No little injury has been done to the common faith in a future

life, great disbelief has been provoked unwittingly, by writers

who have sought to magnify the importance of revealed religion at

the expense of natural religion. Many such persons have labored to

show that all the scientific, philosophical, and moral arguments

for immortality are worthless, the teachings and resurrection of

Christ, the revealed word of God, alone possessing any validity to

establish that great truth. An accomplished author says, in a

recent work, "The immortality of the soul cannot be proved without

the aid of revelation." 3 Bishop Courtenay published, a few years

since, a most deliberate and unrelenting attack upon the arguments

for the deathlessness of the soul, seeking with persevering

remorselessness to demolish every one of them, and to prove that

man totally perishes, but will be restored to life at the second

coming of Christ.4 There can scarcely be a question that such

statements usually awaken and confirm a deep skepticism as to a

future life, instead of enhancing a grateful estimate of the

gospel.

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

inficiati sunt.

2 Schmidt, Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur im neunzehnten

Jahrhundert, band iii. kap. iv.: Der philosophische Radicalismus.

3 Bowen, Metaphysical and Ethical Science, part ii. ch. ix. The

Future States: Their Evidences and Nature considered on Principles

Physical, Moral, and Scriptural, with the Design of Showing the

Value of the Gospel Revelation.

If man is once annihilated, it is hardly credible that he will be

identically restored. Such a stupendous and arbitrary miracle

clashes with the continuity of the universe, and staggers rather

than steadies faith. We should beg such volunteers however sincere

and good their intentions to withhold the impoverishing gift of

their service. And when kindred reasonings are advanced by such

men as the unbelieving Hume, we feel tempted to say, in the

language of a distinguished divine speaking on this very point,

"Ah, gentlemen, we understand you: you belong to the sappers and

miners in the army of the aliens!"

Another party of disbelievers have repudiated the whole conception

of a future state as a protest against the nonsense and cruelty

associated with it in the prevailing superstitions and dogmatisms

of their time. From the beginning of history in most nations, the

details of another existence and its conditions have been

furnished to the eager credulity of the people by the lawless

fancies of poets, the fine spinning brains of metaphysicians, and

the cold blooded calculations or hot headed zeal of sectarian

leaders. Of course a mass of absurdities would grow up around the

central germ and a multitude of horrors sprout forth. While the

common throng would unquestioningly receive all these ridiculous

and revolting particulars, they could not but provoke doubt,

satire, flat rejection, from the bolder and keener wits. So we

find it was in Greece. The fables about the under world the

ferriage over the Styx, poor Tantalus so torturingly mocked, the

daughters of Danaus drawing water in sieves all were accredited by

the general crowd on one extreme.5 On the other extreme the whole

scheme, root and branch, was flung away with scorn. The following

epitaph on an unbeliever is attributed to Callimachus. "O

Charidas, what are the things below? Vast darkness. And what the

returns to earth? A falsehood. And Pluto? A fable. We have

perished: this is my true speech to you; but, if you want the

flattering style, the Pellaan's great ox is in the shades."6

Meanwhile, a few judicious mediators, neither swallowing the whole

gross draught at a gulp, nor throwing the whole away with utter

disgust, drank through the strainer of a discriminative

interpretation. Because caprice, hatred, and favoritism are

embalmed in some perverse doctrine of future punishment is no

defensible reason for denying a righteous retribution. Because

heaven has been located on a hill top, and its sublime denizens

made to eat ambrosia and sometimes to fall out among themselves,

is no adequate reason for rejecting the idea of a heavenly life.

Puerilities of fancy and monstrosities of passion arbitrarily

connected with principles claiming to be eternal truths should be

carefully separated, and not the whole be despised and trodden on

together. From lack of this analysis and discrimination, in the

presence of abnormal excrescences and offensive secretions dislike

and disbelief have often flourished where, if judicial thought and

conscience had cut off the imposed deformities

5 Plutarch, De Superstition. The reality of the popular credulity

and terror in later Rome clearly appears from the fact that Marcus

Aurelius had a law passed condemning to banishment "those who do

any thing through which men's excitable minds are alarmed by a

superstitious fear of the Deity." Nero, after murdering his

mother, haunted by her ghost and tortured by the Furies, attempted

by magical rites to bring up her shade from below, and soften her

vindictive wrath Suetonius, Vita Neronis, cap. xxxiv.

6 Epigram. XIV.

and dispelled the discoloring vengeance, faith and love would have

been confirmed in contemplating the pure and harmonious form of

doctrine left exposed in the beauty of benignant truth. The aim

ostensibly proposed by Lucretius, in his elaborate and masterly

exposition of the Epicurean philosophy, is to free men from their

absurd belief in childish legends and their painful fears of death

and hell. As far as merely this purpose is concerned, he might

have accomplished it as effectually, perhaps, and more directly,

by exposing the adventitious errors without assailing the great

doctrine around which they had been gathered. Bion the

Borysthenite is reported by Diogenes Laertius to have said, with a

sharp humor, that the souls below would be more punished by

carrying water in whole buckets than in such as had been bored! A

soul may pass into the unseen state though there be no Plutonian

wherry, suffer woe though there be no river Pyriphlegethon, enjoy

bliss though there be no cup of nectar borne by Hebe. But to fly

to rash extremes and build positive conclusions on mere ignorance

has always been natural to man, not only as a believer, but also

as an iconoclastic denier.

A third set of disbelievers in a future life consists of those who

advocate the "emancipation of the flesh" and assert the

sufficiency of this life when fully enjoyed. They attack the dogma

of immortality as the essential germ of asceticism, and abjure it

as a protest against that superstitious distrust and gloom which

put a ban on the pleasures of the world. These are the earthlings

who would fain displace the stern law of self denial with the

bland permission of self indulgence, rehabilitate the senses, feed

every appetite full, and, when satiated of the banquet of

existence, fall asleep under the table of the earth. The

countenance of Duty, severe daughter of God, looks commands upon

them to turn from dallying ease and luxury, to sacrifice the

meaner inclinations, to gird themselves for an arduous race

through difficulties, to labor and aspire evermore towards the

highest and the best. They prefer to install in her stead

Aphrodite crowned with Paphian roses, her eyes aglow with the

light of misleading stars, her charms bewitching them with fatal

enchantments and melting them in softest joys. The pale face of

Death, with mournful eyes, lurks at the bottom of every winecup

and looks out from behind every garland; therefore brim the purple

beaker higher and hide the unwelcome intruder under more flowers.

We are a cunning mixture of sense and dust, and life is a fair but

swift opportunity. Make haste to get the utmost pleasure out of it

ere it has gone, scorning every pretended bond by which sour

ascetics would restrain you and turn your days into penitential

scourges. This gospel of the senses had a swarm of apostles in the

last century in France, when the chief gates of the cemetery in

Paris bore the inscription, "Death is an eternal sleep." It has

had more in Germany in this century; and voices of enervating

music are not wanting in our own literature to swell its siren

chorus.7 Perhaps the greatest prophet it has had was Heine, whose

pages reek with a fragrance of pleasure through which sighs, like

a fading wail from the solitary string of a deserted harp struck

by a lonesome breeze, the perpetual refrain of death! death!

death! His motto seems to be, "Quick! let me

7 Pierer, Universal Lexikon, dritte Auflage, Deutsche Literatur,

sect. 42. Schmidt, Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur im

neuntzehnten Jahrhundert, band iii: kap. i.: Das junge

Deutschland.

enjoy what there is; for I must die. Oh, the gusty relish of life!

Oh, the speechless mystery, the infinite reality, of death!" He

says himself, comparing the degradation of his later experience

with the soaring enthusiasm of his youth, "It is as if a star had

fallen from heaven upon a hillock of muck, and swine were gnawing

at it!"

These men think that the doctrine of a future life, like a great

magnet, has drawn the needle of human activity out of its true

direction; that the dominant tendency of the present age is, and

of right ought to be, towards the attainment of material well

being, in a total forgetfulness to lay up treasures in heaven. The

end is enjoyment; the obstacle, asceticism; the means to secure

the end, the destruction of faith in immortality, so that man,

having nothing left but this world, will set himself to improve

and enjoy it. The monkish severity of a morbid and erroneous

theology, darkening the present and prescribing pain in it to

brighten the future and increase its pleasures, legitimates an

earnest reaction. But that reaction should be wise, measured by

truth. It should rectify, not demolish, the prevailing faith. For

the desired end is most likely to be reached by perceiving, not

that all terminates in the grave, but that the greatest enjoyment

flows from a self controlling devotedness to noble ends, that the

claims of another life are in perfect unison with the interests of

this life, that the lawful fruition of every function of human

nature, each lower faculty being subordinated to each higher one,

and the highest always reigning, at once yields the most immediate

pleasure and makes the completest preparation for the hereafter.

In the absence of the all irradiating sun of immortality, these

disbelievers, exulting over the pale taper of sensual pleasure,

remind us of a parcel of apes gathered around a cold glow worm and

rejoicing that they have found a fire in the damp, chilly night.

Besides the freethinkers, who will not yield to authority, but

insist upon standing apart from the crowd, and the satirists, who

level their shafts undiscriminatingly against what they perceive

associated with absurdity, and the worldlings, who prefer the

pleasures of time to the imaginarily contrasted goods of eternity,

there is a fourth class of men who oppose the doctrine of a

personal immortality as a protest against the burdensome miseries

of individuality. The Gipseys exclaimed to Borrow, "What! is it

not enough to have borne the wretchedness of this life, that we

must also endure another?" 8 A feeling of the necessary

limitations and suffering exposures of a finite form of being has

for untold ages harassed the great nations of the East with

painful unrest and wondrous longing. Pantheistic absorption to

lose all imprisoning bounds, and blend in that ecstatic flood of

Deity which, forever full, never ebbs on any coast has been

equally the metaphysical speculation, the imaginative dream, and

the passionate desire, of the Hindu mind. It is the basis and

motive of the most extensive disbelief of individual immortality

the world has known. "The violence of fruition in these foul

puddles of flesh and blood presently glutteth with satiety," and

the mortal circuits of earth and time are a round of griefs and

pangs from which they would escape into the impersonal Godhead.

Sheerly against this lofty strain of poetic souls is that

grovelling life of ignorance which, dominated by selfish

instincts, crawling on brutish grounds,

8 The Zincali, part ii. ch. i.

cannot awaken the creative force of spiritual wants slumbering

within, nor lift its head high enough out of the dust to see the

stars of a deathless destiny; and a fifth group of disbelievers

deny immortality because their degraded experience does not

prophesy it. Many a man might say, with Autolycus, "For the life

to come, I sleep out the thought of it." A mind holy and loving,

communing with God and an ideal world, "lighted up as a spar grot"

with pure feelings and divine truths, is mirrored full of

incorporeal shapes of angels, and aware of their immaterial

disentanglement and eternity. A brain surcharged with fires of

hatred, drowsed with filthy drugs, and drenched with drunkenness,

will teem, on the contrary, with vermin writhing in the meshes of

decaying matter. Cleaving to evanescent things, men feel that they

are passing away like leaves on waves; filled with convictions

rooted and breathing in eternity, they feel that they shall abide

in serene survival, like stars above tempests. Turn from every

obscene sight, curb every base propensity, obey every heavenly

vision by assimilation of immortal things, sacred self denials and

toils, disinterested sympathies and hopes, accumulate divine

treasures and kindle the mounting flame of a divine life, and at

the same time consciousness will crave and faith behold an

illimitable destiny. Experiences worthy of being eternal generate

faith in their own eternity. But the ignorant and selfish

sensualist, whose total experience is of the earth earthy, who has

no realization of pure truth, goodness, beauty, is incapable of

sincere faith in immortal life. The dormancy of his higher powers

excludes the necessary conditions of such a faith. His ignoble

bodily life does not furnish the conscious basis and prophecy of a

glorious spiritual life, but shudderingly proclaims the cessation

of all his experience with the destruction of his senses. The

termination of all the functions he knows, what else can it be but

his virtual annihilation? When to the privative degradations of an

uncultivated and earthy experience, naturally accompanied by a

passive unbelief in immortality, are added the positive coarseness

and guilt of a thick insensibility and a wicked life, aggressive

disbelief is quite likely to arise, the essay of an uneasy

conscience to slay what it feels would be a foe, and strangle the

worm that never dies. The denial springing from such sources is

refuted when it is explained. Its motive should never by any man

be yielded to, much less be willingly nourished. It should be

resisted by a devout culture courting the smiles of God, by rising

into the loftier airs of meditation and duty, by imaginative

sentiment and practical philanthropy, until the eternal instinct,

long smothered under sluggish loads of sense and sin, reached by a

soliciting warmth from heaven, stirs with demonstrating vitality.

