The Destiny of the Soul Part 6

"So, thou hast immortality in mind?

Hast grounds that will not let thee doubt it?

The strongest ground herein I find: That we could never do without it!"

Finally, the climax of these argumentations is capped by that grand closing consideration which we may ent.i.tle the force of congruity, the convincing results of a confluence of harmonious reasons. The hypothesis of immortality accords with the cardinal facts of observation, meets all points of the case, and satisfactorily answers every requirement.

21 Lewis, Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion.

It is the solution of the problem, as the fact of Neptune explained the perturbations of the adjacent planets. Nothing ever gravitates towards nothing; and it must be an unseen orb that so draws our yearning souls. If it be not so, then what terrible contradictions stagger us, and what a chilling doom awaits us! Oh, what mocking irony then runs through the loftiest promises and hopes of the world! Just as the wise and good have learned to live, they disappear amidst the unfeeling waves of oblivion, like snow flakes in the ocean. "The super earthly desires of man are then created in him only, like swallowed diamonds, to cut slowly through his material sh.e.l.l" and destroy him.

The denial of a future life introduces discord, grief, and despair in every direction, and, by making each step of advanced culture the ascent to a wider survey of tantalizing glory and experienced sorrow, as well as the preparation for a greater fall and a sadder loss, turns faithful affection and heroic thought into "blind furies slinging flame." Unless immortality be true, man appears a dark riddle, not made for that of which he is made capable and desirous: every thing is begun, nothing ended; the facts of the present scene are unintelligible; the plainest a.n.a.logies are violated; the delicately rising scale of existence is broken off abrupt; our best reasonings concerning the character and designs of G.o.d, also concerning the implications of our own being and experience, are futile; and the soul's proud faculties tell glorious lies as thick as stars. Such, at least, is the usual way of thinking.

However formidable a front may be presented by the spectral array of doubts and difficulties, seeming impediments to faith in immortality, the faithful servant of G.o.d, equipped with philosophical culture and a saintly life, will fearlessly advance upon them, scatter them right and left, and win victorious access to the prize. So the mariner sometimes, off Sicilian sh.o.r.es, sees a wondrous island ahead, apparently stopping his way with its cypress and cedar groves, glittering towers, vine wreathed balconies, and marble stairs sloping to the water's edge. He sails straight forward, and, severing the pillared porticos and green gardens of Fata Morgana, glides far on over a gla.s.sy sea smiling in the undeceptive sun.

CHAPTER IV.

THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION.

BEFORE examining, in their multifarious detail, the special thoughts and fancies respecting a future life prevalent in different nations and times, it may be well to take a sort of bird's eye view of those general theories of the destination of the soul under which all the individual varieties of opinion may be cla.s.sified. Vast and incongruous as is the heterogeneous ma.s.s of notions brought forth by the history of this province of the world's belief, the whole may be systematized, discriminated, and reduced to a few comprehensive heads. Such an architectural grouping or outlining of the chief schemes of thought on this subject will yield several advantages.

Showing how the different views arose from natural speculations on the correlated phenomena of the outward world and facts of human experience, it affords an indispensable help towards a philosophical a.n.a.lysis and explanation of the popular faith as to the destiny of man after death, in all the immense diversity of its contents. An orderly arrangement and exposition of these cardinal theories also form an epitome holding a bewildering mult.i.tude of particulars in its lucid and separating grasp, changing the fruits of learned investigation from a c.u.mbersome burden on the memory to a small number of connected formularies in the reason. These theories serve as a row of mirrors hung in a line of historic perspective, reflecting every relevant shape and hue of meditation and faith humanity has known, from the ideal visions of the Athenian sage to the instinctive superst.i.tions of the Fejee savage. When we have adequately defined these theories, of which there are seven, traced their origin, comprehended their significance and bearings, and dissected their supporting pretensions, then the whole field of our theme lies in light before us; and, however grotesque or mysterious, simple or subtle, may be the modes of thinking and feeling in relation to the life beyond death revealed in our subsequent researches, we shall know at once where to refer them and how to explain them. The precise object, therefore, of the present chapter is to set forth the comprehensive theories devised to solve the problem, What becomes of man when he dies?

But a little while man flourishes here in the bosom of visible nature. Soon he disappears from our scrutiny, missed in all the places that knew him. Whither has he gone? What fate has befallen him? It is an awful question. In comparison with its concentrated interest, all other affairs are childish and momentary. Whenever that solemn question is asked, earth, time, and the heart, natural transformations, stars, fancy, and the brooding intellect, are full of vague oracles. Let us see what intelligible answers can be constructed from their responses.

