The Destiny of the Soul Part 7

It sprang from unwarranted metaphors, perverted, exaggerated, based on a.n.a.logies not parallel. So far as it a.s.sumes to rest on revelation it will be examined in another place.

Fourthly, after the notion of a great, epochal resurrection, as a reply to the inquiry, What is to become of the soul? a dogma is next encountered which we shall style that of a local and irrevocable conveyance. The disembodied spirit is conveyed to some fixed region,7 a penal or a blissful abode, where it is to tarry unalterably. This idea of the banishment or admission of souls, according to their deserts, or according to an elective grace, into an anch.o.r.ed location called h.e.l.l or heaven, a retributive or rewarding residence for eternity, we shall pa.s.s by with few words, because it recurs for fuller examination in other chapters. In the first place, the whole picture is a gross simile drawn from occurrences of this outward world and unjustifiably applied to the fortunes of the mind in the invisible sphere of the future. The figment of a judicial transportation of the soul from one place or planet to another, as if by a Charon's boat, is a clattering and repulsive conceit, inadmissible by one who apprehends the noiseless continuity of G.o.d's self executing laws. It is a jarring mechanical clash thrust amidst the smooth evolution of spiritual destinies. It compares with the facts as the supposition that the planets are swung around the sun by material chains compares with the law of gravitation.

Moral compensation is no better secured by imprisonment or freedom in separate localities than it is, in a common environment, by the fatal working of their interior forces of character, and their relations with all things else. Moreover, these antagonist kingdoms, Tartarean and Elysian, defined as the everlasting habitations of departed souls, have been successively driven, as dissipated visions, from their a.s.sumed lat.i.tudes and longitudes, one after another, by progressive discovery, until now the intelligent mind knows of no a.s.signable spot for them. Since we are not acquainted with any fixed locations to which the soul is to be carried, to abide there forever in appointed joy or woe, and since there is no scientific necessity nor moral use for the supposition of such places and of the transferrence of the departed to them, we cannot hesitate to reject the a.s.sociated belief as a deluding mistake. The truth, as we conceive it, is not that different souls are borne by constabulary apparitions to two immured dwellings, manacled and hurried into Tophet or saluted and ushered into Paradise, but that all souls spontaneously pa.s.s into one immense empire, drawn therein by their appropriate attractions, to a.s.similate a strictly discriminative experience.

But, as to this, let each thinker form his own conclusion.

The fifth view of the destination of the soul may be called the theory of recurrence.8 When man dies, his surviving spirit is immediately born again in a new body. Thus the souls, a.s.signed in a limited number to each world, continually return, each one still forgetful of his previous lives. This seems to be the specific creed of the Druses, who affirm that all souls were created at once, and that the number is unchanged, while they are born over and over. A Druse boy, dreadfully alarmed by the discharge of a gun, on being asked by a Christian the cause of his fear, replied, "I was born murdered;" that is, the soul of a man who had been shot

7 Lange, Das Land der Herrlichkelt.

8 Schmidius, Diss. de Multiplici Animarum Reditu in Corpora.

pa.s.sed into his body at the moment of his birth.9 The young mountaineer would seem, from the sudden violence with which he was s.n.a.t.c.hed out of his old house, to have dragged a trail of connecting consciousness over into his new one. As a general rule, in distinction from such an exception, memory is like one of those pa.s.ses which the conductors of railroad trains give their pa.s.sengers, "good for this trip only." The notion of an endless succession of lives on the familiar stage of this dear old world, commencing each with clean wiped tablets, possesses for some minds a fathomless allurement; but others wish for no return pa.s.s on their ticket to futurity, preferring an adventurous abandonment "to fresh fields and pastures new," in unknown immensity, to a renewed excursion through landscapes already traversed and experiences drained before.