The last and largest assemblage of dissenters from the prevailing

opinion on this subject comprises those who utter their disbelief

in a future existence out of simple loyalty to seeming truth, as a

protest against what they think a false doctrine, and against the

sophistical and defective arguments by which it has been propped.

It may be granted that the five previously named classes are

equally sincere in their convictions, honest assailants of error

and adherents of truth; but they are actuated by animating motives

of a various moral character. In the present case, the ruling

motive is purely a determination, as Buchner says, to stand by the

facts and to establish the correct doctrine. The directest and

clearest way of giving a descriptive account of the active

philosophical history of this class of disbelievers will be to

follow on the lines of their tracks with statements and criticisms

of their procedures.9 Disbelief in the doctrine of a future life

for man has planted itself upon bold affirmation, and fortified

itself with arguments which may most conveniently be considered

under five distinct heads.

First is the sensational Argument from Appearance. In death the

visible functions cease, the organism dissolves, the mind

disappears; there is apparently a total scattering and end of the

individual. That these phenomena should suggest the thought of

annihilation is inevitable; to suppose that they prove the fact is

absurd. It is an arrant begging of the question; for the very

problem is, Does not an invisible spiritual entity survive the

visible material disintegration? Among the unsound and

superstitious attempts to prove the fact of a future life is that

founded on narratives of ghosts, appearances and visions of the

dead. Dr. Tafel published at Tubingen in 1853 a volume aiming to

demonstrate the immortality and personal identity of the soul by

citation of ninety cases of supernatural appearances, extending

from the history of the ghost whose address to Curtius Rufus is

recorded by Tacitus, to the wonderful story told by Renatus

Luderitz in 1837. Such efforts are worse than vain. Their data are

so explicable in many cases, and so inconclusive in all, that they

quite naturally provoke deeper disbelief and produce telling

retorts. While here and there a credulous person is convinced of a

future life by the asserted appearance of a spirit, the well

informed psychologist refers the argument to the laws of insanity

and illusions, and the skeptic adds as a finality his belief that

there is no future life, because no ghost has ever come back to

reveal and certify it. The argument on both sides is equally

futile, and removed from the true requisitions of the problem.

To the philosophical thinker a mere appearance is scarcely a

presumption in favor of a conclusion in accordance with it.

Science and experience are full of examples exposing the nullity

or the falsity of appearances. The sun seems to move around the

earth; but truth contradicts it. We seem to discern distances and

the forms of bodies by direct sight; but the truth is we see

nothing but shades and colors: all beyond is inference based on

acquired experience. The first darkness would seem to the

trembling contemplator absolutely to blot out the universe; but in

truth it only prevented him from seeing it. The first thorough

unconscious sleep would seem to be the hopeless destruction of the

soul in its perfect oblivion. Death is forever for the first time,

shrouded in the misleading obscurities of an unknown novelty.

Appearances are often deceitful, yielding obvious clews only to

mistakes and falsehoods. They are always superficial, furnishing

no reliable evidence of the reality.

"Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal'd

Within thy beams, O Sun! Or who could find,

Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood reveal'd,

That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind?

Why then do we shun death with anxious strife?

If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life?"

9 Spazier, Antiphadon, oder Prufung einiger Hauptbeweise fur die

Einfachheit und Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele.

When the body dies, the mind is no longer manifested through it.

That is all we immediately know by perception. The inference that

the mind has therefore ceased to be at all, is a mere supposition.

It may still live and act, independently of the body. An outside

phenomenon can prove nothing here. We must by some psychological

probe pierce to the core of the being and discern, as there

concealed, the central interpretation of truth, or else, in want

of this, turn from these surface shadows and seek the solution in

some other province. Millions of appearances being opposed to the

truth or inadequate to hint it, we must never implicitly trust

their suggestions. What microscope can reveal the organic life in

a kernel of corn, and show that through the decay of that kernel a

stalk will spring up and bear a thousand kernels more? But if a

new mental life emerges from the dying form of man, it lies in a

spiritual realm whereinto we have no instruments to gaze. Every

existent thing has its metes and limits. In fact, the only final

weapon and fort of a thing is its environing limitation. It goes

into nothing if that be taken down, the atheist says; into

infinity, the mystic says. The mistake and difficulty lie in

discerning what the last wall around the essence is. "The universe

is the body of our body." The boundary of our life is boundless

life. Schlegel has somewhere asked the question, "Is life in us,

or are we in life?" Because man appears to be wholly extinguished

in death, we have no right whatever in reason to conclude that he

really is so. The star which seemed to set in the western grave of

aged and benighted time, we, soon coming round east to the true

spirit sky, may discern bright in the morning forehead of

eternity. There can be no safe reasoning from the outmost husk and

phenomenon of a thing to its inmost essence and result. And, in

spite of any possible amount of appearance, man himself may pass

distinct and whole into another sphere of being when his flesh

falls to dust. That science should search in vain with her finest

glasses to discern a royal occupant reigning in the purple

chambered palace of the heart, or to trace any such mysterious

tenant departing in sudden horror from the crushed and bleeding

house of life, belongs to the necessary conditions of the subject;

for spirit can only be spiritually discerned. As well might you

seek to smell a color, or taste a sound, tie a knot of water, or

braid a cord of wind.

Next comes the abstract Argument from Speculative Philosophy.

Under this head are to be included all those theories which deny

the soul to be a spiritual entity, but reduce it to an atomic

arrangement, or a dependent attribute, or a process of action.

Heracleitus held that the soul was fire: of course, when the fuel

was exhausted the fire would go out. Thales taught that it was

water: this might all evaporate away. Anaximenes affirmed that it

was air, of which all things were formed by rarefaction and

condensation: on such a supposition it could have no permanent

personal identity. Critias said it was blood: this might

degenerate and lose its nature, or be poured out on the ground.

Leucippus maintained that it was a peculiar concourse of atoms: as

these came together, so they might fly apart and there be an end

of what they formed. The followers of Aristotle asserted that it

was a fifth unknown substance, with properties of its own, unlike

those of fire, air, water, and earth. This might be mortal or

immortal: there was nothing decisive in the conception or the

defining terms to prove which it was. Accordingly, the Peripatetic

school has always been divided on the question of the immortality

of the soul, from the time of its founder's immediate disciples to

this day. It cannot be clearly shown what the mighty Stagyrite's

own opinion really was.

Speculative conceptions as to the nature of the soul like the

foregoing, when advanced as arguments to establish its proper

mortality, are destitute of force, because they are gratuitous

assumptions. They are not generalizations based on careful

induction of facts; they are only arbitrary hypotheses.

Furthermore, they are inconsistent both with the facts and

phenomena of experience. Mind cannot fairly be brought into the

category of the material elements; for it has properties and

performs functions emphatically distinguishing it from every thing

else, placing it in a rank by itself, with exclusive predicates of

its own. Can fire think? Can water will? Can air feel? Can blood

see? Can a mathematical number tell the difference between good

and evil? Can earth be jealous of a rival and loyal to a duty? Can

a ganglion solve a problem in Euclid or understand the Theodicee

of Leibnitz? It is absurd to confound things so distinct. Mind is

mind, and matter is matter; and though we are now consciously

acquainted with them only in their correlation, yet there is as

much reason for supposing that the former survives the close of

that correlation as for supposing that the latter does. True, we

perceive the material remaining and do not perceive the spirit.

Yes; but the differentiation of the two is exactly this, that one

is appreciable by the senses, while the other transcends and

baffles them. It is absolutely inconceivable in imagination,

wholly incredible to reason, intrinsically nonsensical every way,

that a shifting concourse of atoms, a plastic arrangement of

particles, a regular succession of galvanic shocks, a continuous

series of nervous currents, or any thing of the sort, should

constitute the reality of a human soul, the process of a human

life, the accumulated treasures of a human experience, all

preserved at command and traversed by the moral lines of personal

identity. The things lie in different spheres and are full of

incommunicable contrasts. However numerously and intimately

correlated the physical and psychical constituents of man are,

yet, so far as we can know any thing about them, they are steeply

opposed to each other both in essence and function. Otherwise

consciousness is mendacious and language is unmeaning. A recent

able author speaks of "that congeries of organs whose union forms

the brain and whose action constitutes the mind." 10 The mind,

then, is an action! Can an action love and hate, choose and

resolve, rejoice and grieve, remember, repent, and pray? Is not an

agent necessary for an action? All such speculative conceptions as

to the nature of soul as make it purely phenomenal are to be

offset, if they can be, by the view which exhibits the personal

ego or conscious selfhood of the soul, not as an empty spot in

which a swarm of relations centre as their goal point, but as an

indestructible monad, the innermost and substantial essence and

cause of the organization, the self apprehending and unchangeable

axis of all thinking and acting. Some of the most free, acute,

learned, wise, and powerful thinkers of the world have been

champions of this doctrine; especially among the moderns may be

named Leibnitz, Herbart, Goethe, and Hartenstein. Jacobi most

earnestly maintained it both against Mendelssohn and against

Fichte.

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

That the mind is a substantial entity, and therefore may be

conceived as immortal, that it is not a mere functional operation

accompanying the organic life, a phantom procession of conscious

states filing off on the stage of the cerebrum "in a dead march of

mere effects," that it is not, as old Aristoxenus dreamed, merely

a harmony resulting from the form and nature of the body in the

same way that a tune springs from the consenting motions of a

musical instrument, seems to be shown by facts of which we have

direct knowledge in consciousness. We think that the mind is an

independent force, dealing with intellectual products, weighing

opposing motives, estimating moral qualities, resisting some

tendencies, strengthening others, forming resolves, deciding upon

its own course of action and carrying out its chosen designs

accordingly. If the soul were a mere process, it could not pause

in mid career, select from the mass of possible considerations

those adapted to suppress a base passion or to kindle a generous

sentiment, deliberately balance rival solicitations, and, when

fully satisfied, proceed. Yet all this it is constantly doing. So,

if the soul were but a harmony, it would give no sounds contrary

to the affections of the lyre it comes from. But actually it

resists the parts of the instrument from which they say it

subsists, exercising dominion over them, punishing some,

persuading others, and ruling the desires, angers, and fears, as

if itself of a different nature.11 Until an organ is seen to blow

its own bellows, mend its shattered keys, move its pedals, and

play, with no foreign aid, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," or a

violin tunes up its discordant strings and wields its bow in a

spontaneous performance of the Carnival, showing us every Cremona

as its own Paganini, we may, despite the conceits of speculative

disbelief, hold that the mind is a dynamic personal entity. That

thought is the very "latch string of a new world's wicket."

