Part 18

Joseph Priestly: It being a rigid canon of the Newtonian logic not to multiply causes without necessity, we should adhere to a single substance until it be shown, which cannot be, that the properties of mind are incompatible with the properties of matter. He was opposed to protecting and perpetuating absurdity by dodging behind mystery. That there is no difference between spiritual substance and nothing at all. That the doctrine of a separate soul embarrasses the whole system of Christianity.

McBeth: The times have been that when the brains were out the man would die, and there an end.

Buchner: Experience and daily occupation teach us that the spirit perishes with the material substratum--that man dies. ("Matter and Force.")

Burmeister: That the soul of a deceased person does not re-appear after death, is not contested by rational people. Spirits and ghosts are only seen by diseased or superstitious individuals.

Vogt: Physiology decides definitely and categorically against individual immortality, as against any special existence of the soul. The soul does not enter the foetus like the evil spirit into persons possessed, but is a product of the development of the brain, just as muscular activity is a product of muscular development. So soon as the substances composing the brain are aggregated in a similar form, will they exhibit the same functions. We have seen that we can destroy mental activity by injuring the brain. By observing the development of the child we also arrive at the conviction that the activity of the soul progresses in proportion as the brain is gradually developed. The foetus manifests no mental activity, which only shows itself after birth when the brain acquires the necessary material condition. Mental activity changes with the period of life, and ceases altogether at death.

Lecky: ("Rat. in Europe," p. 341, v. I.) Not one of the early fathers entertained the same opinion as the majority of Christians do of the present day, that the soul is perfectly simple, and entirely destitute of all body, figure, form, and extension. On the contrary, they all acknowledged it to contain something corporeal, although of a different kind and nature from the bodies of this mortal sphere.... Tertullian mentions a woman who had seen a soul, which she described as "a transparent and lucid figure, in the perfect form of a man." St. Anthony saw the soul of Ammon carried up to heaven. The soul of a Libyan hermit named Marc was borne to heaven in a napkin. Angels also were not unfrequently seen, and were universally believed to have cohabited with the daughters of the antediluvians.... Sometimes the soul was portrayed as a sexless child, rising out of the mouth of the corpse.

John Meslier: ("Testimony of a Dying Priest.") The barbarians, like all ignorant men, attribute to spirits all the effects of which their inexperience prevents them from discovering the true causes. Ask a barbarian what causes your watch to move, he will answer, "A spirit." Ask our philosophers what moves the universe, they will tell you, "It is a spirit." Ask a theologian what he means by a spirit. He will answer that it is an unknown substance, which is perfectly simple, which has nothing tangible, nothing in common with matter. In good faith, is there any mortal who can form the least idea of such a substance.

James F. Ferrier: (Institutes of Metaphysics.) In vain does the Spiritualist found an argument for the existence of a separate immaterial substance on the alleged incompatibility of the intellectual and physical phenomena to co-inhere in the same sub-stratum. Materiality may very well stand the brunt of that unshotted broadside. This mild artifice can scarcely expect to be treated as a serious observation. Such a hypothesis cannot be meant to be in earnest. Who is to dictate to nature what phenomena, or what qualities inhere in what substances; what effects may result from what causes? Matter is already in the field as an acknowledged entity--this both parties admit. Mind, considered as an independent entity, is not so unmistakably in the field. Therefore as entities are not to be multiplied without necessity, we are not entitled to postulate a new cause, so long as it is possible to account for the phenomena by a cause already in existence; which possibility has never yet been disproved.

Draper: (John William.) Chemistry furnishes us with a striking example of the doctrine of Diogenes of Apollonia, that the air is actually a spiritual being; for, on the discovery of several of the gases by the early experimenters, they were not only regarded as of a spiritual nature, but actually received the name under which they pass to this day, gheist or gas, from a belief that they were ghosts. ("Int. Dev.," p. 103, v. 1.)