Fourier's doctrine of immortality belongs here. According to his idea, the Great Soul of this globe is a composite being, comprising about ten billions of individual souls. Their connection with this planet will be for nearly eighty thousand years. Then the whole sum of them will swarm to some higher planet, Fourier himself, perhaps, being the old gray gander that will head the flock, pilot king of their flight. Each man is to enjoy about four hundred births on earth, poetic justice leading him successively through all the grades and phases of fortune, from cripplehood and beggary to paragons.h.i.+p and the throne. The invisible residence of spirits and the visible are both on this globe, the former in the Great Soul, the latter in bodies. In the other life the soul becomes a sharer in the woes of the Great Soul, which is as unhappy as seven eighths of the incarnated souls; for its fate is a compound of the fates of the human souls taken collectively. Coming into this outward scene at birth, we lose anew all memory of past existence, but wake up again in the Great Soul with a perfect recollection of all our previous lives both in the invisible and in the visible world. These alternating pa.s.sages between the two states will continue until the final swooping of total humanity from this exhausted planet in search of a better abode.10

The idea of the recurrence of souls is the simplest means of meeting a difficulty stated thus by the ingenious Abraham Tucker in his "Light of Nature Pursued." "The numbers of souls daily pouring in from hence upon the next world seem to require a proportionable drain from it somewhere or other; for else the country might be overstocked." The objection urged against such a belief from the fact that we do not remember having lived before is reb.u.t.ted by the a.s.sertion that

"Some draught of Lethe doth await, As old mythologies relate, The slipping through from state to state."

The theory a.s.sociated with this Lethean draught is confirmed by its responsive correspondence with many unutterable experiences, vividly felt or darkly recognised, in our deepest bosom. It seems as if occasionally the poppied drug or other oblivious antidote

9 Churchill, Mount Lebanon, vol. ii. ch. 12.

10 Fourier, Pa.s.sions of the Human Soul, (Morell's translation,) Introduction, vol. i. pp. 14-18; also pp. 233-236.

administered by nature had been so much diluted that reason, only half baffled, struggles to decipher the dim runes and vestiges of a foregone state;

"And ever something is or seems That touches us with mystic gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams."

In those excursive reveries, fed by hope and winged with dream, which scour the glens and scale the peaks of the land of thought, this nook of hypothesis must some time be discovered. And, brought to light, it has much to interest and to please; but it is too dest.i.tute of tangible proof to be successfully maintained against a.s.sault.11

There is another faith as to the fate of souls, best stated, perhaps, in the phrase perpetual migration. The soul, by successive deaths and births, traverses the universe, an everlasting traveller through the rounds of being and the worlds of s.p.a.ce, a transient sojourner briefly inhabiting each.12 All reality is finding its way up towards the attracting, retreating G.o.dhead. Minerals tend to vegetables, these to animals, these to men. Blind but yearning matter aspires to spirit, intelligent spirits to divinity. In every grain of dust sleep an army of future generations. As every thing below man gropes upward towards his conscious estate, "the trees being imperfect men, that seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground," so man himself shall climb the illimitable ascent of creation, every step a star.

The animal organism is a higher kind of vegetable, whose development begins with those substances with the production of which the life of an ordinary vegetable ends.13 The fact, too, that embryonic man pa.s.ses through ascending stages undistinguishable from those of lower creatures, is full of meaning. Does it not betoken a preserved epitome of the long history of slowly rising existence? What unplummeted abysses of time and distance intervene from the primary rock to the Victoria Regia! and again from the first crawling spine to the fetterless mind of a Sch.e.l.ling! But, snail pace by snail pace, those immeasurable separations have been bridged over; and so every thing that now lies at the dark basis of dust shall finally reach the transplendent apex of intellect. The objection of theological prejudice to this developing succession of ascents that it is degrading is an unhealthy mistake. Whether we have risen or fallen to our present rank, the actual rank itself is not altered. And in one respect it is better for man to be an advanced oyster than a degraded G.o.d; for in the former case the path is upwards, in the latter it is downwards. "We wake," observes a profound thinker, "and find ourselves on a stair: there are other stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight." Such was plainly the trust of the author of the following exhortation:

"Be worthy of death; and so learn to live That every incarnation of thy soul In other realms, and worlds, and firmaments Shall be more pure and high."