Thirdly, we have the fanciful Argument from Analogy. The keen

champions of disbelief, with their athletic agility of dialectics,

have made terrible havoc among the troops of poetic arguments from

resemblance, drawn up to sustain the doctrine of immortality. They

have exposed the feebleness of the argument for our immortality

from the wonderful workmanship and costliness of human nature, on

the ground that what requires the most pains and displays the most

skill and genius in its production is the most lovingly preserved.

For God organizes the mind of a man just as easily as he

constructs the geometry of a diamond. His omnipotent attributes

are no more enlisted in the creation of the intelligence of an

elephant or the gratitude of a soul than they are in the

fabrication of the wing of a gnat or the fragrance of a flower.

Infinite wisdom and power are equally implied in each and in all.

They have shown the gross defectiveness of the comparison of the

butterfly and psyche. The butterfly, lying in the caterpillar

neatly folded up like a flower in the bud, in due time comes

forth. It is a material development, open to the senses, a common

demonstration tosensible experience. The disengagement of a spirit

from a fleshly encasement, on the other hand, is a pure hypothesis

wholly removed from sensible apprehension. There is no parallel in

the cases. So the ridiculousness has been made evident of Plato's

famous analogical argument that by a general law of nature all

things are produced contraries from contraries; warmth dies into

the

11 Plato, Phado, 98.

life of cold, and lives out of the death of cold; night is born

from the death of day, and day is born from the death of night;

and thus everywhere death springs from life, and life from

death.12 The whole comparison, considered as evidence of human

immortality, is baseless and full of astonishing sophistry. When

one hemisphere of the earth is turned away from the sun, it is

night there; when it is turned towards the sun, it is day again.

To this state of facts this revolving succession there is

obviously no parallelism whatever in the two phenomenal phases of

man, life and death, whereof one finishes its course and then the

other seems fixed forever. In like manner, when Jeremy Taylor,13

after the example of many others, especially of old Licetus,

argues soberly, as he does in a letter to Evelyn, for the

immortality of the soul from the analogy of lamps burning in tombs

for centuries with no waste of matter, there is no apposite and

valid similarity, even if the instances were not a childish fable.

An equally baseless argument for the existence of an independent

spiritual body within the material body, to be extricated from the

flesh at death and to survive in the same form and dimensions, we

recollect having seen in a work by a Swedenborgian author.14 He

reasons that when a person who has suffered amputation feels the

lost limb as vividly as ever before, the phenomenon is palpable

proof of a spirit limb remaining while the fleshly one is gone! Of

course, the simple physiological explanation is that the mind

instinctively refers the sensations brought in by the severed

nerves to the points where, by inveterate custom, it has hitherto

learned to trace their origination. The report being the same, it

is naturally attributed to the same source.

But those skeptics who have mercilessly exposed these fallacious

arguments from analogy have themselves reasoned in the same way as

fallaciously and as often. When individual life leaves the

physical man, say they, cosmical life immediately enters the

corpse and restores it to the general stock of nature; so when

personal consciousness deserts the psychical man, the universal

spirit resumes the dissolving soul. When certain conditions meet,

a human soul is formed, a gyrating current of thought, or a vortex

of force: soon some accident or a spent impulse breaks the eddy,

and the individual subsides like a whirl in the air or a water

spout in the sea. When the spirit fuel of life is exhausted, man

goes out as an extinguished candle. He ceases like a tone from a

broken harp string. All these analogies are vitiated by radical

unlikeness between the things compared. As arguments they are

perfectly worthless, being spoiled by essential differences in the

cases. Wherein there is a similarity it falls short of the vital

point. There is no justice in the conception of man as a momentary

gyre of individual consciousness drawn from the universal sea by a

sun burst of the Spirit. He is a self ruling intelligence, using a

dependent organism for his own ends, comprehending his own

destiny, successively developing its conditions and acquiring the

materials for occupying and improving them, with a prevision of

eternity. A flower may just as well perish as live, a musical

sound cease as continue, a lamp be put out as burn on: they know

not the difference. Not so with the soul of man. We here overpass

a discrete degree and enter upon a subject

12 Crawford, On the Phadon of Plato.

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

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

within another circle of categories. Let the rash reasoner who

madly tries conclusions on a matter of such infinite pith and

moment, with data so inapt and poor, pause in sacred horror

before, having first "Put out the light, he then puts out

THE LIGHT!"

There are peculiarities in the soul removing it out of the range

of physical combinations and making a distinct destiny fairly

predicable of it. When we reflect on the nature of a self

contained will, intelligent of immaterial verities and perhaps

transcendent of space and time, how burlesque is the terror of the

ancient corpuscular theorists lest the feebly cohering soul, on

leaving the body, especially if death happened during a storm,

would be blown in pieces all abroad! Socrates, in the Phado, has a

hearty laugh over this; but Lucretius seriously urges it.15 The

answer to the skeptical reasoning from analogy is double. First,

the lines of partial correspondence which visibly terminate within

our tangible reach can teach nothing as to the termination of

other lines which lead out of sight and disappear in a spiritual

region. An organized material form for instance, a tree is fatally

limited: else it would finally fill and exhaust the earth. But no

such limiting necessity can be predicated of mind. Secondly, as

far as there is genuine analogy, its implications are much

stronger in favor of immortality than against it. Matter, whose

essence is materiality, survives all apprehensible changes;

spirit, whose essence is spirituality, should do the same.

Another attack on the doctrine of a future life is masked in the

negative Argument from Ignorance. We do not know how we shall live

again; we are unable to construct the conditions and explain the

details of a spiritual state of existence; and therefore, it is

said, we should of right conclude that there is no such thing. The

proposition is not usually stated so blankly; but it really

amounts to that. The Epicureans say, as a tree cannot exist in the

sky, nor clouds in the ocean, nor fishes in the meadow, nor water

in stone, thus the mind cannot exist apart from the nerves and the

blood. This style of reasoning is a bold begging of the question.

Our present experience is vacant of any specific knowledge of the

conditions, methods, and contents of a life it has not yet

experienced: therefore there is no such life. Innumerable millions

of facts beyond our present knowledge unquestionably exist. It is

not in any way difficult to conceive that innumerable millions of

experiences and problems now defying and eluding our utmost powers

may hereafter fall within our comprehension and be easily solved.

Will you accept the horizon of your mind as the limit of the

universe? In the present, experience must be confined within its

own boundaries by the necessity of the case. If an embryo were

endowed with a developed reasoning consciousness, it could not

construct any intelligible theory of the world and life into which

it was destined soon to emerge. But it would surely be bad logic

to infer, because the embryo could not, from want of materials

within its experience, ascertain the how, the when, the where, and

the what, of the life awaiting it, that there was no other life

reserved for it. An acorn buried and sprouting in the dark mould,

if endowed with intelligent consciousness, could not know any

definite particulars of its maturer life yet to be in the upper

light and air, with cattle in its shade and

15 Lib. iii. ll. 503-508.

singing birds in its branches. Ignorance is not a ground of

argument, only of modest suspense. We can only reason from what we

know. And the wondrous mysteries or natural miracles with which

science abounds, myriads of truths transcending all fictions, melt

and remove from the path of faith every supposed difficulty. Any

quantity of facts have been scientifically established as real

which are intrinsically far more strange and baffling to belief

than the assertion of our immortality is. Indeed, "there is no

more mystery in the mind living forever in the future than in its

having been kept out of life through a past eternity. The

authentic wonder is the fact of the transition having been made

from the one to the other; and it is far more incredible that,

from not having been, we are, than that, from actual being, we

shall continue to be." 16

The unbounded possibilities of life suggested by science and open

to imagination furnish sufficient reply to the objection that we

cannot conceive the precise causes and modes of a future state.

Had one little partitular been different in the structure of the

eye, or in the radiation and media of light, we should never have

seen the stars! We should have supposed this globe the whole of

creation. So some slightest integument or hindering condition may

now be hiding from us the sublime reality and arrangements of

immortality which in death's disenveloping hour are to burst into

our vision as the stellar hemisphere through the night. Shut up

now to one form of being and one method of experience, how can we

expect an exhaustive knowledge of other and future forms and

methods of being and experience? It is a contradiction to ask it.

But the soul is warranted in having faith, like a buried mustard

seed which shall yet mount into its future life. A sevenfold

denser mystery and a seven times narrower ignorance would bring no

real argument against the survival of the soul. For in an

omnipotent infinitude of possibilities one line of ignorance

cannot exhaust the avenues and capacities of being. Escaping the

flesh, we may soar into heaven

"Upon ethereal wings, whose way

Lies through an element so fraught

With living Mind that, as they play,

Their every movement is a thought."

Ignorance of the scientific method avails nothing against moral

proofs of the fact. The physiologist studying the coats of the

stomach, the anatomist dissecting the convolutions of the brain,

could never tell that man is capable of sentiment, faith, and

logic. No stethoscope can discern the sound of an expectation, and

no scalpel can lay bare a dream; yet there are expectations and

dreams. No metaphysical glass can detect, no prognosis foresee,

the death of the soul with the dissolution of its organs: on

empirical grounds, the assertion of it is therefore unwarranted.

But though no amount of obscurity enveloping the subject, no

extent of ignorance disabling us now to grasp the secret, is a

legitimate basis of disbelief, yet actually, there can be no

doubt, in multitudes of instances, the effectual cause of

disbelief in immortality is the impossibility of vividly

conceiving its conditions and scenery; "for," as one of the

subtlest of thinkers has remarked, "however far faith may go

beyond experience, it

16 Martineau, Sermon on Immortality, in Endeavors after the

Christian Life.

must always be chained down by it at a distance." But if there are

good grounds for anticipating another life, then man should

confide in it, no matter how incompetent he is to construct its

theatre and foresee its career. A hundred years ago, one might

have scouted the statement that the most fearful surgical

operations would be performed without inflicting pain, because it

was impossible to see how it could be done. Or if a person had

been informed that two men, one in Europe and one in America,

should converse in lightning athwart the bed of the Atlantic, he

might have rejected it as an absurdity, because he could not

conceive the mode. If destined to a future life, all we could

reasonably expect to know of it now would be through hinting germs

and mystic presentiments of it. And there we do experience to the

fullest extent: their ceaseless prophecies are everywhere with us,

"Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not

realized."

The last weapon of disbelief in a future life is the Scientific

Argument from Materialism. Lucretius says, "There is nothing in

the universe but bodies and the properties of bodies." This is a

characteristic example of the method of the materialists: to

assume, as an unquestionable postulate, the very point in debate,

and that, too, in defiance of the intelligent instincts of

consciousness which compel every unsophisticated person to

acknowledge the simultaneous existence of mind and matter as two

correlated yet distinct realities. The better statement would be,

There is nothing in the universe but forces and the relations of

forces. For, while we know ourselves in immediate self

consciousness, as personal intelligences perceiving, willing, and

acting, all we know of an outward world is the effects produced on

us by its forces. Certainly the powers of the universe can never

be lost from the universe. Therefore if our souls are, as

consciousness declares, causes, and not mere phenomena, they are

immortal. To ignore either factor in the problem of life, the

material substratum or the dynamic agent, is mere narrowness and

blindness.