The first theory which we shall consider propounds itself in one terrible word, annihilation. Logically this is the earliest, historically the latest, view. The healthy consciousness, the eager fancy, the controlling sentiment, the crude thought, all the uncurbed instinctive conclusions of primitive human nature, point forcibly to a continued existence for the soul, in some way, when the body shall have perished. And so history shows us in all the savage nations a vivid belief in a future life. But to the philosophical observer, who has by dint of speculation freed himself from the constraining tendencies of desire, faith, imagination, and authority, the thought that man totally ceases with the destruction of his visible organism must occur as the first and simplest settlement of the question.1 The totality of manifested life has absolutely disappeared: why not conclude that the totality of real life has actually lost its existence and is no more? That is the natural inference, unless by some means the contrary can be proved. Accordingly, among all civilized people, every age has had its skeptics, metaphysical disputants who have mournfully or scoffingly denied the separate survival of the soul.

This is a necessity in the inevitable sequences of observation and theory; because, when the skeptic, suppressing or escaping his bia.s.sed wishes, the trammels of traditional opinion, and the spontaneous convictions prophetic of his own uninterrupted being, first looks over the wide scene of human life and death, and reflectingly asks, What is the sequel of this strange, eventful history? obviously the conclusion suggested by the immediate phenomena is that of entire dissolution and blank oblivion. This result is avoided by calling in the aid of deeper philosophical considerations and of inspiring moral truths. But some will not call in that aid; and the whole superficial appearance of the case regarding that alone, as they then will is fatal to our imperial hopes. The primordial clay claims its own from the disanimated frame; and the vanished life, like the flame of an outburnt taper, has ceased to be. Men are like bubbles or foam flakes on the world's streaming surface: glittering in a momentary ray, they break and are gone, and only the dark flood remains still flowing forward. They are like tones of music, commencing and ending with the unpurposed breath that makes them. Nature is a vast congeries of mechanical substances pervaded by mindless forces of vitality. Consciousness is a production which results from the fermentation and elaboration of unconscious materials; and after a time it deceases, its conditions crumbling into their inorganic grounds again.

From the abyss of silence and dust intelligent creatures break forth, s.h.i.+ne, and sink back, like meteor flashes in a cloud. The generations of sentient being, like the annual growths of vegetation, by spontaneity of dynamic development, spring from dead matter, flourish through their destined cycle, and relapse into dead matter. The bosom of nature is, therefore, at once the wondrous womb and the magnificent mausoleum of man. Fate, like an iron skeleton seated at the summit of the world on a throne of fresh growing gra.s.s and mouldering skulls, presides over all, and annihilation is the universal doom of individual life. Such is the atheistic naturalist's creed. However indefensible or shocking it is, it repeatedly appears in the annals of speculation; and any synopsis of the possible conclusions in which the inquiry into man's destiny may rest that should omit this, would be grossly imperfect.

This scheme of disbelief is met by insuperable objections. It excludes some essential elements of the case, confines itself to a wholly empirical view; and consequently the relentless solution it announces applies only to a mutilated problem. To a.s.sert the cessation of the soul because its physical manifestations through the body have ceased, is certainly to affirm without just warrant.

It would appear impossible for volition and intelligence to

1 Lalande, Dictionnaire des Athees Anciens et Modernes.

originate save from a free parent mind. Numerous cogent evidences of design seem to prove the existence of a G.o.d by whose will all things are ordered according to a plan. Many powerful impressions and arguments, instinctive, critical, or moral, combine to teach that in the wreck of matter the spirit emerges, deathless, from the closing waves of decay. The confirmation of that truth becomes irresistible when we see how reason and conscience, with delighted avidity, seize upon its adaptedness alike to the brightest features and the darkest defects of the present life, whose imperfect symmetries and segments are harmoniously filled out by the adjusting complement of a future state.2

The next representation of the fate of the soul disposes of it by re absorption into the essence from which it emanated. There is an eternal fountain of unmade life, from which all individual, transient lives flow, and into which they return. This conception arose in the outset from a superficial a.n.a.logy which must have obtruded itself upon primitive notice and speculation; for man is led to his first metaphysical inquiries by a feeling contemplation of outward phenomena. Now, in the material world, when individual forms perish, each sensible component relapses into its original element and becomes an undistinguishable portion of it. Our exhaled breath goes into the general air and is united with it: the dust of our decaying frames becomes part of the ground and vegetation. So, it is strongly suggested, the lives of things, the souls of men, when they disappear from us, are remerged in the native spirit whence they came. The essential longing of every part for union with its whole is revealed and vocal throughout all nature. Water is sullen in stillness, murmurs in motion, and never ceases its gloom or its complaining until it sleeps in the sea.

