE WORLD
CHAPTER II.
THE DAY OF JUDGMENT
CHAPTER III.
THE MYTHOLOGICAL HELL AND THE TRUE ONE; OR, THE LAW OF PERDITION
CHAPTER IV.
THE GATES OF HEAVEN; OR, THE LAW OF SALVATION IN ALL WORLDS
CHAPTER V.
RESUME OF THE SUBJECT: HOW THE QUESTION OF IMMORTALITY NOW STANDS
CHAPTER VI.
THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT IN THE DESTINY OF THE SOUL
PART FIRST.
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL INTRODUCTORY VIEWS.
CHAPTER I.
THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN.
PAUSING, in a thoughtful hour, on that mount of observation whence
the whole prospect of life is visible, what a solemn vision greets
us! We see the vast procession of existence flitting across the
landscape, from the shrouded ocean of birth, over the illuminated
continent of experience, to the shrouded ocean of death. Who can
linger there and listen, unmoved, to the sublime lament of things
that die? Although the great exhibition below endures, yet it is
made up of changes, and the spectators shift as often. Each rank
of the host, as it advances from the mists of its commencing
career, wears a smile caught from the morning light of hope, but,
as it draws near to the fatal bourne, takes on a mournful cast
from the shadows of the unknown realm. The places we occupy were
not vacant before we came, and will not be deserted when we go,
but are forever filling and emptying afresh.
"Still to every draught of vital breath
Renew'd throughout the bounds of earth and ocean,
The melancholy gates of death
Respond with sympathetic motion."
We appear, there is a short flutter of joys and pains, a bright
glimmer of smiles and tears, and we are gone. But whence did we
come? And whither do we go? Can human thought divine the answer?
It adds no little solemnity and pathos to these reflections to
remember that every considerate person in the unnumbered
successions that have preceded us, has, in his turn, confronted
the same facts, engaged in the same inquiry, and been swept from
his attempts at a theoretic solution of the problem into the real
solution itself, while the constant refrain in the song of
existence sounded behind him, "One generation passeth away, and
another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever." The
evanescent phenomena, the tragic plot and scenery of human birth,
action, and death, conceived on the scale of reality, clothed in
"The sober coloring taken from an eye That hath kept watch o'er
man's mortality,"
and viewed in a susceptible spirit, are, indeed, overwhelmingly
impressive. They invoke the intellect to its most piercing
thoughts. They swell the heart to its utmost capacity of emotion.
They bring us upon the bended knees of wonder and prayer.
"Between two worlds life hovers, like a star'
Twixt night and morn upon the horizon's verge.
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be! The eternal surge
Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar
Our bubbles: as the old burst, new emerge,
Lash'd from the foam of ages: while the graves
Of empires heave but like some passing waves."
Widely regarding the history of human life from the beginning,
what a visionary spectacle it is! How miraculously permanent in
the whole! how sorrowfully ephemeral in the parts! What pathetic
sentiments it awakens! Amidst what awful mysteries it hangs! The
subject of the derivation of the soul has been copiously discussed
by hundreds of philosophers, physicians, and poets, from Vyasa to
Des Cartes, from Galen to Ennemoser, from Orpheus to Henry More,
from Aristotle to Frohschammer. German literature during the last
hundred years has teemed with works treating of this question from
various points of view. The present chapter will present a sketch
of these various speculations concerning the commencement and
fortunes of man ere his appearance on the stage of this world.
The first theory to account for the origin of souls is that of
emanation. This is the analogical theory, constructed from the
results of sensible observation. There is, it says, one infinite
Being, and all finite spirits are portions of his substance,
existing a while as separate individuals, and then reassimilated
into the general soul. This form of faith, asserting the efflux of
all subordinate existence out of one Supreme Being, seems
sometimes to rest on an intuitive idea. It is spontaneously
suggested whenever man confronts the phenomena of creation with
reflective observation, and ponders the eternal round of birth and
death. Accordingly, we find traces of this belief all over the
world; from the ancient Hindu metaphysics whose fundamental
postulate is that the necessary life of God is one constant
process of radiation and resorption, "letting out and drawing in,"
to that modern English poetry which apostrophizes the glad and
winsome child as
"A silver stream
Breaking with laughter from the lake Divine
Whence all things flow."
The conception that souls are emanations from God is the most
obvious way of accounting for the prominent facts that salute our
inquiries. It plausibly answers some natural questions, and boldly
eludes others. For instance, to the early student demanding the
cause of the mysterious distinctions between mind and body, it
says, the one belongs to the system of passive matter, the other
comes from the living Fashioner of the Universe. Again: this
theory relieves us from the burden that perplexes the finite mind
when it seeks to understand how the course of nature, the
succession of lives, can be absolutely eternal without involving
an alternating or circular movement. The doctrine of emanation
has, moreover, been supported by the supposed analytic similarity
of the soul to God. Its freedom, consciousness, intelligence,
love, correspond with what we regard as the attributes and essence
of Deity. The inference, however unsound, is immediate, that souls
are consubstantial with God, dissevered fragments of Him, sent
into bodies. But, in actual effect, the chief recommendation of
this view has probably been the variety of analogies and images
under which it admits of presentation. The annual developments of
vegetable life from the bosom of the earth, drops taken from a
fountain and retaining its properties in their removal, the
separation of the air into distinct breaths, the soil into
individual atoms, the utterance of a tone gradually dying away in
reverberated echoes, the radiation of beams from a central light,
the exhalation of particles of moisture from the ocean, the
evolution of numbers out of an original unity, these are among the
illustrations by which an exhaustless ingenuity has supported the
notion of the emanation of souls from God. That "something cannot
come out of nothing" is an axiom resting on the ground of our
rational instincts. And seeing all things within our comprehension
held in the chain of causes and effects, one thing always evolving
from another, we leap to the conclusion that it is precisely the
same with things beyond our comprehension, and that God is the
aboriginal reservoir of being from which all the rills of finite
existence are emitted.
Against this doctrine the current objections are these two. First,
the analogies adduced are not applicable. The things of spirit and
those of matter have two distinct sets of predicates and
categories. It is, for example, wholly illogical to argue that
because the circuit of the waters is from the sea, through the
clouds, over the land, back to the sea again, therefore the
derivation and course of souls from God, through life, back to
God, must be similar. There are mysteries in connection with the
soul that baffle the most lynx eyed investigation, and on which no
known facts of the physical world can throw light. Secondly, the
scheme of emanation depends on a vulgar error, belonging to the
infancy of philosophic thought, and inconsistent with some
necessary truths. It implies that God is separable into parts, and
therefore both corporeal and finite. Divisible substance is
incompatible with the first predicates of Deity, namely,
immateriality and infinity. Before the conception of the
illimitable, spiritual unity of God, the doctrine of the emanation
of souls from Him fades away, as the mere figment of a dreaming
mind brooding over the suggestions of phenomena and apparent
correspondences.
The second explanation of the origin of souls is that which says
they come from a previous existence. This is the theory of
imagination, framed in the free and seductive realm of poetic
thought. It is evident that this idea does not propose any
solution of the absolute origination of the soul, but only offers
to account for its appearance on earth. The pre existence of souls
has been most widely affirmed. Nearly the whole world of Oriental
thinkers have always taught it. Many of the Greek philosophers
held it. No small proportion of the early Church Fathers believed
it.1 And it is not without able advocates among the scholars and
thinkers
1 Keil, Opuscula; Be Pre existentia Animarum. Beausobre, Hist. du
Manicheisme, lib. vii. cap. iv.
of our own age. There are two principal forms of this doctrine;
one asserting an ascent of souls from a previous existence below
the rank of man, the other a descent of souls from a higher
sphere. Generation is the true Jacob's ladder, on which souls are
ever ascending or descending. The former statement is virtually
that of the modern theory of development, which argues that the
souls known to us, obtaining their first organic being out of the
ground life of nature, have climbed up through a graduated series
of births, from the merest elementary existence, to the plane of
human nature. A gifted author, Dr. Hedge, has said concerning pre
existence in these two methods of conceiving it, writing in a
half humorous, half serious, vein, "It is to be considered as
expressing rather an exceptional than a universal fact. If here
and there some pure liver, or noble doer, or prophet voice,
suggests the idea of a revenant who, moved with pity for human
kind, and charged with celestial ministries, has condescended to
'Soil his pure ambrosial weeds
With the rank vapors of this sin worn mould,'
or if, on the other hand, the 'superfluity of naughtiness'
displayed by some abnormal felon seems to warrant the supposition
of a visit from the Pit, the greater portion of mankind, we
submit, are much too green for any plausible assumption of a
foregone training in good or evil. This planet is not their
missionary station, nor their Botany Bay, but their native soil.
Or, if we suppose they pre existed at all, we must rather believe
they pre existed as brutes, and have travelled into humanity by
the fish fowl quadruped road with a good deal of the habitudes and
dust of that tramp still sticking to them." The theory of
development, deriving human souls by an ascension from the lower
stages of rudimentary being, considered as a fanciful hypothesis
or speculative toy, is interesting, and not destitute of plausible
aspects. But, when investigated as a severe thesis, it is found
devoid of proof. It is enough here to say that the most
authoritative voices in science reject it, declaring that, though
there is a development of progress in the plan of nature, from the
more general to the more specific, yet there is no advance from
one type or race to another, no hint that the same individual ever
crosses the guarded boundaries of genus from one rank and kingdom
to another. Whatever progress there may be in the upward process
of natural creation or the stages of life, yet to suppose that the
life powers of insects and brutes survive the dissolution of their
bodies, and, in successive crossings of the death gulf, ascend to
humanity, is a bare assumption. It befits the delirious lips of
Beddoes, who says,
"Had I been born a four legg'd child, methinks I might have found
the steps from dog to man And crept into his nature. Are there not
Those that fall down out of humanity Into the story where the
four legg'd dwell?"
The doctrine that souls have descended from an anterior life on
high may be exhibited in three forms, each animated by a different
motive. The first is the view of some of the Manichean teachers,
that spirits were embodied by a hostile violence and cunning, the
force and fraud of the apostatized Devil. Adam and Eve were angels
sent to observe the doings of Lucifer, the rebel king of matter.
He seized these heavenly spies and encased them in fleshly
prisons. And then, in order to preserve a permanent union of these
celestial natures with matter, he contrived that their race should
be propagated by the sexes. Whenever by the procreative act the
germ body is prepared, a fiend hies from bale, or an angel stoops
from bliss, or a demon darts from his hovering in the air, to
inhabit and rule his growing clay house for a term of earthly
life. The spasm of impregnation thrills in fatal summons to hell
or heaven, and resistlessly drags a spirit into the appointed
receptacle. Shakspeare, whose genius seems to have touched every
shape of thought with adorning phrase, makes Juliet, distracted
with the momentary fancy that Romeo is a murderous villain, cry,
"O Nature! what hadst thou to do in hell
When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend
In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh?"
The second method of explaining the descent of souls into this
life is by the supposition that the stable bliss, the uncontrasted
peace and sameness, of the heavenly experience, at last wearies
the people of Paradise, until they seek relief in a fall. The
perfect sweetness of heaven cloys, the utter routine and safety
tire, the salient spirits, till they long for the edge and hazard
of earthly exposure, and wander down to dwell in fleshly bodies
and breast the tempest of sin, strife, and sorrow, so as to give a
fresh charm once more to the repose and exempted joys of the
celestial realm. In this way, by a series of recurring lives below
and above, novelty and change with larger experience and more
vivid contentment are secured, the tedium and satiety of fixed
happiness and protection are modified by the relishing opposition
of varied trials of hardship and pain, the insufferable monotony
of immortality broken up and interpolated by epochs of surprise
and tingling dangers of probation.
"Mortals, behold! the very angels quit
Their mansions unsusceptible of change,
Amid your dangerous bowers to sit
And through your sharp vicissitudes to range!"
Thus round and round we run through an eternity of lives and
deaths. Surfeited with the unqualified pleasures of heaven, we
"straggle down to this terrene nativity:" When, amid the sour
exposures and cruel storms of the world, we have renewed our
appetite for the divine ambrosia of peace and sweetness, we
forsake the body and ascend to heaven; this constant recurrence
illustrating the great truths, that alternation is the law of
destiny, and that variety is the spice of life.
But the most common derivation of the present from a previous life
is that which explains the descent as a punishment for sin. In
that earlier and loftier state, souls abused their freedom, and
were doomed to expiate their offences by a banished, imprisoned,
and burdensome life on the earth. "The soul," Plutarch writes,
"has removed, not from Athens to Sardis, or from Corinth to
Lemnos, but from heaven to earth; and here, ill at ease, and
troubled in this new and strange place, she hangs her head like a
decaying plant."
Hundreds of passages to the same purport might easily be cited
from as many ancient writers. Sometimes this fall of souls from
their original estate was represented as a simultaneous event: a
part of the heavenly army, under an apostate leader, having
rebelled, were defeated, and sentenced to a chained bodily life.
Our whole race were transported at once from their native shores
in the sky to the convict land of this world. Sometimes the
descent was attributed to the fresh fault of each individual, and
was thought to be constantly happening. A soul tainted with impure
desire, drawn downwards by corrupt material gravitation, hovering
over the fumes of matter, inhaling the effluvia of vice, grew
infected with carnal longings and contagions, became fouled and
clogged with gross vapors and steams, and finally fell into a body
and pursued the life fitted to it below. A clear human child is a
shining seraph from heaven sunk thus low. Men are degraded
cherubim.
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar."
The theory of the pre existence of the soul merely removes the
mystery one stage further back, and there leaves the problem of
our origin as hopelessly obscure as before. It is sufficiently
refuted by the open fact that it is absolutely destitute of
scientific basis. The explanation of its wide prevalence as a
belief is furnished by two considerations. First, there were old
authoritative sages and poets who loved to speculate and dream,
and who published their speculations and dreams to reign over the
subject fancies of credulous mankind. Secondly, the conception was
intrinsically harmonious, and bore a charm to fascinate the
imagination and the heart. The fragmentary visions, broken
snatches, mystic strains, incongruous thoughts, fading gleams,
with which imperfectrecollection comes laden from our childish
years and our nightly dreams, are referred by self pleasing fancy
to some earlier and nobler existence. We solve the mysteries of
experience by calling them the veiled vestiges of a bright life
departed, pathetic waifs drifted to these intellectual shores over
the surge of feeling from the wrecked orb of an anterior
existence. It gratifies our pride to think the soul "a star
travelled stranger," a disguised prince, who has passingly
alighted on this globe in his eternal wanderings. The gorgeous
glimpses of truth and beauty here vouchsafed to genius, the
wondrous strains of feeling that haunt the soul in tender hours,
are feeble reminiscences of the prerogatives we enjoyed in those
eons when we trod the planets that sail around the upper world of
the gods. That ennui or plaintive sadness which in all life's deep
and lonesome hours seems native to our hearts, what is it but the
nostalgia of the soul remembering and pining after its distant
home? Vague and forlorn airs come floating into our consciousness,
as from an infinitely remote clime, freighted with a luxury of
depressing melancholy.
"Ah! not the nectarous poppy lovers use,
Not daily labor's dull Lethean spring,
Oblivion in lost angels can infuse
Of the soil'd glory and the trailing wing."
How attractive all this must be to the thoughts of men, how
fascinating to their retrospective and aspiring reveries, it
should be needless to repeat. How baseless it is as a
philosophical theory demanding sober belief, it should be equally
superfluous to illustrate further.
The third answer to the question concerning the origin of the soul
is that it is directly created by the voluntary power of God. This
is the theory of faith, instinctively shrinking from the
difficulty of the problem on its scientific ground, and evading it
by a wholesale reference to Deity. Some writers have held that all
souls were created by the Divine fiat at the beginning of the
world, and laid up in a secret repository, whence they are drawn
as occasion calls. The Talmudists say, "All souls were made during
the six days of creation; and therefore generation is not by
traduction, but by infusion of a soul into body." Others maintain
that this production of souls was not confined to any past period,
but is continued still, a new soul being freshly created for every
birth. Whenever certain conditions meet,
"Then God smites his hands together,
And strikes out a soul as a spark,
Into the organized glory of things,
From the deeps of the dark."
This is the view asserted by Vincentius Victor in opposition to
the dogmatism of Tertullian on the one hand and to the doubts of
Augustine on the other.2 It is called the theory of Insufflation,
because it affirms that God immediately breathes a soul into each
new being: even as in the case of Adam, of whom we read that "God
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a
living soul." The doctrine drawn from this Mosaic text, that the
soul is a divine substance, a breath of God, miraculously breathed
by Him into every creature at the commencement of its existence,
often reappears, and plays a prominent part in the history of
psychological opinions. It corresponds with the beautiful Greek
myth of Prometheus, who is fabled to have made a human image from
the dust of the ground, and then, by fire stolen from heaven, to
have animated it with a living soul. So man, as to his body, is
made of earthly clay; but the Promethean spark that forms his soul
is the fresh breath of God. There is no objection to the real
ground and essence of this theory, only to its form and
accompaniments. It is purely anthropomorphitic; it conceives God
as working, after the manner of a man, intermittently,
arbitrarily. It insulates the origination of souls from the fixed
course of nature, severs it from all connection with that common
process of organic life which weaves its inscrutable web through
the universe, that system of laws which expresses the unchanging
will of God, and which constitutes the order by whose solemn logic
alone He acts. The objection to this view is, in a word, that it
limits the creative action of God to human souls. We suppose that
He creates our bodies as well; that He is the immediate Author of
all life in the same sense in which He is the immediate Author of
our souls. The opponents of the creation theory, who strenuously
fought it in the seventeenth century, were accustomed to urge
against it the fanciful objection that "it puts God to an invenust
2 Augustine, De Anima et ejus Origine, lib. iv.
employment scarce consistent with his verecundious holiness; for,
if it be true, whenever the lascivious consent to uncleanness and
are pleased to join in unlawful mixture, God is forced to stand a
spectator of their vile impurities, stooping from his throne to
attend their bestial practices, and raining down showers of souls
to animate the emissions of their concupiscence"3
A fourth reply to the inquiry before us is furnished in
Tertullian's famous doctrine of Traduction, the essential import
of which is that all human souls have been transmitted, or brought
over, from the soul of Adam. This is the theological theory: for
it arose from an exigency in the dogmatic system generally held by
the patristic Church. The universal depravity of human nature, the
inherited corruption of the whole race, was a fundamental point of
belief. But how reconcile this proposition with the conception,
entertained by many, that each new born soul is a fresh creation
from the "substance," "spirit," or "breath" of God? Augustine
writes to Jerome, asking him to solve this question.4 Tertullian,
whose fervid mind was thoroughly imbued with materialistic
notions, unhesitatingly cut this Gordian knot by asserting that
our first parent bore within him the undeveloped germ of all
mankind, so that sinfulness and souls were propagated together. 5
Thus the perplexing query, "how souls are held in the chain of
original sin," was answered. As Neander says, illustrating
Tertullian's view, "The soul of the first man was the fountain
head of all human souls: all the varieties of individual human
nature are but modifications of that one spiritual substance." In
the light of such a thought, we can see how Nature might, when
solitary Adam lived, fulfil Lear's wild conjuration, and
"All the germens spill
At once that make ingrateful man."
In the seventh chapter of the Koran it is written, "The Lord drew
forth their posterity from the loins of the sons of Adam." The
commentators say that God passed his hand down Adam's back, and
extracted all the generations which should come into the world
until the resurrection. Assembled in the presence of the angels,
and endued with understanding, they confessed their dependence on
God, and were then caused to return into the loins of their great
ancestor. This is one of the most curious doctrines within the
whole range of philosophical history. It implies the strict
corporeality of the soul; and yet how infinitely fine must be its
attenuation when it has been diffused into countless thousands of
millions! Der Urkeim theilt sich ins Unendliche.
"What! will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?"
The whole thought is absurd. It was not reached by an induction of
facts, a study of phenomena, or any fair process of reasoning, but
was arbitrarily created to rescue a dogma from otherwise
inevitable rejection. It was the desperate clutch of a heady
theologian reeling in a vortex of hostile argument, and ready to
seize any fancy, however artificial, to save
3 Edward Warren, No Pre Existence, p. 74.
4 Epistola CLXVI.
5 De Anima, cap. x. et xix.
himself from falling under the ruins of his system. Henry Woolner
published in London, in 1655, a book called "Extraction of Soul: a
sober and judicious inquiry to prove that souls are propagated;
because, if they are created, original sin is impossible."
The theological dogma of traduction has been presented in two
forms. First, it is declared that all souls are developed out of
the one substance of Adam's soul; a view that logically implies an
ultimate attenuating diffusion, ridiculously absurd. Secondly, it
is held that "the eating of the forbidden fruit corrupted all the
vital fluids of Eve; and this corruption carried vicious and
chaotic consequences into her ova, in which lay the souls of all
her posterity, with infinitely little bodies, already existing."6
This form is as incredible as the other; for it equally implies a
limitless distribution of souls from a limited deposit. As Whewell
says, "This successive inclusion of germs (Einschachtelungs
Theorie) implies that each soul contains an infinite number of
germs."7 It necessarily excludes the formation of new spiritual
substance: else original transmitted sin is excluded. The doctrine
finds no parallelism anywhere else in nature. Who, no matter how
wedded to the theology of original sin and transmitted death,
would venture to stretch the same thesis over the animal races,
and affirm that the dynamic principles, or animating souls, of all
serpents, eagles, and lions, were once compressed in the first
patriarchal serpent, eagle, or lion?
That the whole formative power of all the simultaneous members of
our race was concentrated in the first cell germ of our original
progenitor, is a scientific impossibility and incredibleness. The
fatal sophistry in the traducian account of the transmission of
souls may be illustrated in the following manner. The germs of all
the apple trees now in existence did not lie in the first apple
seed. All the apple trees now existing were not derived by literal
development out of the actual contents of the first apple seed.
No: but the truth is this. There was a power in the first apple
seed to secure certain conditions; that is, to organize a certain
status in which the plastic vegetative life of nature would posit
new and similar powers and materials. So not all souls were latent
in Adam's, but only an organizing power to secure the conditions
on which the Divine Will that first began, would, in accordance
with His creative plan, forever continue, His spirit creation. The
distinction of this statement from that of traduction is the
difference between evolution from one original germ or stock and
actual production of new beings. Its distinction from the third
theory the theory of immediate creation is the difference between
an intermittent interposition of arbitrary acts and the continuous
working of a plan according to laws scientifically traceable.
There is another solution to the question of the soul's origin,
which has been propounded by some philosophers and may be called
the speculative theory. Its statement is that the germs of souls
were created simultaneously with the formation of the material
universe, and were copiously sown abroad through all nature,
waiting there to be successively taken up and furnished with the
conditions of development.8 These latent seeds of souls, swarming
in all places, are drawn in with the first breath or imbibed with
the earliest nourishment of the
6 Hennings, Geschichte von den Seelen der Menschen, s. 500.
7 Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. I. b. ix. ch. iv.
sect. 4.
8 Ploucquet, De Origin atque Generatione Anima Humana ex
Principiis Monadologicis stabilita.
new born child into the already constructed body which before has
only a vegetative life. The Germans call this representation
panspermismus, or the dissemination theory. Leibnitz, in his
celebrated monadology, carries the same view a great deal further.
He conceives the whole created universe, visible and invisible, to
consist of monads, which are not particles of matter, but
metaphysical points of power. These monads are all souls. They are
produced by what he calls fulgurations of God. The distinction
between fulguration and emanation is this: in the latter case the
procession is historically defined and complete; in the former
case it is momentaneous. The monads are radiated from the Divine
Will, forth through the creation, by the constant flashes of His
volition. All nature is composed of them, and nothing is
depopulated and dead. Their naked being is force, and their
indestructible predicates are perception, desire, tendency to
develop. While they lie dormant, their potential capacities all
inwrapped, they constitute what we entitle matter. When, by the
rising stir of their inherent longing, they leave their passive
state and reach a condition of obscure consciousness, they become
animals. Finally, they so far unwind their bonds and evolve their
facultative potencies as to attain the rank of rational minds in
the grade of humanity. Generation is merely the method by which
the aspiring monad lays the organic basis for the grouped building
of its body. Man is a living union of monads, one regent monad
presiding over the whole organization. That king monad which has
attained to full apperception, the free exercise of perfect
consciousness, is the immortal human soul. 9 Any labored attempt
to refute this ingenious doctrine is needless, since the doctrine
itself is but the developed structure of a speculative conception
with no valid basis of observed fact. It is a sheer hypothesis,
spun out of the self fed bowels of a priori assumption and
metaphysic fancy. It solves the problems only by changes of their
form, leaving the mysteries as numerous and deep as before. It is
a beautiful and sublime piece of latent poetry, the evolution and
architecture of which well display the wonderful genius of
Leibnitz. It is a more subtle and powerful process of thought than
Aristotle's Organon, a more pure and daring work of imagination
than Milton's Paradise Lost. But it spurns the tests of
experimental science, and is entitled to rank only among the
splendid curiosities of philosophy; a brilliant and plausible
theorem, not a sober and solid induction.