But the unbelieving naturalist argues that the total man is a

product of organization, and therefore that with the dissolution

of the living combination of organs all is over. Matter is the

marriage bed and grave of soul. Priestley says, "The principle of

thought no more belongs to substance distinct from body than the

principle of sound belongs to substance distinct from bell." There

is no relevancy in the comparison, because the things are wholly

unlike. Thought is not, as Hartley's theory avowed it was, a

vibration of a cerebral nerve, as sound is a vibration of a

sonorous body; for how could these vibrations be accumulated in

memory as our mental experiences are? When a material vibration

ends, it has gone forever; but thoughts are stored up and

preserved. A hypothetical simile, like that just cited from

Priestley, is not a cogent argument. It is false science thus to

limit the modes of being to what lies within our present empirical

knowledge. Is it not pure presumptuousness to affirm that the

creative power of Almighty God is shut up so that intelligent

creatures can only exist in forms of flesh? When a recent

materialist makes the assertion, "The thinking man is the sum of

his senses," it is manifest that he goes beyond the data, assuming

what should be proved, and confounding the instruments and

material with the workman. It is as if one should say, "A working

cotton manufactory is the sum of its machines," excluding the

persons by whose guiding oversight all is done. Plainly, it may be

granted that all which man knows is brought in through the door of

the senses, without allowing the same of all that man is. We have

no warrant for pronouncing the identical coextensiveness of what

man learns to know and what he is created to be. The very

proposition, man knows something, presupposes three things, a

subject, an act, and an object. Whether the three exist and perish

together or not is matter for discussion, and not fairly to be

settled by forcibly lumping the heterogeneous three into

homogeneous unity.

In the present state of science it must be confessed that all

kinds of physical force whether mechanical, chemical, vital, or

nervous are drawn more or less directly from the sun, the material

reservoir of power for our solar system. This must be admitted,

although some recent materialists have pushed the doctrine so far

that they may be called the Parsees of the West. Whenever the

proper conditions for an animate being are furnished, a force

derived from the sun lifts matter from its stable equilibrium to

the level of organic existence. In due season, from its wavering

life struggle there, it decays back to the deep rest of insensate

earth.17 This is a truth throughout the organic realm, from the

bulb of a sea weed to the brain of a Casar. So much cannot be

denied. Every organism constantly receives from the universe food

and force, and as constantly restores in other forms the material

and dynamical equivalents of what it receives, and finally itself

goes to the sources whence it came. But the affirmation of this

for all within the physical realm is not the admission of it for

what subsists in an immeasurably higher rank and totally different

realm. Entering the psychical sphere, where we deal with a new,

distinct order of realities, not impenetrability, weight,

extension, but thought, affection, will, why may not this province

contain eternities, even though the other holds only mortalities?

It is a question to be examined on its own grounds, not to be put

aside with a foregone conclusion. In nature the cause endures

under all evanescent changes, and survives all phenomenal

beginnings and endings: so in spirit the causal personality, if

there be one, may outlast all the shifting currents of the outward

phenomena in endless persistence. Of course, the manifestation of

the mind through the senses must cease when the senses no longer

remain. The essence of the controversy, then, is exactly this: Is

the mind an entity? or is it a collection of functions? If the

soul be a substantial force, it is immortal. If it be a phenomenal

resultant, it ceases at death.

A reductio ad absurdum immediately occurs. If the psychical

totality of man consists of states of feeling, modes of volition,

and powers of thought, not necessitating any spiritual entity in

which they inhere, then, by parity of reasoning, the physical

totality of man consists of states of nutrition, modes of

absorption, and powers of change, implying no body in which these

processes are effectuated! Qualities cannot exist without a

subject: and just as physical attributes involve a body, spiritual

attributes involve a mind. And, if a mental entity be admitted,

its death or cessation with that of its outer dress or case is not

a fair inference, but needs appropriate evidence.

The soul of a man has been defined as the sum of his ideas, an

idea being a state of the consciousness. But the essence of mind

must be the common ground and element of all

17 Moleschott, Licht and Leben.

different states of consciousness. What is that common ground and

element but the presence of a percipient volitional force, whether

manifested or unmanifested, still there? That is the germinal core

of our mental being, integrating and holding in continuous

identity all the phenomenal fluctuations of consciousness. It is

clear that any other representation seems inconsistent with the

most central and vivid facts of our knowledge. In illustration of

this, let us see how every materialistic exposition omits utterly,

or fails to account for, the most essential element, the solitary

and crowning peculiarity, of the case. For example, it is said

that thought or consciousness is a phenomenal process of changes

sustained in the brain by a correlation of forces, just as the

rainbow appears, but has no ontological subsistence of its own:

the continuous spectrum hangs steady on the ceaselessly renewed

substratum of the moving mist rack and the falling rain. But the

comparison is absolutely inapplicable, because the deepest ground

principle of the mind is wanting in the rainbow, namely, conscious

and continuous identity holding in each present moment all the

changes of the past moments. If the rainbow were gifted with

consciousness, it could not preserve its personal identity, but

merely its phenomenal identity, for any two successive moments,

since its whole being would consist of an untied succession of

states.

Traversing the body from its extreme tissues to the gray vesicular

substance composing the spinal cord and covering the surface and

convolutions of the brain, are two sets of white, fibrous nerves.

One set, the afferents, bring in sensation, all kinds of tidings,

from the out world of matter. The other set, the efferents, carry

out volition, all kinds of decrees, from the in world of mind.

Without an afferent nerve no influence of the world can reach the

mind; and without an efferent nerve no conclusion of the mind can

reach the world. As we are now constituted, this machinery is

necessary for the intercommunication of the mind and the material

universe. But if there be something in the case besides live

machinery and crossing telegrams, if there be a monarch mind

inaccessible to the vulgar crowd of things and only conversing

with them through the internuncial nerves, that spirit entity may

itself be capable of existing forever in an ideal universe and of

communing there face to face with its own kingly lineage and

brood. And we maintain that the account of the phenomena is

grossly defective, and that the phenomena themselves are palpably

inexplicable, except upon the supposition of such an entity, which

uses the organism but is not the organism itself nor a function of

it. "Ideas," one materialist teaches, "are transformed

sensations." Yes; but that does not supersede a transforming mind.

There must be a force to produce the transformations. "The

phenomena of mind," says another, "consist in a succession of

states of consciousness." Yes; but what is it that presides over,

takes up, and preserves this succession? The phenomena of the mind

are not the mind itself. "The actions of the mind are the

functions of the cerebrum," adds a third. Yes; but the inquiry is,

what is the mind itself? not, what are its acts? The admission of

the gray nerve cells of the brain, as the material substratum

through which sensations are received and volitions returned, does

not exclude the necessity of a dynamical cause for the

metamorphosing phenomenon. That cause must be free and

intelligent, because the products of its action, as well as its

accompanying consciousness, are marked by freedom and intelligence.

For example, when a cylindrical and

fibrous porter deposits his sensitive burden in the vesicular and

cineritious substance, something examines it, tests its import,

reflects on what shall be done, forms an intelligent resolution,

and commands another porter to bear the dynamic load forth. The

reflective and determining something that does this is the mind.

Thus, by the fact of an indissoluble dynamic will, is the broad

lineal experience of man grasped and kept from dissipating into

crumbled psychical states, as when the dead kings of ancient India

were burned their corpses were wrapped in asbestos shrouds to hold

the ashes together.

The flame of a burnt out candle twinkling in the socket is not

numerically the same with that which appeared when it was first

lighted; nor is a river at any two periods numerically the same.

Different particles constantly feed an ever renewed flame or

stream, just like the former but never the same. A totally new

element appears when we contemplate mind. Here, although the whole

molecular substance of the visible organism is in perpetual flux,

the same conscious personality persists through all, growing ever

richer in an accumulating possession of past experiences still

held in living command. The Arethusa of identity threads the

blending states of consciousness, and, passing the ocean bed of

death, may emerge in some morning fount of immortality. A

photographic image impressed on suitable paper and then

obliterated is restored by exposure to the fumes of mercury. But

if an indefinite number of impressions were superimposed on the

same paper, could the fumes of mercury restore any one called for

at random? Yet man's memory is a plate with a hundred millions of

impressions all cleanly preserved, and he can at will select and

evoke the one he wants. No conceivable relationship of

materialistic forces can account for the facts of this miraculous

daguerreotype plate of experience, and the power of the mind to

call out into solitary conspicuousness a desired picture which has

forty nine million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine

hundred and ninety nine latent pictures lying above it, and fifty

millions below it. It has been said that "the impressions on the

brain, whether perceptions or intellections, are fixed and

retained through the exactness of assimilation. As the mind took

cognizance of the change made by the first impression of an object

acting on the brain through the sense organs, so afterwards it

recognises the likeness of that change in the parts inserted by

the nutritive process.18 This passage implies that the mind is an

agent, not a phenomenon; and it describes some of the machinery

with which the mind works, not the essence of the mind itself. Its

doctrine does not destroy nor explain the presiding and elective

power which interprets these assimilated and preserved changes,

choosing out such of them as it pleases, that unavoided and

incomprehensible power, the hiding place of volition and eternity,

whose startling call has often been known, in some dread crisis,

to effect an instantaneous restoration of the entire bygone life,

making all past events troop through the memory, a swiftly awful

cavalcade marching along the fibrous pavement of the brain, while

each terrified thought rushes to its ashy window to behold. We

here leave the material realm behind and enter a spiritual

province where other predicates and laws hold, and where,

"delivered over to a night of pure light, in which no unpurged

sight is sharp enough to penetrate the mysterious essence that

sprouteth into different persons," we kneel in most pious awe, and

cry, with Sir

18 Paget. Surgical Pathology, Lecture II.

Thomas Browne, "There is surely a piece of divinity in us,

something that was before the elements and owes no homage unto the

sun!"

The fatal and invariable mistake of materialism is that it

confounds means and steps with causes, processes with sources,

organs with ends, predicates with subject.19 Alexander Bain denies

that there is any cerebral closet or receptacle of sensation and

imagery where impressions are stored to be reproduced at pleasure.

He says, the revival of a past impression, instead of being an

evocation of it from an inner chamber, is a setting on anew of the

current which originally produced it, now to produce it again.20

But this theory does not alter the fact that all past impressions

are remembered and can be revived at will by an internal

efficiency. The miracle, and the necessity of an unchanging

conscious entity to explain it, are implied just as they were on

the old theory. "The organs of sense," Sir Isaac Newton writes,

"are not for enabling the soul to perceive the species of things

in its sensorium, but for conveying them there." 21 Now, as we

cannot suppose that God has a brain or needs any material organs,

but rather that all infinitude is his Sensorium, so spirits may

perceive spiritual realities without any mediating organism. Our

physical experience in the present is no limit to the spiritual

possibilities of the future. The materialistic argument against

immortality fails, because it excludes essential facts. As

anterior to our experience in the present state there was a power

to organize experiences and to become what we are, so none of the

superficial reasonings of a mere earth science can show that there

is not now a power to organize experiences in a future state and

to become what our faith anticipates we shall be. And this

suggests to speculative curiosity the query, Shall we commence our

future life, a psychical cell, as we commenced our present life, a

physical cell?

It will be well, perhaps, to reply next to some of the aggressive

sophistries of disbelief. The following lines by Dr. Beddoes are

striking, but, considered as a symbol of life, seem almost

wilfully defective:

"The body is but an engine Which draws a mighty stream of

spiritual power Out of the world's own soul, and makes it play A

while in visible motion."