Like spray on the rock, the stranding generations strike the sepulchre and are dissipated into universal vapor. As lightnings slink back into the charged bosom of the thunder cloud, as eager waves, spent, subside in the deep, as furious gusts die away in the great atmosphere, so the gleaming ranks of genius, the struggling ma.s.ses of toil, the pompous hosts of war, fade and dissolve away into the peaceful bosom of the all engulfing SOUL.

This simplest, earliest philosophy of mankind has had most extensive and permanent prevalence.3 For immemorial centuries it has possessed the mind of the countless millions of India. Baur thinks the Egyptian identification of each deceased person with Osiris and the burial of him under that name, were meant to denote the reception of the individual human life into the universal nature life. The doctrine has been implicitly held wherever pantheism has found a votary, from Anaximander, to whom finite creatures were "disintegrations or decompositions from the Infinite," to Alexander Pope, affirming that

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is, and G.o.d the soul."

The first reasoners, who gave such an ineradicable direction and tinge to the thinking of after ages, were furthermore driven to the supposition of a final absorption, from the

2 Drossbach, Die Harmonie der Ergebnisse der Naturforschung mit den Forderungen des Menschlichen Gemuthes.

3 Blount, Anima Mundi; or, The Opinions of the Ancients concerning Man's Soul after this Life.

impossibility, in that initiatory stage of thought, of grasping any other theory which would apparently meet the case so well or be more satisfactory. They, of course, had not yet arrived at the idea that G.o.d is a personal Spirit whose nature is revealed in the const.i.tutive characteristics of the human soul, and who carries on his works from eternity to eternity without monotonous repet.i.tion or wearisome stagnancy, but with perpetual variety in never ceasingmotion. Whatever commences must also terminate, they said, forgetting that number begins with one but has no end. They did not conceive of the universe of being as an eternal line, making immortality desirable for its endless novelty, but imaged it to themselves as a circle, making an everlasting individual consciousness dreadful for its intolerable sameness, an immense round of existence, phenomena, and experience, going forth and returning into itself, over and over, forever and ever. To escape so repulsive a contemplation, they made death break the fencing integument of consciousness and empty all weary personalities into the absolute abyss of being.

Again: the extreme difficulty of apprehending the truth of a Creator literally infinite, and of a limitless creation, would lead to the same result in another way. Without doubt, it seemed to the naive thinkers of antiquity, that if hosts of new beings were continually coming into life and increasing the number of the inhabitants of the future state, the fountain from which they proceeded would some time be exhausted, or the universe grow plethoric with population. There would be no more substance below or no more room above. The easiest method of surmounting this problem would be by the hypothesis that all spirits come out of a great World Spirit, and, having run their mortal careers, are absorbed into it again. Many especially the deepest Oriental dreamers have also been brought to solace themselves with this conclusion by a course of reasoning based on the exposures, and a.s.sumed inevitable sufferings, of all finite being. They argue that every existence below the absolute G.o.d, because it is set around with limitations, is necessarily obnoxious to all sorts of miseries. Its pleasures are only "honey drops scarce tasted in a sea of gall." This conviction, with its accompanying sentiment, runs through the sacred books of the East, is the root and heart of their theology, the dogma that makes the cruelest penances pleasant if a renewed existence may thus be avoided. The sentiment is not alien to human longing and surmise, as witnesses the night thought of the English poet who, world sated, and sadly yearning, cries through the starry gloom to G.o.d,

"When shall my soul her incarnation quit, And, readopted to thy blest embrace, Obtain her apotheosis in thee?"

Having stated and traced the doctrine of absorption, it remains to investigate the justice of its grounds. The doctrine starts from a premise partly true and ends in a conclusion partly false. We emanate from the creative power of G.o.d, and are sustained by the in flowing presence of his life, but are not discerptions from his own being, any more than beams of light are distinct substances shot out and shorn off from the sun to be afterwards drawn back and a.s.similated into the parent orb. We are destined to a harmonious life in his unifying love, but not to be fused and lost as insentient parts of his total consciousness. We are products of

G.o.d's will, not component atoms of his soul. Souls are to be in G.o.d as stars are in the firmament, not as lumps of salt are in a solvent. This view is confirmed by various arguments.