One more method of treating the inquiry before us will complete
the list. It is what we may properly call the scientific theory,
though in truth it is hardly a theory at all, but rather a careful
statement of the observed facts, and a modest confession of
inability to explain the cause of them. Those occupying this
position, when asked what is the origin of souls, do not pretend
to unveil the final secret, but simply say, everywhere in the
world of life, from bottom to top, there is an organic growth in
accordance with conditions. This is what is styled the theory of
epigenesis, and is adopted by the chief physiologists of the
present day. Swammerdam, Malebranche, even Cuvier, had defended
the doctrine of successive inclusion; but Wolf, Blumenbach, and
Von Baer established in its place the doctrine of epigenesis. 10
9 Leibnitz, Monadologie.
10 Ennemoser, Historisch psychologische Untersuchungen tiber den
Ursprung der menschlichen Seelen, zweite Auflage.
Scrupulously confining themselves to the mass of collected facts
and the course of scrutinized phenomena, they say there is a
natural production of new living beings in conformity to certain
laws, and give an exposition of the fixed conditions and sequences
of this production. Here they humbly stop, acknowledging that the
causal root of power, which produces all these consequences, is an
inexplicable mystery. Their attitude is well represented by
Swedenborg when he says, in reference to this very subject, "Any
one may form guesses; but let no son of earth pretend to penetrate
the mysteries of creation." 11
Let us notice now the facts submitted to us. First, at the base of
the various departments of nature, we see a mass of apparently
lifeless matter. Out of this crude substratum of the outward world
we observe a vast variety of organized forms produced by a
variously named but unknown Power. They spring in regular methods,
in determinate shapes, exist on successive stages of rank, with
more or less striking demarcations of endowment, and finally fall
back again, as to their physical constituents, into the inorganic
stuff from which they grew. This mysterious organizing Power,
pushing its animate and builded receptacles up to the level of
vegetation, creates the world of plants.
"Every clod feels a stir of might,
An instinct within it that reaches and towers,
And, grasping blindly above it for light,
Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers."
On the level of sensation, where the obscure rudiments of will,
understanding, and sentiment commence, this life giving Power
creates the world of animals. And so, on the still higher level of
reason and its concomitants, it creates the world of men. In a
word, the great general fact is that an unknown Power call it what
we may, Nature, Vital Force, or God creates, on the various planes
of its exercise, different families of organized beings. Secondly,
a more special fact is, that when we have overleaped the mystery
of a commencement, every being yields seed according to its kind,
wherefrom, when properly conditioned, its species is perpetuated.
How much, now, does this second fact imply? It is by adding to the
observed phenomena an indefensible hypothesis that the error of
traduction is obtained. We observe that human beings are begotten
by a deposit of germs through the generative process. To affirm
that these germs are transmitted down the generations from the
original progenitor of each race, in whom they all existed at
first, is an unwarranted assertion and involves absurdities. It is
refuted both by Geoffrey St. Hilaire's famous experiments on eggs,
and by the crossing of species.12 In opposition to this
theological figment, observation and science require the belief
that each being is endowed independently with a germ forming
power.
Organic life requires three things: a fruitful germ; a quickening
impulse; a nourishing medium. Science plainly shows us that this
primal nucleus is given, in the human species, by the union of the
contents of a sperm cell with those of a germ cell; that this
dynamic start is imparted from the life force of the parents; and
that this feeding environment is
11 Tract on the Origin and Propagation of the Soul, chap. i.
12 Flourens, Amount of Life on the Globe, part ii. ch. iii. sect. ii.
furnished by the circle of co ordinated relations. That the
formative power of the new organism comes from, or at least is
wholly conditioned by, the parent organism, should be believed,
because it is the obvious conclusion, against which there is
nothing to militate. That the soul of the child comes in some way
from the soul of the parent, or is stamped by it, is also implied
by the normal resemblance of children to parents, not more in
bodily form than in spiritual idiosyncrasies. This fact alone
furnishes the proper qualification to the acute and significant
lines of the Platonizing poet:
"Wherefore who thinks from souls new souls to bring,
The same let presse the sunne beames in his fist
And squeeze out drops of light, or strongly wring
The rainbow till it die his hands, well prest."
"That which is born of the flesh is flesh: that which is born of
the spirit is spirit." As the body of the child is the derivative
of a germ elaborated in the body of the parent, so the soul of the
child is the derivative of a developing impulse of power imparted
from the soul of the parent. And as the body is sustained by
absorbing nutrition from matter, so the soul is sustained by
assimilating the spiritual substances of the invisible kingdom.
The most ethereal elements must combine to nourish that consummate
plant whose blossom is man's mind. This representation is not
materialism; for spirit belongs to a different sphere and is the
subject of different predicates from matter, though equally under
a constitution of laws. Nor does this view pretend to explain what
is inherently transcendent: it leaves the creation of the soul
within as wide a depth and margin of mystery as ever. Neither is
this mode of exposing the problem atheistic. It refers the forms
of life, all growths, all souls, to the indefinable Power that
works everywhere, creates each thing, vivifies, governs, and
contains the universe. And, however that Power be named, is it not
God? And thus we still reverently hold that it is God's own hands
"That reach through nature, moulding men." The ancient heroes of
Greece and India were fond of tracing their genealogy up directly
to their deities, and were proud to deem that in guarding them the
gods stooped to watch over a race of kings, a puissant and
immortal stock,
"Whose glories stream'd from the same clond girt founts
Whence their own dawn'd upon the infant world."
After all the researches that have been made, we yet find the
secret of the beginning of the soul shrouded among the fathomless
mysteries of the Almighty Creator, and must ascribe our birth to
the Will of God as piously as it was done in the eldest mythical
epochs of the world. Notwithstanding the careless frivolity of
skepticism and the garish light of science abroad in this modern
time, there are still stricken and yearning depths of wonder and
sorrow enough, profound and awful shadows of night and fear
enough, to make us recognise, in the golden joys that visit us
rarely, in the illimitable visions that emancipate us often, in
the unearthly thoughts and dreams that ravish our minds,
enigmatical intimations of our kinship with God, prophecies of
a super earthly destiny whose splendors already break through the
clouds of ignorance, the folds of flesh, and the curtains of
time in which our spirits here sit pavilioned.
Augustine pointedly observes, "It is no evil that the origin of
the soul remains obscure, if only its redemption be made
certain."13 Non est periculum si origo animoe lateat, dum
redemptio clareat. No matter how humanity originates, if its
object be to produce fruit, and that fruit be immortal souls. When
our organism has perfected its intended product, willingly will we
let the decaying body return into the ground, if so be we are
assured that the ripened spirit is borne into the heavenly garner.
Let us, in close, reduce the problem of the soul's origin to its
last terms. The amount of force in the universe is uniform.14
Action and reaction being equal, no new creation of force is
possible: only its directions, deposits, and receptacles may be
altered. No combination of physical processes can produce a
previously non existent subject: it can only initiate the
modification, development, assimilation, of realities already in
being. Something cannot come out of nothing. The quickening
formation of a man, therefore, implies the existence, first, of a
material germ, the basis of the body; secondly, of a power to
impart to that germ a dynamic impulse, in other words, to deposit
in it a spirit atom, or monad of life force. Now, the fresh body
is originally a detached product of the parent body, as an apple
is the detached product of a tree. So the fresh soul is a
transmitted force imparted by the parent soul, either directly
from itself, or else conditioned by it and drawn from the ground
life of nature, the creative power of God. If filial soul be
begotten by procession and severance of conscious force from
parental soul, the spiritual resemblance of offspring and
progenitors is clearly explained. This phenomenon is also equally
well explained if the parent soul, so called, be a die striking
the creative substance of the universe into individual form. The
latter supposition seems, upon the whole, the more plausible and
scientific. Generation is a reflex condition moving the life basis
of the world to produce a soul, as a physical impression moves the
soul to produce a perception.15
But, however deep the mystery of the soul's origin, whatever our
conclusion in regard to it, let us not forget that the inmost
essence and verity of the soul is conscious power; and that all
power defies annihilation. It is an old declaration that what
begins in time must end in time; and with the metaphysical shears
of that notion more than once the burning faith in eternal life
has been snuffed out. Yet how obvious is its sophistry! A being
beginning in time need not cease in time, if the Power which
originated it intends and provides for its perpetuity. And that
such is the Creative intention for man appears from the fact that
the grand forms of belief in all ages issuing from his mental
organization have borne the stamp of an expected immortality. Our
ideas may disappear, but they are always recoverable. If the souls
of men are ideas of God, must they not be as enduring as his mind?
13 Epist. CLVI.
14 Faraday, Conservation of Force, Phil. Mag., April, 1857.
15 Dr. Frohschammer, Ursprang der menechlichen Seelen, sect. 115.
The naturalist who so immerses his thoughts in the physical phases
of nature as to lose hold on indestructible centres of
personality, should beware lest he lose the motive which propels
man to begin here, by virtue and culture, to climb that ladder of
life whose endless sides are affections, but whose discrete rounds
are thoughts.
CHAPTER II.
HISTORY OF DEATH.
DEATH is not an entity, but an event; not a force, but a state.
Life is the positive experience, death the negation. Yet in nearly
every literature death has been personified, while no kindred
prosopopoeia of life is anywhere to be found. With the Greeks,
Thanatos was a god; with the Romans, Mors was a goddess: but no
statue was ever moulded, no altar ever raised, to Zoe or Vita. At
first thought, we should anticipate the reverse of this; but, in
truth, the fact is quite naturally as it is. Life is a continuous
process; and any one who makes the effort will find how difficult
it is to conceive of it as an individual being, with distinctive
attributes, functions, and will. It is an inward possession which
we familiarly experience, and in the quiet routine of custom we
feel no shock of surprise at it, no impulse to give it imaginative
shape and ornament. On the contrary, death is an impending
occurrence, something which we anticipate and shudder at,
something advancing toward us in time to strike or seize us. Its
externality to our living experience, its threatening approach,
the mystery and alarm enwrapping it, are provocative conditions
for fanciful treatment, making personifications inevitable.
With the Old Aryan race of India, death is Yama, the soul of the
first man, departed to be the king of the subterranean realm of
the subsequent dead, and returning to call after him each of his
descendants in turn. To the good he is mild and lovely, but to the
impious he is clad in terror and acts with severity. The purely
fanciful character of this thought is obvious; for, according to
it, death was before death, since Yama himself died. Yama does not
really represent death, but its arbiter and messenger. He is the
ruler over the dead, who himself carries the summons to each
mortal to become his subject.
In the Hebrew conception, death was a majestic angel, named
Sammael, standing in the court of heaven, and flying thence over
the earth, armed with a sword, to obey the behests of God. The
Talmudists developed and dressed up the thought with many details,
half sublime, half fantastic. He strides through the world at a
step. From the soles of his feet to his shoulders he is full of
eyes. Every person in the moment of dying sees him; and at the
sight the soul retreats, running through all the limbs, as if
asking permission to depart from them. From his naked sword fall
three drops: one pales the countenance, one destroys the vitality,
one causes the body to decay. Some Rabbins say he bears a cup from
which the dying one drinks, or that he lets fall from the point of
his sword a single acrid drop upon the sufferer's tongue: this is
what is called "tasting the bitterness of death." Here again, we
see, it is not strictly death that is personified. The embodiment
is not of the mortal act, but of the decree determining that act.
The Jewish angel of death is not a picture of death in itself, but
of God's decree coming to the fated individual who is to die.
The Greeks sometimes depicted death and sleep as twin boys, one
black, one white, borne slumbering in the arms of their mother,
night. In this instance the phenomenon of dissolving
unconsciousness which falls on mortals, abstractly generalized in
the mind, is then concretely symbolized. It is a bold and happy
stroke of artistic genius; but it in no way expresses or suggests
the scientific facts of actual death. There is also a classic
representation of death as a winged boy with a pensive brow and
an inverted torch, a butterfly at his feet. This beautiful image,
with its affecting accompaniments, conveys to the beholder not
the verity, nor an interpretation, of death, but the sentiments
of the survivors in view of their bereavement. The sad brow denotes
the grief of the mourner, the winged insect the disembodied
psyche, the reversed torch the descent of the soul to the under
world; but the reality of death itself is nowhere hinted.
The Romans give descriptions of death as a female figure in dark
robes, with black wings, with ravenous teeth, hovering everywhere,
darting here and there, eager for prey. Such a view is a
personification of the mysteriousness, suddenness, inevitableness,
and fearfulness, connected with the subject of death in men's
minds, rather than of death itself. These thoughts are grouped
into an imaginary being, whose sum of attributes are then
ignorantly both associated with the idea of the unknown cause and
confounded with the visible effect. It is, in a word, mere poetry,
inspired by fear and unguided by philosophy.
Death has been shown in the guise of a fowler spreading his net,
setting his snares for men. But this image concerns itself with
the accidents of the subject, the unexpectedness of the fatal
blow, the treacherous springing of the trap, leaving the root of
the matter untouched. The circumstances of the mortal hour are
infinitely varied, the heart of the experience is unchangeably the
same: there are a thousand modes of dying, but there is only one
death. Ever so complete an exhibition of the occasions and
accompaniments of an event is no explanation of what the inmost
reality of the event is.
The Norse conception of death as a vast, cloudy presence, darkly
sweeping on its victims, and bearing them away wrapped in its
sable folds, is evidently a free product of imagination brooding
not so much on the distinct phenomena of an individual case as on
the melancholy mystery of the disappearance of men from the
familiar places that knew them once but miss them now. In a
somewhat kindred manner, the startling magnificence of the sketch
in the Apocalypse, of death on the pale horse, is a product of
pure imagination meditating on the wholesale slaughter which was
to deluge the earth when God's avenging judgments fell upon the
enemies of the Christians. But to consider this murderous warrior
on his white charger as literally death, would be as erroneous as
to imagine the bare armed executioner and the guillotine to be
themselves the death which they inflict. No more appalling picture
of death has been drawn than that by Milton, whose dire image has
this stroke of truth in it, that its adumbrate formlessness
typifies the disorganizing force which reduces all cunningly built
bodies of life to the elemental wastes of being. The incestuous
and mistreated progeny of Sin is thus delineated:
"The shape,
If shape it might be call'd that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,
Or substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd,
For each seem'd either, black it stood as night,
Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,
And shook a dreadful dart: what seem'd his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on."
But the most common personification of death is as a skeleton
brandishing a dart; and then he is called the grisly king of
terrors; and people tremble at the thought of him, as children do
at the name of a bugbear in the dark. What sophistry this is! It
is as if we should identify the trophy with the conqueror, the
vestiges left in the track of a traveller with the traveller
himself. Death literally makes a skeleton of man; so man
metaphorically makes a skeleton of Death! All these
representations of death, however beautiful, or pathetic, or
horrible, are based on superficial appearances, misleading
analogies, arbitrary fancies, perturbed sensibilities, not on a
firm hold of realities, insight of truth, and philosophical
analysis. They are all to be brushed aside as phantoms of
nightmare or artificial creations of fiction. Poetry has mostly
rested, hitherto, on no veritable foundation of science, but on a
visionary foundation of emotion. It has wrought upon flitting,
sensible phenomena rather than upon abiding substrata of facts.
For example, a tender Greek bard personified the life of a tree as
a Hamadryad, the moving trunk and limbs her undulating form and
beckoning arms, the drooping boughs her hair, the rustling foliage
her voice. A modern poet, endowed with the same strength of
sympathy, but acquainted with vegetable chemistry, might personify
sap as a pale, liquid maiden, ascending through the roots and
veins to meet air, a blue boy robed in golden warmth, descending
through the leaves, with a whisper, to her embrace. So the
personifications of death in literature, thus far, give us no
penetrative glance into what it really is, help us to no acute
definition of it, but poetically fasten on some feature, or
accident, or emotion, associated with it.
There are in popular usage various metaphors to express what is
meant by death. The principal ones are, extinction of the vital
spark, departing, expiring, cutting the thread of life, giving up
the ghost, falling asleep. These figurative modes of speech spring
from extremely imperfect correspondences. Indeed, the unlikenesses
are more important and more numerous than the likenesses. They are
simply artifices to indicate what is so deeply obscure and
intangible. They do not lay the secret bare, nor furnish us any
aid in reaching to the true essence of the question. Moreover,
several of them, when sharply examined, involve a fatal error. For
example, upon the admitted supposition that in every case of dying
the soul departs from the body, still, this separation of the soul
from the body is not what constitutes death. Death is the state of
the body when the soul has left it. An act is distinct from its
effects. We must, therefore, turn from the literary inquiry to the
metaphysical and scientific method, to gain any satisfactory idea
and definition of death.
A German writer of extraordinary acumen and audacity has said,
"Only before death, but not in death, is death death. Death is so
unreal a being that he only is when he is not, and is not when he
is."1 This paradoxical and puzzling as it may appear is
susceptible of quite lucid interpretation and defence. For death
is, in its naked significance, the state of not being. Of course,
then, it has no existence save in the conceptions of the living.
We compare a dead
1 Feuerbach, Gedanken uber Tod and Unsterblichkeit, sect. 84.
person with what he was when living, and instinctively personify
the difference as death. Death, strictly analyzed, is only this
abstract conceit or metaphysical nonentity. Death, therefore,
being but a conception in the mind of a living person, when that
person dies death ceases to be at all. And thus the realization of
death is the death of death. He annihilates himself, dying with
the dart he drives. Having in this manner disposed of the
personality or entity of death, it remains as an effect, an event,
a state. Accordingly, the question next arises, What is death when
considered in this its true aspect?
A positive must be understood before its related negative can be
intelligible. Bichat defined life as the sum of functions by which
death is resisted. It is an identical proposition in verbal
disguise, with the fault that it makes negation affirmation,
passiveness action. Death is not a dynamic agency warring against
life, but simply an occurrence. Life is the operation of an
organizing force producing an organic form according to an ideal
type, and persistently preserving that form amidst the incessant
molecular activity and change of its constituent substance. That
operation of the organic force which thus constitutes life is a
continuous process of waste, casting off the old exhausted matter,
and of replacement by assimilation of new material. The close of
this process of organific metamorphosis and desquamation is death,
whose finality is utter decomposition, restoring all the bodily
elements to the original inorganic conditions from which they were
taken. The organic force with which life begins constrains
chemical affinity to work in special modes for the formation of
special products: when it is spent or disappears, chemical
affinity is at liberty to work in its general modes; and that is
death. "Life is the co ordination of actions; the imperfection of
the co ordination is disease, its arrest is death." In other
words, "life is the continuous adjustment of relations in an
organism with relations in its environment." Disturb that
adjustment, and you have malady; destroy it, and you have death.
Life is the performance of functions by an organism; death is the
abandonment of an organism to the forces of the universe. No
function can be performed without a waste of the tissue through
which it is performed: that waste is repaired by the assimilation
of fresh nutriment. In the balancing of these two actions life
consists. The loss of their equipoise soon terminates them both;
and that is death. Upon the whole, then, scientifically speaking,
to cause death is to stop "that continuous differentiation and
integration of tissues and of states of consciousness"
constituting life. 2 Death, therefore, is no monster, no force,
but the act of completion, the state of cessation; and all the
bugbears named death are but poor phantoms of the frightened and
childish mind.
Life consisting in the constant differentiation of the tissues by
the action of oxygen, and their integration from the blastema
furnished by the blood, why is not the harmony of these processes
preserved forever? Why should the relation between the integration
and disintegration going on in the human organism ever fall out of
correspondence with the relation between the oxygen and food
supplied from its environment? That is to say, whence originated
the sentence of death upon man? Why do we not live immortally as
we are? The current reply is, we die because our first parent
sinned. Death is a penalty inflicted upon the
2 Spencer, Principles of Psychology, pp. 334-373.
human race because Adam disobeyed his Maker's command. We must
consider this theory a little.
The narrative in Genesis, of the creation of man and of the events
in the Garden of Eden, cannot be traced further back than to the
time of Solomon, three thousand years after the alleged
occurrences it describes. This portion of the book of Genesis, as
has long been shown, is a distinct document, marked by many
peculiarities, which was inserted in its present place by the
compiler of the elder Hebrew Scriptures somewhere between seven
and ten centuries before Christ.3 Ewald has fully demonstrated
that the book of Genesis consists of many separate fragmentary
documents of different ages, arranged together by a comparatively
late hand. Among the later of these pieces is the account of the
primeval pair in paradise. Grotefend argues, with much force and
variety of evidence, that this story was derived from a far more
ancient legend book, only fragments of which remained when the
final collection was made of this portion of the Old Testament.4
Many scholars have thought the account was not of Hebrew origin,
but was borrowed from the literary traditions of some earlier
Oriental nation. Rosenmuller, Von Bohlen, and others, say it bears
unmistakable relationship to the Zendavesta which tells how
Ahriman, the old Serpent, beguiled the first pair into sin and
misery. These correspondences, and also that between the tree of
life and the Zoroastrian plant hom, which gives life and will
produce the resurrection, are certainly striking. Buttmann sees in
God's declaration to Adam, "Behold, I have given you for food
every herb bearing seed, and every tree in which is fruit bearing
seed," traces of a prohibition of animal food. This was not the
vestige of a Hebrew usage, but the vegetarian tradition of some
sect eschewing meat, a tradition drawn from South Asia, whence the
fathers of the Hebrew race came.5 Gesenius says, "Many things in
this narrative were drawn from older Asiatic tradition." 6 Knobel
also affirms that numerous matters in this relation were derived
from traditions of East Asian nations.7 Still, it is not necessary
to suppose that the writer of the account in Genesis borrowed any
thing from abroad. The Hebrew may as well have originated such
ideas as anybody else. The Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the
Chaldeans, the Persians, the Etruscans, have kindred narratives
held as most ancient and sacred.8 The Chinese, the Sandwich
Islanders, the North American Indians, also have their legends of
the origin and altered fortunes of the human race. The
resemblances between many of these stories are better accounted
for by the intrinsic similarities of the subject, of the mind, of
nature, and of mental action, than by the supposition of
derivation from one another.
Regarding the Hebrew narrative as an indigenous growth, then, how
shall we explain its origin, purport, and authority? Of course we
cannot receive it as a miraculous revelation conveying infallible
truth. The Bible, it is now acknowledged, was not given in the
providence
3 Tuch, Kommentar uber Genesis, s. xcviii.
4 Zur altesten Sagenpoesie des Orients. Zeitschrift der deutschen
Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, band viii. ss. 772-779.
5 Mythologus, (Schopfung and Sundenfall, ) band i. s. 137.
6 Article "Adam," in Encyclopadia by Ersch and Gruber.
7 Die Genesis erklart, s. 28.
8 Palfrey's Academical Lectures, vol. ii. pp. 21-28.
of God to teach astronomy, geology, chronology, and the operation
of organic forces, but to help educate men in morality and piety.
It is a religious, not a scientific, work. Some unknown Hebrew
poet, in the early dawn of remembered time, knowing little
metaphysics and less science, musing upon the fortunes of man, his
wickedness, sorrow, death, and impressed with an instinctive
conviction that things could not always have been so, casting
about for some solution of the dim, pathetic problem, at last
struck out the beautiful and sublime poem recorded in Genesis,
which has now for many a century, by Jews, Christians,
Mohammedans, been credited as authentic history. With his own
hands God moulds from earth an image in his own likeness, breathes
life into it, and new made man moves, lord of the scene, and lifts
his face, illuminated with soul, in submissive love to his
Creator. Endowed with free will, after a while he violated his
Maker's command: the divine displeasure was awakened, punishment
ensued, and so rushed in the terrible host of ills under which we
suffer. The problem must early arise: the solution is, to a
certain stage of thought, at once the most obvious and the most
satisfactory conceivable. It is the truth. Only it is cast in
imaginative, not scientific, form, arrayed in emblematic, not
literal, garb. The Greeks had a lofty poem by some early unknown
author, setting forth how Prometheus formed man of clay and
animated him with fire from heaven, and how from Pandora's box the
horrid crew of human vexations were let into the world. The two
narratives, though most unequal in depth and dignity, belong in
the same literary and philosophical category. Neither was intended
as a plain record of veritable history, each word a naked fact,
but as a symbol of its author's thoughts, each phrase the
metaphorical dress of a speculative idea.
