Part 2

I do not overlook the existence of divers theological systems in which the attitude toward a future life is very different from that with which our Christian education has made us familiar. We sometimes hear such systems cited as exceptions to the alleged universality of the human belief in immortality. The Buddhist looks forward through myriads of successive sentient existences to a culminating state of Nirwana, which if not actual extinction is at least complete quiescence, the absolute zero of being. It hardly needs saying, however, that Buddhistic theology, though it may have arrived at such a zero through long flights of metaphysical reasoning, is nevertheless based in all its foundations upon the primitive belief in man's survival of death. Sometimes it is said that the Jews of the Old Testament times had no proper conception of immortality. It can hardly be maintained, however, that such stories as that of the conversation at Endor between the living Saul and the dead Samuel could emanate from a people destitute of belief in a life after death. In point of fact ancient Jewish thought abounds in traces of the primitive ghost-world. It is only by contrast with the glorious and inspiring Christian development of the belief in immortality that the earlier dispensation seems so jejune and meagre in its faith. There was little to arouse religious emotion in the dismal world of flitting shadows, the Sheol or Hades from which the Greek hero would so gladly have escaped, even to take the most menial position in all the sunlit world. Greek and Hebrew thought, in what we call the classic ages, stood alike in need of religious revival. The mythic lore of the Greek mind had flowered luxuriantly in æsthetic fancies, while the spiritual life of Judaism languished amid strict obedience to forms and precepts. The far-reaching thoughts of Greek philosophers and the lofty ethics of Hebrew preachers were divorced from the primitive ghost-world, even as the mental processes of the modern scholar are separated by a great gulf from those of the woman who comes to scrub the floor. The advent of Christianity fused together the various elements. The doctrine of a future life was endowed with all the moral significance that Jewish thought could give to it, and with all the mystic glory that Hellenic speculation could contribute, so that the effect upon men was that of a fresh revelation of life and immortality through the gospel. Grotesque and hideous features also were brought in from the ghost-worlds of the classic ages, as well as from that of the Teutonic barbarians, and the result is seen in mediæval Christianity. At no other time, perhaps, has the Unseen World played such a leading part in men's minds as in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of our Christian era, in the age that witnessed the culmination of sublimity in church architecture, in the society whose thought found comprehensive expression in the "Summa" of St. Thomas, as the thought of our times is expressed in Spencer's "First Principles," in an intellectual atmosphere, which just as it was about passing away was depicted for all coming time in the poem of Dante. It was a time of spiritual awakening such as mankind had never before witnessed, but it was also an age of new problems, an age wherein the seeds of revolt were thickly germinating. The nature and constitution of the Unseen World had been too rashly and too elaborately set forth in theorems born of the slender knowledge of primitive times, and the growing tendency to interrogate Nature soon led to conclusions which broke down the old edifice of thought. In the sixteenth century came Copernicus and administered such a shock to the mind as even Luther's defiance of the papacy scarcely equalled. In recent days, when Bishop Wilberforce reckoned without his host in trying to twit Huxley with his monkey ancestry, our minds were getting inured to all sorts of audacious innovations, so that they did not greatly disturb us. For its unsettling effects upon time-honoured beliefs and mental habits the Darwinian theory is no more to be compared to the Copernican than the invention of the steamboat is to be compared to the voyages of Columbus. We are in no danger of overrating the bewilderment that was wrought by the discovery that our earth is not the physical centre of things, and that the sun apparently does not exist for the sole purpose of giving light and warmth to man's terrestrial habitat. We need not wonder that in conservative Spain scarcely a century ago the University of Salamanca prohibited the teaching of the Newtonian astronomy. We need not wonder that Galileo should have been commanded to hold his tongue on a topic that seemed to cast discredit upon the whole theology that assumes man to be the central object of the Divine care.