Man is that miraculous engine which includes not only all the

needful machinery, but also fuel, fire, steam, and speed, and

then, in climacteric addition to these, an engineer! Does the

engineer die when the fire goes out and the locomotive stops? When

the engine madly plunges off the embankment or bridge of life,

does the engineer perish in the ruin, or nimbly leap off and

immortally escape? The theory of despair has no greater

plausibility than that of faith.

Feuerbach teaches that the memento mori of reason meets us

everywhere in the spiritual God's acre of literature. A book is a

grave, which buries not the dead remains, but the quick

19 Frauenstadt, Per Materialismus, seine Wahrheit und sein

Irrthum, s. 169.

20 The Senses and the Intellect, p. 61.

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

man, not his corpse, but his soul. And so we live on the psychical

deposits of our ancestry. Our souls consist of that material which

once constituted other souls, as our bodies consist of the

material which once constituted other bodies. A thought, it is to

be replied, is never excreted from the mind and left behind. Only

its existence is indicated by symbols, while itself is added to

the eternal stock of the deathless mind. A thought is a spiritual

product in the mind from an affection of the cerebral substance. A

sentence is a symbol of a thought adapted to create in the

contemplator just such a cerebral affection as that from which it

sprang, and to deposit in his mind just such a spiritual product

as that which it now denotes. Thus are we stimulated and

instructed by the transmitted symbols of our ancestors'

experiences, but not literally nourished by assimilation of their

very psychical substance, as this remorseless prophet of death's

ghastly idealism would have us believe. Still, in whatever aspect

we regard it, one cannot but shudder before that terrible

cineritious substance whose dynamic inhabitants are generated in

the meeting of matter's messages with mind's forces, and sent

forth in emblems to shake the souls of millions, revolutionize

empires, and refashion the world.

Strauss employs an ingenious argument against the belief in a

future life, an argument as harmless in reality as it is novel and

formidable in appearance. "Whether the nerve spirit be considered

as a dependent product, or as the producing principle of the

organism, it ends at death: for, in the former case, it can no

longer be produced when the organism perishes; in the latter case,

that it ceases to sustain the organism is a proof that it has

itself decayed."22 In this specious bit of special pleading,

unwarranted postulates are assumed and much confusion of thought

is displayed. It is covertly taken for granted that every thing

seen in a given phenomenon is either product or producer; but

something may be an accompanying part, involved in the conditions

of the phenomenon, yet not in any way essentially dependent on it,

and in fact surviving it. What does Strauss mean by "the nerve

spirit"? Is there no mind behind it and above it, making use of it

as a servant? Our present life is the result of an actual and

regulated harmony of forces. Surely that harmony may end without

implying the decay of any of its initial components, without

implying the destruction of the central constituent of its

intelligence. It is illegitimate logic, passing from pure

ignorance to positive affirmation; a saltation of sophistry from a

negative premise of blindness to all behind the organic life, to a

dogmatic conclusion of denial that there is any thing behind the

organic life.

A subtle and vigorous disbeliever has said, "The belief in

immortality is not a correct expression of human nature, but rests

solely on a misunderstanding of it. The real opinion of human

nature is expressed in the universal sorrow and wailing over

death." It is obvious to answer that both these expressions are

true utterances of human nature. It grieves over the sadness of

parting, the appalling change and decay, the close locked mystery

of the unseen state. It rejoices in the solace and cheer of a

sublime hope springing out of the manifold powerful promises

within and without. Instead of contemning the idea of a heavenly

futurity as an idle dream image of human longing, it were both

devouter and more reasonable, from

22 Charakteristiken und Kritiken, s. 394.

that very causal basis of it, to revere it and confide in it as

divinely pledged. All the thwarted powers and preparations and

affections, too grand, too fine, too sacred, to meet their fit

fulfilment here, are a claim for some holier and vaster sphere, a

prophecy of a more exalted and serene existence, elsewhere. The

unsatisfied and longing soul has created the doctrine of a future

life, has it? Very good. If the soul has builded a house in

heaven, flown up and made a nest in the breezy boughs of

immortality, that house must have tenants, that nest must be

occupied. The divinely implanted instincts do not provide and

build for naught.

Certain considerations based on the resemblances of men and

beasts, their asserted community of origin and fundamental unity

of nature, have had great influence in leading to the denial of

the immortality of the human soul. It is taken for granted that

animals are totally mortal; and then, from the apparent

correspondences of phenomena and fate between them and us, the

inference is drawn that the cases are parallel throughout, and

that our destiny, too, is annihilation. The course of thought on

this subject has been extremely curious, illustrating, on the one

hand, that "where our egotism begins, there the laws of logic

break," and, on the other hand, that often when fancy gets scent

of a theory the voice and lash of reason are futile to restrain it

until the theory is run into the ground. Des Cartes, and after him

Malebranche and a few other writers, gave no slight currency to

the notion that brutes are mere machines, moved by prearranged

influences and utterly destitute of intelligence, will, or

consciousness. This scheme gave rise to many controversies, but

has now passed into complete neglect.23 Of late years the tendency

has been to assimilate instead of separating man and beast.

Touching the outer sphere, we have Oken's homologies of the

cranial vertebra. In regard to the inner sphere, we have a score

of treatises, like Vogt's Pictures from Brute Life, affirming that

there is no qualitative, but merely a quantitative, distinction

between the human soul and the brute soul.24 Over this point the

conflict is still thick and hot. But, however much of truth there

may be in the doctrine of the ground identity of the soul of a man

and the soul of a dog, the conclusion that man therefore perishes

is a pure piece of sophistry. Such a monstrous assassination of

the souls of the human race with the jaw bone of an ass may be

legitimately avoided in either of two ways. It is as fair to argue

the immortality of animals from their likeness to us, as our

annihilation from our likeness to them. The psychological realm

has been as much deepened in them by the researches of modern

science as the physiological domain has been widened in us. As

Agassiz says, we must not lose sight of the mental individuality

of animals in an exclusive attention to the bodily side of their

nature.25 A multitude of able thinkers have held the faith that

animals have immaterial and deathless souls. Rightly considered,

there is nothing in such a

23 Darmanson, La bete transformee en machine. Ditton, Appendix to

Discourse on Resurrection of Christ, showing that brutes are not

mere machines, but have immortal souls. Orphal, Sind die Thiere

blos sinnliche Geschopfe? Thomasius, De Anima Brutorum, quo

asseritur, eam non esse Materialem, contra Cartesianam Opinionem.

Winkler, Philosophische Untersuchungen von dem Seyn and Wesen der

Seelen der Thiere, von einzelnen Liebhabern der Weltweisheit.

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

25 Essay on Classification, p. 64.

doctrine which a keen reasoner may not credit and a person of the

most refined feelings find pleasure in embracing. In their serene

catholicity and divine sympathy, science and religion exclude

pride and contempt.

But admitting that there is no surviving psychical entity in the

brute, that is in no way a clear postulate for proving that the

same fact holds of man. The lower endowments and provinces of

man's nature and experience may correspond ever so closely with

the being and life of brutes whose existence absolutely ceases at

death, and yet he may be immortal. The higher range of his

spiritual faculties may elevate him into a realm of universal and

eternal principles, extricating his soul from the meshes of decay.

He may come into contact with a sphere of truths, grasp and rise

into a region of realities, conferring the prerogative of

deathlessness, not to be reached by natures gifted in a much lower

degree, although of the same kind. Such a distinction is made

between men themselves by Spinoza.26 His doctrine of immortality

depicts the stupendous boon as contingent, to be acquired by

observance of conditions. If the ideas of the soul represent

perishable objects, it is itself mortal; if imperishable, it is

immortal. Now, brutes, it is probable, never rise to the

apprehension of pure and eternal truths; but men do. It was a mean

prejudice, founded on selfish ignorance and pride, which first

assumed the total destruction of brutes in death, and afterwards,

by the grovelling range of considerations in which it fastened and

the reaction it naturally provoked, involved man and all his

imperial hopes in the same fate. A firm logical discrimination

disentangles the human mind from this beastly snarl.27 The

difference in data warrants a difference in result. The argument

for the immortality of brutes and that for the immortality of men

are, in some respects, parallel lines, but they are not

coextensive. Beginning together, the latter far outreaches the

former. Man, like the animals, eats, drinks, sleeps, builds;

unlike them, he adorns an ideal world of the eternal future, lays

up treasures in its heavenly kingdom, and waits to migrate into

it.

There are two distinct methods of escaping the fatal inference of

disbelief usually drawn by materialists. First, by the denial of

their philosophical postulates, by the predication of immaterial

substance, affirming the soul to be a spaceless point, its life an

indivisible moment. The reasonings in behalf of this conception

have been manifold, and cogent enough to convince a multitude of

accomplished and vigorous thinkers.28 In Herbart's system the soul

is an immaterial monad, or real, capable of the permanent

formation of states in its interior. Its life consists of a

quenchless series of self preservations. These reals, with their

relations and aggregations, constitute at once the varying

phenomena and the causal substrata of the universe. Mamertius

Claudianus, a philosophical priest of Southern Gaul in the fifth

century, wrote a treatise "On the Nature of the Soul." He says,

"When the soul wills, it is all will; when it recollects or feels,

it is all recollection or feeling. Now, will, recollection, and

feeling, are not bodies. Therefore the soul is incorporeal." This

makes the conscious man an

26 Jouffroy, Introduction to Ethics: Channing's trans., vol. ii.

pp. 189-191.

27 Schaller, Leib und Seele, kap. 13: Der Psychische Unterschied

des Menschen vom Thiere.

28 Crombie, Natural Theology, vol. ii.: Essay on the Immortality

of the Soul. Brougham, Discourse of Nat. Theol., sect. 5.

imperishable substantial activity. An old English writer, with

quaint eloquence, declares, "There is a proportion between an atom

and the universe, because both are quantitative. All this excesse

vanisheth into nothing as soon as the lowest substance shineth out

of that orbe where they reside that scorn divisibility."

From this brief statement of the position of the immaterialists,

without arguing it, we pass to note, in the second place, that

nearly all the postulates ordinarily claimed by the materialist

may be granted without by any means proving the justice of their

disbelief of a future life.29 Admit that there can be no sensation

without a nerve, no thought without a brain, no phenomenal

manifestation without an organ. Such an admission legitimates the

conclusion, on empirical grounds, that our present mode of life

must cease with the dissolution of our organism. It does not even

empirically prove that we may not survive in some other mode of

being, passing perhaps to an inconceivably higher stage and more

blessed kind of life. After the entire disintegration of our

material organs, we may, by some now unknown means, possess in a

refined form the equivalents of what those organs gave us. There

may be, interfused throughout the gross mortal body, an immortal

body of exquisitely delicate structure invisibly extricating

itself from the carious ruins at death. Plattner develops and

defends this hypothesis with plausible skill and power.30 The

Hindus conceived the soul to be concealed within several

successive sheaths, the innermost of which accompanied it through

all its transmigrations.31 "The subtile person extends to a small

distance over the skull, like the flame of a lamp above its wick."

32 The later Pythagoreans and Platonists seem to have believed

that the same numerical ethereal body with which the soul was at

first created adhered to it inseparably during all its descents

into grosser bodies, a lucid and wingy vehicle, which, purged by

diet and catharms, ascends again, bearing the soul to its native

seat.33 The doctrine of Swedenborg asserts man to be interiorly an

organized form pervading the physical body, an eternal receptacle

of life from God. In his terminology, "constant influx of life"

supersedes the popular idea of a self contained spiritual

existence. But this influx is conditioned by its receiving organ,

the undecaying inner body.34 However boldly it may be assailed and

rejected as a baseless theory, no materialistic logic can disprove

the existence of an ethereal form contained in, animating, and

surviving, the visible organism. It is a possibility; although,

even if it be a fact, science, by the very conditions of the case,

can never unveil or demonstrate it.