Eichhorn maintains, with no slight plausibility, that the whole
account of the Garden of Eden was derived from a series of
allegorical pictures which the author had seen, and which he
translated from the language of painting into the language of
words. At all events, we must take the account as symbolic, a
succession of figurative expressions. Many of the best minds have
always so considered it, from Josephus to Origen, from Ambrose to
Kant. What, then, are the real thoughts which the author of this
Hebrew poem on the primal condition of man meant to convey beneath
his legendary forms of imagery? These four are the essential ones.
First, that God created man; secondly, that he created him in a
state of freedom and happiness surrounded by blessings; third,
that the favored subject violated his Sovereign's order; fourth,
that in consequence of this offence he was degraded from his
blessed condition, beneath a load of retributive ills. The
composition shows the characteristics of a philosopheme or a myth,
a scheme of conceptions deliberately wrought out to answer an
inquiry, a story devised to account for an existing fact or
custom. The picture of God performing his creative work in six
days and resting on the seventh, may have been drawn after the
septenary division of time and the religious separation of the
Sabbath, to explain and justify that observance. The creation of
Eve out of the side of Adam was either meant by the author as an
allegoric illustration that the love of husband and wife is the
most powerful of social bonds, or as a pure myth seeking to
explain the incomparable cleaving together of husband and wife by
the entirely poetic supposition that the first woman was taken out
of the first man, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. All early
literatures teem with exemplifications of this process, a
spontaneous secretion by the imagination to account for some
presented phenomenon. Or perhaps this part of the relation
"and he called her woman [manness], because she was taken
out of man" may be an instance of those etymological myths with
which ancient literature abounds. Woman is named Isha because she
was taken out of man, whose name is Ish. The barbarous treatment
the record under consideration has received, the utter
baselessness of it in the light of truth as foundation for literal
belief, find perhaps no fitter exposure than in the fact that for
many centuries it was the prevalent faith of Christendom that
every woman has one rib more than man, a permanent memorial of the
Divine theft from his side. Unquestionably, there are many good
persons now who, if Richard Owen should tell them that man has the
same number of ribs as woman, would think of the second chapter of
Genesis and doubt his word!
There is no reason for supposing the serpent in this recital to be
intended as a representative of Satan. The earliest trace of such
an interpretation is in the Wisdom of Solomon, an anonymous and
apocryphal book composed probably a thousand years later. What is
said of the snake is the most plainly mythical of all the
portions. What caused the snake to crawl on his belly in the dust,
while other creatures walk on feet or fly with wings? Why, the
sly, winding creature, more subtle, more detestable, than any
beast of the field, deceived the first woman; and this is his
punishment! Such was probably the mental process in the writer. To
seek a profound and true theological dogma in such a statement is
as absurd as to seek it in the classic myth that the lapwing with
his sharp beak chases the swallow because he is the descendant of
the enraged Tereus who pursued poor Progne with a drawn sword. Or,
to cite a more apposite case, as well might we seek a reliable
historical narrative in the following Greek myth. Zeus once gave
man a remedy against old age. He put it on the back of an ass and
followed on foot. It being a hot day, the ass grew thirsty, and
would drink at a fount which a snake guarded. The cunning snake
knew what precious burden the ass bore, and would not, except at
the price of it, let him drink. He obtained the prize; but with
it, as a punishment for his trick, he incessantly suffers the
ass's thirst. Thus the snake, casting his skin, annually renews
his youth, while man is borne down by old age.9 In all these cases
the mental action is of the same kind in motive, method, and
result.
The author of the poem contained in the third chapter of Genesis
does not say that man was made immortal. The implication plainly
is that he was created mortal, taken from the dust and naturally
to return again to the dust. But by the power of God a tree was
provided whose fruit would immortalize its partakers. The penalty
of Adam's sin was directly, not physical death, but being forced
in the sweat of his brow to wring his subsistence from the sterile
ground cursed for his sake; it was indirectly literal death, in
that he was prevented from eating the fruit of the tree of life.
"God sent him out of the garden, lest he eat and live forever." He
was therefore, according to the narrative, made originally subject
to death; but an immortalizing antidote was prepared for him,
which he forfeited by his transgression. That the writer made use
of the trees of life and knowledge as embellishing allegories is
most
9 Alian, no Nat. Animal., lib. vi. cap. 51.
probable. But, if not, he was not the only devout poet who, in the
early times, with sacred reverence believed the wonders the
inspiring muse gave him as from God. It is not clear from the
Biblical record that Adam was imagined the first man. On the
contrary, the statement that Cain was afraid that those who met
him would kill him, also that he went to the land of Nod and took
a wife and builded a city, implies that there was another and
older race. Father Peyrere wrote a book, called "Praadamita," more
than two hundred years ago, pointing out this fact and arguing
that there really were men before Adam. If science should
thoroughly establish the truth of this view, religion need not
suffer; but the common theology, inextricably built upon and
intertangled with the dogma of "original sin," would be hopelessly
ruined. But the leaders in the scientific world will not on that
account shut their eyes nor refuse to reason. Christians should
follow their example of truth seeking, with a deeper faith in God,
fearless of results, but resolved upon reaching reality.
It is a very singular and important fact that, from the appearance
in Genesis of the account of the creation and sin and punishment
of the first pair, not the faintest explicit allusion to it is
subsequently found anywhere in literature until about the time of
Christ. Had it been all along credited in its literal sense, as a
divine revelation, could this be so? Philo Judaus gives it a
thoroughly figurative meaning. He says, "Adam was created mortal
in body, immortal in mind. Paradise is the soul, piety the tree of
life, discriminative wisdom the tree of knowledge; the serpent is
pleasure, the flaming sword turning every way is the sun revolving
round the world."10 Jesus himself never once alludes to Adam or to
any part of the story of Eden. In the whole New Testament there
are but two important references to the tradition, both of which
are by Paul. He says, in effect, "As through the sin of Adam all
are condemned unto death, so by the righteousness of Christ all
shall be justified unto life." It is not a guarded doctrinal
statement, but an unstudied, rhetorical illustration of the
affiliation of the sinful and unhappy generations of the past with
their offending progenitor, Adam, of the believing and blessed
family of the chosen with their redeeming head, Christ. He does
not use the word death in the Epistle to the Romans prevailingly
in the narrow sense of physical dissolution, but in a broad,
spiritual sense, as appears, for example, in these instances: "To
be carnally minded is death;" "The law of the spirit of life in
Christ hath made me free from the law of sin and death." For the
spiritually minded were not exempt from bodily death. Paul himself
died the bodily death. His idea of the relations of Adam and
Christ to humanity is more clearly expressed in the other passage
already alluded to. It is in the Epistle to the Corinthians, and
appears to be this. The first man, Adam, was of the earth, earthy,
the head and representative of a corruptible race whose flesh and
blood were never meant to inherit the kingdom of God. The second
man, Christ the Lord, soon to return from heaven, was a quickening
spirit, head and representative of a risen spiritual race for whom
is prepared the eternal inheritance of the saints in light. As by
the first man came death, whose germ is transmitted with the
flesh, so by the second man comes the resurrection of the dead,
whose type is seen in his glorified ascension from Hades to
heaven. "As in Adam all die, even so in
10 De Mundi Opificio, liv lvi. De Cherub. viii.
Christ shall all be made alive." Upon all the line of Adam sin has
entailed, what otherwise would not have been known, moral death
and a disembodied descent to the under world. But the gospel of
Christ, and his resurrection as the first fruits of them that
slept, proclaim to all those that are his, at his speedy coming, a
kindred deliverance from the lower gloom, an investiture with
spiritual bodies, and an admission into the kingdom of God.
According to Paul, then, physical death is not the retributive
consequence of Adam's sin, but is the will of the Creator in the
law of nature, the sowing of terrestrial bodies for the gathering
of celestial bodies, the putting off of the image of the earthy
for the putting on of the image of the heavenly. The specialty of
the marring and punitive interference of sin in the economy is, in
addition to the penalties in moral experience, the interpolation,
between the fleshly "unclothing" and the spiritual "clothing
upon," of the long, disembodied, subterranean residence, from the
descent of Abel into its palpable solitude to the ascent of Christ
out of its multitudinous world. From Adam, in the flesh, humanity
sinks into the grave realm; from Christ, in the spirit, it shall
rise into heaven. Had man remained innocent, death, considered as
change of body and transition to heaven, would still have been his
portion; but all the suffering and evil now actually associated
with death would not have been.
Leaving the Scriptures, the first man appears in literature, in
the history of human thought on the beginning of our race, in
three forms. There is the Mythical Adam, the embodiment of
poetical musings, fanciful conceits, and speculative dreams; there
is the Theological Adam, the central postulate of a group of
dogmas, the support of a fabric of controversial thought, the lay
figure to fill out and wear the hypothetical dresses of a
doctrinal system; and there is the Scientific Adam, the first
specimen of the genus man, the supposititious personage who, as
the earliest product, on this grade, of the Creative organic force
or Divine energy, commenced the series of human generations. The
first is a hypostatized legend, the second a metaphysical
personification, the third a philosophical hypothesis. The first
is an attractive heap of imaginations, the next a dialectic mass
of dogmatisms, the last a modest set of theories.
Philo says God made Adam not from any chance earth, but from a
carefully selected portion of the finest and most sifted clay, and
that, as being directly created by God, he was superior to all
others generated by men, the generations of whom deteriorate in
each remove from him, as the attraction of a magnet weakens from
the iron ring it touches along a chain of connected rings. The
Rabbins say Adam was so large that when he lay down he reached
across the earth, and when standing his head touched the
firmament: after his fall he waded through the ocean, Orion like.
Even a French Academician, Nicolas Fleurion, held that Adam was
one hundred and twenty three feet and nine inches in height. All
creatures except the angel Eblis, as the Koran teaches, made
obeisance to him. Eblis, full of envy and pride, refused, and was
thrust into hell by God, where he began to plot the ruin of the
new race. One effect of the forbidden fruit he ate was to cause
rotten teeth in his descendants. He remained in Paradise but one
day. After he had eaten from the prohibited tree, Eve gave of the
fruit to the other creatures in Eden, and they all ate of it, and
so became mortal, with the sole exception of the phoenix, who
refused to taste it, and consequently remained immortal.
The Talmud teaches that Adam would never have died had he not
sinned. The majority of the Christian fathers and doctors, from
Tertullian and Augustine to Luther and Calvin, have maintained the
same opinion. It has been the orthodox that is, the prevailing
doctrine of the Church, affirmed by the Synod at Carthage in the
year four hundred and eighteen, and by the Council of Trent in the
year fifteen hundred and forty five. All the evils which afflict
the world, both moral and material, are direct results of Adam's
sin. He contained all the souls of men in himself; and they all
sinned in him, their federal head and legal representative. When
the fatal fruit was plucked,
"Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat, Sighing through
all her works, gave signs of woe That all was lost."
Earthquakes, tempests, pestilences, poverty, war, the endless
brood of distress, ensued. For then were
"Turn'd askance The poles of earth twice ten degrees and more
From the sun's axle, and with labor push'd Oblique the centric
globe."
Adam's transcendent faculties and gifts were darkened and
diminished in his depraved posterity, and all base propensities
let loose to torment, confuse, and degrade them. We can scarcely
form a conception of the genius, the beauty, the blessedness, of
the first man, say the theologians in chorus.11 Augustine
declares, "The most gifted of our time must be considered, when
compared with Adam in genius, as tortoises to birds in speed."
Adam, writes Dante, "was made from clay, accomplished with every
gift that life can teem with." Thomas Aquinas teaches that "he was
immortal by grace though not by nature, had universal knowledge,
fellowshipped with angels, and saw God." South, in his famous
sermon on "Man the Image of God," after an elaborate panegyric of
the wondrous majesty, wisdom, peacefulness, and bliss of man
before the fall, exclaims, "Aristotle was but the rubbish of an
Adam, and Athens the rudiments of Paradise!" Jean Paul has
amusingly burlesqued these conceits. "Adam, in his state of
innocence, possessed a knowledge of all the arts and sciences,
universal and scholastic history, the several penal and other
codes of law, and all the old dead languages, as well as the
living. He was, as it were, a living Pegasus and Pindus, a movable
lodge of sublime light, a royal literary society, a pocket seat of
the Muses, and a short golden age of Louis the Fourteenth!"
Adam has been called the Man without a Navel, because, not being
born of woman, there could be no umbilical cord to cut. The
thought goes deep. In addition to the mythico theological pictures
of the mechanical creation and superlative condition of the first
man, two forms of statement have been advanced by thoughtful
students of nature. One is the theory of chronological progressive
development; the other is the theory of the
11 Strauss gives a multitude of apposite quotations in his
Christliche Glaubenslehre, band i. s. 691, sect. 51, ff.
simultaneous creation of organic families of different species or
typical forms. The advocate of the former goes back along the
interminable vistas of geologic time, tracing his ancestral line
through the sinking forms of animal life, until, with the aid of a
microscope, he sees a closed vesicle of structureless membrane;
and this he recognises as the scientific Adam. This theory has
been brought into fresh discussion by Mr. Darwin in his rich and
striking work on the Origin of Species12 The other view contrasts
widely with this, and is not essentially different from the
account in Genesis. It shows God himself creating by regular
methods, in natural materials, not by a vicegerent law, not with
the anthropomorphitic hands of an external potter. Every organized
fabric, however complex, originates in a single physiological
cell. Every individual organism from the simple plant known as red
snow to the oak, from the zoophyte to man is developed from such a
cell. This is unquestionable scientific knowledge. The phenomenal
process of organic advancement is through growth of the cell by
selective appropriation of material, self multiplication of the
cell, chemical transformations of the pabulum of the cell,
endowment of the muscular and nervous tissues produced by those
transformations with vital and psychical properties.
But the essence of the problem lies in the question, Why does one
of these simple cells become a cabbage, another a rat, another a
whale, another a man? Within the limits of known observation
during historic time, every organism yields seed or bears progeny
after its own kind. Between all neighboring species there are
impassable, discrete chasms. The direct reason, therefore, why one
cell stops in completion at any given vegetable stage, another at
a certain animal stage, is that its producing parent was that
vegetable or that animal. Now, going back to the first individual
of each kind, which had no determining parent like itself, the
theory of the gradually ameliorating development of one species
out of the next below it is one mode of solving the problem.
Another mode more satisfactory at least to theologians and their
allies is to conclude that God, the Divine Force, by whom the life
of the universe is given, made the world after an ideal plan,
including a systematic arrangement of all the possible
modifications. This plan was in his thought, in the unity of all
its parts, from the beginning; and the animate creation is the
execution of its diagrams in organic life. Instead of the lineal
extraction of the complicated scheme out of one cell, there has
been, from epoch to epoch, the simultaneous production of all
included in one of its sections. The Creator, at his chosen times,
calling into existence a multitude of cells, gave each one the
amount and type of organic force which would carry it to the
destined grade and form. In this manner may have originated, at
the same time, the first sparrow, the first horse, the first man,
in short, a whole circle of congeners.
"The grassy clods now calved; now half appear'd
The tawny lion, pawing to get free
His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds,
And rampant shakes his brinded mane."
12 The most forcible defence of this hypothesis is that made by
Herbert Spencer. See, in his volume of Essays, No. 2 of the
Haythorne Papers. Also see Oken, Entstehung des ersten Menechen,
Isis, 1819, ss. 1117-1123.
Each creature, therefore, would be distinct from others from the
first. "Man, though rising from not man, came forth sharply
defined." The races thus originated in their initiative
representatives by the creative power of God, thenceforth possess
in themselves the power, each one, in the generative act, to put
its typical dynamic stamp upon the primordial cells of its
immediate descendants. Adam, then, was a wild man, cast in
favoring conditions of climate, endowed with the same faculties as
now, only not in so high a degree. For, by his peculiar power of
forming habits, accumulating experience, transmitting acquirements
and tendencies, he has slowly risen to his present state with all
its wealth of wisdom, arts, and comforts.
By either of these theories, that of Darwin, or that of Agassiz,
man, the head of the great organic family of the earth, and it
matters not at all whether there were only one Adam and Eve, or
whether each separate race had its own Adams and Eves,13 not
merely a solitary pair, but simultaneous hundreds, man, physically
considered, is indistinguishably included in the creative plan
under the same laws and forces, and visibly subject to the same
destination, as the lower animals. He starts with a cell as they
do, grows to maturity by assimilative organization and endowing
transformation of foreign nutriment as they do, his life is a
continuous process of waste and repair of tissues as theirs is,
and there is, from the scientific point of view, no conceivable
reason why he should not be subject to physical death as they are.
They have always been subject to death, which, therefore, is an
aboriginal constituent of the Creative plan. It has been
estimated, upon data furnished by scientific observation, that
since the appearance of organic life on earth, millions of years
ago, animals enough have died to cover all the lands of the globe
with their bones to the height of three miles. Consequently, the
historic commencement of death is not to be found in the sin of
man. We shall discover it as a necessity in the first organic cell
that was ever formed.
The spherule of force which is the primitive basis of a cell
spends itself in the discharge of its work. In other words, "the
amount of vital action which can be performed by each living cell
has a definite limit." When that limit is reached, the exhausted
cell is dead. To state the fact differently: no function can be
performed without "the disintegration of a certain amount of
tissue, whose components are then removed as effete by the
excretory processes." This final expenditure on the part of a cell
of its modification of force is the act of molecular death, the
germinal essence of all decay. That this organic law should rule
in every living structure is a necessity inherent in the actual
conditions of the creation. And wherever we look in the realm of
physical man, even "from the red outline of beginning Adam" to the
amorphous adipocere of the last corpse when fate's black curtain
falls on our race, we shall discern death. For death is the other
side of life. Life and death are the two hands with which the
organic power works.
The threescore simple elements known to chemists die, that is,
surrender their peculiar powers and properties, and enter into new
combinations to produce and support higher forms of life.
Otherwise these inorganic elemental wastes would be all that the
material universe could show.
13 The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races, by Louis Agassiz,
Christian Examiner, July, 1850.
The simple plant consists of single cells, which, in its
development, give up their independent life for the production
of a more exalted vegetable form. The formation of a perfectly
organized plant is made possible only through the continuous dying
and replacement of its cells. Similarly, in the development of an
animal, the constituent cells die for the good of the whole
creature; and the more perfect the animal the greater the
subordination of the parts. The cells of the human body are
incessantly dying, being borne off and replaced. The epidermis or
scarf skin is made of millions of insensible scales, consisting of
former cells which have died in order with their dead bodies to
build this guardian wall around the tender inner parts. Thus,
death, operating within the individual, seen in the light of
natural science, is a necessity, is purely a form of self
surrendering beneficence, is, indeed, but a hidden and indirect
process and completion of life.14
And is not the death of the total organism just as needful, just
as benignant, as the death of the component atoms? Is it not the
same law, still expressing the same meaning? The chemicalelements
wherein individuality is wanting, as Wagner says, die that
vegetable bodies may live. Individual vegetable bodies die that
new individuals of the species may live, and that they may supply
the conditions for animals to live. The individual beast dies that
other individuals of his species may live, and also for the good
of man. The plant lives by the elements and by other plants: the
animal lives by the elements, by the plants, and by other animals:
man lives and reigns by the service of the elements, of the
plants, and of the animals. The individual man dies if we may
trust the law of analogy for the good of his species, and that he
may furnish the conditions for the development of a higher life
elsewhere. It is quite obvious that, if individuals did not die,
new individuals could not live, because there would not be room.
It is also equally evident that, if individuals did not die, they
could never have any other life than the present. The foregoing
considerations, fathomed and appreciated, transform the
institution of death from caprice and punishment into necessity
and benignity. In the timid sentimentalist's view, death is
horrible. Nature unrolls the chart of organic existence, a
convulsed and lurid list of murderers, from the spider in the
window to the tiger in the jungle, from the shark at the bottom of
the sea to the eagle against the floor of the sky. As the perfumed
fop, in an interval of reflection, gazes at the spectacle through
his dainty eyeglass, the prospect swims in blood and glares with
the ghastly phosphorus of corruption, and he shudders with
sickness. In the philosophical naturalist's view, the dying
panorama is wholly different. Carnivorous violence prevents more
pain than it inflicts; the wedded laws of life and death wear the
solemn beauty and wield the merciful functions of God; all is
balanced and ameliorating; above the slaughterous struggle safely
soar the dove and the rainbow; out of the charnel blooms the rose
to which the nightingale sings love; nor is there poison which
helps not health, nor destruction which supplies not creation with
nutriment for greater good and joy.
By painting such pictures as that of a woman with "Sin" written on
her forehead in great glaring letters, giving to Death a globe
entwined by a serpent, or that of Death as a
14 Hermann Wagner, Der Tod, beleuchtet vom Standpunkte der
Naturwissenschaften.
skeleton, waving a black banner over the world and sounding
through a trumpet, "Woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth!" by
interpreting the great event as punishment instead of fulfilment,
extermination instead of transition, men have elaborated, in the
faith of their imaginations, a melodramatic death which nature
never made. Truly, to the capable observer, death bears the double
aspect of necessity and benignity: necessity, because it is an
ultimate fact, as the material world is made, that, since organic
action implies expenditure of force, the modicum of force given to
any physical organization must finally be spent; benignity,
because a bodily immortality on earth would both prevent all the
happiness of perpetually rising millions and be an unspeakable
curse upon its possessors.
The benevolence of death appears from this fact, that it
boundlessly multiplies the numbers who can enjoy the prerogatives
of life. It calls up ever fresh generations, with wondering eyes
and eager appetites, to the perennial banquet of existence. Had
Adam not sinned and been expelled from Paradise, some of the
Christian Fathers thought, the fixed number of saints foreseen by
God would have been reached and then no more would have been
born.15
Such would have been the necessity, there being no death. But, by
the removal of one company as they grow tired and sated, room is
made for a new company to approach and enjoy the ever renewing
spectacle and feast of the world. Thus all the delightful boons
life has, instead of being cooped within a little stale circle,
are ceaselessly diffused and increased. Vivacious claimants
advance, see what is to be seen, partake of what is furnished, are
satisfied, and retire; and their places are immediately taken by
hungry successors. Thus the torch of life is passed briskly, with
picturesque and stimulating effect, along the manifold race of
running ages, instead of smouldering stagnantly forever in the
moveless grasp of one. The amount of enjoyment, the quantity of
conscious experience, gained from any given exhibition by a
million persons to each of whom it is successively shown for one
hour, is, beyond all question, immensely greater and keener than
one person could have from it in a million hours. The generations
of men seem like fire flies glittering down the dark lane of
History; but each swarm had its happy turn, fulfilled its hour,
and rightfully gave way to its followers. The disinterested
beneficence of the Creator ordains that the same plants, insects,
men, shall not unsurrenderingly monopolize and stop the bliss of
breath. Death is the echo of the voice of love reverberated from
the limit of life.
The cumulative fund of human experience, the sensitive affiliating
line of history, like a cerebral cord of personal identity
traversing the centuries, renders a continual succession of
generations equivalent to the endless existence of one generation;
but with this mighty difference, that it preserves all the edge
and spice of novelty. For consider what would be the result if
death were abolished and men endowed with an earthly immortality.
At first they might rejoice, and think their last, dreadest enemy
destroyed. But what a mistake! In the first place, since none are
to be removed from the earth, of course none must come into it.
The space and material are all wanted by those now in possession.
All are soon mature men and women, not another infant ever to hang
upon a mother's breast or be lifted in a father's arms.
15 Augustine, Op. Imp. iii. 198.
All the prattling music, fond cares, yearning love, and
gushing joys and hopes associated with the rearing of children,
gone! What a stupendous fragment is stricken from the fabric of
those enriching satisfactions which give life its truest value and
its purest charm! Ages roll on. They see the same everlasting
faces, confront the same returning phenomena, engage in the same
worn out exercises, or lounge idly in the unchangeable conditions
which bear no stimulant which they have not exhausted. Thousands
of years pass. They have drunk every attainable spring of
knowledge dry. Not a prize stirs a pulse. All pleasures,
permutated till ingenuity is baffled, disgust them. No terror
startles them. No possible experiment remains untried; nor is
there any unsounded fortune left. No dim marvels and boundless
hopes beckon them with resistless lures into the future. They have
no future. One everlasting now is their all. At last the incessant
repetition of identical phenomena, the unmitigated sameness of
things, the eternal monotony of affairs, become unutterably
burdensome and horrible. Full of loathing and immeasurable
fatigue, a weariness like the weight of a universe oppresses them;
and what would they not give for a change! any thing to break the
nightmare spell of ennui, to fling off the dateless flesh, to
die, to pass into some unguessed realm, to lie down and sleep
forever: it would be the infinite boon!
