The Destiny of the Soul Part 68

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 acc.u.mulating possession of past experiences still held in living command. The Arethusa of ident.i.ty threads the blending states of consciousness, and, pa.s.sing 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 a.s.similation. 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.similated 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 ent.i.ty 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 G.o.d 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 antic.i.p.ates 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 G.o.d'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 const.i.tuted other souls, as our bodies consist of the material which once const.i.tuted 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 a.s.similation 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 refas.h.i.+on 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 a.s.sumed 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 const.i.tuent of its intelligence. It is illegitimate logic, pa.s.sing 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 a.s.serted 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, ill.u.s.trating, 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 dest.i.tute of intelligence, will, or consciousness. This scheme gave rise to many controversies, but has now pa.s.sed into complete neglect.23 Of late years the tendency has been to a.s.similate instead of separating man and beast.

Touching the outer sphere, we have Oken's h.o.m.ologies 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 quant.i.tative, 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 ident.i.ty 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 a.s.sa.s.sination of the souls of the human race with the jaw bone of an a.s.s 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 Aga.s.siz 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 mult.i.tude 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 a.s.seritur, 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 Cla.s.sification, 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 ent.i.ty 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 a.s.sumed 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 s.p.a.celess point, its life an indivisible moment. The reasonings in behalf of this conception have been manifold, and cogent enough to convince a mult.i.tude 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, const.i.tute at once the varying phenomena and the causal substrata of the universe. Mamertius Claudia.n.u.s, 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 quant.i.tative. All this excesse vanisheth into nothing as soon as the lowest substance s.h.i.+neth out of that orbe where they reside that scorn divisibility."

From this brief statement of the position of the immaterialists, without arguing it, we pa.s.s 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, pa.s.sing 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 a.s.serts man to be interiorly an organized form pervading the physical body, an eternal receptacle of life from G.o.d. 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 a.s.sailed 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 ent.i.ties, 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 const.i.tutes the totality of the thing, and is not advent.i.tiously 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 ent.i.ty, 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.