When subjected to a certain mode of thought developed recently by

Faraday, Drossbach, and others, materialism itself brightens and

dissolves into a species of idealism, the universe becomes a

glittering congeries of indestructible points of power, and the

immortality of the soul is established as a mathematical

certainty.35 All bodies, all entities, are but forms of

This has been ably shown by Spiers in his treatise, Ueber das

korperliche Bedingtsein der Seelenthatigkeiten.

30 Spes immortalitatis animorum per rationes physiologicas

confirmata.

31 Dabistan, vol. ii. p. 177.

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

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

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

35 Lott, Herbarti de animi immortalitate doctrina.

force.36 Gravity, cohesion, bitterness, thought, love,

recollection, are manifestations of force peculiarly conditioned.

Our perceptions are a series of states of consciousness. An

attribute or property of a thing is an exercise of force or mode

of activity producing a certain state of consciousness in us. The

sum of its attributes or properties constitutes the totality of

the thing, and is not adventitiously laid upon the thing: you can

separate the parts of a thing; but you cannot take away its forces

from any part, because they are its essence. Matter is not a

limitation or neutralization, but a state and expression, of

force. Force itself is not multiplex, but one, all qualities and

directions of it lying potentially in each entity, the kinds and

amounts which shall be actually manifested depending in each case

on the conditions environing it. All matter, all being, therefore,

consists of ultimate atoms or monads, each one of which is an

inseparable solidarity of activities. The universe is an eternal

society of eternal force individuals, all of which are capable of

constant changes in groupings, aggregations, developments,

relations, but absolutely incapable of annihilation. Every atom

possesses potential reason, and comes to self apprehension

whenever the appropriate conditions meet. All differences

originate from conditions and exist not in essentialities.

According to this theory, the eternity of the soul is sure, but

that eternity must be an endless series of mutual transitions

between consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death.37 Since

all cannot be men at once, they must take their turns. Carus says,

a soul enclosing in itself an independent consciousness is

inconceivable. When the organism by which consciousness is

conditioned and revealed is destroyed in death, consciousness

disappears as certainly as the gleaming height of a dome falls in

when its foundation is removed. And Drossbach adds, death is the

shade side of life. Without shade, light would not be perceptible,

nor life without death; for only contrast leads to knowledge. The

consciousness of life is realized by interchange with the

unconsciousness of death. Mortality is the inevitable attribute of

a self conscious being. The immortality of such a being can be

nothing else than an everlasting mortality. In this restless

alternation between the opposite states of life and death, being

holds continuous endurance, but consciousness is successively

extinguished and revived, while memory is each time hopelessly

lost. Widenmann holds that the periods of death are momentary, the

soul being at once born again, retaining no vestiges of its

past.38 Drossbach, on the contrary, believes that memory is an

indefeasible quality of the soul atom, the reason why we do not

remember previous lives being that the present is our first

experiment. When all atoms destined to become men have once run

the human career, the earliest ones will begin to reappear with

full memory of their preceding course. It matters not how long it

requires for one circuit of the whole series of souls; for the

infinite future is before us, and, as we are unconscious in death,

the lapse of ages is nothing. We lie down to sleep, and instantly

rise up to a new life.

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

37 Drossbach, Die personliche Unsterblichkeit als Folge der

atomistischen Verfaasung der Natur, abschn. iv. kap. ii. sect. 5,

6.

38 Gedanken uber die Unsterblichkeit als Wiederholung des

Erdenlebens.

"Death gives to life all its relish, as hunger is the true sauce

of food. Death first makes us precious and dear to ourselves.

Since it lies in the nature of change that no condition is

endless, but morning ever follows night, death cannot be endless.

Be unconcerned; thy being shall as little be lost as the grain of

dust at thy foot! Because in death thou dost not know that thou

art, therefore fearest thou that thou shalt be no more? O

pusillanimous! the great events of nature are too vast for thy

weak heart. A whole eternity thou hast not been conscious that

thou art, and yet thou hast become conscious of it. Every night

thou losest thy consciousness, yet art thou conscious again, and

shalt be. The loss of consciousness is not necessarily the loss of

self. The knowledge of my being is not my being itself, but a

peculiar force thereof, which, entering into reciprocal action

with other forces, is subject to change. It is its essence to act,

and thus to change, yet without surrendering its essence. Goethe's

words may be applied to the soul: 'It is; therefore eternally it

is.'

Not in cold motionlessness consists eternal life, but in eternal

movement, in eternal alteration, in incessant change. These are

warranties that no state endures forever, not even the

unconscious, death." 39

In this unfolding of the theory there are many arbitrary and

fanciful conceptions which may easily be dispensed with. The

interspersion of the bright life of the human monads with blank

epochs of oblivious darkness, and the confinement of their destiny

to an endless repetition of their life course on this globe, are

not necessary. In the will of God the free range of the boundless

universe may lie open to them and an incessant career in forever

novel circumstances await them. It is also conceivable that human

souls, leading still recurrent lives on earth with total

forgetfulness, may at last acquire sufficient power, in some happy

concurrence or sublime exigency, to summon back and retain all

their foregone states. But, leaving aside all such incidental

speculations, the chief interest of the dynamic atomistic or monad

theory, as affording a solid basis for immortality, is in relation

to the arrogance of a shallow and conceited materialism. Says the

materialist, "Show me a spirit, and I will believe in your

heaven." Replies the idealist, "Show me your matter, however small

a piece, and I will yield to your argument." Spirit is no

phenomenon to be shown, and matter is an inference from thought:

thus the counter statements of physical science and ideal

philosophy fairly offset each other, and throw their respective

advocates back upon the natural ground of unsophisticated faith

and observation. Standing there unperverted, man has an invincible

reliance on the veracity of his faculties and the normal reports

of nature. Through immediate apprehension of his own conscious

will and the posited experience of his senses, he has knowledge

both of causal forms of being, or free productive force, and of

resultant processes and phenomena. And surely sound logic teaches

that the latter may alter or disappear without implying the

annihilation of the former. If all material substance, so called,

were destroyed, not only would space remain as an infinite

indivisible unity, but the equivalents

39 Drossbach, Die individuelle Unsterblichkeit vom monadistisch

metaphysischen Standpunkte betrachtet.

of what had been destroyed must remain in some form or other. Who

shall say that these equivalents would not be intelligent points

of power, capable of organizing aggregate bodies and of

reconstituting the universe in the will of God, or of forming from

period to period, in endless succession, new kinds of universes,

each abounding in hitherto unimagined modes of life and degrees of

bliss? To our present faculties, with only our present

opportunities and data, the final problem of being is insoluble.

We resolve the properties of matter into methods of activity,

manifestations of force. But there, covered with alluring awe, a

wall of impenetrable mystery confronts us with its baffling "Thus

far, and no farther, shall thine explicating gaze read the secrets

of destiny." We cannot tell what force is. We can conceive neither

its genesis nor its extinction. Over that obscure environment,

into the immense empire of possibilities, we must bravely fling

the treasures of our love and the colors of our hope, and with a

divine impulse in the moment of death leap after, trusting not to

sink as nothing into the abyss of nowhere, but, landing safe in

some elysium better than we know, to find ourselves still in God.

In dealing with moral problems in the realm of the higher reason,

intuitions, mysterious hints, prophetic feelings, instinctive

apprehensions of fitness and harmony, may be of more convincing

validity than all the formal arguments logic can build.40

"Sentiment," Ancillon says, as quoted by Lewes, "goes further than

knowledge: beyond demonstrative proofs there is natural evidence;

beyond analysis, inspiration; beyond words, ideas; beyond ideas,

emotions; and the sense of the infinite is a primitive fact of the

soul." In transcendental mathematics, problems otherwise

unapproachable are solved by operating with emblems of the

relations of purely imaginary quantities to the facts of the

problems. The process is sound and the result valid, notwithstanding

the hypothetical and imaginary character of the aids in reaching it.

When for mastering the dim momentous problems of our destiny

the given quantities and relations of science are inadequate,

the helpful supposititious conditions furnished by faith may

equally lead over their airy ways to conclusions of eternal truth.

The disbelievers of a future life have in their investigations

applied methods not justly applicable to the subject, and

demanded a species of proof impossible for the subject to yield:

as if one should use his ear to listen to the symmetries of beauty,

and his eye to gaze upon the undulations of music.

It is therefore that the terribly logical onslaughts of

Feuerbach are harmless upon most persons. The glittering scimetar

of this Saracenic metaphysician flashes swift and sharp, but he

fights the air with weapons of air. No blood flows from the

severed emptiness of space; no clash of the blows is heard any

more than bell strokes would be heard in an exhausted receiver.

One may justifiably accept propositions which strict science

cannot establish and believe in the existence of a thing which

science cannot reveal, as Jacobi has abundantly shown41 and as

Wagner has with less ability tried to illustrate.42 The utmost

possible achievement of a negative criticism is to show the

invalidity of the physiological,

40 Abel, Disquisitio omnium tam pro immortalitate quam pro

mortalitate argumentandi generum.

41 Von den goutlichen Dingen and ibrer Offenbarung. Wissen und

Glauben mit besonderer Beziehung zur Zukunft der Seelen:

Fortsetzung der Betrachtungen uber Menschenschopfung und

Seelensubstanz.

analogical, and metaphysical arguments to furnish positive proof

of a future life for us. But this negation fully admitted is no

evidence of our total mortality. Science is impotent to give any

proof reaching to such a conclusion. However badly the archery of

the sharp eyed and strong armed critics of disbelief has riddled

the outer works of ordinary argument, it has not slain the

garrison. Scientific criticism therefore leaves us at this point:

there may be an immortal soul in us. Then the question whether

there actually is an immortal soul in us, rests entirely on moral

facts and considerations. Allowing their native force to these

moral facts and considerations, the healthy ethical thinker,

recognising in himself an innermost self conscious ego which knows

itself persistent and identical amidst the multiplex vicissitude

of transient conditions, lies down to die expecting immediately to

continue his being's journey elsewhere, in some other guise.

Leaving out of view these moral facts and considerations, the

materialistic naturalist thinker, recognising his consciousness as

only a phantom procession of states across the cerebral stage hung

in ashy livery and afloat on blood, lies down to expire expecting

immediately to be turned into nobody forever. Misinterpreting and

undervaluing these moral facts and considerations, the anchorless

speculative thinker, recognising his organism as an eye through

which the World Spirit beholds itself, or a momentary pulse in

which the All feels itself, his consciousness as a part of the

infinite Thought, lies down on his death couch expecting

immediately to be turned into everybody, eternity, instead of

greeting him with an individual kiss, wrapping him in a monistic

embrace. The broad drift of human conviction leads to the first

conclusion, a persistent personality. The greatest philosophers,

from Plato to Pascal, deny the second view, a blotting extinction

of the soul, declaring it false in science and incredible in

presentation. The third theory a pantheistic absorption the

irresistible common sense of mankind repudiates as a morbid dream.

