THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL
If we accept the idea of the immanence of God we shall be forced to
abandon belief in a miraculous instantaneous creation of man and the
earth on which he exists. The old, absurd, unscientific, impossible idea
that the race came from an original human pair must be replaced by the
hypothesis of the evolution of the soul.
It was about the fact of evolution that the great storm of controversy
raged between scientists and theologians in the middle of the nineteenth
century, and later. The evolutionary truths were not at first well
understood. They seemed to question or deny the existence of God. Deep
within humanity is intuitive religious belief. It is a natural faith
that transcends all facts, like the faith of a child in its mother.
Because evolution was contrary to all preconceived ideas of the earth's
inception it seemed at first to shatter faith and destroy hope, and
against fact and reason itself rose the protest of intuition with
spiritual intensity. People felt more than they reasoned and cried out
that science was about to destroy the belief in God. But time has proved
that they had merely misinterpreted the meaning of evolution. Further
understanding has shown that, instead of destroying the belief in God,
evolution has given us a new and better understanding of the whole
matter and has placed the hope of immortality on firmer ground than it
previously occupied.
Evolution is an established and generally accepted fact. No educated
person now thinks of questioning it. It is settled beyond dispute that
all things in the physical world have become what they are through a
long, slow, gradual evolution and that organisms the most perfect in
form and most complex in function have evolved from simpler ones. The
age of miracle has passed and belief in miracle has passed so far as its
relation to the material world is concerned. It is no longer necessary
to have a belief in an anthropomorphic God, performing feats in defiance
of natural law, in order to account for that which exists. Science has
reduced the cosmos to comprehension and shown that, given nebulous
physical matter, we can understand how the earth came into existence.
But why should we stop with the application of the laws of evolution to
material things? Only the outright materialist, who asserts that life is
a product of matter, can logically do so, and so great an authority in
the scientific world as Sir Oliver Lodge has asserted that there is no
longer any such thing as scientific materialism.[B] Those who accept the
idea of the existence of the soul at all must necessarily accept the
idea of the evolution of the soul. How can consciousness possibly
escape the laws that evolve the media for the expression of
consciousness? There must be the evolution of mind as certainly as there
is evolution of matter. The material and the spiritual, form and life,
are inseparable. Indeed, scientific progress has now brought us to the
point where matter, as such, practically disappears and we are face to
face with the fact that matter is really but a manifestation of force.
How, then, is it longer possible to speak of the soul and not accept the
evolution of the soul? Psychology is no less a science than physiology.
The phenomena of consciousness are as definitely studied as physical
phenomena, and it is no more difficult to account for a myriad souls
than to account for a million suns and their planets. The scientists who
have taken the position that the universe has a spiritual side as well
as a material side are among the most eminent and distinguished of the
modern world. If evolution has produced the starry heavens from the
material side it has likewise evolved the human souls of our world and
others from the spiritual side. It is no more difficult to understand
the one than the other.
From the scientific viewpoint the old popular belief in the creation of
the earth and the race by an act suddenly accomplished is, of course,
preposterous. If we could know nothing back of the present moment and
were called upon to account for the world as we see it--with its cities,
its ships and railways, its cultivated fields and parks--many people who
still believe in instantaneous creation of the soul would save
themselves much mental exertion by declaring that God had made it all as
it stands for the use and entertainment of man. But we know that it is
utterly absurd to think of the world leaping into existence
instantaneously--nothing existing one day and all trains running on time
between ready-made cities the next, carrying ready-made people about. It
sounds ridiculous only because we are putting it in material terms, but
in very truth it is less ludicrous than thinking of the instantaneous
creation of the creators of cities and railways.
The idea that we are a sudden creation is only possible because of the
very vague ideas of what human souls are. The chief difficulty with the
popular notion that a human soul is as new as the body it inhabits is
that it is a vague and indefinite conception of life, and the moment we
begin to think seriously about it the weakness of the idea becomes
apparent. Such a notion has no relationship to the processes of
reasoning. How can one reason with a man who believes it possible for a
soul to spring into existence from the void? What is the use in
reasoning about the "whys and wherefores" when it settles the whole
matter to say: "God did it"?
One thing that prevents us from believing not only that millions of
souls were created in the twinkling of an eye, but also that the world
as it now is was likewise suddenly created, is that we happen to know
quite definitely the history of the world a little way into the past,
and that history affirms that the earth and all life on it is the
product of slow evolutionary growth.
The evolution of the soul places the realm of religion on a scientific
basis. Not only the origin of the soul but its development and its
destiny at once appear in a new light. The mind is instinctively
impressed with the dignity of the idea of the evolution of the soul,
which, with its corollary, the immanence of God, makes the divinity of
man a fact in nature.
FOOTNOTES:
[B] Raymond: or Life and Death.