CHAPTER IX.

THE SUBJECTIVE ELEMENT.

When speaking of the fundamental postulates involved in the religious idea, we pointed out that, besides the unknown cause of physical phenomena, "every religion assumes also that there is in human nature something equally hyperphysical with the object which it worships, whether we call this something soul, or mind, or spirit." Let us call it soul. And first let us examine what it is that religion says of the soul, after which we may be in a position to consider what degree of truth, if any, is involved in its assertions.

Now the great fact which presents itself to our notice in this inquiry is the broad line of demarcation which religion has everywhere drawn between the mental and corporeal functions of man, or in other words, between his soul and his body. Generally, it expresses this grand distinction by the assertion that the soul continues to live after the body is dissolved. This doctrine is very ancient and very wide-spread. A few illustrations of its prevalence are all that can be given here.[100]

The rude people of Kamtschatka, who had so little notion of a providence, believed in a subterranean life after death. The soul they thought was immortal, and the body would at some time rejoin it, when the two would live on together, much as they do here but under happier conditions. Their place of abode was to be under the earth, where there was another earth resembling ours. Some of them objected to being baptized, because they would then be compelled to meet their enemies the Russians, instead of living among their own people under ground. Animals too were all of them to live again (Kamtschatka, p. 269-273). The Tartars, when visited by Carpin, had some notion that after death they would enjoy another life where they would perform the same actions as in this (Bergeron, vol. i. art. 3, p. 32). "The most intelligent Greenlanders," writes a traveler among that people, "assert that the soul is a spiritual being quite different from the body and from all matter, that requires no material nourishment, and while the body is decaying in the ground, lives after death and needs a nourishment that is not corporeal, but which they do not know" (H. G., p. 242). The American Indians firmly believed in the immortality of the soul. They thought it would keep the same tendencies after death as the living man had evinced; hence their custom—one that is widely spread—of burying the property of the dead along with the body. The souls were obliged after death to take a long journey, at the end of which they arrived at their appropriate places of suffering and enjoyment. The Paradise of virtuous Indians consisted in the very definite pleasures of good hunting and fishing, eternal spring, abundance of everything with no work, and all the satisfactions of the senses (N. F., tome 3, p. 351-353). The Kafirs, as we have already seen, worship their ancestors, whose "Amadhlozi," or spirits, they believe to continue in existence after death. What they mean by Amadhlozi they explain with tolerable clearness by saying that they are identical with the shadow. These spirits are the true objects of a Kafir's worship, being supposed to possess great power over the affairs of their descendants and relatives for weal or woe. They are believed to reappear in the form of a certain species of harmless snakes, and should a man observe such a snake on the grave of his deceased relation, he will say, "Oh, I have seen him to-day basking on the top of the grave" (R. S. A., pt. 2, p. 142.—K. N., pp. 161,162). Similar reverence for the dead is shown in other parts of Africa. In his lecture on the Ashantees, Mr. Reade says that, "on the death of a member of the household he is sometimes buried under the floor of the hut, in the belief that his spirit may occasionally join in the circle of the living. Food also is placed upon the grave, for they think that as the body of man contains an indwelling spirit, so there exists in the corruptible food an immaterial essence on which the ghost of the departed will feed."

To come to races standing higher in the scale of civilization: the Peruvians had definite notions of a future state, with an upper world in which the good lived a quiet life, free from trouble, and a lower world in which the bad were punished by suffering all the miseries and troubles of this terrestrial condition without intermission (C. R., b. 2, ch. vii). In China the utmost respect is paid to deceased progenitors, who are the objects of a regular _cultus_. India has had from early ages its highly-developed and subtle notions of the distinction of spirit from body, and the former is held to prolong its existence after its separation from the latter, both as disembodied in heavens or hells, and embodied in animals or other men. Some schools believed in the immortality of the soul; others asserted that its final destination was extinction. Buddhism ranged itself with the latter opinion, while still maintaining the doctrine of metempsychosis, and of rewards and punishments both in this world and in numerous others to which spirits went in the course of their wanderings. Parsee souls hover about the grave a few days; then proceed upon a long journey. At its conclusion they pass over a narrow bridge, which the good traverse in safety to enter Paradise, while the bad fall over it and go into hell. In the Mussulman faith there are likewise but two destinies open to man—eternal happiness and eternal suffering. Among the Jews in the time of Christ two doctrines prevailed. Their ancient religion, while aware of the distinction between the spirit and the body, left the continued life of the former an open question. Hence the Pharisees asserted, while the Sadducees denied, a future state. Christ was in this respect a Pharisee of the Pharisees. He, however, like Mahomet, provided only two abodes for the souls of men; one in heaven with his Father, the other in hell, where the fire was never quenched. It was felt, however, by the general Christian world that this sharp separation of all mankind into black and white, goats and sheep, was quite untenable. Hence the Catholic institution of Purgatory, which, whatever may be said against it, is a wise and liberal modification of the harsh doctrine of Christ, affording a resource for the vast intermediate mass who are neither wholly virtuous nor wholly wicked, and providing an agreeable exercise for that natural piety which prompts us to mingle the names of departed friends in our devotions, whether (as in Africa) to pray to them, or (as in Europe) to pray for them.