In the first place, it is supported by the philosophical distinction between emanation and creation. The conception of creation gives us a personal G.o.d who wills to certain ends; that of emanation reduces the Supreme Being to a ghastly array of laws, revolving abysses, galvanic forces, nebular star dust, dead ideas, and vital fluids. According to the latter supposition, finite existences flow from the Infinite as consequences from a principle, or streams from a fountain; according to the former, they proceed as effects from a cause, or thoughts from a mind.

That is pantheistic, fatal, and involves absorption by a logical necessity; this is creative, free, and does not presuppose any circling return. Material things are thoughts which G.o.d transiently contemplates and dismisses; spiritual creatures are thoughts which he permanently expresses in concrete immortality.

The soul is a thought; the body is the word in which it is clothed.

Secondly, the a.n.a.logy which first leads to belief in absorption is falsely interpreted. Taken on its own ground, rightly appreciated, it legitimates a different conclusion.

A grain of sand thrown into the bosom of Sahara does not lose its individual existence. Distinct drops are not annihilated as to their simple atoms of water, though sunk in the midst of the sea.

The final particles or monads of air or granite are not dissolvingly blended into continuity of unindividualized atmosphere or rock when united with their elemental ma.s.ses, but are thrust unapproachably apart by molecular repulsion. Now, a mind, being, as we conceive, no composite, but an ultimate unity, cannot be crushed or melted from its integral persistence of personality. Though plunged into the centre of a surrounding wilderness or ocean of minds, it must still retain itself unlost in the mult.i.tude. Therefore, if we admit the existence of an inclusive mundane Soul, it by no means follows that lesser souls received into it are deprived of their individuality. It is "one not otherwise than as the sea is one, by a similarity and contiguity of parts, being composed of an innumerable host of distinct spirits, as that is of aqueous particles; and as the rivers continually discharge into the sea, so the vehicular people, upon the disruption of their vehicles, discharge and incorporate into that ocean of spirits making the mundane Soul."4

Thirdly, every consideration furnished by the doctrine of final causes as applied to existing creatures makes us ask, What use is there in calling forth souls merely that they may be taken back again? To justify their creation, the fulfilment of some educative aim, and then the lasting fruition of it, appear necessary. Why else should a soul be drawn from out the unformed vastness, and have its being struck into bounds, and be forced to pa.s.s through such appalling ordeals of good and evil, pleasure and agony? An individual of any kind is as important as its race; for it contains in possibility all that its type does. And the purposes of things, so far as we can discern them, the nature of our spiritual const.i.tution, the meaning of our circ.u.mstances and probation, the resulting tendencies of our experience, all seem to prophesy, not the destruction, but the perfection and perpetuation, of individual being.

4 Tucker, Light of Nature, Part II. chap. xxii.

Fourthly, the same inference is yielded by applying a similar consideration to the Creator. Allowing him consciousness and intentions, as we must, what object could he have either in exerting his creative power or in sending out portions of himself in new individuals, save the production of so many immortal personalities of will, knowledge, and love, to advance towards the perfection of holiness, wisdom, and blessedness, filling his mansions with his children? By thus multiplying his own image he adds to the number of happy creatures who are to be bound together in bands of glory, mutually receiving and returning his affection, and swells the tide of conscious bliss which fills and rolls forever through his eternal universe.

Nor, finally, is it necessary to expect personal oblivion in G.o.d in order to escape from evil and win exuberant happiness. Those ends are as well secured by the fruition of G.o.d's love in us as by the drowning of our consciousness in his plenitude of delight.

Precisely herein consists the fundamental distinction of the Christian from the Brahmanic doctrine of human destiny. The Christian hopes to dwell in blissful union with G.o.d's will, not to be annihilatingly sunk in his essence. To borrow an ill.u.s.tration from Scotus Erigena,5 as the air when thoroughly illumined by suns.h.i.+ne still keeps its aerial nature and does not become suns.h.i.+ne, or as iron all red in the flame still keeps its metallic substance and does not turn to fire itself, so a soul fully possessed and moved by G.o.d does not in consequence lose its own sentient and intelligent being. It is still a bounded ent.i.ty, though recipient of boundless divinity. Thus evil ceases, each personality is preserved and intensely glorified, and, at the same time, G.o.d is all in all. The totality of perfected, enraptured, immortalized humanity in heaven may be described in this manner, adopting the masterly expression of Coleridge:

"And as one body seems the aggregate Of atoms numberless, each organized, So, by a strange and dim similitude, Infinite myriads of self conscious minds In one containing Spirit live, who fills With absolute ubiquity of thought All his involved monads, that yet seem Each to pursue its own self centring end."