Take away from man all that is dependent on, or interlinked with,
the appointment of death, and it would make such fundamental
alterations of his constitution and relations that he would no
longer be man. It would leave us an almost wholly different race.
If it is a divine boon that men should be, then death is a good to
us; for it enables us to be men. Without it there would neither be
husband and wife, nor parent and child, nor family hearth and
altar; nor, indeed, would hardly any thing be as it is now. The
existent phenomena of nature and the soul would comprise all. And
when the jaded individual, having mastered and exhausted this
finite sum, looked in vain for any thing new or further, the world
would be a hateful dungeon to him, and life an awful doom; and how
gladly he would give all that lies beneath the sun's golden round
and top of sovereignty to migrate into some untried region and
state of being, or even to renounce existence altogether and lie
down forever in the attractive slumber of the grave! Without
death, mankind would undergo the fate of Sisyphus, no future, and
in the present the oppression of an intolerable task with an
aching vacuum of motive. The certainty and the mystery of death
create the stimulus and the romance of life. Give the human race
an earthly immortality, and you exclude them from every thing
greater and diviner than the earth affords. Who could consent to
that? Take away death, and a brazen wall girds in our narrow life,
against which, if we remained men, we should dash and chafe in the
climax of our miserable longing, as the caged lion or eagle beats
against his bars.
The gift of an earthly immortality conferred on a single person a
boon which thoughtless myriads would clasp with frantic triumph
would prove, perhaps, a still more fearful curse than if
distributed over the whole species.
Retaining his human affections, how excruciating and remediless
his grief must be, to be so cut off from all equal community of
experience and destiny with mankind, to see all whom he loves,
generation after generation, fading away, leaving him alone, to
form new ties again to be dissolved, to watch his beloved ones
growing old and infirm, while he stands without a change! His love
would be left, in agony of melancholy grandeur, "a solitary angel
hovering over a universe of tombs" on the tremulous wings of
memory and grief, those wings incapacitated, by his madly coveted
prerogative of deathlessness, ever to move from above the sad rows
of funereal urns. Zanoni, in Bulwer's magnificent conception, says
to Viola, "The flower gives perfume to the rock on whose breast it
grows. A little while, and the flower is dead; but the rock still
endures, the snow at its breast, the sunshine on its summit." A
deathless individual in a world of the dying, joined with them by
ever bereaved affections, would be the wretchedest creature
conceivable. As no man ever yet prayed for any thing he would pray
to be released, to embrace dear objects in his arms and float away
with them to heaven, or even to lie down with them in the kind
embrace of mother earth. And if he had no affections, but lived a
stoic existence, exempt from every sympathy, in impassive
solitude, he could not be happy, he would not be man: he must be
an intellectual marble of thought or a monumental mystery of woe.
Death, therefore, is benignity. When men wish there were no such
appointed event, they are deceived, and know not what they wish.
Literature furnishes a strange and profound, though wholly
unintentional, confirmation of this view. Every form in which
literary genius has set forth the conception of an earthly
immortality represents it as an evil. This is true even down to
Swift's painful account of the Struldbrugs in the island of
Laputa. The legend of the Wandering Jew,16 one of the most
marvellous products of the human mind in imaginative literature,
is terrific with its blazoned revelation of the contents of an
endless life on earth. This story has been embodied, with great
variety of form and motive, in more than a hundred works. Every
one is, without the writer's intention, a disguised sermon of
gigantic force on the benignity of death. As in classic fable poor
Tithon became immortal in the dawning arms of Eos only to lead a
shrivelled, joyless, repulsive existence; and the fair young witch
of Cuma had ample cause to regret that ever Apollo granted her
request for as many years as she held grains of dust in her hand;
and as all tales of successful alchemists or Rosicrucians concur
in depicting the result to be utter disappointment and revulsion
from the accursed prize; we may take it as evidence of a
spontaneous conviction in the depths of human nature a conviction
sure to be brought out whenever the attempt is made to describe in
life an opposite thought that death is benign for man as he is
constituted and related on earth. The voice of human nature speaks
truth through the lips of Cicero, saying, at the close of his
essay on Old Age, "Quodsi non sumus immortales futuri, tamen
exstingui homini suo tempore optabile est."
In a conversation at the house of Sappho, a discussion once arose
upon the question whether death was a blessing or an evil. Some
maintained, the former alternative; but Sappho victoriously closed
the debate by saying, If it were a blessing to die, the immortal
gods would experience it. The gods live forever: therefore, death
is an evil.17 The reasoning was plausible and brilliant. Yet its
sophistry is complete. To men, conditioned as they are in this
world, death may be the greatest blessing; while to the gods,
conditioned so differently, it may have no similar application.
16 Bibliographical notice of the legend of the wandering Jew, by
Paul Lacroix; trans. into English by G.W. Thornbury. Grasse, Der
ewige Jude.
17 Fragment X. Quoted in Mare's Hist. Lit. Greece, book iii. chap.
v. sect. 18.
Because an earthly eternity in the flesh would be a frightful
calamity, is no reason why a heavenly eternity in the spirit
would be other than a blissful inheritance.
Thus the remonstrance which may be fallaciously based on some of
the foregoing considerations namely, that they would equally make
it appear that the immortality of man in any condition would be
undesirable is met. A conclusion drawn from the facts of the
present scene of things, of course, will not apply to a scene
inconceivably different. Those whose only bodies are their minds
may be fetterless, happy, leading a wondrous life, beyond our
deepest dream and farthest fancy, and eternally free from trouble
or satiety.
Death is to us, while we live, what we think it to be. If we
confront it with analytic and defiant eye, it is that nothing
which ever ceases in beginning to be. If, letting the
superstitious senses tyrannize over us and cow our better part of
man, we crouch before the imagination of it, it assumes the shape
of the skeleton monarch who takes the world for his empire, the
electric fluid for his chariot, and time for his sceptre. In the
contemplation of death, hitherto, fancy inspired by fear has been
by far too much the prominent faculty and impulse. The literature
of the subject is usually ghastly, appalling, and absurd, with
point of view varying from that of the credulous Hindu,
personifying death as a monster with a million mouths devouring
all creatures and licking them in his flaming lips as a fire
devours the moths or as the sea swallows the torrents,18 to that
of the atheistic German dreamer, who converts nature into an
immeasurable corpse worked by galvanic forces, and that of the
bold French philosopher, Carnot, whose speculations have led to
the theory that the sun will finally expend all its heat, and
constellated life cease, as the solar system hangs, like a dead
orrery, ashy and spectral, the ghost of what it was. So the
extravagant author of Festus says,
"God tore the glory from the sun's broad brow And flung the
flaming scalp away."
The subject should be viewed by the unclouded intellect, guided by
serene faith, in the light of scientific knowledge. Then death is
revealed, first, as an organic necessity in the primordial life
cell; secondly, as the cessation of a given form of life in its
completion; thirdly, as a benignant law, an expression of the
Creator's love; fourthly, as the inaugurating condition of another
form of life. What we are to refer to sin is all the seeming
lawlessness and untimeliness of death. Had not men sinned, all
would reach a good age and pass away without suffering. Death is
benignant necessity; the irregularity and pain associated with it
are an inherited punishment. Finally, it is a condition of
improvement in life. Death is the incessant touch with which the
artist, Nature, is bringing her works to perfection.
Physical death is experienced by man in common with the brute.
Upon grounds of physiology there is no greater evidence for man's
Spiritual survival through that overshadowed crisis than there is
for the brute's. And on grounds of sentiment man ought not to
shrink from sharing his open future with these mute comrades. Des
Cartes and Malebranche taught that animals are mere machines,
without souls, worked by God's arbitrary power. Swedenborg held
that "the souls of brutes are extinguished with their bodies." 19
18 Thomson's trans. of Bhagavad Gita, p. 77.
19 Outlines of the Infinite, chap. ii. sect. iv. 13.
Leibnitz, by his doctrine of eternal monads, sustains the
immortality of all creatures.
Coleridge defended the same idea. Agassiz, with much power and
beauty, advocates the thought that animals as well as men have a
future life. 20 The old traditions affirm that at least four
beasts have been translated to heaven; namely, the ass that spoke
to Balaam, the white foal that Christ rode into Jerusalem, the
steed Borak that bore Mohammed on his famous night journey, and
the dog that wakened the Seven Sleepers. To recognise, as Goethe
did, brothers in the green wood and in the teeming air, to
sympathize with all lower forms of life, and hope for them an open
range of limitless possibilities in the hospitable home of God, is
surely more becoming to a philosopher, a poet, or a Christian,
than that careless scorn which commonly excludes them from regard
and contemptuously leaves them to annihilation. This subject has
been genially treated by Richard Dean in his "Essay on the Future
Life of Brutes."
But on moral and psychological grounds the distinction is vast
between the dying man and the dying brute. Bretschneider, in a
beautiful sermon on this point, specifies four particulars. Man
foresees and provides for his death: the brute does not. Man dies
with unrecompensed merit and guilt: the brute does not. Man dies
with faculties and powers fitted for a more perfect state of
existence: the brute does not. Man dies with the expectation of
another life: the brute does not. Three contrasts may be added to
these. First, man desires to die amidst his fellows: the brute
creeps away by himself, to die in solitude. Secondly, man inters
his dead with burial rites, rears a memorial over them, cherishes
recollections of them which often change his subsequent character:
but who ever heard of a deer watching over an expiring comrade, a
deer funeral winding along the green glades of the forest? The
barrows of Norway, the mounds of Yucatan, the mummy pits of
Memphis, the rural cemeteries of our own day, speak the human
thoughts of sympathetic reverence and posthumous survival, typical
of something superior to dust. Thirdly, man often makes death an
active instead of a passive experience, his will as it is his
fate, a victory instead of a defeat.21 As Mirabeau sank towards
his end, he ordered them to pour perfumes and roses on him, and to
bring music; and so, with the air of a haughty conqueror, amidst
the volcanic smoke and thunder of reeling France, his giant spirit
went forth. The patriot is proud to lay his body a sacrifice on
the altar of his country's weal. The philanthropist rejoices to
spend himself without pay in a noble cause, to offer up his life
in the service of his fellow men. Thousands of generous students
have given their lives to science and clasped death amidst their
trophied achievements. Who can count the confessors who have
thought it bliss and glory to be martyrs for truth and God?
Creatures capable of such deeds must inherit eternity. Their
transcendent souls step from their rejected mansions through the
blue gateway of the air to the lucid palace of the stars. Any
meaner allotment would be discordant and unbecoming their rank.
Contemplations like these exorcise the spectre host of the brain
and quell the horrid brood of fear. The noble purpose of self
sacrifice enables us to smile upon the grave, "as some sweet
clarion's breath stirs the soldier's scorn of danger."
20 Contributions to the Natural History of the United States, vol.
i. pp. 64-66. Umbreit, fiber das Sterben ais einen Akt menschlich
personlicher Selbststandigkeit. Studien und Kritiken, 1837.
Death parts with its false frightfulness, puts on its true beauty,
and becomes at once the evening star of memory and the morning
star of hope, the Hesper of the sinking flesh, the Phosphor of
the rising soul. Let the night come, then: it shall be welcome.
And, as we gird our loins to enter the ancient mystery, we will
exclaim, with vanishing voice, to those we leave behind,
"Though I stoop Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, It is but for
a time I press God's lamp Close to my breast: its splendor, soon
or late, Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge somewhere."
CHAPTER III.
GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE.
IT is the purpose of the following chapter to describe the
originating supports of the common belief in a future life; not to
probe the depth and test the value of the various grounds out of
which the doctrine grows, but only to give a descriptive sketch of
what they are, and a view of the process of growth. The objections
urged by unbelievers belong to an open discussion of the question
of immortality, not to an illustrative statement of the suggesting
grounds on which the popular belief rests. When, after sufficient
investigation, we ask ourselves from what causes the almost
universal expectation of another life springs, and by what
influences it is nourished, we shall not find adequate answer in
less than four words: feeling, imagination, faith, and reflection.
The doctrine of a future life for man has been created by the
combined force of instinctive desire, analogical observation,
prescriptive authority, and philosophical speculation. These are
the four pillars on which the soul builds the temple of its hopes;
or the four glasses through which it looks to see its eternal
heritage.
First, it is obvious that man is endowed at once with
foreknowledge of death and with a powerful love of life. It is not
a love of being here; for he often loathes the scene around him.
It is a love of self possessed existence; a love of his own soul
in its central consciousness and bounded royalty. This is an
inseparable element of his very entity. Crowned with free will,
walking on the crest of the world, enfeoffed with individual
faculties, served by vassal nature with tributes of various joy,
he cannot bear the thought of losing himself, of sliding into the
general abyss of matter. His interior consciousness is permeated
with a self preserving instinct, and shudders at every glimpse of
danger or hint of death. The soul, pervaded with a guardian
instinct of life, and seeing death's steady approach to destroy
the body, necessitates the conception of an escape into another
state of existence. Fancy and reason, thus set at work, speedily
construct a thousand theories filled with details. Desire first
fathers thought, and then thought woos belief.
Secondly, man, holding his conscious being precious beyond all
things, and shrinking with pervasive anxieties from the moment of
destined dissolution, looks around through the realms of nature,
with thoughtful eye, in search of parallel phenomena further
developed, significant sequels in other creatures' fates, whose
evolution and fulfilment may haply throw light on his own. With
eager vision and heart prompted imagination he scrutinizes
whatever appears related to his object. Seeing the snake cast its
old slough and glide forth renewed, he conceives, so in death man
but sheds his fleshly exuvia, while the spirit emerges,
regenerate. He beholds the beetle break from its filthy sepulchre
and commence its summer work; and straightway he hangs a golden
scarsbaus in his temples as an emblem of a future life. After
vegetation's wintry deaths, hailing the returning spring that
brings resurrection and life to the graves of the sod, he dreams
of some far off spring of Humanity, yet to come, when the frosts
of man's untoward doom shall relent, and all the costly seeds sown
through ages in the great earth tomb shall shoot up in celestial
shapes. On the moaning sea shore, weeping some dear friend, he
perceives, now ascending in the dawn, the planet which he lately
saw declining in the dusk; and he is cheered by the thought that
"As sinks the day star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his
drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new spangled
ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky, So Lycidas, sunk
low, shall mount on high."
Some traveller or poet tells him fabulous tales of a bird which,
grown aged, fills its nest with spices, and, spontaneously
burning, soars from the aromatic fire, rejuvenescent for a
thousand years; and he cannot but take the phoenix for a
miraculous type of his own soul springing, free and eternal, from
the ashes of his corpse. Having watched the silkworm, as it wove
its cocoon and lay down in its oblong grave apparently dead, until
at length it struggles forth, glittering with rainbow colors, a
winged moth, endowed with new faculties and living a new life in a
new sphere, he conceives that so the human soul may, in the
fulness of time, disentangle itself from the imprisoning meshes of
this world of larva, a thing of spirit beauty, to sail through
heavenly airs; and henceforth he engraves a butterfly on the
tombstone in vivid prophecy of immortality. Thus a moralizing
observation of natural similitudes teaches man to hope for an
existence beyond death.
Thirdly, the prevailing belief in a future life is spread and
upheld by the influence of authority. The doctrine of the soul's
survival and transference to another world, where its experience
depends on conditions observed or violated here, conditions
somewhat within the control of a select class of men here, such a
doctrine is the very hiding place of the power of priest craft, a
vast engine of interest and sway which the shrewd insight of
priesthoods has often devised and the cunning policy of states
subsidized. In most cases of this kind the asserted doctrine is
placed on the basis of a divine revelation, and must be implicitly
received. God proclaims it through his anointed ministers:
therefore, to doubt it or logically criticize it is a crime.
History bears witness to such a procedure wherever an organized
priesthood has flourished, from primeval pagan India to modern
papal Rome. It is traceable from the dark Osirian shrines of Egypt
and the initiating temple at Eleusis to the funeral fires of Gaul
and the Druidic conclave in the oak groves of Mona; from the
reeking altars of Mexico in the time of Montezuma to the masses
for souls in Purgatory said this day in half the churches of
Christendom. Much of the popular faith in immortality which has
prevailed in all ages has been owing to the authority of its
promulgators, a deep and honest trust on the part of the people in
the authoritative dicta of their religious teachers.
In all the leading nations of the earth, the doctrine of a future
life is a tradition handed down from immemorial antiquity,
embalmed in sacred books which are regarded as infallible
revelations from God. Of course the thoughtless never think of
questioning it; the reverent piously embrace it; all are educated
to receive it. In addition to the proclamation of a future life by
the sacred books and by the priestly hierarchies, it has also been
affirmed by countless individual saints, philosophers, and
prophets. Most persons readily accept it on trust from them as a
demonstrated theory or an inspired knowledge of theirs. It is
natural for modest unspeculative minds, busied with worldly cares,
to say, These learned sages, these theosophic seers, so much more
gifted, educated, and intimate with the divine counsels and plan
than we are, with so much deeper experience and purer insight than
we have, must know the truth: we cannot in any other way do so well
as to follow their guidance and confide in their assertions.
Accordingly, multitudes receive the belief in a life to come on
the authority of the world's intellectual and religious leaders.
Fourthly, the belief in a future life results from philosophical
meditation, and is sustained by rational proofs.1 For the
completion of the present outline, it now remains to give a brief
exposition of these arguments. For the sake of convenience and
clearness, we must arrange these reasonings in five classes;
namely, the physiological, the analogical, the psychological, the
theological, and the moral.
There is a group of considerations drawn from the phenomena of our
bodily organization, life and death, which compose the
physiological argument for the separate existence of the soul. In
the first place, it is contended that the human organization, so
wondrously vitalized, developed, and ruled, could not have grown
up out of mere matter, but implies a pre existent mental entity, a
spiritual force or idea, which constituted the primeval impulse,
grouped around itself the organic conditions of our existence, and
constrained the material elements to the subsequent processes and
results, according to a prearranged plan.2 This dynamic agent,
this ontological cause, may naturally survive when the fleshly
organization which it has built around itself dissolves. Its
independence before the body began involves its independence after
the body is ended. Stahl has especially illustrated in physiology
this idea of an independent soul monad.
Secondly, as some potential being must have preceded our birth, to
assimilate and construct the physical system, so the great
phenomena attending our conscious life necessitate, both to our
instinctive apprehension and in our philosophical conviction, the
distinctive division of man into body and soul, tabernacle and
tenant. The illustrious Boerhaave wrote a valuable dissertation on
the distinction of the mind from the body, which is to be found
among his works. Every man knows that he dwells in the flesh but
is not flesh. He is a free, personal mind, occupying and using a
material body, but not identified with it. Ideas and passions of
purely immaterial origin pervade every nerve with terrific
intensity, and shake his encasing corporeity like an earthquake. A
thought, a sentiment, a fancy, may prostrate him as effectually as
a blow on his brain from a hammer. He wills to move a palsied
limb: the soul is unaffected by the paralysis, but the muscles
refuse to obey his volition: the distinction between the person
willing and the instrument to be wielded is unavoidable.
Thirdly, the fact of death itself irresistibly suggests the
duality of flesh and spirit. It is the removal of the energizing
mind that leaves the frame so empty and meaningless. Think of the
undreaming sleep of a corpse which dissolution is winding in its
chemical embrace. A moment ago that hand was uplifted to clasp
yours, intelligent accents were vocal on those
1 Wohlfarth, Triumph des Glaubens an Unsterblichkeit und
Wiedersehen uber jeden Zweifel. Oporinus, Historia Critica
Doctrina de Immortalitate Mortalium.
2 Muller, Elements of Physiology, book vi. sect. i. ch. 1.
lips, the light of love beamed in that eye. One shuddering sigh,
and how cold, vacant, forceless, dead, lies the heap of clay! It
is impossible to prevent the conviction that an invisible power
has been liberated; that the flight of an animating principle has
produced this awful change. Why may not that untraceable something
which has gone still exist? Its vanishing from our sensible
cognizance is no proof of its perishing. Not a shadow of genuine
evidence has ever been afforded that the real life powers of any
creature are destroyed.3 In the absence of that proof, a multitude
of considerations urge us to infer the contrary. Surely there is
room enough for the contrary to be true; for, as Jacobi profoundly
observes, "life is not a form of body; but body is one form of
life." Therefore the soul which now exists in this form, not
appearing to be destroyed on its departure hence, must be supposed
to live hereafter in some other form.4
A second series of observations and reflections, gathered from
partial similarities elsewhere in the world, are combined to make
the analogical argument for a future life. For many centuries, in
the literature of many nations, a standard illustration of the
thought that the soul survives the decay of its earthy investiture
has been drawn from the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the
butterfly.5 This world is the scene of our grub state. The body is
but a chrysalis of soul. When the preliminary experience and
stages are finished and the transformation is complete, the spirit
emerges from its cast off cocoon and broken cell into the more
ethereal air and sunnier light of a higher world's eternal day.
The emblematic correspondence is striking, and the inference is
obvious and beautiful. Nor is the change, the gain in endowments
and privileges, greater in the supposed case of man than it is
from the slow and loathsome worm on the leaf to the swift and
glittering insect in the air.
Secondly, in the material world, so far as we can judge, nothing
is ever absolutely destroyed. There is no such thing as
annihilation. Things are changed, transformations abound; but
essences do not cease to be. Take a given quantity of any kind of
matter; divide and subdivide it in ten thousand ways, by
mechanical violence, by chemical solvents. Still it exists, as the
same quantity of matter, with unchanged qualities as to its
essence, and will exist when Nature has manipulated it in all her
laboratories for a billion ages. Now, as a solitary exception to
this, are minds absolutely destroyed? are will, conscience,
thought, and love annihilated? Personal intelligence, affection,
identity, are inseparable components of the idea of a soul. And
what method is there of crushing or evaporating these out of
being? What force is there to compel them into nothing? Death is
not a substantive cause working effects. It is itself merely an
effect. It is simply a change in the mode of existence. That this
change puts an end to existence is an assertion against analogy,
and wholly unsupported.
Thirdly, following the analogy of science and the visible order of
being, we are led to the conception of an ascending series of
existences rising in regular gradation from coarse to fine, from
brutal to mental, from earthly composite to simply spiritual, and
thus pointing up the rounds of life's ladder, through all nature,
to the angelic ranks of heaven. Then, feeling his kinship and
common vocation with supernal beings, man is assured of a loftier
condition of
3 Sir Humphry Davy, Proteus or Immortality.
4 Bakewell, Natural Evidence of a Future State.
5 Butler, Analogy, part i. ch. 1.
of existence reserved for him. There are no such immense, vacantly
yawning chasms, as that would be, between our fleshly estate and
the Godhead. Nature takes no such enormous jumps. Her scaling
advance is by staid and normal steps.
"There's lifeless matter.
Add the power of shaping,
And you've the crystal: add again the organs
Wherewith to subdue sustenance to the form
And manner of one's self, and you've the plant:
Add power of motion, senses, and so forth,
And you've all kinds of beasts: suppose a pig.
To pig add reason, foresight, and such stuff,
Then you have man.
What shall, we add to man
To bring him higher?"
Freedom from the load of clay, emancipation of the spirit into the
full range and masterdom of a spirit's powers!
Fourthly, many strong similarities between our entrance into this
world and our departure out of it would make us believe that death
is but another and higher birth.6 Any one acquainted with the
state of an unborn infant deriving its sole nutriment, its very
existence, from its vascular connection with its mother could
hardly imagine that its separation from its mother would introduce
it to a new and independent life. He would rather conclude that it
would perish, like a twig wrenched from its parent limb. So it may
be in the separation of the soul from the body. Further, as our
latent or dimly groping senses were useless while we were
developing in embryo, and then implied this life, so we now have,
in rudimentary condition, certain powers of reason, imagination,
and heart, which prophesy heaven and eternity; and mysterious
intimations ever and anon reach us from a diviner sphere,
"Like hints and echoes of the world To spirits folded in the
womb."
The Persian poet, Buzurgi, says on this theme,
"What is the soul? The seminal principle from the loins of
destiny. This world is the womb: the body, its enveloping
membrane: The bitterness of dissolution, dame Fortune's pangs of
childbirth. What is death? To be born again, an angel of
eternity."
Fifthly, many cultivated thinkers have firmly believed that the
soul is not so young as is usually thought, but is an old stager
on this globe, having lived through many a previous existence,
here or elsewhere.7 They sustain this conclusion by various
considerations, either drawn from premises presupposing the
necessary eternity of spirits, or resting on dusky reminiscences,
"shadowy recollections," of visions and events vanished long ago.