From this brief review of the opinions of various races, it will be evident that some conception of a spirit in man as distinguished from his body prevails and always has prevailed throughout the world. The special characteristic of this spiritual essence has always been held to be its immateriality. All religions conceive it as distinct from the body, most of them evincing this view by treating it as capable of independent existence. Many of them no doubt invest the spirit after death with a material form, but this is the clothing of the idea, not the idea itself. The form is received after the spirit has left its terrestrial body, and does not originally belong to it; as in the case of the serpents in South Africa, in which ancestral souls are thought to dwell. This immaterial nature is clearly expressed—so far as such an abstract idea can find clear expression from a rude people—by those Kafirs who compare the soul to a shadow. Nothing in the external world seems to have so purely subjective a character as shadows; things which cannot be felt or handled, and which appear to have no independent substance.

Immateriality then is universally asserted (or attempted to be asserted) of the soul. This is of the very essence of the idea. No race believes that any portion of the body, or the body as a whole, is the same thing as mind or spirit. But immortality is not equally involved in the idea or inseparable from it. Notably the Buddhistic creed—held by a considerable fraction of mankind—teaches its votaries to look forward to utter extinction as the _summum bonum_. True, the masses of average believers may not dwell upon the hope of Nirvâna, but upon that of heaven.[101] But the authorized dogma of the Church is, that "not enjoyment and not sorrow is our destined end" or goal, but the absolute rest, if so it may be called, of ceasing to exist. And that this dogma was fervently accepted and thoroughly believed in as a genuine "gospel," the early literature of Buddhism amply proves. The Jews, a most religious people, had no settled hope of immortality provided by their creed, though the account of the creation of Adam shows how clearly they distinguished mind from matter. Warburton indeed infers the authenticity of the Hebrew Revelation from the very fact of the absence of the doctrine of immortality; for no author of a popular religion, except God himself, could have afforded to dispense with so important an article. The more defective Judaism was, the more clearly it was divine. Nor were the classical nations of Greece and Rome at all more certain. With them also opinions differed—some, like Plato and his followers, asserting the immortality of the soul; others, like Epicurus and his school, denying it. Cicero discusses it as an open question, though himself holding to the belief in future existence. His two possible alternatives are continued life in a condition of happiness, or utter cessation of life; either of which he accepts with equal calmness. The fear of hell did not torment him: "post mortem quidem sensus aut optandus aut nullus est" (Cato Major, xx. 74). Even if we are not to be immortal, as he hopes, nevertheless it is a happy thing for man to be extinguished at the fitting season (Ibid., xxiii. 86). Less philosophical people, however, were troubled, like Christians, with the notion of a future world of punishment; and Lucretius addresses himself with all the ardor of a man proclaiming a beneficent gospel to the dissipation of this popular delusion:—

"Nil igitur mors est, ad nos neque pertinet hilum, Quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur."[102]

Like other thinkers of his time, he distinguishes between the _animus_ and _anima_—spirit and soul, and this threefold division of the nature of man subsisted for a time in the language and ideas of Christians. But the essential point is that, whatever further subdivisions may have been made, all schools, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, agreed in the fundamental distinction between the spiritual principle and the material instruments; between mind and matter, or soul and body.