W. R. Grove: ("Correlation and Conservation of Forces," p. 103.) The ancients when they witnessed natural phenomenon, removed from ordinary analogies, and unexplained by any mechanical action known to them, referred it to a soul, a spiritual or preternatural power: thus amber and the magnet were supposed by Thales to have a soul; the functions of digestion, assimilation, etc., were supposed by Paracelsus to be effected by a spirit (the Archæus). Air and gases were also at first deemed spiritual, but subsequently became invested with a more material character, and the word gas, from geist, a ghost or spirit, affords us an instance of the gradual transmission of a spiritual into a physical conception.

Buchner: Now, in the same manner as the steam engine produces motion, so does the organic complication of force-endowed materials produce in the animal body a sum of effects, so interwoven as to become a unit, and is then by us called spirit, soul, thought.

Taylor: Mr. Darwin saw two Malay women in Keeling Island, who had a wooden spoon dressed in clothes like a doll. This spoon had been carried to the grave of a dead man, and becoming inspired at full moon, in fact lunatic, it danced about convulsively like a table or a hat at a modern spirit-seance. ("Early History of Mankind," p. 139, v. 2.) Savages believe that their pots, kettles, pans, etc., have souls. His knives, tobacco-pipes, the winds, water, fire, storm, etc., have souls.

Samuel Johnson: ("Oriental Religions," p. 543.) Various North-American tribes believe that the soul of a dying person may be drawn into the bosom of a sterile woman, or blown by the breath into that of the nearest relative, and so come again to birth in the way that the receiver desires.

Theodore Parker, John Wesley, Jeremy Taylor, Coleridge, Lamartine, Agassiz, and hosts of other men well known to fame, taught that animals as well as men, had immortal souls.

Brodie: (President of the Royal Society, 1858.) The mind of animals is essentially the same as that of man. Every one familiar with the dog will admit that that creature knows right from wrong, and is conscious when he has committed a fault.

Du Bois-Reymond: With awe and wonder must the student of nature regard that microscopic molecule of nervous substance which is the seat of the laborious, constructive, orderly, loyal, dauntless soul of the ant. It has developed itself to its present state through a countless series of generations.

John Fiske: But the propriety of identifying soul and breath, which really quits the body at its decease, has furnished the chief name for the soul, not only to the Hebrew, the Sanskrit, and the classic tongues; not only to German and English, where geist, and ghost, according to Max Muller, have the meaning of "breath," and are akin to such words as gas, gust, and geyser; but also to numerous barbaric languages. ("Myths and Myth-Makers," p. 225.) The belief in wraiths has survived into modern times, and now and then appears in that remnant of primeval philosophy known as "Spiritualism," as for example, in the case of the lady who "thought she saw her own father look in at the church window at the moment he was dying at his own house." (Ib., p. 229.) The Kamtchadales expressly declare that all animals, even flies and bugs, will live after death,--a belief, which, in our day, has been indorsed on philosophical grounds by an eminent living naturalist. (Ib., 230.) [Mr. Fiske refers to Agassiz.]

M. Figuier: Human souls are for the most part the surviving souls of deceased animals; in general, the souls of precocious children like Mozart come from nightingales, while the souls of great architects have passed into them from beavers, and etc., etc. ("The To-morrow of Death," p. 247.)

W. Lauder Lindsay: By no kind of scientific evidence can it be proved that soul exists, whether in man or other animals.... Nor should it be forgotten that, according to many writers, the word or term "soul" is regarded as synonymous with "mind," in which case there can be no question as to its possession by the higher animals. While the term "soul" has also been applied--in figurative senses no doubt--even to plants. ("Mind in the Lower Animals," v. 1, p. 101.) It obviously lies with those who assert dogmatically that all men have immortal souls, while no animals possess them, to reconcile with such a conviction the provable fact that many animals are superior to many men, not only in general intelligence, but also as regards moral sense and religious feeling. (Ib.) Ideas of justice or right, feelings of decency or shame, that combination or essence of moral qualities known as conscience, are as certainly present in some animals as they appear to be absent in countless numbers of men. (Ib., p. 103.)