11 Bertram, Prufung der Meinung von der Praexistenz der menechlichen Seele.

12 Nurnberger, Still Leben, oder uber die Unsterblichkeit der Seele.

13 Liebig, Animal Chemistry, ch. ix.

Bulwer likewise has said, "Eternity may be but an endless series of those emigrations which men call deaths, abandonments of home after home, ever to fairer scenes and loftier heights. Age after age, the spirit that glorious nomad may s.h.i.+ft its tent, fated not to rest in the dull Elysium of the heathen, but carrying with it evermore its twin elements, activity and desire."

But there is something unsatisfactory, even sad and dreary, in this prospect of incessant migration. Must not the pilgrim pine and tire for a goal of rest? Exhausted with wanderings, sated with experiments, will he not pray for the exempted lot of a contented fruition in repose? One must weary at last of being even so sublime a vagabond as he whose nightly hostelries are stars. And, besides, how will sundered friends and lovers, between whom, on the road, races and worlds interpose, ever over take each other, and be conjoined to journey hand in hand again or build a bower together by the way? A poet of finest mould, in happiest mood, once saw a leaf drop from a tree which overhung a mirroring stream. The reflection of the leaf in the watery sky hollow far below seemed to rise from beneath as swiftly as the object fell from above; and the two, encountering at the surface, became one.

Then he sang, touching with his strain the very marrow of deepest human desire,

"How speeds, from in the river's thought, The spirit of the leaf that falls, Its heaven in that calm bosom wrought, As mine among yon crimson walls!

From the dry bough it spins, to greet Its shadow on the placid river: So might I my companions meet, Nor roam the countless worlds forever!"

Moreover, some elements of this theory are too grotesque, are the too rash inferences from a too crude induction, to win sober credit to any extent. It is easy to devise and carry out in consistent descriptive details the hypothesis that the soul has risen, through ten thousand transitions, from the condition of red earth or a tadpole to its present rank, and that,

"As it once crawl'd upon the sod, It yet shall grow to be a G.o.d;"

but what scientific evidence is there to confirm and establish the supposition as a truth? Why, if it be so, to borrow the humorous satire of good old Henry More,

"Then it will follow that cold stopping curd And harden'd moldy cheese, when they have rid Due circuits through the heart, at last shall speed Of life and sense, look thorough our thin eyes And view the close wherein the cow did feed Whence they were milk'd: grosse pie crust will grow wise, And pickled cuc.u.mbers sans doubt philosophize!"

The form of this general outline stalks totteringly on stilts of fancy, and sprawls headlong with a logical crash at the first critical probe.

The final theory of the destination of souls, now left to be set forth, may be designated by the word transition.14 It affirms that at death they pa.s.s from the separate material worlds, which are their initiating nurseries, into the common spiritual world, which is everywhere present. Thus the visible peoples the invisible, each person in his turn consciously rising from this world's rudimentary darkness to that world's universal light. Dwelling here, free souls, housed in frames of dissoluble clay,

"We hold a middle rank 'twixt heaven and earth, On the last verge of mortal being stand, lose to the realm where angels have their birth, Just on the boundaries of the spirit land."

Why has G.o.d "broken up the solid material of the universe into innumerable little globes, and swung each of them in the centre of an impa.s.sable solitude of s.p.a.ce," unless it be to train up in the various spheres separate households for final union as a single diversified family in the boundless spiritual world? 15 The surmise is not unreasonable, but recommends itself strongly, that,

"If yonder stars be fill'd with forms of breathing clay like ours, Perchance the s.p.a.ce which spreads between is for a spirit's powers."