Such, then, is the universal voice of the religious instinct. Let us test the truth of this second postulate as we did that of the first: by endeavoring to do without it. Then we have matter and motion of matter; and the problem is:—Given these elements to find the resultant, mind. Motion is merely change of matter from place to place; therefore the question is, whether in any kind of matter and any changes of matter we can discover mind. Consider the material world statically. As known to science (and we have no right to go beyond scientific observation now), it contains certain properties perceptible to the senses, such as color, sound, taste, and smell, roughness, smoothness, and other tangible qualities, with extension and resistance, discoverable by the muscular sense and touch combined. Any further properties which a deeper analysis may disclose will still belong to the domain of sensible perception, the senses being the instruments employed in their discovery. In which of these statical conditions of matter can mind be shown to be involved? Or what combination of statical conditions can produce mind as a part of the compound? Plainly any attempt to discover it in matter at rest would be an absurdity. Now consider the world dynamically. Here we have matter in motion, matter as the recipient and the transmitter of certain qualities of force. The mode of motion may be either molar (that of masses through space), or molecular (that of particles within a mass). In either case it is nothing but a change of position relatively to other objects. Now, how can change of position either be mind, or result in mind? Take the case of a planet whirling through space. Does this molar motion, considered in any conceivable light, bring us one step nearer to mental phenomena? But all molar motion is of the same kind, and however completely analyzed, can lead to nothing but matter changing its position in space. Is molecular motion in better case? When light is transmitted to the eye, the vibrations of the atmosphere, which form the objective side of this phenomenon, arriving at the optic nerve, cause corresponding vibrations in it, and these transmitted to the brain result in certain movements in its component particles. Which of all these vibrations and movements is sensation? At what point does the physical fact of changes in molecules of matter pass into the mental fact of changes in the quantity or quality of the light perceived? Evidently no such point of transition can be found. And not only can it not be found, but the bare hypothesis of its existence is negatived by the fact that every physical movement produces an exactly equivalent amount of physical movement; so that there is nothing whatever in the resultant which is not accounted for in the antecedents, and nothing in the antecedents which has not its full effect in the resultant. There is thus no room left for the passage of the objective fact of molecular motion into the subjective fact of feeling.

Although these considerations practically exhaust the question, yet another aspect of it may, for the sake of greater clearness, be briefly touched upon. If the doctrine of abiogenesis be accepted, it may be thought to afford some confirmation to the materialistic hypothesis that mind is but a function or property of matter. Do we not here see (it may be asked) life and sensation arising out of non-sentient materials? And if a single living creature can thus arise, then, by the doctrine of evolution, all mind whatever is affiliated on matter. Such a conclusion, however, would be quite unwarranted by the facts observed. In abiogenesis unorganic matter is seen to pass into organic matter, and this is the whole of the process known to science. To assume that at some period in this process the material constituents of the newly-formed creature acquire the property of sensation is, to say the least, a very unscientific proceeding. For, throughout all their permutations, the component elements can (or could with improved instruments) be exactly observed, measured, and weighed; enabling us to say that so and so much, such and such of the inorganic elements has become so and so much, such and such of the organic compound. Now the factors of this compound do not (_ex hypothesi_) contain sensation. How, then, did the compound acquire it? Where is your warrant for suddenly introducing a consequent sensation—for which you have no assignable antecedent?

Thus it is evident that between mind and matter, between spirit and body, between internal and external phenomena, there is a great gulf fixed, which no scientific or metaphysical cunning can succeed in bridging over. Matter is never sensation, and cannot be conceived as ever becoming sensation. The chain of material phenomena, with its several series of causes and effects, is never broken; no physical cause is without its adequate physical effect, nor is any physical effect without a physical cause sufficient to produce it. The body is to the mind an external, material phenomena; closely connected indeed with mental states, and always more or less present to consciousness, but no part of our true selves, no necessary element in our conception of what we actually are. Every portion of the bodily frame can be regarded by us as an outward object, wholly independent of ourselves, and logically, if not practically, separable from ourselves. Many portions, such as the limbs, are actually so separable; and all of them are separable in thought.

Still more impassable is this chasm in nature seen to be when we remark, that there are two all-pervading elements in which mind and matter have their being, and that the phenomena within each element have definite relations to other phenomena within the same element, but are incapable of being brought into a like relation with those of the other element. These two elements are Space and Time. Material particles are related to one another in space, and in space alone. They are nearer to, or more distant from, above or below, to the north, south, east, or west of, the other material particles with which we compare them. But they are not earlier or later than other particles. The existence of concrete objects may be earlier or later than that of other concrete objects; but when we talk of their existence as earlier or later, we are talking of their relation to consciousness, not of their relation to one another. It is the total framed and classified by the mind that has a relation in time to some other similar total; each total, analyzed into its ultimate atoms, has only relations in space to the other total, likewise analyzed into its ultimate atoms. Contrariwise, mental objects, or states of consciousness, are related to one another in time, and in time alone. States of consciousness can be compared as earlier or later, simultaneous or successive. They have no space-relations either to one another or to the material world. It is common indeed to consider the mind as located in the body, but this is incorrect. For absolutely nothing is meant by saying that anything is in a given place except that it stands in given space-relations to surrounding objects. My body is in a place because it is _upon_ the ground, _in_ the air, _below_ the clouds, _amid_ a certain environment which constitutes the country and locality of that country which it is in. But my mind has no surrounding objects of this nature at all. The thought, say, of a distant friend can by no possibility be imagined as enclosed within the grey matter of the brain, just to the right of a nerve A, and in contact with a ganglion B. This thought, and its accompanying emotion, could not be found by any vivisection (if such were possible), though its correlative physical condition might. Hence the mind is not in the body, but is an independent entity whose phenomena, successive in time, run parallel to but never intermingle with the phenomena of body, extended in space.