Ernst Haeckel: The final result of this comparison is this: That between the most highly developed animal souls, and the lowest developed human souls there exists only a small quantitative, but no qualitative difference, and this difference is much less than the difference between the lowest and the highest human souls, or than the difference between the lowest and the highest animal souls. ("Hist. of Creation," v. 2, p. 362.) Some of the wildest tribes, of men, in Southern Asia and Eastern Africa have no trace whatever of the first foundations of all human civilization of family life, and marriage. They live together, in herds, like apes, generally climbing on trees and eating fruits; they do not know of fire, and use stones and clubs as weapons, just like the higher apes. (Ib., p. 363.)

Descartes: (17 c.) Matter, whose essence is extension, is known by the senses; mind, whose essence is thinking, can be known only by self-consciousness. The thinking principle is immaterial.

Origen: The nature of the soul is such as to make her capable of existing eternally, backward as well as forward, because her spiritual essence, as such, makes it impossible that she should, either through age or violence, be dissolved.

Rev. Joseph Baylee, D. D.: (Principal of St. Aidan's College, Birkenhead, England.) Man is eternal. He was in existence before he was born; sinned before he was born, and if he had never been born would have suffered eternal damnation for that sin. (Dis. on God and the Bible between Dr. Baylee and Mr. Bradlaugh.)

Draper: ("Conflict," p. 127.) Moreover, to many devout persons there is something very revolting in the suggestion that the Almighty is a servitor to the caprices and lusts of men, and that at a certain term after its origin, it is necessary for him to create for the embryo a soul.

Vedic Theology: The soul is a particle of that all-pervading principle, the Universal Intellect, or Soul of the World, detached for a while from its primitive source; and placed in connection with the bodily frame, but destined, by an inevitably as rivers run back to be lost in the ocean from whence they arose.

The Bible: As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more. (Job 7 : 9.) They are dead, they shall not live; they are deceased, they shall not rise; therefore hast thou visited and destroyed them, and made all their memory to perish. (Isa. 26 : 14.) For the living know that they shall die, but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward, for the memory of them is forgotten. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest. (Eccl. 9 : 5, 10.) For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts, even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast; for all is vanity. All go unto one place, all are of the dust and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward; and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth? (Eccl. 3 : 19-22.) There (the grave) the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest. (Vide Job 3 : 11-22.)

Having thus successfully responded to the interrogatory, What is the soul? that is to say, the constituent thereof, let us now very briefly settle the locus in quo:

Plato: The soul is located in the brain.

Aristotle: The soul is located in the heart.

Heraclitus: The soul is located in the blood.

Epicurus: The soul is located in the chest.

Critios: The soul is located in the blood.

Sommering: The soul is located in the ventricles.

Kant: The soul is located in the water contained in the ventricles.

Plotinus: The body is located in the soul, and not the soul in the body.

Ennemoser: The whole body is the seat of the soul.

Fischer: The soul is located in the nervous system.

Ficinus: The soul is located in the heart.

Descartes: The soul is located in the pineal gland.

Bontekoe: The soul is located in the corpus callosum.

Willis: The soul is located in the corpora striata.

Vieussens: The soul is located in the centrum ovale.

Boerhaave: The soul is located on the boundary line of the gray and white substance.

Mayer: The soul is located in the medulla oblongata.

Camper: The soul is located in the pineal gland, nates and testes.

Dohoney: Scientifically speaking, man is a threefold being: body, soul, and spirit. The home of the spirit is the cerebrum, while the seat of the soul is the cerebellum. ("Man," p. 118.)

La Pieronie: The dwelling place of the soul is in the callous body.