Now, if the idea of foregone conscious lives, personal careers oft
repeated with unlost being, be admitted, as it frequently has been
by such men as Plato and Wordsworth, all the
6 Bretschneider, Predigten uber Tod, Unsterblichkeit, und
Anferstehung.
7 James Parker, Account of the Divine Goodness concerning the
Pre existence of Souls.
connected analogies of the case carry us to the belief that
immortality awaits us. We shall live through the next transition,
as we have lived through the past ones.
Sixthly, rejecting the hypothesis of an anterior life, and
entertaining the supposition that there is no creating and
overruling God, but that all things have arisen by spontaneous
development or by chance, still, we are not consistently obliged
to expect annihilation as the fate of the soul. Fairly reasoning
from the analogy of the past, across the facts of the present, to
the impending contingencies of the future, we may say that the
next stage in the unfolding processes of nature is not the
destruction of our consciousness, but issues in a purer life,
elevates us to a spiritual rank. It is just to argue that if
mindless law or boundless fortuity made this world and brought us
here, it may as well make, or have made, another world, and bear
us there. Law or chance excluding God from the question may as
easily make us immortal as mortal. Reasoning by analogy, we may
affirm that, as life has been given us, so it will be given us
again and forever.
Seventhly, faith in immortality is fed by another analogy, not
based on reflection, but instinctively felt. Every change of
material in our organism, every change of consciousness, is a kind
of death. We partially die as often as we leave behind forgotten
experiences and lost states of being. We die successively to
infancy, childhood, youth, manhood. The past is the dead: but our
course is still on, forever on. Having survived so many deaths, we
expect to survive all others and to be ourselves eternally.
There is a third cluster of reasonings, deduced from the
distinctive nature of spirit, constituting the psychological
argument for the existence of the soul independent of the body. In
the outset, obviously, if the soul be an immaterial entity, its
natural immortality follows; because death and decay can only be
supposed to take effect in dissoluble combinations. Several
ingenious reasons have been advanced in proof of the soul's
immateriality, reasons cogent enough to have convinced a large
class of philosophers.8 It is sufficient here to notice the
following one. All motion implies a dynamic mover. Matter is
dormant. Power is a reality entirely distinct from matter in its
nature. But man is essentially an active power, a free will.
Consequently there is in him an immaterial principle, since all
power is immaterial. That principle is immortal, because
subsisting in a sphere of being whose categories exclude the
possibility of dissolution.9
Secondly, should we admit the human soul to be material, yet if it
be an ultimate monad, an indivisible atom of mind, it is immortal
still, defying all the forces of destruction. And that it actually
is an uncompounded unit may be thus proved. Consciousness is
simple, not collective. Hence the power of consciousness, the
central soul, is an absolute integer. For a living perceptive
whole cannot be made of dead imperceptive parts. If the soul were
composite, each component part would be an individual, a
distinguishable consciousness. Such not being the fact, the
conclusion results that the soul is one, a simple substance.10
8 Astrue, Dissertation sur l'Immaterialite et l'Immortalite de
l'Ame. Broughton, Defence of the Doctrine of the Human Soul as an
Immaterial and Naturally Immortal Principle. Marstaller, Von der
Unsterblichkeit der Menschlichen Seele.
9 Andrew Baxter, Inquiry into the Nature of the Soul.
10 Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, sect. 150.
Of course it is not liable to death, but is naturally eternal.
Thirdly, the indestructibleness of the soul is a direct inference
from its ontological characteristics. Reason, contemplating the
elements of the soul, cannot but embrace the conviction of its
perpetuity and its essential independence of the fleshly
organization. Our life in its innermost substantive essence is
best defined as a conscious force. Our present existence is the
organic correlation of that personal force with the physical
materials of the body, and with other forces. The cessation of
that correlation at death by no means involves, so far as we can
see, the destruction or the disindividualization of the primal
personal force. It is a fact of striking significance, often
noticed by psychologists, that we are unable to conceive ourselves
as dead. The negation of itself is impossible to consciousness.
The reason we have such a dread of death is that we conceive
ourselves as still alive, only in the grave, or wandering through
horrors and shut out from wonted pleasures. It belongs to material
growths to ripen, loosen, decay; but what is there in sensation,
reflection, memory, volition, to crumble in pieces and rot away?
Why should the power of hope, and joy, and faith, change into
inanity and oblivion? What crucible shall burn up the ultimate of
force? What material processes shall ever disintegrate the
simplicity of spirit? Earth and plant, muscle, nerve, and brain,
belong to one sphere, and are subject to the temporal fates that
rule there; but reason, imagination, love, will, belong to
another, and, immortally fortressed there, laugh to scorn the
fretful sieges of decay.
Fourthly, the surviving superiority of the soul, inferred from its
contrast of qualities to those of its earthy environment, is
further shown by another fact, the mind's dream power, and the
ideal realm it freely soars or walks at large in when it
pleases.11 This view has often been enlarged upon, especially by
Bonnet and Sir Henry Wotton. The unhappy Achilles, exhausted with
weeping for his friend, lay, heavily moaning, on the shore of the
far sounding sea, in a clear spot where the waves washed in upon
the beach, when sleep took possession of him. The ghost of
miserable Patroclus calve to him and said, "Sleepest thou and art
forgetful of me, O Achilles?" And the son of Peleus cried, "Come
nearer: let us embrace each other, though but for a little while."
Then he stretched out his friendly hands, but caught him not; for
the spirit, shrieking, vanished beneath the earth like smoke.
Astounded, Achilles started up, clasped his hands, and said,
dolefully, "Alas! there is then indeed in the subterranean abodes
a spirit and image, but there is no body in it."12 The realm of
dreams is a world of mystic realities, intangible, yet existent,
and all prophetic, through which the soul nightly floats while the
gross body slumbers. It is everlasting, because there is nothing
in it for corruption to take hold of. The appearances and sounds
of that soft inner sphere, veiled so remote from sense, are
reflections and echoes from the spirit world. Or are they a direct
vision and audience of it? The soul really is native resident in a
world of truth, goodness, and beauty, fellow citizen with divine
ideas and affections. Through the senses it has knowledge and
communion with the hard outer world of matter. When the senses
fall away, it is left, imperishable denizen of its own appropriate
world of idealities.
11 Schubert, Die Symbolik des Traumes.
12 Iliad, lib. xxiii. ll. 60 106.
Another assemblage of views, based on the character of God, form
the theological argument for the future existence of man.13
Starting with the idea of a God of infinite perfections, the
immortality of his children is an immediate deduction from the
eternity of his purposes. For whatever purpose God originally gave
man being, for the disinterested distribution of happiness, for
the increase of his own glory, or whatever else, will he not for
that same purpose continue him in being forever? In the absence of
any reason to the contrary, we must so conclude. In view of the
unlimited perfections of God, the fact of conscious responsible
creatures being created is sufficient warrant of their perpetuity.
Otherwise God would be fickle. Or, as one has said, he would be a
mere drapery painter, nothing within the dress.
Secondly, leaving out of sight this illustration of an eternal
purpose in eternal fulfilment, and confining our attention to the
analogy of the divine works and the dignity of the divine Worker,
we shall be freshly led to the same conclusion. Has God moulded
the dead clay of the material universe into gleaming globes and
ordered them to fly through the halls of space forever, and has he
created, out of his own omnipotence, mental personalities
reflecting his own attributes, and doomed them to go out in
endless night after basking, poor ephemera, in the sunshine of a
momentary life? It is not to be imagined that God ever works in
vain. Yet if a single consciousness be extinguished in everlasting
nonentity, so far as the production of that consciousness is
concerned he has wrought for nothing. His action was in vain,
because all is now, to that being, exactly the same as if it had
never been. God does nothing in sport or unmeaningly: least of all
would he create filial spirits, dignified with the solemn
endowments of humanity, without a high and serious end.14 To make
men, gifted with such a transcendent largess of powers, wholly
mortal, to rot forever in the grave after life's swift day, were
work far more unworthy of God than the task was to Michael Angelo
set him in mockery by Pietro, the tyrant who succeeded Lorenzo the
Magnificent in the dukedom of Florence, that he should scoop up
the snow in the Via Larga, and with his highest art mould a statue
from it, to dissolve ere night in the glow of the Italian sun.
Thirdly, it is an attribute of Infinite Wisdom to proportion
powers to results, to adapt instruments to ends with exact
fitness. But if we are utterly to die with the ceasing breath,
then there is an amazing want of symmetry between our endowments
and our opportunity; our attainments are most superfluously
superior to our destiny. Can it be that an earth house of six feet
is to imprison forever the intellect of a La Place, whose
telescopic eye, piercing the unfenced fields of immensity,
systematized more worlds than there are grains of dust in this
globe? the heart of a Borromeo, whose seraphic love expanded to
the limits of sympathetic being? the soul of a Wycliffe, whose
undaunted will, in faithful consecration to duty, faced the fires
of martyrdom and never blenched? the genius of a Shakspeare, whose
imagination exhausted worlds and then invented new? There is vast
incongruity between our faculties and the scope given them here.
On all it sees below the soul reads "Inadequate," and rises
13 Aebli, Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele, sechster Brief.
14 Ulrici, Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele aus dem Wesen
Gottes erwiesen.
dissatisfied from every feast, craving, with divine hunger and
thirst, the ambrosia and nectar of a fetterless and immortal
world. Were we fated to perish at the goal of threescore, God
would have harmonized our powers with our lot. He would never have
set such magnificent conceptions over against such poor
possibilities, nor have kindled so insatiable an ambition for so
trivial a prize of dust to dust.
Fourthly, one of the weightiest supports of the belief in a future
life is that yielded by the benevolence of God. Annihilation is
totally irreconcilable with this. That He whose love for his
creatures is infinite will absolutely destroy them after their
little span of life, when they have just tasted the sweets of
existence and begun to know the noble delights of spiritual
progress, and while illimitable heights of glory and blessedness
are beckoning them, is incredible. We are unable to believe that
while his children turn to him with yearning faith and gratitude,
with fervent prayer and expectation, he will spurn them into
unmitigated night, blotting out those capacities of happiness
which he gave them with a virtual promise of endless increase.
Will the affectionate God permit humanity, ensconced in the field
of being, like a nest of ground sparrows, to be trodden in by the
hoof of annihilation? Love watches to preserve life. It were
Moloch, not the universal Father, that could crush into death
these multitudes of loving souls supplicating him for life, dash
into silent fragments these miraculous personal harps of a
thousand strings, each capable of vibrating a celestial melody of
praise and bliss.
Fifthly, the apparent claims of justice afford presumptive proof,
hard to be resisted, of a future state wherein there are
compensations for the unmerited ills, a complement for the
fragmentary experiences, and rectification for the wrongs, of the
present life.15 God is just; but he works without impulse or
caprice, by laws whose progressive evolution requires time to show
their perfect results. Through the brief space of this existence,
where the encountering of millions of free intelligences within
the fixed conditions of nature causes a seeming medley of good and
evil, of discord and harmony, wickedness often triumphs, villany
often outreaches and tramples ingenuous nobility and helpless
innocence. Some saintly spirits, victims of disease and penury,
drag out their years in agony, neglect, and tears. Some bold
minions of selfishness, with seared consciences and nerves of
iron, pluck the coveted fruits of pleasure, wear the diadems of
society, and sweep through the world in pomp. The virtuous suffer
undeservedly from the guilty. The idle thrive on the industrious.
All these things sometimes happen. In spite of the compensating
tendencies which ride on all spiritual laws, in spite of the
mysterious Nemesis which is throned in every bosom and saturates
the moral atmosphere with influence, the world is full of wrongs,
sufferings, and unfinished justice.16 There must be another world,
where the remunerating processes interiorly begun here shall be
openly consummated. Can it be that Christ and Herod, Paul and
Nero, Timour and Fenelon, drop through the blind trap of death
into precisely the same condition of unwaking sleep? Not if there
be a God!
15 M. Jules Simon, La Religion Naturelle, liv. iii.:
l'Immortalite.
16 Dr. Chalmers, Bridgewater Treatise, chap. 10.
There is a final assemblage of thoughts pertaining to the
likelihood of another life, which, arranged together, may be
styled the moral argument in behalf of that belief.17 These
considerations are drawn from the seeming fitness of things,
claims of parts beseeching completion, vaticinations of
experience. They form a cumulative array of probabilities whose
guiding forefingers all indicate one truth, whose consonant voices
swell into a powerful strain of promise. First, consider the
shrinking from annihilation naturally felt in every breast. If man
be not destined for perennial life, why is this dread of non
existence woven into the soul's inmost fibres? Attractions are co
ordinate with destinies, and every normal desire foretells its own
fulfilment. Man fades unwillingly from his natal haunts, still
longing for a life of eternal remembrance and love, and confiding
in it. All over the world grows this pathetic race of forget me
nots. Shall not Heaven pluck and wear them on her bosom? Secondly,
an emphatic presumption in favor of a second life arises from the
premature mortality prevalent to such a fearful extent in the
human family. Nearly one half of our race perish before reaching
the age of ten years. In that period they cannot have fulfilled
the total purposes of their creation. It is but a part we see, and
not the whole. The destinies here seen segmentary will appear full
circle beyond the grave.
The argument is hardly met by asserting that this untimely
mortality is the punishment for non observance of law; for,
denying any further life, would a scheme of existence have been
admitted establishing so awful a proportion of violations and
penalties? If there be no balancing sphere beyond, then all should
pass through the experience of a ripe and rounded life. But there
is the most perplexing inequality. At one fell swoop, infant,
sage, hero, reveller, martyr, are snatched into the invisible
state. There is, as a noble thinker has said, an apparent "caprice
in the dispensation of death strongly indicative of a hidden
sequel." Immortality unravels the otherwise inscrutable mystery.
Thirdly, the function of conscience furnishes another attestation
to the continued existence of man. This vicegerent of God in the
breast, arrayed in splendors and terrors, which shakes and
illumines the whole circumference of our being with its thunders
and lightnings, gives the good man, amidst oppressions and woes, a
serene confidence in a future justifying reward, and transfixes
the bad man, through all his retinue of guards and panoplied
defences, with icy pangs of fear and with a horrid looking for
judgment to come. The sublime grandeur of moral freedom, the
imperilling dignities of probation, the tremendous
responsibilities and hazards of man's felt power and position, are
all inconsistent with the supposition that he is merely to cross
this petty stage of earth and then wholly expire. Such momentous
endowments and exposures imply a corresponding arena and career.
After the trial comes the sentence; and that would be as if a
palace were built, a prince born, trained, crowned, solely that he
might occupy the throne five minutes! The consecrating, royalizing
idea of duty cannot be less than the core of eternal life.
Conscience is the sensitive corridor along which the mutual
whispers of a divine communion pass and repass. A moral law and a
free will
17 Crombie, Natural Theology, Essay IV.: The Arguments for
Immortality. Bretschneider, Die Religiose Glaubenslehre, sect.
20-21.
are the root by which we grow out of God, and the stem by which we
are grafted into him.
Fourthly, all probable surmisings in favor of a future life, or
any other moral doctrine, are based on that primal postulate
which, by virtue of our rational and ethical constitution, we are
authorized and bound to accept as a commencing axiom, namely, that
the scheme of creation is as a whole the best possible one,
impelled and controlled by wisdom and benignity. Whatever, then,
is an inherent part of the plan of nature cannot be erroneous nor
malignant, a mistake nor a curse. Essentially and in the finality,
every fundamental portion and element of it must be good and
perfect. So far as science and philosophy have penetrated, they
confirm by facts this a priori principle, telling us that there is
no pure and uncompensated evil in the universe. Now, death is a
regular ingredient in the mingled world, an ordered step in the
plan of life. If death be absolute, is it not an evil? What can
the everlasting deprivation of all good be called but an immense
evil to its subject? Such a doom would be without possible solace,
standing alone in steep contradiction to the whole parallel moral
universe. Then might man utter the most moving and melancholy
paradox ever expressed in human speech:
"What good came to my mind I did deplore, Because it perish must,
and not live evermore."
Fifthly, the soul, if not outwardly arrested by some hostile
agent, seems capable of endless progress without ever exhausting
either its own capacity or the perfections of infinitude.18 There
are before it unlimited truth, beauty, power, nobleness, to be
contemplated, mastered, acquired. With indefatigable alacrity,
insatiable faculty and desire, it responds to the infinite call.
The obvious inference is that its destiny is unending advancement.
Annihilation would be a sequel absurdly incongruous with the
facts. True, the body decays, and all manifested energy fails; but
that is the fault of the mechanism, not of the spirit. Were we to
live many thousands of years, as Martineau suggests, no one
supposes new souls, but only new organizations, would be needed.
And what period can we imagine to terminate the unimpeded spirit's
abilities to learn, to enjoy, to expand? Kant's famous
demonstration of man's eternal life on the grounds of practical
reason is similar. The related ideas of absolute virtue and a
moral being necessarily imply the infinite progress of the latter
towards the former. That progress is impossible except on
condition of the continued existence of the same being. Therefore
the soul is immortal.19
Sixthly, our whole life here is a steady series of growing
preparations for a continued and ascending life hereafter. All the
spiritual powers we develop are so much athletic training, all the
ideal treasures we accumulate are so many preliminary attainments,
for a future life. They have this appearance and superscription.
Man alone foreknows his own death and expects a succeeding
existence; and that foresight is given to prepare him. There are
wondrous impulses in us, constitutional convictions prescient of
futurity, like those prevising instincts in birds leading them to
take preparatory flights before their actual migration.
18 Addison, Spectator, Nos. 3 and 210.
19 Jacob, Beweis fur die Unsterblichkeit der Seele aus dem
Begriffe der Pflicht.
Eternity is the stuff of which our love, flying forward, builds
its nest in the eaves of the universe. If we saw wings growing
out upon a young creature, we should be forced to conclude that
he was intended some time to fly. It is so with man. By exploring
thoughts, disciplinary sacrifices, supernal prayers, holy toils
of disinterestedness, he fledges his soul's pinions, lays up
treasures in heaven, and at last migrates to the attracting clime.
"Here sits he, shaping wings to fly: His heart forebodes a
mystery; He names the name eternity."
Seventhly, in the degree these preparations are made in obedience
to obscure instincts and the developing laws of experience, they
are accompanied by significant premonitions, lucid signals of the
future state looked to, assuring witnesses of its reality. The
more one lives for immortality, the more immortal things he
assimilates into his spiritual substance, the more confirming
tokens of a deathless inheritance his faith finds. He becomes
conscious of his own eternity.20 When hallowed imagination weighs
anchor and spreads sail to coast the dim shores of the other
world, it hears cheerful voices of welcome from the headlands and
discerns beacons burning in the port. When in earnest communion
with our inmost selves, solemn meditations of God, mysterious
influences shed from unseen spheres, fall on our souls, and many a
"strange thought, transcending our wonted themes, into glory
peeps." A vague, constraining sense of invisible beings, by whom
we are engirt, fills us. We blindly feel that our rank and
destination are with them. Lift but one thin veil, we think, and
the occult Universe of Spirit would break to vision with cloudy
crowds of angels. Thousand "hints chance dropped from nature's
sphere," pregnant with friendly tidings, reassure us. "Strange,"
said a gifted metaphysician once, "that the barrel organ, man,
should terminate every tune with the strain of immortality!" Not
strange, but divinely natural. It is the tentative prelude to the
thrilling music of our eternal bliss written in the score of
destiny. When at night we gaze far out into immensity, along the
shining vistas of God's abode, and are almost crushed by the
overwhelming prospects that sweep upon our vision, do not some
pre monitions of our own unfathomed greatness also stir within us?
Yes: "the sense of Existence, the ideas of Right and Duty, awful
intuitions of God and immortality, these, the grand facts and
substance of the spirit, are independent and indestructible. The
bases of the Moral Law, they shall stand in every tittle, although
the stars should pass away. For their relations and root are in
that which upholds the stars, even with worlds unseen from the
finite, whose majestic and everlasting arrangements shall burst
upon us as the heavens do through the night when the light of this
garish life gives place to the solemn splendors of eternity."
Eighthly, the belief in a life beyond death has virtually
prevailed everywhere and always. And the argument from universal
consent, as it is termed, has ever been esteemed one of the
foremost testimonies, if not indeed the most convincing testimony,
to the truth of the doctrine. Unless the belief can be shown to be
artificial or sinful, it must seem conclusive. Its innocence is
self evident, and its naturalness is evidenced by its
universality.
20 Theodore Parker, Sermon of Immortal Life.
The rudest and the most polished, the simplest and the most
learned, unite in the expectation, and cling to it through
every thing. It is like the ruling presentiment implanted in
those insects that are to undergo metamorphosis. This believing
instinct, so deeply seated in our consciousness, natural,
innocent, universal, whence came it, and why was it given?
There is but one fair answer. God and nature deceive not.
Ninthly, the conscious, practical faith of civilized nations, to
day, in a future life, unquestionably, in a majority of
individuals, rests directly on the basis of authority, trust in a
foreign announcement. There are two forms of this authority. The
authority of revelation is most prominent and extensive. God has
revealed the truth from heaven. It has been exemplified by a
miraculous resurrection. It is written in an infallible book, and
sealed with authenticating credentials of super natural purport.
It is therefore to be accepted with implicit trust. Secondly, with
some, the authority of great minds, renowned for scientific
knowledge and speculative acumen, goes far. Thousands of such men,
ranking among the highest names of history, have positively
affirmed the immortality of the soul as a reliable truth. For
instance, Goethe says, on occasion of the death of Wieland, "The
destruction of such high powers is something which can never, and
under no circumstances, even come into question." Such a dogmatic
expression of conviction resting on bare philosophical grounds,
from a mind so equipped, so acute, and so free, has great weight,
and must influence a modest student who hesitates in confessed
incompetence.21 The argument is justly powerful when but humanly
considered, and when divinely derived, of course, it absolutely
forecloses all doubts.
Tenthly, there is another life, because a belief in it is
necessary to order this world, necessary as a comfort and an
inspiration to man now. A good old author writes, "the very nerves
and sinews of religion is hope of immortality." The conviction
that there is a retributive life hereafter is the moral cement of
the social fabric. Take away this truth, and one great motive of
patriots, martyrs, thinkers, saints, is gone. Take it away, and to
all low minded men selfishness becomes the law, earthly enjoyment
the only good, suffering and death the only evil. Life then is to
be supremely coveted and never put in risk for any stake. Self
indulgence is to be secured at any hazard, little matter by what
means. Abandon all hope of a life to come, and "from that instant
there is nothing serious in mortality." In order that the world
should be governable, ethical, happy, virtuous, magnanimous, is it
possible that it should be necessary for the world to believe in
an untruth?
"So, thou hast immortality in mind?
Hast grounds that will not let thee doubt it?
The strongest ground herein I find:
That we could never do without it!"
Finally, the climax of these argumentations is capped by that
grand closing consideration which we may entitle the force of
congruity, the convincing results of a confluence of harmonious
reasons. The hypothesis of immortality accords with the cardinal
facts of observation, meets all points of the case, and
satisfactorily answers every requirement.
21 Lewis, Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion.
It is the solution of the problem, as the fact of Neptune explained
the perturbations of the adjacent planets. Nothing ever gravitates
towards nothing; and it must be an unseen orb that so draws our
yearning souls. If it be not so, then what terrible contradictions
stagger us, and what a chilling doom awaits us! Oh, what mocking
irony then runs through the loftiest promises and hopes of the
world! Just as the wise and good have learned to live, they
disappear amidst the unfeeling waves of oblivion, like snow flakes
in the ocean. "The super earthly desires of man are then created
in him only, like swallowed diamonds, to cut slowly through his
material shell" and destroy him.
The denial of a future life introduces discord, grief, and despair
in every direction, and, by making each step of advanced culture
the ascent to a wider survey of tantalizing glory and experienced
sorrow, as well as the preparation for a greater fall and a sadder
loss, turns faithful affection and heroic thought into "blind
furies slinging flame." Unless immortality be true, man appears a
dark riddle, not made for that of which he is made capable and
desirous: every thing is begun, nothing ended; the facts of the
present scene are unintelligible; the plainest analogies are
violated; the delicately rising scale of existence is broken off
abrupt; our best reasonings concerning the character and designs
of God, also concerning the implications of our own being and
experience, are futile; and the soul's proud faculties tell
glorious lies as thick as stars. Such, at least, is the usual way
of thinking.