From the view here stated of the irremoveable distinction between mind and matter an important corollary will be seen to follow.[103] No physical movement (it has been shown) can be conceived as passing into a state of consciousness, for each physical movement begets further physical movement, and while it is fully spent in its physical consequent is itself fully accounted for by its physical antecedent. The converse of this doctrine must therefore be equally true. That is to say, no state of consciousness can pass into a physical movement, for, if it could, this movement would have another than a physical antecedent. In other words, the mind can in no way influence the actions of the body. It cannot stand in a casual relation to any physical fact whatever. Hence the doctrine of the will (not only of free will but of any will) falls to the ground. For the current conception of a will supposes that a chain of material events passes at some point in its course into a state of consciousness, and that this state of consciousness again originates a chain of material events. Say that I hear some one call my name, and go to the window to ascertain who it is. Then the common explanation would be, not only that the atmospheric undulations, which are the material correlative of sound passing into the brain by the auditory nerves, produced the sensation of hearing, which is true, but that this sensation in its turn produced those exertions of the limbs which result in my arrival at the window, which is erroneous. According to the view here adopted, the atmospheric undulations stand in a direct relation of causation to the affection of the auditory nerve, and this affection, in a direct relation of causation, to the resulting movements. The states of consciousness in like manner stand in a direct relation of simple sequence to each other; the sensation of sitting in a room being followed by that of hearing my name, this by the thought that there is some one outside calling me, this by the sensation of motion through space, and this last by that of seeing the person from whom the call emanated standing in the expected place. But at no point can the one train of events be converted into the other. And while the train of external sequences does influence the train of internal sequences, this latter has no corresponding influence upon the former. For this would imply that at some period in the succession physical movements lost themselves in consciousness; ceased to _be_ physical movements, and became something of an alien nature. It would imply further that such movements originated _de novo_ from something of an alien nature having no calculable or measurable relation to them. Either of which implications would constitute an exception to the Persistence of Force.

Man is, in short, as the adherents of this opinion have called him, a "conscious automaton." He does not will his own actions, nor do external manifestations, whether those of the unconscious or the conscious orders of existence, influence his will. But along with the set of objective facts there is always present a parallel set of subjective facts, and the subjective facts stand in an invariable relation to the objective facts. So that where the material circumstances, both those of the surrounding world and those of the body, are of a given character, the non-material circumstances, the state of mind, is also of a given and precisely corresponding character. Variations in the one imply variations in the other; feelings in the one change or remain fixed with changes or fixity in the other.

Could the friends of dogmatic religion know the things belonging to their peace, they would bestow upon this doctrine their most earnest support; for it deals the death-blow to that semi-scientific materialism which derives a certain countenance from the discoveries of the day, and which is—second to religious dogmas themselves—the most dangerous enemy of the spiritual conception of the universe and of mankind. Not that in lifting a voice against materialistic views, I mean for a moment to lend a helping hand to the vulgar and irreverent outcry which is so often raised against matter itself as something gross and degraded, and deserving only of a contemptuous tolerance at our hands. I should have thought that the endless beauty of the material universe, and the varied enjoyments to be derived from its contemplation, as also the profound instruction to be obtained by its study, would have sufficed to give it a higher place in the estimation of religious minds. With such opposition to materialism as this I can have no vestige of sympathy. The form of materialism which I contend against, not as irreligious but as unphilosophic, is that which confounds the two orders of phenomena—physical and mental—under one idea, that of matter. Matter is supposed in this philosophy to be the parent of mind. A bridge is sought to be thrown across the great gulf which is fixed between us and the world without. But the moment we seek to walk over this imaginary bridge it crashes beneath our feet, and we are hurled into the abyss below.

Between that which feels, thinks, perceives, and reasons on the one hand, and that which is felt, thought about, perceived, and reasoned on, there is no community of nature. The distinction between these two, though it need not be ultimate in the order of things, is absolutely ultimate in the order of thought. In their own undiscoverable nature these two manifestations may be one; in their relation to us they are for ever two.