Buchner: Some authors imagine that the soul, under certain circumstances, leaves the brain for a short time and occupies another part of the nervous system. The solar plexus, a concatenation of sympathetic nerves, situated in the abdomen, was especially pointed out as the favored spot. ("Force and Matter," p. 195.)

Prochaska: Assumed that the cerebrum and the cerebellum were the seat of "soul sensations," and the sensorium commune the seat of "body sensations."

Whytt: As the schoolmen supposed the Deity to exist in every ubi but not in any place, which is to say in Latin that he exists everywhere, but in English nowhere, so they imagined the soul of man not to occupy space, but to exist in an indivisible point.

Prof. Erdmann: The theory that the soul has its seat in the brain, must lead to the result that when the body is separated from the head, the soul should continue to exist.

Fortlage: There are certain errors in the human mind. The error of the seat of the soul in the brain is one of them.

McCulloch says, in his able work on the "Credibility of the Scriptures": There is no word in the Hebrew language that signifies either soul or spirit, in the technical sense in which we use the terms, as implying something distinct from the body. ("Credibility of Scriptures," p. 491, v. 2.)

Kitto, in his "Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature," renders Genesis 2 : 7, as follows: "And Jehovah God formed the man [Heb. the Adam] of dust from the ground, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life: and the man became a living animal.

Bishop Tilotson says: The immortality of the soul is rather supposed, or taken for granted, than expressly revealed in the Bible.

The Egyptian doctrine of the soul is one of the most important, as it is the most ancient, for this nation seems to have been the first to declare that the soul was immortal. (Chambers' Encyclopedia.)

R. Peterson.

IMMORTALITY.

There is still another question. Why should God, a being of infinite tenderness, leave the question of immortality in doubt? How is it that there is nothing in the Old Testament on this subject? Why is it that he who made all the constellations did not put in his heaven the star of hope? How do you account for the fact that you do not find in the Old Testament, from the first mistake in Genesis to the last curse in Malachi, a funeral service? Is it not strange that some one in the Old Testament did not stand by an open grave of father or mother and say, "We shall meet again"? Was it because the divinely inspired men did not know? You taunt me by saying that I know no more of the immortality of the soul than Cicero knew. I admit it. I know no more than the lowest savage, no more than a doctor of divinity, that is to say, nothing.--Ingersoll, Ingersoll-Field Discussion.

Some urge that the soul is life. What is life? Is it not the word by which we express the aggregate normal functional activity of vegetable and animal organisms, necessarily differing in degree, if not in kind, with each different organization? To talk of immortal life, and yet to admit the decay and destruction of the organization, is much the same as to talk of a square circle. You link together two words which contradict each other. The solution of the soul problem is not so difficult as many imagine. The greatest difficulty is, that we have been trained to use certain words as "God," "matter," "mind," "spirit," "soul," "intelligence," and we have been further trained to take these words as representatives of realities, which in fact, they do not represent. We have to unlearn much of our school lore. We have specially to carefully examine the meaning of each word we use. I am told that the mind and the body are separate from one another. Are the brightness and steel of the knife separate? Is not brightness the quality attaching to a certain modification of existence--steel? Is not intelligence a quality attaching to a certain modification of existence--man? The word brightness has no meaning, except as relating to some bright thing. The word intelligence, no meaning, except as relating to some intelligent thing. I take some water and drop it upon the steel, in due course the process of oxidation takes place, and the brightness is gone. I drop into a man's brain a bullet; the process of the destruction of life takes place, and his intelligence is gone. By changing the state of the steel we destroy its brightness, and by disorganizing the man destroy his intelligence. Is mind an entity or result? an existence or a condition? Surely it is but the result of organic activity, a phenomenon of animal life. ("Has Man a Soul?" Charles Bradlaugh.)