Man naturally believes himself immortal but not infinite. Monism

is a doctrine utterly foreign to undiseased thinking. Although it

be a Fichte, a Schelling, or a Hegel, who says that the soul is a

circumscribed yet omnipotent ego, which first radiates the

universe, and afterwards beholds it in the mirror of itself, and

at length breaks into dead universality, the conception is, to the

average apprehension of humanity, as overweening a piece of wild

fancy as ever rose in a madman's reveries.43

The ordinary contemplator of the phenomena of the world and the

sequel of human life from the materialistic point of view feels

disgust and terror at the prospect. The scene seems to him

degrading and the fate fearful. The loathing and dismay vulgarly

experienced thus, it is true, arise from an exaggerated

misapprehension of the basis and meaning of the facts: rightly

appreciated, all is rulingly alive, aspirant, beautiful, and

benignant. The ceaseless transformations filling the heights and

depths of the creation are pervaded with joy and

42 A full discussion of the pantheistic doctrine of immortality

will be found in the following works. Richmann, Gemsinfassl.

Darstellung und Wurdigung aller gehaltreichen Beweisarten fur Gott

und fur Unsterblichkeit der Seele. Unius, Unsterblichkeit.

Blanche, Philosophische Unsterblichkeitlehre.

43 Weisse, Die philosophische Geheimlehre von der Unsterblichkeit

des menschlichen Individuums. Goschel, Von den Beweisen fur die

Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele im Lichte der speculativen

Philosophie. Morell, Historical and Critical View of the

Speculative Philosophy of Europe in the 19th Century, part ii. ch.

v. sect. 2: The German School of the 19th Century. Buchanan,

Modern Atheism.

clothed with a noble poetry. There is no real death: what seems so

is but a "return or falling home of the fundamental phenomenon to

the phenomenal foundation, a dissolution through which nature

seeks her ground and strives to renew herself in her principles."

Still, in spite of this more profound and genial interpretation of

the shifting metamorphoses of nature, the fear of there being no

conscious future life for man produces, when first entertained, a

horrid constriction around the heart, felt like the ice cold coils

of a serpent. The thought of tumbling hopelessly into "The blind

cave of eternal night" naturally oppresses the heart of man with

sadness and with alarm. To escape the unhappiness thus inflicted,

recourse has been had to expedients. Four artificial substitutes

for immortality have been devised. Fondly fixing attention upon

these, men have tried to find comfort and to absorb their thoughts

from the dreaded spectre and the long oblivion. The first is the

sentimental phantasm of posthumous fame. The Latin bard, ancient

Ennius, sings,

"Nemo me lacrymis decoret, nec funera fletu Faxit. Cur? volito

vivu' per ora virum." 44

Shakspeare likewise often expresses the same thought:

"When all the breathers of this world are dead, You still shall

live (such virtue hath my pen) Where breath most breathes, even in

the mouths of men."

And again in similar strain:

"My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since, spite of

him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er dull and

speechless tribes."

Napoleon is reported to have said, "My soul will pass into history

and the deathless memories of mankind; and thus in glory shall I

be immortal." This characteristically French notion forms the

essence of Comte's "positivist" doctrine of a future life. Those

deemed worthy after their death to be incorporated, by vote of the

people, in the Supreme Being, the Grand Etre, a fictitious product

of a poetic personification, through the perpetual fame and

influence thus secured have an immortal life in the thoughts and

feelings of a grateful posterity. Comte says, "Positivism greatly

improves immortality and places it on a firmer foundation, by

changing it from objective to subjective." Great and eternal

Humanity is God. The dead who are meritorious are alone

remembered, and, thus incorporated into the Divinity, they have a

"subjective immortality in the brains of the living." 45 It is a

poor shadow of the sublime truth which the soul craves. Leopardi,

in his Bruto Minore, expresses this "poor hope of being in the

future's breath:"

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

45 Catechism of Positive Religion, Conversation III.

"dell' atra morte ultima raggio Conscia future eta." That proud

and gifted natures should have seriously stooped to such a toy, to

solace themselves with it, is a fact strange and pathetic. With

reverential tenderness of sympathy must we yearn towards those

whose loving natures, baffled of any solid resource, turn

appealingly, ere they fade away, to clasp this substanceless image

of an image.

Another scheme is what may be called the "lampada tradunt" 46

theory of a future life. Generations succeed each other, and the

course is always full. Eternal life takes up new subjects as fast

as its exhausted receptacles perish. Men are the mortal cells of

immortal humanity. The individual must comfort himself with the

sympathetic reflection that his extinction destroys nothing, since

all the elements of his being will be manipulated into the forms

of his successors.

Life is a constant renovation, and its sum is forever full and

equal on the globe. The only genuine resurrection unto eternal

life is an unending re creation of organisms from the same

materials to repeat the same physiological and psychological

processes.47 There is a gleam of cheer and of nobleness in this

representation; but, upon the whole, it is perhaps as ineffectual

as the former. It is a vapid consolation, in view of our own

annihilation, to think that others will then live and also be

annihilated in their turn. It is pleasant to believe that the

earth will forever be peopled with throngs of men; but though such

a belief might help to reconcile us to our fate, it could not

alter the intrinsic sadness of that fate.

A third substitute for the common view of immortality is a

scientific perception of the fact that the peculiar force which

each man is, the sum of his character and life, is a cause

indestructibly mixed with the course of subsequent history, an

objective personal immortality, though not a conscious one. What

he was, remains and acts forever in the world.

The fourth substitute is an identification of self with the

integral scheme of things. I am an inseparable portion of the

totality of being, to move eternally in its eternal motion.

"If death seem hanging o'er thy separate soul, Discern thyself a

part of life's great whole."

Lose the thought of thy particular evanescence in the thought of

the universal permanence. The inverted torch denotes death to a

mere inhabitant of the earth: to a citizen of the universe,

downward and upward are the same. Perhaps one who rejects the

ordinary doctrine of a future life can be solaced and edified by

these substitutes in proportion to his fineness, greatness, and

nobleness. But to most persons no substitute can atone for the

withdrawn truth of immortality itself.

In regard to the eternal preservation of personal consciousness,

it were bigoted blindness to deny that there is room for doubts

and fears. While the monad soul so to call it lies here beneath

the weak glimmer of suns so far off that they are forceless to

develop it to a

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

47 Schultz Schultzenstein, Die Bildung des menschlichen Geistes

durch Kultur der Verjungung seines Lebens, ss. 834-847: Die

Unsterblichkeitsbegriffe.

victorious assurance, we cannot but sometimes feel misgivings and

be depressed by skeptical surmises. Accordingly, while belief has

generally prevailed, disbelief has in every age had its

representatives. The ancients had their Dicaarchus, Protagoras,

Panatius, Lucan, Epicurus, Casar, Horace, and a long list besides.

The moderns have had their Gassendi, Diderot, Condillac, Hobbes,

Hume, Paine, Leopardi, Shelley, and now have their Feuerbach,

Vogt, Moleschott, and scores of others needless to be named. And

although in any argument from authority the company of the great

believers would incomparably outshine and a thousand times

outweigh the array of deniers, this does not alter the obvious

fact that there are certain phenomena which are natural

provocatives of doubt and whose troubling influence scarcely any

one can always escape. Homer, in giving expression to Hector's

confidence of victory over the Greeks, makes him wish that he were

but as sure of entering the state of the immortal gods.48 When

some one asked Dr. Johnson, "Have we not proof enough of the

immortality of the soul?" he replied, "I want more." Davenant of

whom Southey says, "I know no other author who has so often

expressed his doubts respecting a future state and how burdensome

he felt them" writes, "But ask not bodies doom'd to die,

To what abode they go: Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy,

It is not safe to know."

Charles Lamb writes, "If men would honestly confess their

misgivings, (which few men will,) there are times when the

strongest Christian of us has reeled under questionings of such

staggering obscurity." Many a man, seeing nature hang her veil of

shifting glories above the silent tombs of vanished generations,

voiceless now forever, entertaining innumerable contradictory

queries amidst feelings of decay and sights of corruption, before

the darkness of unknown futurity might piteously exclaim, without

deserving blame,

"I run the gauntlet of a file of doubts, Each one of which down

hurls me to the ground."

Who that has reached maturity of reflection cannot appreciate and

sympathize somewhat with these lines of Byron, when he stands

before a lifeless form of humanity?

"I gazed, as oft I have gazed the same, To try if I could wrench

aught out of death Which should confirm, or shake, or make, a

faith; But it was all a mystery. Here we are, And there we go: but

where? Five bits of lead, Or three, or two, or one, send very far!

And is this blood, then, form'd but to be shed? Can every element

our elements mar? Can air, earth, water, fire, live and we dead?

We, whose minds comprehend all things? No more."

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

Doubt is not sin, but rather a misfortune; for it is to adopt a

suggestion from Schaller a cleft in the soul through which thought

steals away what the heart desires. The guilt or innocence of

doubting depends on the spirit in which it is done. There are two

attitudes of mind and moods of feeling before propositions and

evidence. One is, "I will not believe unless I see the prints of

the nails and lay my finger in the marks of the wounds." The other

is, "Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief." In abstract logic

or rigid science the former may be appropriate and right. The

latter alone can be justifiable in moral and religious things. If

a man sorrowfully and humbly doubts, because he cannot help it, he

shall not be condemned. When he is proud of his doubts,

complacently swells with fancied superiority, plays the fanfaron

with his pretentious arguments, and sets up as a propagandist of

disbelief, being all the while in reality "Most ignorant of what

he is most assured, His glassy essence," his conduct is offensive

to every good man, and his spirit must receive the condemnation of

God. A missionary of atheism and death, horridly eager to destroy

those lofty thoughts which so much help to make us men, is a

shocking spectacle. Yet a few such there are, who seem delighted

as by their dismal theory they bury mankind in an iron tomb of

materialism and inscribe on the irrevocable door the solitary

words, Fate and Silence.

The more attentively one dwells on the perishable physical side of

life, the more prone he will be to believe in an absolute death;

the more prevailingly he ponders the incorruptible psychical side,

the more prepared he will be to credit immortality. The chemist

who confines his studies exclusively within his own province, when

he reflects on the probable sequence of life, will speculatively

see himself vanish in his blowpipes and retorts. Whoso devotedly

dabbles in organisms, nerves, and bloods may easily become

skeptical of spirit; for it everywhere balks his analysis and

eludes his search. The objects he deals with are things. They

belong to change and dissolution. Mind and its proper home belong

to a different category of being. Because no heaven appears at the

end of the telescope, and no soul is seen on the edge of the

dissecting knife, and no mind is found at the bottom of the

crucible, to infer that therefore there is neither heaven, nor

soul, nor mind, is as monstrous a non sequitur as it would be to

infer the non existence of gravity because it cannot be distilled

in any alembic nor discerned with any glass. The man who goes into

the dark crimson dripping halls of physiology seeking proofs of

immortality, and, failing to find them, abandons his faith in it,

is like that hapless traveller who, groping in the catacombs under

Rome, was buried by the caving in of the sepulchral roof, and thus

lost his life, while all the time, above, the great vault of

heaven was stretching, blue and breezy, filled with sunshine and

sentient joy!

When we contemplate men in a mass, like a swarm of bees or a hive

of ants, we find ourselves doubting their immortality. They melt

away, in swiftly confused heaps and generations, into the bosom of

nature. On the other hand, when we think of individuals, an almost

unavoidable thought of personal identity makes us spontaneously

conclude them immortal. It rather requires the effort then to

think them otherwise. But obviously the real problem is never of

the multitudinous throng, but always of the solitary person. In

reference

to this question it is sophistry to fix our thoughts on a Chinese

city as crowded with nameless and indistinguishable human

inhabitants as a decayed cheese is with vermin. Fairness requires

that our imaginations and reasonings upon the subject fasten upon

an individual, set apart and uplifted, like a king, in the

incommunicable distinctness and grandeur of selfhood and

responsibility.