However formidable a front may be presented by the spectral array
of doubts and difficulties, seeming impediments to faith in
immortality, the faithful servant of God, equipped with
philosophical culture and a saintly life, will fearlessly advance
upon them, scatter them right and left, and win victorious access
to the prize. So the mariner sometimes, off Sicilian shores, sees
a wondrous island ahead, apparently stopping his way with its
cypress and cedar groves, glittering towers, vine wreathed
balconies, and marble stairs sloping to the water's edge. He sails
straight forward, and, severing the pillared porticos and green
gardens of Fata Morgana, glides far on over a glassy sea smiling
in the undeceptive sun.
CHAPTER IV.
THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION.
BEFORE examining, in their multifarious detail, the special
thoughts and fancies respecting a future life prevalent in
different nations and times, it may be well to take a sort of
bird's eye view of those general theories of the destination of
the soul under which all the individual varieties of opinion may
be classified. Vast and incongruous as is the heterogeneous mass
of notions brought forth by the history of this province of the
world's belief, the whole may be systematized, discriminated, and
reduced to a few comprehensive heads. Such an architectural
grouping or outlining of the chief schemes of thought on this
subject will yield several advantages.
Showing how the different views arose from natural speculations on
the correlated phenomena of the outward world and facts of human
experience, it affords an indispensable help towards a
philosophical analysis and explanation of the popular faith as to
the destiny of man after death, in all the immense diversity of
its contents. An orderly arrangement and exposition of these
cardinal theories also form an epitome holding a bewildering
multitude of particulars in its lucid and separating grasp,
changing the fruits of learned investigation from a cumbersome
burden on the memory to a small number of connected formularies in
the reason. These theories serve as a row of mirrors hung in a
line of historic perspective, reflecting every relevant shape and
hue of meditation and faith humanity has known, from the ideal
visions of the Athenian sage to the instinctive superstitions of
the Fejee savage. When we have adequately defined these theories,
of which there are seven, traced their origin, comprehended their
significance and bearings, and dissected their supporting
pretensions, then the whole field of our theme lies in light
before us; and, however grotesque or mysterious, simple or subtle,
may be the modes of thinking and feeling in relation to the life
beyond death revealed in our subsequent researches, we shall know
at once where to refer them and how to explain them. The precise
object, therefore, of the present chapter is to set forth the
comprehensive theories devised to solve the problem, What becomes
of man when he dies?
But a little while man flourishes here in the bosom of visible
nature. Soon he disappears from our scrutiny, missed in all the
places that knew him. Whither has he gone? What fate has befallen
him? It is an awful question. In comparison with its concentrated
interest, all other affairs are childish and momentary. Whenever
that solemn question is asked, earth, time, and the heart, natural
transformations, stars, fancy, and the brooding intellect, are
full of vague oracles. Let us see what intelligible answers can be
constructed from their responses.
The first theory which we shall consider propounds itself in one
terrible word, annihilation. Logically this is the earliest,
historically the latest, view. The healthy consciousness, the
eager fancy, the controlling sentiment, the crude thought, all the
uncurbed instinctive conclusions of primitive human nature, point
forcibly to a continued existence for the soul, in some way, when
the body shall have perished. And so history shows us in all the
savage nations a vivid belief in a future life. But to the
philosophical observer, who has by dint of speculation freed
himself from the constraining tendencies of desire, faith,
imagination, and authority, the thought that man totally ceases
with the destruction of his visible organism must occur as the
first and simplest settlement of the question.1 The totality of
manifested life has absolutely disappeared: why not conclude that
the totality of real life has actually lost its existence and is
no more? That is the natural inference, unless by some means the
contrary can be proved. Accordingly, among all civilized people,
every age has had its skeptics, metaphysical disputants who have
mournfully or scoffingly denied the separate survival of the soul.
This is a necessity in the inevitable sequences of observation and
theory; because, when the skeptic, suppressing or escaping his
biassed wishes, the trammels of traditional opinion, and the
spontaneous convictions prophetic of his own uninterrupted being,
first looks over the wide scene of human life and death, and
reflectingly asks, What is the sequel of this strange, eventful
history? obviously the conclusion suggested by the immediate
phenomena is that of entire dissolution and blank oblivion. This
result is avoided by calling in the aid of deeper philosophical
considerations and of inspiring moral truths. But some will not
call in that aid; and the whole superficial appearance of the
case regarding that alone, as they then will is fatal to our
imperial hopes. The primordial clay claims its own from the
disanimated frame; and the vanished life, like the flame of an
outburnt taper, has ceased to be. Men are like bubbles or foam
flakes on the world's streaming surface: glittering in a momentary
ray, they break and are gone, and only the dark flood remains
still flowing forward. They are like tones of music, commencing
and ending with the unpurposed breath that makes them. Nature is a
vast congeries of mechanical substances pervaded by mindless
forces of vitality. Consciousness is a production which results
from the fermentation and elaboration of unconscious materials;
and after a time it deceases, its conditions crumbling into their
inorganic grounds again.
From the abyss of silence and dust intelligent creatures break
forth, shine, and sink back, like meteor flashes in a cloud. The
generations of sentient being, like the annual growths of
vegetation, by spontaneity of dynamic development, spring from
dead matter, flourish through their destined cycle, and relapse
into dead matter. The bosom of nature is, therefore, at once the
wondrous womb and the magnificent mausoleum of man. Fate, like an
iron skeleton seated at the summit of the world on a throne of
fresh growing grass and mouldering skulls, presides over all, and
annihilation is the universal doom of individual life. Such is the
atheistic naturalist's creed. However indefensible or shocking it
is, it repeatedly appears in the annals of speculation; and any
synopsis of the possible conclusions in which the inquiry into
man's destiny may rest that should omit this, would be grossly
imperfect.
This scheme of disbelief is met by insuperable objections. It
excludes some essential elements of the case, confines itself to a
wholly empirical view; and consequently the relentless solution it
announces applies only to a mutilated problem. To assert the
cessation of the soul because its physical manifestations through
the body have ceased, is certainly to affirm without just warrant.
It would appear impossible for volition and intelligence to
1 Lalande, Dictionnaire des Athees Anciens et Modernes.
originate save from a free parent mind. Numerous cogent evidences
of design seem to prove the existence of a God by whose will all
things are ordered according to a plan. Many powerful impressions
and arguments, instinctive, critical, or moral, combine to teach
that in the wreck of matter the spirit emerges, deathless, from
the closing waves of decay. The confirmation of that truth becomes
irresistible when we see how reason and conscience, with delighted
avidity, seize upon its adaptedness alike to the brightest
features and the darkest defects of the present life, whose
imperfect symmetries and segments are harmoniously filled out by
the adjusting complement of a future state.2
The next representation of the fate of the soul disposes of it by
re absorption into the essence from which it emanated. There is an
eternal fountain of unmade life, from which all individual,
transient lives flow, and into which they return. This conception
arose in the outset from a superficial analogy which must have
obtruded itself upon primitive notice and speculation; for man is
led to his first metaphysical inquiries by a feeling contemplation
of outward phenomena. Now, in the material world, when individual
forms perish, each sensible component relapses into its original
element and becomes an undistinguishable portion of it. Our
exhaled breath goes into the general air and is united with it:
the dust of our decaying frames becomes part of the ground and
vegetation. So, it is strongly suggested, the lives of things, the
souls of men, when they disappear from us, are remerged in the
native spirit whence they came. The essential longing of every
part for union with its whole is revealed and vocal throughout all
nature. Water is sullen in stillness, murmurs in motion, and never
ceases its gloom or its complaining until it sleeps in the sea.
Like spray on the rock, the stranding generations strike the
sepulchre and are dissipated into universal vapor. As lightnings
slink back into the charged bosom of the thunder cloud, as eager
waves, spent, subside in the deep, as furious gusts die away in
the great atmosphere, so the gleaming ranks of genius, the
struggling masses of toil, the pompous hosts of war, fade and
dissolve away into the peaceful bosom of the all engulfing SOUL.
This simplest, earliest philosophy of mankind has had most
extensive and permanent prevalence.3 For immemorial centuries it
has possessed the mind of the countless millions of India. Baur
thinks the Egyptian identification of each deceased person with
Osiris and the burial of him under that name, were meant to denote
the reception of the individual human life into the universal
nature life. The doctrine has been implicitly held wherever
pantheism has found a votary, from Anaximander, to whom finite
creatures were "disintegrations or decompositions from the
Infinite," to Alexander Pope, affirming that
"All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is,
and God the soul."
The first reasoners, who gave such an ineradicable direction and
tinge to the thinking of after ages, were furthermore driven to
the supposition of a final absorption, from the
2 Drossbach, Die Harmonie der Ergebnisse der Naturforschung mit
den Forderungen des Menschlichen Gemuthes.
3 Blount, Anima Mundi; or, The Opinions of the Ancients concerning
Man's Soul after this Life.
impossibility, in that initiatory stage of thought, of grasping
any other theory which would apparently meet the case so well or
be more satisfactory. They, of course, had not yet arrived at the
idea that God is a personal Spirit whose nature is revealed in the
constitutive characteristics of the human soul, and who carries on
his works from eternity to eternity without monotonous repetition
or wearisome stagnancy, but with perpetual variety in never
ceasingmotion. Whatever commences must also terminate, they said,
forgetting that number begins with one but has no end. They did
not conceive of the universe of being as an eternal line, making
immortality desirable for its endless novelty, but imaged it to
themselves as a circle, making an everlasting individual
consciousness dreadful for its intolerable sameness, an immense
round of existence, phenomena, and experience, going forth and
returning into itself, over and over, forever and ever. To escape
so repulsive a contemplation, they made death break the fencing
integument of consciousness and empty all weary personalities into
the absolute abyss of being.
Again: the extreme difficulty of apprehending the truth of a
Creator literally infinite, and of a limitless creation, would
lead to the same result in another way. Without doubt, it seemed
to the naive thinkers of antiquity, that if hosts of new beings
were continually coming into life and increasing the number of the
inhabitants of the future state, the fountain from which they
proceeded would some time be exhausted, or the universe grow
plethoric with population. There would be no more substance below
or no more room above. The easiest method of surmounting this
problem would be by the hypothesis that all spirits come out of a
great World Spirit, and, having run their mortal careers, are
absorbed into it again. Many especially the deepest Oriental
dreamers have also been brought to solace themselves with this
conclusion by a course of reasoning based on the exposures, and
assumed inevitable sufferings, of all finite being. They argue
that every existence below the absolute God, because it is set
around with limitations, is necessarily obnoxious to all sorts of
miseries. Its pleasures are only "honey drops scarce tasted in a
sea of gall." This conviction, with its accompanying sentiment,
runs through the sacred books of the East, is the root and heart
of their theology, the dogma that makes the cruelest penances
pleasant if a renewed existence may thus be avoided. The sentiment
is not alien to human longing and surmise, as witnesses the night
thought of the English poet who, world sated, and sadly yearning,
cries through the starry gloom to God,
"When shall my soul her incarnation quit, And, readopted to thy
blest embrace, Obtain her apotheosis in thee?"
Having stated and traced the doctrine of absorption, it remains to
investigate the justice of its grounds. The doctrine starts from a
premise partly true and ends in a conclusion partly false. We
emanate from the creative power of God, and are sustained by the
in flowing presence of his life, but are not discerptions from his
own being, any more than beams of light are distinct substances
shot out and shorn off from the sun to be afterwards drawn back
and assimilated into the parent orb. We are destined to a
harmonious life in his unifying love, but not to be fused and lost
as insentient parts of his total consciousness. We are products of
God's will, not component atoms of his soul. Souls are to be in
God as stars are in the firmament, not as lumps of salt are in a
solvent. This view is confirmed by various arguments.
In the first place, it is supported by the philosophical
distinction between emanation and creation. The conception of
creation gives us a personal God who wills to certain ends; that
of emanation reduces the Supreme Being to a ghastly array of laws,
revolving abysses, galvanic forces, nebular star dust, dead ideas,
and vital fluids. According to the latter supposition, finite
existences flow from the Infinite as consequences from a
principle, or streams from a fountain; according to the former,
they proceed as effects from a cause, or thoughts from a mind.
That is pantheistic, fatal, and involves absorption by a logical
necessity; this is creative, free, and does not presuppose any
circling return. Material things are thoughts which God
transiently contemplates and dismisses; spiritual creatures are
thoughts which he permanently expresses in concrete immortality.
The soul is a thought; the body is the word in which it is
clothed.
Secondly, the analogy which first leads to belief in absorption is
falsely interpreted. Taken on its own ground, rightly appreciated,
it legitimates a different conclusion.
A grain of sand thrown into the bosom of Sahara does not lose its
individual existence. Distinct drops are not annihilated as to
their simple atoms of water, though sunk in the midst of the sea.
The final particles or monads of air or granite are not
dissolvingly blended into continuity of unindividualized
atmosphere or rock when united with their elemental masses, but
are thrust unapproachably apart by molecular repulsion. Now, a
mind, being, as we conceive, no composite, but an ultimate unity,
cannot be crushed or melted from its integral persistence of
personality. Though plunged into the centre of a surrounding
wilderness or ocean of minds, it must still retain itself unlost
in the multitude. Therefore, if we admit the existence of an
inclusive mundane Soul, it by no means follows that lesser souls
received into it are deprived of their individuality. It is "one
not otherwise than as the sea is one, by a similarity and
contiguity of parts, being composed of an innumerable host of
distinct spirits, as that is of aqueous particles; and as the
rivers continually discharge into the sea, so the vehicular
people, upon the disruption of their vehicles, discharge and
incorporate into that ocean of spirits making the mundane Soul."4
Thirdly, every consideration furnished by the doctrine of final
causes as applied to existing creatures makes us ask, What use is
there in calling forth souls merely that they may be taken back
again? To justify their creation, the fulfilment of some educative
aim, and then the lasting fruition of it, appear necessary. Why
else should a soul be drawn from out the unformed vastness, and
have its being struck into bounds, and be forced to pass through
such appalling ordeals of good and evil, pleasure and agony? An
individual of any kind is as important as its race; for it
contains in possibility all that its type does. And the purposes
of things, so far as we can discern them, the nature of our
spiritual constitution, the meaning of our circumstances and
probation, the resulting tendencies of our experience, all seem to
prophesy, not the destruction, but the perfection and
perpetuation, of individual being.
4 Tucker, Light of Nature, Part II. chap. xxii.
Fourthly, the same inference is yielded by applying a similar
consideration to the Creator. Allowing him consciousness and
intentions, as we must, what object could he have either in
exerting his creative power or in sending out portions of himself
in new individuals, save the production of so many immortal
personalities of will, knowledge, and love, to advance towards the
perfection of holiness, wisdom, and blessedness, filling his
mansions with his children? By thus multiplying his own image he
adds to the number of happy creatures who are to be bound together
in bands of glory, mutually receiving and returning his affection,
and swells the tide of conscious bliss which fills and rolls
forever through his eternal universe.
Nor, finally, is it necessary to expect personal oblivion in God
in order to escape from evil and win exuberant happiness. Those
ends are as well secured by the fruition of God's love in us as by
the drowning of our consciousness in his plenitude of delight.
Precisely herein consists the fundamental distinction of the
Christian from the Brahmanic doctrine of human destiny. The
Christian hopes to dwell in blissful union with God's will, not to
be annihilatingly sunk in his essence. To borrow an illustration
from Scotus Erigena,5 as the air when thoroughly illumined by
sunshine still keeps its aerial nature and does not become
sunshine, or as iron all red in the flame still keeps its metallic
substance and does not turn to fire itself, so a soul fully
possessed and moved by God does not in consequence lose its own
sentient and intelligent being. It is still a bounded entity,
though recipient of boundless divinity. Thus evil ceases, each
personality is preserved and intensely glorified, and, at the same
time, God is all in all. The totality of perfected, enraptured,
immortalized humanity in heaven may be described in this manner,
adopting the masterly expression of Coleridge:
"And as one body seems the aggregate Of atoms numberless, each
organized, So, by a strange and dim similitude, Infinite myriads
of self conscious minds In one containing Spirit live, who fills
With absolute ubiquity of thought All his involved monads, that
yet seem Each to pursue its own self centring end."
A third mode of answering the question of human destiny is by the
conception of a general resurrection. Souls, as fast as they leave
the body, are gathered in some intermediate state, a starless
grave world, a ghostly limbo. When the present cycle of things is
completed, when the clock of time runs down and its lifeless
weight falls in the socket, and "Death's empty helmet yawns grimly
over the funeral hatchment of the world," the gates of this long
barred receptacle of the deceased will be struck open, and its
pale prisoners, in accumulated hosts, issue forth, and enter on
the immortal inheritance reserved for them. In the sable land of
Hades all departed generations are bivouacking in one vast army.
On the resurrection morning, striking their shadowy tents, they
will scale the walls of the abyss, and, reinvested with their
bodies, either plant their banners on the summits of the earth in
permanent encampment, or storm the battlements of the sky and
colonize heaven with flesh and blood.
5 Philosophy and Doctrines of Erigena, Universalist Quarterly
Review, vol. vii. p. 100.
All advocates of the doctrine of psychopannychism, or the sleep
of souls from death till the last day, in addition to the general
body of orthodox Christians, have been supporters of this
conclusion.6
Three explanations are possible of the origination of this belief.
First, a man musing over the affecting panorama of the seasons as
it rolls through the year, budding life alternating with deadly
desolation, spring still bringing back the freshness of leaves,
flowers, and carolling birds, as if raising them from an annual
interment in winter's cold grave, and then thinking of the destiny
of his own race, how many generations have ripened and decayed,
how many human crops have been harvested from the cradle and
planted in the tomb, might naturally especially if he had any
thing of the poet's associating and creative mind say to himself,
Are we altogether perishable dust, or are we seed sown for higher
fields, seed lying dormant now, but at last to sprout into swift
immortality when God shall make a new sunshine and dew
omnipotently penetrate the dry mould where we tarry? No matter how
partial the analogy, how forced the process, how false the result,
such imagery would sooner or later occur; and, having occurred, it
is no more strange that it should get literal acceptance than it
is that many other popular figments should have secured the firm
establishment they have.
Secondly, a mourner just bereaved of one in whom his whole love
was garnered, distracted with grief, his faculties unbalanced, his
soul a chaos, is of sorrow and fantasy all compact; and he solaces
himself with the ideal embodiment of his dreams, half seeing what
he thinks, half believing what he wishes. His desires pass through
unconscious volition into supposed facts. Before the miraculous
power of his grief wielded imagination the world is fluent, and
fate runs in the moulds he conceives. The adored form on which
corruption now banquets, he sees again, animated, beaming, clasped
in his arms. He cries, It cannot be that those holy days are
forever ended, that I shall never more realize the blissful dream
in which we trod the sunny world together! Oh, it must be that
some time God will give me back again that beloved one! the
sepulchre closed so fast shall be unsealed, the dead be restored,
and all be as it was before! The conception thus once born out of
the delirium of busy thought, anguished love, and regnant
imagination, may in various ways win a fixed footing in faith.
Thirdly, the notion which we are now contemplating is one link in
a chain of thought which, in the course of time and the range of
speculation, the theorizing mind could not fail to forge. The
concatenation of reflections is this. Death is the separation of
soul and body. That separation is repulsive, an evil. Therefore it
was not intended by the Infinite Goodness, but was introduced by a
foe, and is a foreign, marring element. Finally God will vanquish
his antagonist, and banish from the creation all his thwarting
interferences with the primitive perfection of harmony and
happiness. Accordingly, the souls which Satan has caused to be
separated from their bodies are reserved apart until the fulness
of time, when there shall be a universal resurrection and
restoration. So far as reason is competent to pronounce on this
view considered as a sequel to the disembodying doom of man, it is
an arbitrary piece of fancy. Philosophy ignores it. Science gives
no hint of it.
6 Baumgarten, Beantwortung des Sendschreibens Heyns vom Schlafe
der abgeschiedenen Seelen. Chalmers. Astronomical Discourses, iv.
It sprang from unwarranted metaphors, perverted, exaggerated,
based on analogies not parallel. So far as it assumes to rest
on revelation it will be examined in another place.
Fourthly, after the notion of a great, epochal resurrection, as a
reply to the inquiry, What is to become of the soul? a dogma is
next encountered which we shall style that of a local and
irrevocable conveyance. The disembodied spirit is conveyed to some
fixed region,7 a penal or a blissful abode, where it is to tarry
unalterably. This idea of the banishment or admission of souls,
according to their deserts, or according to an elective grace,
into an anchored location called hell or heaven, a retributive or
rewarding residence for eternity, we shall pass by with few words,
because it recurs for fuller examination in other chapters. In the
first place, the whole picture is a gross simile drawn from
occurrences of this outward world and unjustifiably applied to the
fortunes of the mind in the invisible sphere of the future. The
figment of a judicial transportation of the soul from one place or
planet to another, as if by a Charon's boat, is a clattering and
repulsive conceit, inadmissible by one who apprehends the
noiseless continuity of God's self executing laws. It is a jarring
mechanical clash thrust amidst the smooth evolution of spiritual
destinies. It compares with the facts as the supposition that the
planets are swung around the sun by material chains compares with
the law of gravitation.
Moral compensation is no better secured by imprisonment or freedom
in separate localities than it is, in a common environment, by the
fatal working of their interior forces of character, and their
relations with all things else. Moreover, these antagonist
kingdoms, Tartarean and Elysian, defined as the everlasting
habitations of departed souls, have been successively driven, as
dissipated visions, from their assumed latitudes and longitudes,
one after another, by progressive discovery, until now the
intelligent mind knows of no assignable spot for them. Since we
are not acquainted with any fixed locations to which the soul is
to be carried, to abide there forever in appointed joy or woe, and
since there is no scientific necessity nor moral use for the
supposition of such places and of the transferrence of the
departed to them, we cannot hesitate to reject the associated
belief as a deluding mistake. The truth, as we conceive it, is not
that different souls are borne by constabulary apparitions to two
immured dwellings, manacled and hurried into Tophet or saluted and
ushered into Paradise, but that all souls spontaneously pass into
one immense empire, drawn therein by their appropriate
attractions, to assimilate a strictly discriminative experience.
But, as to this, let each thinker form his own conclusion.
The fifth view of the destination of the soul may be called the
theory of recurrence.8 When man dies, his surviving spirit is
immediately born again in a new body. Thus the souls, assigned in
a limited number to each world, continually return, each one still
forgetful of his previous lives. This seems to be the specific
creed of the Druses, who affirm that all souls were created at
once, and that the number is unchanged, while they are born over
and over. A Druse boy, dreadfully alarmed by the discharge of a
gun, on being asked by a Christian the cause of his fear, replied,
"I was born murdered;" that is, the soul of a man who had been
shot
7 Lange, Das Land der Herrlichkelt.
8 Schmidius, Diss. de Multiplici Animarum Reditu in Corpora.
passed into his body at the moment of his birth.9 The young
mountaineer would seem, from the sudden violence with which he was
snatched out of his old house, to have dragged a trail of
connecting consciousness over into his new one. As a general rule,
in distinction from such an exception, memory is like one of those
passes which the conductors of railroad trains give their
passengers, "good for this trip only." The notion of an endless
succession of lives on the familiar stage of this dear old world,
commencing each with clean wiped tablets, possesses for some minds
a fathomless allurement; but others wish for no return pass on
their ticket to futurity, preferring an adventurous abandonment
"to fresh fields and pastures new," in unknown immensity, to a
renewed excursion through landscapes already traversed and
experiences drained before.
Fourier's doctrine of immortality belongs here. According to his
idea, the Great Soul of this globe is a composite being,
comprising about ten billions of individual souls. Their
connection with this planet will be for nearly eighty thousand
years. Then the whole sum of them will swarm to some higher
planet, Fourier himself, perhaps, being the old gray gander that
will head the flock, pilot king of their flight. Each man is to
enjoy about four hundred births on earth, poetic justice leading
him successively through all the grades and phases of fortune,
from cripplehood and beggary to paragonship and the throne. The
invisible residence of spirits and the visible are both on this
globe, the former in the Great Soul, the latter in bodies. In the
other life the soul becomes a sharer in the woes of the Great
Soul, which is as unhappy as seven eighths of the incarnated
souls; for its fate is a compound of the fates of the human souls
taken collectively. Coming into this outward scene at birth, we
lose anew all memory of past existence, but wake up again in the
Great Soul with a perfect recollection of all our previous lives
both in the invisible and in the visible world. These alternating
passages between the two states will continue until the final
swooping of total humanity from this exhausted planet in search of
a better abode.10
The idea of the recurrence of souls is the simplest means of
meeting a difficulty stated thus by the ingenious Abraham Tucker
in his "Light of Nature Pursued." "The numbers of souls daily
pouring in from hence upon the next world seem to require a
proportionable drain from it somewhere or other; for else the
country might be overstocked." The objection urged against such a
belief from the fact that we do not remember having lived before
is rebutted by the assertion that
"Some draught of Lethe doth await, As old mythologies relate, The
slipping through from state to state."