The idea of immortality, like the great sea, has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, beating its countless waves of hope and joy against the shores of time, and was not born of an book, nor of any religion, nor of any creed; it was born of human affection, and will continue to ebb and flow beneath the clouds and mists of doubt and darkness as long as love kisses the lips of death. It is the rainbow of hope shining upon the tears of grief. We love, therefore we wish to live, and the foundation of the idea of immortality is human affection and human love, and I have a thousand times more confidence in the affections of the human heart, in the deep and splendid feelings of the human soul than I have in any book that ever was or ever can be written by mortal man.--Ingersoll.

Is This Life the "Be-all and End-all?"

To answer that question, or to give my views on the subject as to whether man lives after death or is extinguished as a living being by death, would ordinarily involve a long preliminary discourse; but I think I can give you my views, such as they are, in a few words. Life is sensation, sensibility, the power of feeling. Without sensation there is no life. We feel with our nerves; we see with our eyes; we hear with our ears. Without nerves there would be no feeling, without eyes no seeing, without ears no hearing. These senses, therefore, of feeling, seeing, hearing, exist in combination with certain forms of matter, and cannot exist without such combination. So the mind exists in combination with the matter, brain. Without the brain there can be no mental phenomena, no thinking, no perceiving. These things are palpable; they are truths which may not be disputed. Therefore, if death destroys our nerves, it destroys our power of feeling; if it destroys our eyes, it destroys our power of seeing; if it destroys our ears, it destroys our power of hearing; if it destroys our brain, it destroys our power of thinking and perceiving. The man lies down, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, knowing nothing; he is a corpse. Separated from the brain, the mind cannot act, cannot think, cannot conceive; therefore, if it exists at all, it is the same as if it were dead. In that condition, the mind can no more think or perceive than the dust into which the decomposed nerves have fallen can feel. What follows then? That the man has come to an end, entirely; he is extinguished.--Selected.

So you must equally bear with the comparatively small number of scientists who, within the last three hundred years, have worked out the hypothesis that the soul is not matter, substance, or entity, at all, but simply the continuous action or process of the nervous systems of animals, and especially of the brain of man, in answer to their environment. In a word, the life, soul, spirit, mind, thought, feeling, and consciousness are but varying tones of the music which our nervous systems give out when the world plays upon them--much as the piano answers to the touch of our hands. The music was not in, nor the property of the piano, nor of the hand, but it arises and exists only by reason of the playing-contact of the two. Thus the life or soul is not a property of brain-matter, or of our nerves, nor of the world or its impinging force; but when those world forces by touch, heat, light, electricity and foods do reach so as to act upon the nerves and brain, then comes their reaction, and we call that reaction feeling, life, soul, thought, reason, etc., through all of the varying music of consciousness, whether exhibited by a child, a savage, a Newton or a Goethe.--Anon.

Materialism--Prof. Tyndall.

If Materialism is confounded, science is rendered dumb.... Materialism, therefore, is not a thing to be mourned over, but to be honestly considered; accepted if wholly true, rejected if false. ("Fragments of Science," p. 221.) It ought to be known and avowed that the physical philosopher, as such, must be a pure Materialist. His inquiries deal with matter and force, and with them alone. (Ib., p. 72.) As regards knowledge, physical science is polar. (Ib., p. 52.) It is the advance of [this] knowledge that has given a materialistic color to the philosophy of our age. (Ib., p. 222.) We may fear and scorn Materialism; but he who knew all about it, and could apply his knowledge, might become the preacher of a new gospel. (Ib., p. 221.)

Through our neglect of the monitions of a reasonable Materialism, we sin and suffer daily. (Ib., p. 224.) The practical monitions are plain enough which declare that on our dealings with matter depend our weal or woe, physical and moral. (Ib., p. 222.) It is our duty not to shirk--it ought rather to be our privilege to accept, the established results of physical inquiries; for here, assuredly, our ultimate weal depends upon our loyalty to truth. Is mind degraded by this recognition of its dependence [on matter]? Assuredly not. Matter, on the contrary, is raised to the level it ought to occupy, and from which timid ignorance would remove it. (Ib., p. 221.)