A third mode of answering the question of human destiny is by the conception of a general resurrection. Souls, as fast as they leave the body, are gathered in some intermediate state, a starless grave world, a ghostly limbo. When the present cycle of things is completed, when the clock of time runs down and its lifeless weight falls in the socket, and "Death's empty helmet yawns grimly over the funeral hatchment of the world," the gates of this long barred receptacle of the deceased will be struck open, and its pale prisoners, in acc.u.mulated hosts, issue forth, and enter on the immortal inheritance reserved for them. In the sable land of Hades all departed generations are bivouacking in one vast army.

On the resurrection morning, striking their shadowy tents, they will scale the walls of the abyss, and, reinvested with their bodies, either plant their banners on the summits of the earth in permanent encampment, or storm the battlements of the sky and colonize heaven with flesh and blood.

5 Philosophy and Doctrines of Erigena, Universalist Quarterly Review, vol. vii. p. 100.

All advocates of the doctrine of psychopannychism, or the sleep of souls from death till the last day, in addition to the general body of orthodox Christians, have been supporters of this conclusion.6

Three explanations are possible of the origination of this belief.

First, a man musing over the affecting panorama of the seasons as it rolls through the year, budding life alternating with deadly desolation, spring still bringing back the freshness of leaves, flowers, and carolling birds, as if raising them from an annual interment in winter's cold grave, and then thinking of the destiny of his own race, how many generations have ripened and decayed, how many human crops have been harvested from the cradle and planted in the tomb, might naturally especially if he had any thing of the poet's a.s.sociating and creative mind say to himself, Are we altogether perishable dust, or are we seed sown for higher fields, seed lying dormant now, but at last to sprout into swift immortality when G.o.d shall make a new suns.h.i.+ne and dew omnipotently penetrate the dry mould where we tarry? No matter how partial the a.n.a.logy, how forced the process, how false the result, such imagery would sooner or later occur; and, having occurred, it is no more strange that it should get literal acceptance than it is that many other popular figments should have secured the firm establishment they have.

Secondly, a mourner just bereaved of one in whom his whole love was garnered, distracted with grief, his faculties unbalanced, his soul a chaos, is of sorrow and fantasy all compact; and he solaces himself with the ideal embodiment of his dreams, half seeing what he thinks, half believing what he wishes. His desires pa.s.s through unconscious volition into supposed facts. Before the miraculous power of his grief wielded imagination the world is fluent, and fate runs in the moulds he conceives. The adored form on which corruption now banquets, he sees again, animated, beaming, clasped in his arms. He cries, It cannot be that those holy days are forever ended, that I shall never more realize the blissful dream in which we trod the sunny world together! Oh, it must be that some time G.o.d will give me back again that beloved one! the sepulchre closed so fast shall be unsealed, the dead be restored, and all be as it was before! The conception thus once born out of the delirium of busy thought, anguished love, and regnant imagination, may in various ways win a fixed footing in faith.

Thirdly, the notion which we are now contemplating is one link in a chain of thought which, in the course of time and the range of speculation, the theorizing mind could not fail to forge. The concatenation of reflections is this. Death is the separation of soul and body. That separation is repulsive, an evil. Therefore it was not intended by the Infinite Goodness, but was introduced by a foe, and is a foreign, marring element. Finally G.o.d will vanquish his antagonist, and banish from the creation all his thwarting interferences with the primitive perfection of harmony and happiness. Accordingly, the souls which Satan has caused to be separated from their bodies are reserved apart until the fulness of time, when there shall be a universal resurrection and restoration. So far as reason is competent to p.r.o.nounce on this view considered as a sequel to the disembodying doom of man, it is an arbitrary piece of fancy. Philosophy ignores it. Science gives no hint of it.

6 Baumgarten, Beantwortung des Sendschreibens Heyns vom Schlafe der abgeschiedenen Seelen. Chalmers. Astronomical Discourses, iv.