The soul encased in flesh is thereby confined to one home, its natal nest; but, liberated at death, it wanders at will, un.o.bstructed, through every world and cerulean deep; and wheresoever it is, there, in proportion to its own capacity and fitness, is heaven and is G.o.d.16 All those world spots so thickly scattered through the Yggdrasill of universal s.p.a.ce are but the brief sheltering places where embryo intelligences clip their sh.e.l.ls, and whence, as soon as fledged through the discipline of earthly teaching and essays, the broodlet souls take wing into the mighty airs of immensity, and thus enter on their eternal emanc.i.p.ation. This conjecture is, of all which have been offered yet, perhaps the completest, least perplexed, best recommended by its harmony with our knowledge and our hope. And so one might wish to rest in it with humble trust.

The final destiny of an immortal soul, after its transition into the other world, must be either unending progress towards infinite perfection, or the reaching of its perihelion at last and then revolving in uninterrupted fruition. In the former case, pursuing an infinite aim, with each degree of its attainment the flying goal still recedes. In the latter case, it will in due season touch its bound and there be satisfied,

"When weak Time shall be pour'd out Into Eternity, and circular joys Dance in an endless round."

14 Taylor, Physical Theory of Another Life, ch. xii.

15 Taylor, Sat.u.r.day Evening, pp. 95-111.

16 Taylor, Physical Theory of Another Life, ch. xvii.

This result seems the more probable of the two; for the a.s.sertion of countless decillions of personalities all progressing beyond every conceivable limit, on, still on, forever, is incredible. If endless linear progress were the destiny of each being, the whole universe would at last become a line! And though it is true that the idea of an ever novel chase attracts and refreshes the imagination, while the idea of a monotonous revolution repels and wearies it, this is simply because we judge after our poor earthly experience and its flagging a.n.a.logies. It will not be so if that revolution is the vivid realization of all our being's possibilities.

Annihilation, absorption, resurrection, conveyance, recurrence, migration, transition, these seven answers to the question of our fate, and of its relation to the course of nature, are thinkable in words. We may choose from among them, but can construct no real eighth. First, there is a constant succession of growth and decay.

Second, there is a perpetual flow and ebb of personal emanation and impersonal resumption. Third, there is a continual return of the same persistent ent.i.ties. Fourth, all matter may be sublimated to spirit, and souls alone remain to occupy boundless s.p.a.ce.

Fifth, the power of death may cease, all the astronomic orbs be populated and enjoyed, each by one generation of everlasting inhabitants, the present order continuing in each earth until enough have lived to fill it, then all of them, physically restored, dwelling on it, with no more births or deaths. Sixth, if matter be not trans.m.u.table to soul, when that peculiar reality from which souls are developed is exhausted, and the last generation of incarnated beings have risen from the flesh, the material creation may, in addition to the inter stellar region, be eternally appropriated by the spirit races to their own free range and use, through adaptations of faculty unknown to us now; else it may vanish as a phantasmal spectacle. Or, finally, souls may be absolutely created out of nothing by the omnipotence of G.o.d, and the universe may be infinite: then the process may proceed forever.

But men's beliefs are formed rather by the modes of thought they have learned to adopt than by any proofs they have tested; not by argumentation about a subject, but by the way of looking at it.

The moralist regards all creation as the work of a personal G.o.d, a theatre of moral ends, a just Providence watching over the parts, and the conscious immortality of the actors an inevitable accompaniment. The physicist contemplates the universe as const.i.tuted of atoms of attraction and repulsion, which subsist in perfect mobility through s.p.a.ce, but are concreted in the molecular ma.s.ses of the planets. The suns are vast engines for the distribution of heat or motion, the equivalent of all kinds of force. This, in its diffusion, causes innumerable circulations and combinations of the original atoms. Organic growth, life, is the fruition of a force derived from the sun. Decay, death, is the rendering up of that force in its equivalents. Thus, the universe is a composite unity of force, a solidarity of ultimate unities which are indestructible, though in constant circulation of new groupings and journeys. To the religious faith of the moralist, man is an eternal person, reaping what he has sowed. To the speculative intellect of the physicist, man is an atomic force, to be liberated into the ethereal medium until again harnessed in some organism. In both cases he is immortal: but in that, as a free citizen of the ideal world; in this, as a flying particle of the dynamic immensity.

PART SECOND.

ETHNIC THOUGHTS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.