From looking about this grave paved star, from painful and

degrading contemplations of dead bodies, "the snuff and loathed

part of nature which burns itself out," let a man turn away, and

send his interior kingly glance aloft into ideal realms, let him

summon up the glorious sentiments of freedom, duty, admiration,

the noble experiences of self sacrifice, love, and joy, and his

soul will extricate itself from the filthy net of material decay,

and feel the divine exemption of its own clean prerogatives,

dazzling types of eternity, and fragments of blessedness that

"Promise, on our Maker's truth, Long morrow to this mortal youth."

Martyrdom is demonstration of immortality; for self preservation

is the innermost, indestructible instinct of every conscious

being. When the soul, in a sacred cause, enthusiastically rushes

upon death, or in calm composure awaits death, it is irresistibly

convinced that it cannot be hurt, but will be blessed, by the

crisis. It knows that in an inexpressibly profound sense whosoever

would ignobly save his life loses it, but whosoever would nobly

lose his life saves it. Martyrdom demonstrates immortality.

"Life embark'd out at sea, 'mid the wave tumbling roar, The poor

ship of my body went down to the floor; But I broke, at the bottom

of death, through a door, And, from sinking, began forever to

soar."

The most lamentable and pertinacious doubts of immortality

sometimes arise from the survey of instances of gross wickedness,

sluggishness, and imbecility forced on our attention. But, as

these undeniably are palpable violations of the creative

intention, it is not just to reason from them. In fairness the

argument demands that we select the noblest, healthiest specimens

of completed humanity to reason from. Should we not take a case in

which God's will is so far plainly fulfilled, in order to trace

that will farther and even to its finality? And regarding on his

death bed a Newton, a Fenelon, a Washington, is it difficult to

conceive him surviving the climax and catastrophe of his somatic

cell basis and soaring to a more august range of existence?

Remembering that such as these have lived and died, ay, and even

the godlike Nazarene, can we believe that man is merely a white

interrogation point lifted on the black margin of matter to ask

the answerless secret of the universe and be erased?

Such a conclusion charges God with the transcendent crime of

infanticide perpetrated in the most deliberate manner and on the

most gigantic scale. Who can bear, by thus quenching the hope of

another life, to add death to death, and overcast, to every

thoughtful eye, the whole sunny field of life with the melancholy

shadow of a bier? There is a noble strength and confidence,

cheering to the reader, in these words of one of the wisest and

boldest of thinkers: "I should be the very last man to be willing

to dispense with the faith in a future life: nay, I would say,

with Lorenzo de'Medici, that all those are dead, even for the

present life, who do not hope for another. I have the firm

conviction that our soul is an existence of indestructible nature,

whose working is from eternity to eternity. It is like the sun,

that seems indeed to set, but really never sets, shining on in

unchangeable splendor." 49 Such a view of our destiny incomparably

inspires and ennobles us. Man, discovering under all the poor,

wretched accidents of earth and sense and hard fortune the

immortality of his soul, feels as that king's son who, lost in

infancy, and growing up under the care of a forest hind, supposed

himself to belong to the rude class among whom he lived; but one

day, learning his true parentage, he knew beneath his mean

disguise that he was a prince, and immediately claimed his

kingdom. These facts of experience show clearly how much it

behooves us to cultivate by every honest method this cardinal

tenet of religion, how much wiser faith is in listening to the

lucid echoes of the sky than despair in listening to the muffled

reverberations of the grave. All noble and sweet beliefs grow with

the growing nobleness and tenderness of characters sensitive to

those fine revealings which pachydermatous souls can never know.

In the upper hall of reason, before the high shrine of faith, burn

the base doubts begotten in the cellars of sense; and they may

serve as tapers to light your tentative way to conviction. If the

floating al Sirat between physiology and psychology, earth and

heaven, is too slippery and perilous for your footing, where heavy

limbed science cannot tread, nerve the wings of faith for a free

flight. Or, if every effort to fasten a definite theory on some

solid support on the other side of the gulf fails, venture forth

on the naked line of limitless desire, as the spider escapes from

an unwelcome position by flinging out an exceedingly long and fine

thread and going forth upon it sustained by the air.50 Whoever

preserves the full intensity of the affections is little likely to

lose his trust in God and a future life, even when exposed to

lowering and chilling influences from material science and

speculative philosophy: the glowing of the heart, as Jean Paul

says, relights the extinguished torch in the night of the

intellect, as a beast stunned by an electric shock in the head is

restored by an electric shock in the breast. Daniel Webster says,

in an expression of his faith in Christianity written shortly

before his death, "Philosophical argument, especially that drawn

from the vastness of the universe in comparison with the apparent

insignificance of this globe, has sometimes shaken my reason for

the faith which is in me; but my heart has always assured and

reassured me."51 Contemplating the stable permanence of nature as

it swallows our fleet generations, we may feel that we vanish like

sparks in the night; but when we think of the persistent identity

of the soul, and of its immeasurable superiority to the brute mass

of matter, the aspect of the case changes and the moral inference

is reversed. Does not the simple truth of love conquer and trample

the world's aggregated lie? The man who, with assiduous toil and

earnest faith, develops his forces, and disciplines his faculties,

and cherishes his aspirations, and accumulates virtue and wisdom,

is thus preparing the auspicious stores and conditions of another

existence. As he slowly journeys over the mountains of life, aware

that there can be

49 Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe.

50 Greenough, An Artist's Creed.

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

no returning, he gathers and carries with him materials to build a

ship when he reaches the strand of death. Upon the mist veiled

ocean launching then, he will sail where? Whither God orders. Must

not that be to the right port?

We remember an old Brahmanic poem brought from the East by Ruckert

and sweetly resung in the speech of the West full of encouragement

to those who shall die.52 A man wrapped in slumber calmly reclines

on the deck of a ship stranded and parting in the breakers. The

plank on which he sleeps is borne by a huge wave upon a bank of

roses, and he awakes amidst a jubilee of music and a chorus of

friendly voices bidding him welcome. So, perhaps, when the body is

shattered on the death ledge, the soul will be tossed into the

fragrant lap of eternal life on the self identified and dynamic

plank of personality.

52 Brahmanische Erzahlungen, s. 5.

CHAPTER IX.

MORALITY OF THE DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE. IN discussing the

ethics of the doctrine of a future life a subject here amazingly

neglected, there more amazingly maltreated, and nowhere, within

our knowledge, truly analyzed and exhibited1 it is important that

the theme be precisely defined and the debate kept strictly to the

lines. Let it be distinctly understood, therefore, that the

question to be handled is not, "Whether there ought to be a future

life or not," nor, "Whether there is a future life or not." The

question is, "What difference should it make to us whether we

admit or deny the fact of a future life?" If we believe that we

are to pass through death into an immortal existence, what

inferences pertaining to the present are right, fully to be drawn

from the supposition? If, on the other hand, we think there is

nothing for us after the present, what are the logical

consequences of that faith in regard to our aims and rules of

conduct in this world?

Suppose a man who has always imagined that death is utter

annihilation should in some way suddenly acquire knowledge that an

endless existence immediately succeeds the termination of this:

what would be the legitimate instructions of his new information?

Before we can fairly answer this inquiry, we need to know what

relations connect the two states of existence. A knowledge of the

law and method and means of man's destiny is more important for

his guidance than the mere ascertainment of its duration. With

reference to the query before us, four hypotheses are conceivable.

If, in the first place, there be no connection whatever except

that of temporal sequence between the present life and the future,

then, so far as duty is concerned, the expectation of a world to

come yields not the slightest practical application for the

experience that now is. It can only be a source of comfort or of

terror; and that will be accordingly as it is conceived under the

aspect of benignity or of vengeance. If, secondly, the character

of the future life depend on conditions to be fulfilled here, but

those conditions be not within our control, then, again, no

inferences of immediate duty can be drawn from the apprehended

hereafter. Being quasi actors in a scene prearranged and with a

plot predetermined, we can no more be capable of any obligation or

choice, in regard to the end, than puppets which some unseen

Harlequin moves by the terrible wires of primitive decree or

transmitted depravity towards the genial or the tragic crisis. If

the soul's fate there is to be heaven or hell according to the

part enacted here, it must have free will and a fair opportunity

to work the unmarred problem safely out. Otherwise the future life

is reduced, as far as it affects us here, to a mere source of

complacency or of horror as it respectively touches the elect and

the reprobate.

Thirdly, it may be conceived that the future life is a state of

everlasting reward and punishment unchangeably decided by the way

in which the probationary period allotted on

1 The only direct treatise on the subject known to us is

Tilemann's Kritik der Unsterblichkeitslehre in Ansehung des

Sittengesetzes, published in 1789. And this we have not seen.

earth is passed through. Here are men, for a brief time, free to

act thus or otherwise. Do thus, and the endless bliss of heaven is

won. Do otherwise, and the endless agony of hell is incurred. The

plain rule of action yielded by this doctrine is, Sacrifice all

other things to the one thing needful. The present life is in

itself a worthless instant. The future life is an inexhaustible

eternity. And yet this infinite wealth of glory or woe depends on

how you act during that poor moment. Therefore you have nothing to

do while on earth but to seek the salvation of your soul. To waste

a single pulse beat on any thing else is the very madness of

folly. To find out how to escape hell and secure heaven, and then

to improve the means, this should absolutely absorb every energy

and every thought and every desire of every moment. This world is

a bridge of straw over the roaring gulf of eternal fire. Is there

leisure for sport and business, or room for science and

literature, or mood for pleasures and amenities? No: to get

ourselves and our friends into the magic car of salvation, which

will waft us up from the ravenous crests of the brimstone lake

packed with visages of anguish, to bind around our souls the

floating cord of redemption, which will draw us up to heaven, this

should intensely engage every faculty. Nothing else can be

admitted save by oversight of the awful facts. For is it not one

flexible instant of opportunity, and then an adamantine

immortality of doom? That doctrine of a future life which makes

eternal unalterable happiness or misery depend on the fleeting

probation allowed here yields but one practical moral; and that it

pronounces with imminent urgency and perfect distinctness. The

only true duty, the only real use, of this life is to secure the

forensic salvation of the soul by improvement of the appointed

means. Suspended by such a hair of frailty, for one breathless

moment, on such a razor edged contingence, an entrancing sea of

blessedness above, a horrible abyss of torture beneath, such

should be the all concentrating anxiety to secure safety that

there would be neither time nor taste for any thing else. Every

object should seem an altar drenched with sacrificial blood, every

sound a knell laden with dolorous omen, every look a propitiatory

confession, every breath a pleading prayer. From so single and

preternatural a tension of the believer's faculties nothing could

allow an instant's cessation except a temporary forgetting or

blinking of the awful scene and the immeasurable hazard. Such

would be a logical application to life of the genuine morals of

the doctrine under consideration. But the doctrine itself is to be

rejected as false on many grounds. It is deduced from Scripture by

a technical and unsound interpretation. It is unjust and cruel,

irreconcilable with the righteousness or the goodness of God. It

is unreasonable, opposed to the analogies of nature and to the

experience of man. It is wholly impossible to carry it out

consistently in the practice of life. If it were thoroughly

credited and acted upon, all the business of the world would

cease, and the human race would soon die out.