The theory associated with this Lethean draught is confirmed by
its responsive correspondence with many unutterable experiences,
vividly felt or darkly recognised, in our deepest bosom. It seems
as if occasionally the poppied drug or other oblivious antidote
9 Churchill, Mount Lebanon, vol. ii. ch. 12.
10 Fourier, Passions of the Human Soul, (Morell's translation,)
Introduction, vol. i. pp. 14-18; also pp. 233-236.
administered by nature had been so much diluted that reason, only
half baffled, struggles to decipher the dim runes and vestiges of
a foregone state;
"And ever something is or seems That touches us with mystic
gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams."
In those excursive reveries, fed by hope and winged with dream,
which scour the glens and scale the peaks of the land of thought,
this nook of hypothesis must some time be discovered. And, brought
to light, it has much to interest and to please; but it is too
destitute of tangible proof to be successfully maintained against
assault.11
There is another faith as to the fate of souls, best stated,
perhaps, in the phrase perpetual migration. The soul, by
successive deaths and births, traverses the universe, an
everlasting traveller through the rounds of being and the worlds
of space, a transient sojourner briefly inhabiting each.12 All
reality is finding its way up towards the attracting, retreating
Godhead. Minerals tend to vegetables, these to animals, these to
men. Blind but yearning matter aspires to spirit, intelligent
spirits to divinity. In every grain of dust sleep an army of
future generations. As every thing below man gropes upward towards
his conscious estate, "the trees being imperfect men, that seem to
bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground," so man himself
shall climb the illimitable ascent of creation, every step a star.
The animal organism is a higher kind of vegetable, whose
development begins with those substances with the production of
which the life of an ordinary vegetable ends.13 The fact, too,
that embryonic man passes through ascending stages
undistinguishable from those of lower creatures, is full of
meaning. Does it not betoken a preserved epitome of the long
history of slowly rising existence? What unplummeted abysses of
time and distance intervene from the primary rock to the Victoria
Regia! and again from the first crawling spine to the fetterless
mind of a Schelling! But, snail pace by snail pace, those
immeasurable separations have been bridged over; and so every
thing that now lies at the dark basis of dust shall finally reach
the transplendent apex of intellect. The objection of theological
prejudice to this developing succession of ascents that it is
degrading is an unhealthy mistake. Whether we have risen or fallen
to our present rank, the actual rank itself is not altered. And in
one respect it is better for man to be an advanced oyster than a
degraded god; for in the former case the path is upwards, in the
latter it is downwards. "We wake," observes a profound thinker,
"and find ourselves on a stair: there are other stairs below us,
which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a
one, which go upward and out of sight." Such was plainly the trust
of the author of the following exhortation:
"Be worthy of death; and so learn to live That every incarnation
of thy soul In other realms, and worlds, and firmaments Shall be
more pure and high."
11 Bertram, Prufung der Meinung von der Praexistenz der
menechlichen Seele.
12 Nurnberger, Still Leben, oder uber die Unsterblichkeit der
Seele.
13 Liebig, Animal Chemistry, ch. ix.
Bulwer likewise has said, "Eternity may be but an endless series
of those emigrations which men call deaths, abandonments of home
after home, ever to fairer scenes and loftier heights. Age after
age, the spirit that glorious nomad may shift its tent, fated not
to rest in the dull Elysium of the heathen, but carrying with it
evermore its twin elements, activity and desire."
But there is something unsatisfactory, even sad and dreary, in
this prospect of incessant migration. Must not the pilgrim pine
and tire for a goal of rest? Exhausted with wanderings, sated with
experiments, will he not pray for the exempted lot of a contented
fruition in repose? One must weary at last of being even so
sublime a vagabond as he whose nightly hostelries are stars. And,
besides, how will sundered friends and lovers, between whom, on
the road, races and worlds interpose, ever over take each other,
and be conjoined to journey hand in hand again or build a bower
together by the way? A poet of finest mould, in happiest mood,
once saw a leaf drop from a tree which overhung a mirroring
stream. The reflection of the leaf in the watery sky hollow far
below seemed to rise from beneath as swiftly as the object fell
from above; and the two, encountering at the surface, became one.
Then he sang, touching with his strain the very marrow of deepest
human desire,
"How speeds, from in the river's thought,
The spirit of the leaf that falls,
Its heaven in that calm bosom wrought,
As mine among yon crimson walls!
From the dry bough it spins, to greet
Its shadow on the placid river:
So might I my companions meet,
Nor roam the countless worlds forever!"
Moreover, some elements of this theory are too grotesque, are the
too rash inferences from a too crude induction, to win sober
credit to any extent. It is easy to devise and carry out in
consistent descriptive details the hypothesis that the soul has
risen, through ten thousand transitions, from the condition of red
earth or a tadpole to its present rank, and that,
"As it once crawl'd upon the sod, It yet shall grow to be a god;"
but what scientific evidence is there to confirm and establish the
supposition as a truth? Why, if it be so, to borrow the humorous
satire of good old Henry More,
"Then it will follow that cold stopping curd And harden'd moldy
cheese, when they have rid Due circuits through the heart, at last
shall speed Of life and sense, look thorough our thin eyes And
view the close wherein the cow did feed Whence they were milk'd:
grosse pie crust will grow wise, And pickled cucumbers sans doubt
philosophize!"
The form of this general outline stalks totteringly on stilts of
fancy, and sprawls headlong with a logical crash at the first
critical probe.
The final theory of the destination of souls, now left to be set
forth, may be designated by the word transition.14 It affirms that
at death they pass from the separate material worlds, which are
their initiating nurseries, into the common spiritual world, which
is everywhere present. Thus the visible peoples the invisible,
each person in his turn consciously rising from this world's
rudimentary darkness to that world's universal light. Dwelling
here, free souls, housed in frames of dissoluble clay,
"We hold a middle rank 'twixt heaven and earth,
On the last verge of mortal being stand,
lose to the realm where angels have their birth,
Just on the boundaries of the spirit land."
Why has God "broken up the solid material of the universe into
innumerable little globes, and swung each of them in the centre of
an impassable solitude of space," unless it be to train up in the
various spheres separate households for final union as a single
diversified family in the boundless spiritual world? 15 The
surmise is not unreasonable, but recommends itself strongly,
that,
"If yonder stars be fill'd with forms of breathing clay like ours,
Perchance the space which spreads between is for a spirit's
powers."
The soul encased in flesh is thereby confined to one home, its
natal nest; but, liberated at death, it wanders at will,
unobstructed, through every world and cerulean deep; and
wheresoever it is, there, in proportion to its own capacity and
fitness, is heaven and is God.16 All those world spots so thickly
scattered through the Yggdrasill of universal space are but the
brief sheltering places where embryo intelligences clip their
shells, and whence, as soon as fledged through the discipline of
earthly teaching and essays, the broodlet souls take wing into the
mighty airs of immensity, and thus enter on their eternal
emancipation. This conjecture is, of all which have been offered
yet, perhaps the completest, least perplexed, best recommended by
its harmony with our knowledge and our hope. And so one might wish
to rest in it with humble trust.
The final destiny of an immortal soul, after its transition into
the other world, must be either unending progress towards infinite
perfection, or the reaching of its perihelion at last and then
revolving in uninterrupted fruition. In the former case, pursuing
an infinite aim, with each degree of its attainment the flying
goal still recedes. In the latter case, it will in due season
touch its bound and there be satisfied,
"When weak Time shall be pour'd out Into Eternity, and circular
joys Dance in an endless round."
14 Taylor, Physical Theory of Another Life, ch. xii.
15 Taylor, Saturday Evening, pp. 95-111.
16 Taylor, Physical Theory of Another Life, ch. xvii.
This result seems the more probable of the two; for the assertion
of countless decillions of personalities all progressing beyond
every conceivable limit, on, still on, forever, is incredible. If
endless linear progress were the destiny of each being, the whole
universe would at last become a line! And though it is true that
the idea of an ever novel chase attracts and refreshes the
imagination, while the idea of a monotonous revolution repels and
wearies it, this is simply because we judge after our poor earthly
experience and its flagging analogies. It will not be so if that
revolution is the vivid realization of all our being's
possibilities.
Annihilation, absorption, resurrection, conveyance, recurrence,
migration, transition, these seven answers to the question of our
fate, and of its relation to the course of nature, are thinkable
in words. We may choose from among them, but can construct no real
eighth. First, there is a constant succession of growth and decay.
Second, there is a perpetual flow and ebb of personal emanation
and impersonal resumption. Third, there is a continual return of
the same persistent entities. Fourth, all matter may be sublimated
to spirit, and souls alone remain to occupy boundless space.
Fifth, the power of death may cease, all the astronomic orbs be
populated and enjoyed, each by one generation of everlasting
inhabitants, the present order continuing in each earth until
enough have lived to fill it, then all of them, physically
restored, dwelling on it, with no more births or deaths. Sixth, if
matter be not transmutable to soul, when that peculiar reality
from which souls are developed is exhausted, and the last
generation of incarnated beings have risen from the flesh, the
material creation may, in addition to the inter stellar region, be
eternally appropriated by the spirit races to their own free range
and use, through adaptations of faculty unknown to us now; else it
may vanish as a phantasmal spectacle. Or, finally, souls may be
absolutely created out of nothing by the omnipotence of God, and
the universe may be infinite: then the process may proceed
forever.
But men's beliefs are formed rather by the modes of thought they
have learned to adopt than by any proofs they have tested; not by
argumentation about a subject, but by the way of looking at it.
The moralist regards all creation as the work of a personal God, a
theatre of moral ends, a just Providence watching over the parts,
and the conscious immortality of the actors an inevitable
accompaniment. The physicist contemplates the universe as
constituted of atoms of attraction and repulsion, which subsist in
perfect mobility through space, but are concreted in the molecular
masses of the planets. The suns are vast engines for the
distribution of heat or motion, the equivalent of all kinds of
force. This, in its diffusion, causes innumerable circulations and
combinations of the original atoms. Organic growth, life, is the
fruition of a force derived from the sun. Decay, death, is the
rendering up of that force in its equivalents. Thus, the universe
is a composite unity of force, a solidarity of ultimate unities
which are indestructible, though in constant circulation of new
groupings and journeys. To the religious faith of the moralist,
man is an eternal person, reaping what he has sowed. To the
speculative intellect of the physicist, man is an atomic force, to
be liberated into the ethereal medium until again harnessed in
some organism. In both cases he is immortal: but in that, as a
free citizen of the ideal world; in this, as a flying particle of
the dynamic immensity.
PART SECOND.
ETHNIC THOUGHTS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
BARBARIAN NOTIONS OF A FUTURE LIFE.
PROCEEDING now to give an account of the fancies and opinions in
regard to a future life which have been prevalent, in different
ages, in various nations of the earth, it will be best to begin by
presenting, in a rapid series, some sketches of the conceits of
those uncivilized tribes who did not so far as our knowledge
reaches possess a doctrine sufficiently distinctive and full, or
important enough in its historical relations, to warrant a
detailed treatment in separate chapters.
We will glance first at the negroes. According to all accounts,
while there are, among the numerous tribes, diversities and
degrees of superstition, there is yet, throughout the native pagan
population of Africa, a marked general agreement of belief in the
survival of the soul, in spectres, divination, and witchcraft; and
there is a general similarity of funeral usages. Early travellers
tell us that the Bushmen conceived the soul to be immortal, and as
impalpable as a shadow, and that they were much afraid of the
return of deceased spirits to haunt them. They were accustomed to
pray to their departed countrymen not to molest them, but to stay
away in quiet. They also employed exorcisers to lay these ill
omened ghosts. Meiners relates of some inhabitants of the Guinea
coast that their fear of ghosts and their childish credulity
reached such a pitch that they threw their dead into the ocean, in
the expectation of thus drowning soul and body together.
Superstitions as gross and lawless still have full sway. Wilson,
whose travels and residence there for twenty years have enabled
him to furnish the most reliable information, says, in his recent
work,1 "A native African would as soon doubt his present as his
future state of being." Every dream, every stray suggestion of the
mind, is interpreted, with unquestioning credence, as a visit from
the dead, a whisper from a departed soul. If a man wakes up with
pains in his bones or muscles, it is because his spirit has
wandered abroad in the night and been flogged by some other
spirit. On certain occasions the whole community start up at
midnight, with clubs, torches, and hideous yells, to drive the
evil spirits out of the village. They seem to believe that the
souls of dead men take rank with good or bad spirits, as they have
themselves been good or bad in this life. They bury with the
deceased clothing, ornaments, utensils,
1 Western Africa, ch. xii.
and statedly convey food to the grave for the use of the
revisiting spirit. With the body of king Weir of the Cavalla
towns, who was buried in December of 1854, in presence of several
missionaries, was interred a quantity of rice, palm oil, beef, and
rum: it was supposed the ghost of the sable monarch would come
back and consume these articles. The African tribes, where their
notions have not been modified by Christian or by Mohammedan
teachings, appear to have no definite idea of a heaven or of a
hell; but future reward or punishment is considered under the
general conception of an association, in the disembodied state,
with the benignant or with the demoniacal powers.
The New Zealanders imagine that the souls of the dead go to a
place beneath the earth, called Reinga. The path to this region is
a precipice close to the sea shore at the North Cape. It is said
that the natives who live in the neighborhood can at night hear
sounds caused by the passing of spirits thither through the air.
After a great battle they are thus warned of the event long before
the news can arrive by natural means.2 It is a common superstition
with them that the left eye of every chief, after his death,
becomes a star. The Pleiades are seven New Zealand chiefs,
brothers, who were slain together in battle and are now fixed in
the sky, one eye of each, in the shape of a star, being the only
part of them that is visible. It has been observed that the
mythological doctrine of the glittering host of heaven being an
assemblage of the departed heroes of earth never received a more
ingenious version.3 Certainly it is a magnificent piece of insular
egotism. It is noticeable here that, in the Norse mythology, Thor,
having slain Thiasse, the giant genius of winter, throws his eyes
up to heaven, and they become stars. Shungie, a celebrated New
Zealand king, said he had on one occasion eaten the left eye of a
great chief whom he had killed in battle, for the purpose of thus
increasing the glory of his own eye when it should be transferred
to the firmament. Sometimes, apparently, it was thought that there
was a separate immortality for each of the eyes of the dead, the
left ascending to heaven as a star, the right, in the form of a
spirit, taking flight for Reinga.
The custom, common in Africa and in New Zealand, of slaying the
slaves or the wives of an important person at his death and
burying them with him, prevails also among the inhabitants of the
Feejee Islands. A chief's wives are sometimes strangled on these
occasions, sometimes buried alive. One cried to her brother, "I
wish to die, that I may accompany my husband to the land where he
has gone. Love me, and make haste to strangle me, that I may
overtake him."4 Departing souls go to the tribunal of Ndengei, who
either receives them into bliss, or sends them back, as ghosts, to
haunt the scenes of their former existence, or distributes them as
food to devils, or imprisons them for a period and then dooms them
to annihilation. The Feejees are also very much afraid of Samiulo,
ruler of a subterranean world, who sits at the brink of a huge
fiery cavern, into which he hurls the souls he dislikes. In the
road to Ndengei stands an enormous giant, armed with an axe, who
tries to maim and murder the passing souls. A powerful chief,
whose gun was interred with him, loaded it, and, when
2 Shortland, Traditions of the New Zealanders, ch. vii.
3 Library of Ent. Knowl.: The New Zealanders, pp. 223-237.
4 Wilkes, Narrative of the U. S. Exploring Expedition, vol. iii.
ch. 3.
he came near the giant, shot at him, and ran by while the monster
was dodging the bullet.
The people of the Sandwich Islands held a confused medley of
notions as to another life. In different persons among them were
found, in regard to this subject, superstitious terror, blank
indifference, positive unbelief. The current fancy was that the
souls of the chiefs were led, by a god whose name denotes the
"eyeball of the sun," to a life in the heavens, while plebeian
souls went down to Akea, a lugubrious underground abode. Some
thought spirits were destroyed in this realm of darkness; others,
that they were eaten by a stronger race of spirits there; others
still, that they survived there, subsisting upon lizards and
butterflies.5 What a piteous life they must have led here whose
imaginations could only soar to a future so unattractive as this!
The Kamtschadales send all the dead alike to a subterranean
elysium, where they shall find again their wives, clothes, tools,
huts, and where they shall fish and hunt. All is there as here,
except that there are no fire spouting mountains, no bogs,
streams, inundations, and impassable snows; and neither hunting
nor fishing is ever pursued in vain there. This lower paradise is
but a beautified Kamtschatka, freed from discommoding hardships
and cleansed of tormenting Cossacks and Russians. They have no
hell for the rectification of the present wrong relations of
virtue and misery, vice and happiness. The only distinction they
appear to make is that all who in Kamtschatka are poor, and have
few small and weak dogs, shall there be rich and be furnished with
strong and fat dogs. The power of imagination is very remarkable
in this raw people, bringing the future life so near, and
awakening such an impatient longing for it and for their former
companions that they often, the sooner to secure a habitation
there, anticipate the natural time of their death by suicide.6
The Esquimaux betray the influence of their clime and habits, in
the formation of their ideas of the life to come, as plainly as
the Kamtschadales do. The employments and enjoyments of their
future state are rude and earthy. They say the soul descends
through successive places of habitation, the first of which is
full of pains and horrors. The good, that is, the courageous and
skilful, those who have endured severe hardships and mastered many
seals, passing through this first residence, find that the other
mansions regularly improve. They finally reach an abode of perfect
satisfaction, far beneath the storms of the sea, where the sun is
never obscured by night, and where reindeer wander in great droves
beside waters that never congeal, and wherein the whale, the
walrus, and the best sea fowls always abound.7 Hell is deep, but
heaven deeper still. Hell, they think, is among the roots, rocks,
monsters, and cold of the frozen or vexed and suffering waters;
but
"Beneath tempestuous seas and fields of ice
Their creed has placed a lowlier paradise."
The Greenlanders, too, located their elysium beneath the abysses
of the ocean, where the good Spirit Torngarsuk held his reign in a
happy and eternal summer. The wizards, who pretended to visit this
region at will, described the disembodied souls as pallid, and, if
one
5 Jarves, Hist. of the Sandwich Islands, p. 42.
6 Christoph Meiners, Vermischte Philosophische Schriften, 169-173.
7 Prichard, Physical Hist. of Mankind, vol. i. ch. 2.
sought to seize them, unsubstantial.8 Some of these people,
however, fixed the site of paradise in the sky, and regarded the
aurora borealis as the playing of happy souls. So Coleridge
pictures the Laplander
"Marking the streamy banners of the North, And thinking he those
spirits soon should join Who there, in floating robes of rosy
light, Dance sportively."
But others believed this state of restlessness in the clouds was
the fate only of the worthless, who were there pinched with hunger
and plied with torments. All agreed in looking for another state
of existence, where, under diverse circumstances, happiness and
misery should be awarded, in some degree at least, according to
desert.9
The Peruvians taught that the reprobate were sentenced to a hell
situated in the centre of the earth, where they must endure
centuries of toil and anguish. Their paradise was away in the blue
dome of heaven. There the spirits of the worthy would lead a life
of tranquil luxury. At the death of a Peruvian noble his wives and
servants frequently were slain, to go with him and wait on him in
that happy region.10 Many authors, including Prescott, yielding
too easy credence to the very questionable assertions of the
Spanish chroniclers, have attributed to the Peruvians a belief in
the resurrection of the body. Various travellers and writers have
also predicated this belief of savage nations in Central Africa,
of certain South Sea islanders, and of several native tribes in
North America. In all these cases the supposition is probably
erroneous, as we think for the following reasons. In the first
place, the idea of a resurrection of the body is either a late
conception of the associative imagination, or else a doctrine
connected with a speculative theory of recurring epochs in the
destiny of the world; and it is in both instances too subtle and
elaborate for an uncultivated people. Secondly, in none of the
cases referred to has any reliable evidence been given of the
actual existence of the belief in question. It has merely been
inferred, by persons to whose minds the doctrine was previously
familiar, from phenomena by no means necessarily implying it. For
example, a recent author ascribes to the Feejees the belief that
there will be a resurrection of the body just as it was at the
time of death. The only datum on which he founds this astounding
assertion is that they often seem to prefer to die in the full
vigor of manhood rather than in decrepit old age! 11 Thirdly, we
know that the observation and statements of the Spanish monks and
historians, in regard to the religion of the pagans of South
America, were of the most imperfect and reckless character. They
perpetrated gross frauds, such as planting in the face of high
precipices white stones in the shape of the cross, and then
pointing to them in proof of their assertion that, before the
Christians came, the Devil had here parodied the rites and
doctrines of the gospel. 12 They said the Mexican goddess, wife of
the sun, was Eve, or
8 Egede, Greenland, ch. 18.
9 Dr. Karl Andree, Gronland.
10 Prescott, Conquest of Peru, vol. i. ch. 3.
11 Erskine, Islands of the Western Pacific, p. 248.
12 Schoolcraft, History, &c. of the Indian Tribes, part v. p. 93.
the Virgin Mary, and Quetzalcoatl was St. Thomas! 13 Such
affirmers are to be cautiously followed. Finally, it is a quite
significant fact that while some point to the pains which the
Peruvians took in embalming their dead as a proof that they looked
for a resurrection of the body, Acosta expressly says that they
did not believe in the resurrection, and that this unbelief was
the cause of their embalming.14 Garcilaso de la Vega, in his
"Royal Commentaries of the Peruvian Incas," says that when he
asked some Peruvians why they took so great care to preserve in
the cemeteries of the dead the nails and hair which had been cut
off, they replied that in the day of resurrection the dead would
come forth with whatever of their bodies was left, and there would
be too great a press of business in that day for them to afford
time to go hunting round after their hair and nails.15 The fancy
of a Christian is too plain here. If the answer were really made
by the natives, they were playing a joke on their credulous
questioner, or seeking to please him with distorted echoes of his
own faith.
The conceits as to a future life entertained by the Mexicans
varied considerably from those of their neighbors of Peru. Souls
neither good nor bad, or whose virtues and vices balanced each
other, were to enter a medium state of idleness and empty content.
The wicked, or those dying in any of certain enumerated modes of
death, went to Mictlan, a dismal hell within the earth. The souls
of those struck by lightning, or drowned, or dying by any of a
given list of diseases, also the souls of children, were
transferred to a remote elysium, Tlalocan. There was a place in
the chief temple where, it was supposed, once a year the spirits
of all the children who had been sacrificed to Tlaloc invisibly
came and assisted in the ceremonies. The ultimate heaven was
reserved for warriors who bravely fell in battle, for women who
died in labor, for those offered up in the temples of the gods,
and for a few others. These passed immediately to the house of the
sun, their chief god, whom they accompanied for a term of years,
with songs, dances, and revelry, in his circuit around the sky.
Then, animating the forms of birds of gay plumage, they lived as
beautiful songsters among the flowers, now on earth, now in
heaven, at their pleasure.16 It was the Mexican custom to dress
the dead man in the garb appropriated to the guardian deity of his
craft or condition in life. They gave him a jug of water. They
placed with him slips of paper to serve as passports through
guarded gates and perilous defiles in the other world. They made a
fire of his clothes and utensils, to warm the shivering soul while
traversing a region of cold winds beyond the grave.17 The
following sentence occurs in a poem composed by one of the old
Aztec monarchs: "Illustrious nobles, loyal subjects, let us aspire
to that heaven where all is eternal and corruption cannot come.
The horrors of the tomb are but the cradle of the sun, and the
shadows of death are brilliant lights for the stars." 18
13 Squier, Serpent Symbol in America, p. 13.
14 Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, book v. ch. 7.
15 Book ii. ch. 7.
16 Clavigero, History of Mexico, book vi. sect. 1.
17 Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, vol. i. ch. 6.
18 Ibid. sect. 39.
Amidst the mass of whimsical conceptions entering into the faith
of the widely spread tribes of North America, we find a ruling
agreement in the cardinal features of their thought concerning a
future state of existence. In common with nearly all barbarous
nations, they felt great fear of apparitions. The Sioux were in
the habit of addressing the deceased at his burial, and imploring
him to stay in his own place and not come to distress them. Their
funeral customs, too, from one extremity of the continent to the
other, were very much alike. Those who have reported their
opinions to us, from the earliest Jesuit missionaries to the
latest investigators of their mental characteristics, concur in
ascribing to them a deep trust in a life to come, a cheerful view
of its conditions, and a remarkable freedom from the dread of
dying. Charlevoix says, "The best established opinion among the
natives is the immortality of the soul." On the basis of an
account written by William Penn, Pope composed the famous passage
in his "Essay on Man:"
Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind.
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way:
Yet simple nature to his faith hath given,
Behind the cloud topp'd hill, an humbler heaven,
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Or happier island in the watery waste.
To be, contents his natural desire:
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire,
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company."
Their rude instinctive belief in the soul's survival, and surmises
as to its destiny, are implied in their funeral rites, which, as
already stated, were, with some exceptions, strikingly similar
even in the remotest tribes.19
In the bark coffin, with a dead Indian the Onondagas buried a
kettle of provisions, a pair of moccasins, a piece of deer skin
and sinews of the deer to sew patches on the moccasins, which it
was supposed the deceased would wear out on his journey. They also
furnished him with a bow and arrows, a tomahawk and knife, to
procure game with to live on while pursuing his way to the land of
spirits, the blissful regions of Ha wah ne u.20 Several Indian
nations, instead of burying the food, suspended it above the
grave, and renewed it from time to time. Some writers have
explained this custom by the hypothesis of an Indian belief in two
souls, one of which departed to the realm of the dead, while the
other tarried by the mound until the body was decayed, or until it
had itself found a chance to be born in a new body.21 The
supposition seems forced and extremely doubtful. The truth
probably lies in a simpler explanation, which will be offered
further on.
19 Baumgarten, Geschichte der Volker von America, xiii. haupts.:
vom Tod, Vergribniss, und Trauer.
20 Clarke, Onondaga, vol. l. p. 51.
21 Muller, Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen, sect.
66.
The Winnebagoes located paradise above, and called the milky way
the "Road of the Dead." 22 It was so white with the crowds of
journeying ghosts! But almost all, like the Ojibways, imagined
their elysium to lie far in the West. The soul, freed from the
body, follows a wide beaten path westward, and enters a country
abounding with all that an Indian covets. On the borders of this
blessed land, in a long glade, he finds his relatives, for many
generations back, gathered to welcome him.23 The Chippewas, and
several other important tribes, always kindled fires on the fresh
graves of their dead, and kept them burning four successive
nights, to light the wandering souls on their way.24 An Indian
myth represents the ghosts coming back from Ponemah, the land of
the Hereafter, and singing this song to the miraculous Hiawatha:
"Do not lay such heavy burdens
On the graves of those you bury,
Not such weight of furs and wampum,
Not such weight of pots and kettles;
For the spirits faint beneath them.
Only give them food to carry,
Only give them fire to light them.
Four days is the spirit's journey
To the land of ghosts and shadows,
Four its lonely night encampments.
Therefore, when the dead are buried,
Let a fire, as night approaches,
Four times on the grave be kindled,
That the soul upon its journey
May not grope about in darkness." 25
The subject of a future state seems to have been by far the most
prominent one in the Indian imagination. They relate many
traditions of persons who have entered it, and returned, and given
descriptions of it. A young brave, having lost his betrothed,
determined to follow her to the land of souls. Far South, beyond
the region of ice and snows, he came to a lodge standing before
the entrance to wide blue plains. Leaving his body there, he
embarked in a white stone canoe to cross a lake. He saw the souls
of wicked Indians sinking in the lake; but the good gained an
elysian shore, where all was warmth, beauty, ease, and eternal
youth, and where the air was food. The Master of Breath sent him
back, but promised that he might at death return and stay. 26 The
Wyandots tell of a dwarf, Tcha ka bech, who climbed a tree which
grew higher as often as he blew on it. At last he reached heaven,
and discovered it to be an excellent place. He descended the tree,
building wigwams at intervals in the branches. He then returned
with his sister and nephew, resting each night in one of the
wigwams.
22 Schoolcraft, History, &c. of the Indian Tribes, part iv. p.
240.
23 Ibid. part ii. p. 135.
24 Ibid. part v. p. 64; part iv. p. 55.
25 Longfellow, Song of Hiawatha, xix.: The Ghosts.
26 Schoolcraft, Indian in his Wigwam. p 79.
He set his traps up there to catch animals. Rising in the night to
go and examine his traps, he saw one all on fire, and, upon
approaching it, found that he had caught the sun!
Where the Indian is found believing in a Devil and a hell, it is
the result of his intercourse with Europeans. These elements of
horror were foreign to his original religion.27 There are in some
quarters faint traces of a single purgatorial or retributive
conception. It is a representation of paradise as an island, the
ordeal consisting in the passage of the dark river or lake which
surrounds it. The worthy cross with entire facility, the unworthy
only after tedious struggles. Some say the latter are drowned;
others, that they sink up to their chins in the water, where they
pass eternity in vain desires to attain the alluring land on which
they gaze.28 Even this notion may be a modification consequent
upon European influence. At all events, it is subordinate in force
and only occasional in occurrence. For the most part, in the
Indian faith mercy swallows up the other attributes of the Great
Spirit. The Indian dies without fear, looking for no punishments,
only for rewards.29 He regards the Master of Breath not as a holy
judge, but as a kind father. He welcomes death as opening the door
to a sweet land. Ever charmingly on his closing eyes dawns the
prospect of the aboriginal elysium, a gorgeous region of soft
shades, gliding streams, verdant groves waving in gentle airs,
warbling birds, herds of stately deer and buffalo browsing on
level plains. It is the earth in noiseless and solemn
metamorphosis.30
We shall conclude this chapter by endeavoring to explain the
purport and origin of the principal ceremonies and notions which
have now been set forth pertaining to the disembodied state. The
first source of these particulars is to be sought, not in any
clear mental perceptions, or conscious dogmatic belief, but in the
natural workings of affection, memory, and sentiment. Among almost
every people, from the Chinese to the Araucanians, from the
Ethiopians to the Dacotahs, rites of honor have been paid to the
dead, various offerings have been placed at their graves. The
Vedas enjoin the offering of a cake to the ghosts of ancestors
back to the third generation. The Greeks were wont to pour wine,
oil, milk, and blood into canals made in the graves of their dead.
The early Christians adopted these "Feasts of the Dead" as
Augustine and Tertullian call them from the heathen, and
Celebrated them over the graves of their martyrs and of their
other deceased friends. Such customs as these among savages like
the Shillooks or the Choctaws are usually supposed to imply the
belief that the souls of the deceased remain about the places of
sepulture and physically partake of the nourishment thus
furnished. The interpretation is farther fetched than need be, and
is unlikely; or, at all events, if it be true in some cases, it is
not the whole truth. In the first place, these people see that the
food and drink remain untouched, the weapons and utensils are left
unused in the grave. Secondly, there are often certain features in
the barbaric ritual obviously metaphorical, incapable of literal
acceptance. For instance, the Winnebagoes light a small fire on
the grave of a deceased warrior to light him on his journey to the
land of souls,
27 Loskiel, Hist. Mission of United Brethren to N. A. Indians,
part i. ch. 3.
28 Schoolcraft, Indian in his Wigwam, p. 202. History, &c. of
Indian Tribes, part iv. p. 173.
29 Schoolcraft, History of Indian Tribes, part ii. p. 68.
30 Ibid. pp. 403, 404.
although they say that journey extends to a distance of four days
and nights and is wholly invisible. They light and tend that
watch fire as a memorial of their departed companion and a rude
expression of their own emotions; as an unconscious emblem of
their own struggling faith, not as a beacon to the straying ghost.
Again, the Indian mother, losing a nursing infant, spurts some of
her milk into the fire, that the little spirit may not want for
nutriment on its solitary path.31 Plato approvingly quotes
Hesiod's statement that the souls of noble men become guardian
demons coursing the air, messengers and agents of the gods in the
world. Therefore, he adds, "we should reverence their tombs and
establish solemn rites and offerings there;" though by his very
statement these places were not the dwellings or haunts of the
freely circuiting spirits.32
Not by an intellectual doctrine, but by an instinctive
association, when not resisted and corrected, we connect the souls
of the dead in our thoughts with the burial places of their forms.
The New Zealand priests pretend by their spells to bring wandering
souls within the enclosed graveyards.33 These sepulchral folds are
full of ghosts. A sentiment native to the human breast draws
pilgrims to the tombs of Shakspeare and Washington, and, if not
restrained and guided by cultivated thought, would lead them to
make offerings there. Until the death of Louis XV., the kings of
France lay in state and were served as in life for forty days
after they died.34 It would be ridiculous to attempt to wring any
doctrinal significance from these customs. The same sentiment
which, in one form, among the Alfoer inhabitants of the Arru
Islands, when a man dies, leads his relatives to assemble and
destroy whatever he has left, which, in another form, causes the
Papist to offer burning candles, wreaths, and crosses, and to
recite prayers, before the shrines of the dead saints, which, in
still another form, moved Albert Durer to place all the pretty
playthings of his child in the coffin and bury them with it, this
same sentiment, in its undefined spontaneous workings, impelled
the Peruvian to embalm his dead, the Blackfoot to inter his
brave's hunting equipments with him, and the Cherokee squaw to
hang fresh food above the totem on her husband's grave post. What
should we think if we could foresee that, a thousand years hence,
when the present doctrines and customs of France and America are
forgotten, some antiquary, seeking the reason why the mourners in
Pere la Chaise and Mount Auburn laid clusters of flowers on the
graves of their lamented ones, should deliberately conclude that
it was believed the souls remained in the bodies in the tomb and
enjoyed the perfume of the flowers? An American traveller, writing
from Vienna on All Saints' Day, in 1855, describes the avenues of
the great cemetery filled with people hanging festoons of flowers
on the tombstones, and placing burning candles of wax on the
graves, and kneeling in devotion; it being their childish belief,
he says, that their prayers on this day have efficacy to release
their deceased relatives from purgatory, and that the dim taper
flickering on the sod lights the unbound soul to its heavenly
home. Of course these rites are not literal expressions of literal
beliefs, but are
31 Andree, North America, p. 246.
32 Republic, book v. ch. 15.
33 R. Taylor, New Zealand, ch. 7.
34 Meiners, Kritische Geschichte der Religionen, buch iii. absch.
1.
symbols of ideas, emblems of sentiments, figurative and inadequate
shadows of a theological doctrine, although, as is well known,
there is, among the most ignorant persons, scarcely any
deliberately apprehended distinction between image and entity,
material representation and spiritual verity.
If a member of the Oneida tribe died when they were away from
home, they buried him with great solemnity, setting a mark over
the grave; and whenever they passed that way afterwards they
visited the spot, singing a mournful song and casting stones upon
it, thus giving symbolic expression to their feelings. It would be
absurd to suppose this song an incantation to secure the repose of
the buried brave, and the stones thrown to prevent his rising; yet
it would not be more incredible or more remote from the facts than
many a commonly current interpretation of barbarian usages. An
amusing instance of error well enforcing the need of extreme
caution in drawing inferences is afforded by the example of those
explorers who, finding an extensive cemetery where the aborigines
had buried all their children apart from the adults, concluded
they had discovered the remains of an ancient race of pigmies! 35
The influence of unspeculative affection, memory, and sentiment
goes far towards accounting for the funeral ritual of the
barbarians. But it is not sufficient. We must call in further aid;
and that aid we find in the arbitrary conceits, the poetic
associations, and the creative force of unregulated fancy and
imagination. The poetic faculty which, supplied with materials by
observation and speculation, constructed the complex mythologies
of Egypt and Greece, and which, turning on its own resources,
composed the Arabian tales of the genii and the modern literature
of pure fiction, is particularly active, fertile, and tyrannical,
though in a less continuous and systematic form, in the barbarian
mind. Acting by wild fits and starts, there is no end to the
extravagant conjectures and visions it bodies forth. Destitute of
philosophical definitions, totally unacquainted with critical
distinctions or analytic reflection, absurd notions, sober
convictions, dim dreams, and sharp perceptions run confusedly
together in the minds of savages. There is to them no clear and
permanent demarcation between rational thoughts and crazy fancies.
Now, no phenomenon can strike more deeply or work more powerfully
in human nature, stirring up the exploring activities of intellect
and imagination, than the event of death, with its bereaving
stroke and prophetic appeal. Accordingly, we should expect to find
among uncultivated nations, as we actually do, a vast medley of
fragmentary thoughts and pictures plausible, strange, lovely, or
terrible relating to the place and fate of the disembodied soul.
These conceptions would naturally take their shaping and coloring,
in some degree, from thescenery, circumstances, and experience
amidst which they were conceived and born. Sometimes these
figments were consciously entertained as wilful inventions,
distinctly contemplated as poetry. Sometimes they were
superstitiously credited in all their grossness with full assent
of soul. Sometimes all coexisted in vague bewilderment. These
lines of separation unquestionably existed: the difficulty is to
know where, in given instances, to draw them. A few examples will
serve at once to illustrate the
35 Smithsonian Contributions, vol. ii. Squier's Aboriginal
Monuments, appendix, pp. 127-131.
operation of the principle now laid down, and to present still
further specimens of the barbarian notions of a future life.
Some Indian tribes made offerings to the spirits of their departed
heroes by casting the boughs of various trees around the ash,
saying that the branches of this tree were eloquent with the
ghosts of their warrior sires, who came at evening in the chariot
of cloud to fire the young to deeds of war.36 There is an Indian
legend of a witch who wore a mantle composed of the scalps of
murdered women. Taking this off, she shook it, and all the scalps
uttered shrieks of laughter. Another describes a magician scudding
across a lake in a boat whose ribs were live rattlesnakes.37 An
exercise of mind virtually identical with that which gave these
strokes made the Philippine Islanders say that the souls of those
who die struck by lightning go up the beams of the rainbow to a
happy place, and animated Ali to declare that the pious, on coming
out of their sepulchres, shall find awaiting them white winged
camels with saddles of gold. The Ajetas suspended the bow and
arrows of a deceased Papuan above his grave, and conceived him as
emerging from beneath every night to go a hunting.38 The fisherman
on the coast of Lapland was interred in a boat, and a flint and
combustibles were given him to light him along the dark cavernous
passage he was to traverse. The Dyaks of Borneo believe that every
one whose head they can get possession of here will in the future
state be their servant: consequently, they make a business of
"head hunting," accumulating the ghastly visages of their victims
in their huts.39 The Caribs have a sort of sensual paradise for
the "brave and virtuous," where, it is promised, they shall enjoy
the sublimated experience of all their earthly satisfactions; but
the "degenerate and cowardly" are threatened with eternal
banishment beyond the mountains, where they shall be tasked and
driven as slaves by their enemies.40 The Hispaniolians locate
their elysium in a pleasant valley abounding with guava, delicious
fruits, cool shades, and murmuring rivulets, where they expect to
live again with their departed ancestors and friends.41 The
Patagonians say the stars are their translated countrymen, and the
milky way is a field where the departed Patagonians hunt
ostriches. Clouds are the feathers of the ostriches they kill.42
The play is here seen of the same mythological imagination which,
in Italy, pictured a writhing giant beneath Mount Vesuvius, and,
in Greenland, looked on the Pleiades as a group of dogs
surrounding a white bear, and on the belt of Orion as a company of
Greenlanders placed there because they could not find the way to
their own country. Black Bird, the redoubtable chief of the O Ma
Haws, when dying, said to his people, "Bury me on yonder lofty
bluff on the banks of the Missouri, where I can see the men and
boats passing by on the river." 43 Accordingly, as soon as he
ceased
36 Browne, Trees of America, p. 328.
37 Schoolcraft, Hist. &c part i. pp. 32-34.
38 Earl, The Papuans, p. 132.
39 Earl, The Eastern Seas, ch. 8.
40 Edwards, Hist. of the West Indies, book i. ch. 2.
41 Ibid. ch. 3.
42 Falkner, Patagonia, ch. 5.
43 Catlin, North American Indians, vol. ii. p. 6.
to breathe, they set him there, on his favorite steed, and heaped
the earth around him. This does not imply any believed doctrine,
in our sense of the term, but is plainly a spontaneous
transference for the moment, by the poetic imagination, of the
sentiments of the living man to the buried body.
The unhappy Africans who were snatched from their homes, enslaved
and cruelly tasked in the far West India islands, pined under
their fate with deadly homesickness. The intense longing moulded
their plastic belief, just as the sensation from some hot bricks
at the feet of a sleeping man shaped his dreams into a journey up
the side of Atna. They fancied that if they died they should
immediately live again in their fatherland. They committed suicide
in great numbers. At last, when other means had failed to check
this epidemic of self destruction, a cunning overseer brought them
ropes and every facility for hanging, and told them to hang
themselves as fast as they pleased, for their master had bought a
great plantation in Africa, and as soon as they got there they
would be set to work on it. Their helpless credulity took the
impression; and no more suicides occurred.44
The mutual formative influences exerted upon a people's notions
concerning the future state, by the imagination of their poets and
the peculiarities of their clime, are perhaps nowhere more
conspicuously exhibited than in the case of the Caledonians who at
an early period dwelt in North Britain. They had picturesque
traditions locating the habitation of ghosts in the air above
their fog draped mountains. They promised rewards for nothing but
valor, and threatened punishments for nothing but cowardice; and
even of these they speak obscurely. Nothing is said of an under
world. They supposed the ghosts at death floated upward naturally,
true children of the mist, and dwelt forever in the air, where
they spent an inane existence, indulging in sorrowful memories of
the past, and, in unreal imitation of their mortal occupations,
chasing boars of fog amid hills of cloud and valleys of shadow.
The authority for these views is Ossian, "whose genuine strains,"
Dr. Good observes, "assume a higher importance as historical
records than they can claim when considered as fragments of
exquisite poetry."
"A dark red stream comes down from the hill. Crugal sat upon the
beam; he that lately fell by the hand of Swaran striving in the
battle of heroes. His face is like the beam of the setting moon;
his robes are of the clouds of the hill; his eyes are like two
decaying flames; dark is the wound on his breast. The stars dim
twinkled through his form, and his voice was like the sound of a
distant stream. Dim and in tears he stood, and stretched his pale
hand over the hero. Faintly he raised his feeble voice, like the
gale of the reedy Lego. 'My ghost, O'Connal, is on my native
hills, but my corse is on the sands of Ullin. Thou shalt never
talk with Crugal nor find his lone steps on the heath. I am light
as the blast of Cromla, and I move like the shadow of mist.
Connal, son of Colgar, I see the dark cloud of death. It hovers
over the plains of Lena. The sons of green Erin shall fall. Remove
from the field of ghosts.' Like the darkened moon, he retired in
the midst of the whistling blast."
We recognise here several leading traits in all the early
unspeculative faiths, the vapory form, the echoless motion, the
marks of former wounds, the feeble voice, the memory
44 Meiners, Geschichte der Religionen, buch xiv. sect. 765.
of the past, the mournful aspect, and the prophetic words. But the
rhetorical imagery, the scenery, the location of the spirit world
in the lower clouds, are stamped by emphatic climatic
peculiarities, whose origination, easily traceable, throws light
on the growth of the whole mass of such notions everywhere.
Two general sources have now been described of the barbarian
conceptions in relation to a future state. First, the natural
operation of an earnest recollection of the dead; sympathy,
regret, and reverence for them leading the thoughts and the heart
to grope after them, to brood over the possibilities of their
fate, and to express themselves in rites and emblems. Secondly,
the mythological or arbitrary creations of the imagination when it
is set strongly at work, as it must be by the solemn phenomena
associated with death. But beyond these two comprehensive
statements there is, directly related to the matter, and worthy of
separate illustration, a curious action of the mind, which has
been very extensively experienced and fertile of results. It is a
peculiar example of the unconscious impartation of objective
existence to mental ideas. With the death of the body the man does
not cease to live in the remembrance, imagination, and heart of
his surviving friends. By an unphilosophical confusion, this
internal image is credited as an external existence. The dead pass
from their customary haunts in our society to the imperishable
domain of ideas. This visionary world of memory and fantasy is
projected outward, located, furnished, and constitutes the future
state apprehended by the barbarian mind. Feuerbach says in his
subtle and able Thoughts on Death and Immortality, "The Realm of
Memory is the Land of Souls." Ossian, amid the midnight mountains,
thinking of departed warriors and listening to the tempest, fills
the gale with the impersonations, of his thoughts, and exclaims,
"I hear the steps of the dead in the dark eddying blast."
The barbarian brain seems to have been generally impregnated with
the feeling that every thing else has a ghost as well as man. The
Gauls lent money in this world upon bills payable in the next.
They threw letters upon the funeral pile to be read by the soul of
the deceased.45 As the ghost was thought to retain the scars of
injuries inflicted upon the body, so, it appears, these letters
were thought, when destroyed, to leave impressions of what had
been written on them. The custom of burning or burying things with
the dead probably arose, in some cases at least, from the
supposition that every object has its mancs. The obolus for
Charon, the cake of honey for Cerberus, the shadows of these
articles would be borne and used by the shadow of the dead man.
Leonidas saying, "Bury me on my shield: I will enter even Hades as
a Lacedamonian," 46 must either have used the word Hades by
metonymy for the grave, or have imagined that a shadowy fac simile
of what was interred in the grave went into the grim kingdom of
Pluto. It was a custom with some Indian tribes, on the new made
grave of a chief, to slay his chosen horse; and when he fell they
supposed
"That then, upon the dead man's plain, The rider grasp'd his steed
again."
45 Pomponius Mela, De Orbis Situ, iii. 2.
46 Translation of Greek Anthology, in Bohn's Library, p. 58.
The hunter chases the deer, each alike a shade. A Feejee once, in
presence of a missionary, took a weapon from the grave of a buried
companion, saying, "The ghost of the club has gone with him." The
Iroquois tell of a woman who was chased by a ghost. She heard his
faint war whoop, his spectre voice, and only escaped with her life
because his war club was but a shadow wielded by an arm of air.
The Slavonians sacrificed a warrior's horse at his tomb.47 Nothing
seemed to the Northman so noble as to enter Valhalla on horseback,
with a numerous retinue, in his richest apparel and finest armor.
It was firmly believed, Mallet says, that Odin himself had
declared that whatsoever was burned or buried with the dead
accompanied them to his palace.48 Before the Mohammedan era, on
the death of an Arab, the finest camel he had owned was tied to a
stake beside his grave, and left to expire of hunger over the body
of his master, in order that, in the region into which death had
introduced him, he should be supplied with his usual bearer.49 The
Chinese who surpass all other people in the offerings and worship
paid at the sepulchres of their ancestors make little paper
houses, fill them with images of furniture, utensils, domestics,
and all the appurtenances of the family economy, and then burn
them, thus passing them into the invisible state for the use of
the deceased whom they mourn and honor.50 It is a touching thought
with the Greenlanders, when a child dies, to bury a dog with him
as a guide to the land of souls; for, they say, the dog is able to
find his way anywhere.51 The shadow of the faithful servant guides
the shadow of the helpless child to heaven. In fancy, not without
a moved heart, one sees this spiritual Bernard dog bearing the
ghost child on his back, over the spectral Gothard of death, safe
into the sheltering hospice of the Greenland paradise.
It is strange to notice the meeting of extremes in the rude
antithetical correspondence between Plato's doctrine of archetypal
ideas, the immaterial patterns of earthly things, and the belief
of savages in the ghosts of clubs, arrows, sandals, and
provisions. The disembodied soul of the philosopher, an eternal
idea, turns from the empty illusions of matter to nourish itself
with the substance of real truth. The spectre of the Mohawk
devours the spectre of the haunch of roast venison hung over his
grave. And why should not the two shades be conceived, if either?
"Pig, bullock, goose, must have their goblins too,
Else ours would have to go without their dinners:
If that starvation doctrine were but true,
How hard the fate of gormandizing sinners!"
The conception of ghosts has been still further introduced also
into the realm of mathematics in an amusing manner. Bishop
Berkeley, bantered on his idealism by Halley, retorted that he too
was an idealist; for his ultimate ratios terms only appearing with
the
47 Wilkinson, Dalmatia and Montenegro, vol. i. ch. 1.
48 Northern Antiquities, ch. 10.
49 Lamartine, History of Turkey, book i. ch. 10.
50 Kidd, China, sect. 3.
51 Crantz, History of Greenland, book iii. ch. 6, sect. 47.
disappearance of the forms in whose relationship they consist were
but the ghosts of departed quantities! It may be added here that,
according to the teachings of physiological psychology, all
memories or recollected ideas are literally the ghosts of departed
sensations.
We have thus seen that the conjuring force of fear, with its dread
apparitions, the surmising, half articulate struggles of
affection, the dreams of memory, the lights and groups of poetry,
the crude germs of metaphysical speculation, the deposits of the
inter action of human experience and phenomenal nature, now in
isolated fragments, again, huddled indiscriminately together
conspire to compose the barbarian notions of a future life.