This unsettling of men's minds was of course indefinitely increased by the revolt of Descartes against the scholastic philosophy, by Newton's immense contributions to physics, and by such discoveries as those of Harvey, Black, and Lavoisier, which showed by what methods truth could be obtained concerning Nature's operations, and how different such methods were from those by which the accepted systems of theology had been built up. The result has been wholesale skepticism directed against everything whatever that now exists or has ever existed in the shape of an ancient belief. This result was first reached in France about the middle of the eighteenth century, when the thoughts of Locke and Newton were eagerly absorbed in a community irritated beyond endurance by social injustice, and in which the church had done much to forfeit respect. Thus came about that violent outbreak of materialistic atheism which, in spite of its generous aims and many admirable achievements, is surely one of the most mournful episodes in the history of human thought. The French philosophers set an example to three generations; the note struck by Diderot and Buffon and D'Alembert continued to resound until the scientific horizon had become radiant in every quarter with the promise of a brighter day, and its echoes have not yet died. It was but lately that the voice of Lamettrie was heard again from the lips of Strauss and Buechner, and even to-day we may sometimes be entertained by a belated eighteenth century naturalist who is fully persuaded that his denial of human immortality is an inevitable corollary from the doctrine of evolution. Indeed the progress of scientific discovery has been so rapid since the time of Diderot, its achievements have been so vast, its results so multifarious and so dazzling, that it has well-nigh absorbed the attention of the foremost minds. The dogmas of theology seem stale and empty, the speculations of metaphysics vain and unprofitable, in comparison with the fascinating marvels of chemistry and astronomy, of palæontology and spectrum analysis; and it is natural that we should rejoice over the methods of research that are enabling us thus to wrest from Nature a few of her long guarded secrets, and to make up our minds to have nothing to do with conclusions that are not obtained or at least verified by such scientific methods. Daily we hear sounded the praises of observation, of experiment, of comparison; we are warned against long deductions, since the strength of any chain of arguments is measured by that of its weakest link, and experience is perpetually teaching us, to our vexation and chagrin, that what reason says must be so is not so, that facts will not fit hypothesis. The more things we try to explain, the better we realize that we live in a world of unexplained residua. Away, then, with all so-called truths that cannot be tested by weights and measures, or other direct appeals to the senses! Your modern philosopher will have nothing of them. His system is composed, from start to finish, of scientific theorems. As for the higher speculations, the deeper generalizations, in which philosophy has been wont to indulge concerning the aim and meaning of existence, he waves them away as profitless or even mischievous. The world is full of questions as pressing as they are baffling. As I once heard Herbert Spencer say, "You cannot take up any problem in physics without being quickly led to some metaphysical problem which you can neither solve nor evade." It was in order to secure philosophic peace of mind that Auguste Comte undertook to build up what he called Positive Philosophy, in which the existence of all such problems was to be complacently ignored,--much as the ostrich seeks escape from a dilemma by burying its head in the sand. In a far more reverent and justifiable spirit the agnostic like Huxley or Spencer acknowledges the limitations of the human mind and builds as far as he may, leaving the rest to God.

In the fervour of this modern reliance upon scientific methods, we are warned with especial emphasis against all humours and predilections which we may be in danger of cherishing as human beings. In a new sense of the words we are reminded that "the heart of man is deceitful and desperately wicked," and if any belief is especially pleasant or consoling to us, forthwith does Science lay upon us her austere command to mortify the flesh and treat the belief in question with exceptional disfavour and suspicion. Thus there has grown up a kind of Puritanism in the scientific temper which, while announcing its unalterable purpose to follow Truth though she lead us to Hades, takes a kind of grim satisfaction in emphasizing the place of destination.

Now there can be no sort of doubt that this rigid and vigorous scientific temper is in the main eminently wholesome and commendable. In the interests of intellectual honesty there is nothing which we need more than to be put on our guard against allowing our reasoning processes to be warped by our feelings. Nevertheless in steering clear of Scylla it would be a pity to tumble straight into the maw of Charybdis, and it behooves us to ask just how far the canons of scientific method are competent to guide us in dealing with ultimate questions. Science has given us so many surprises that our capacity for being shocked or astounded is well-nigh exhausted, and our old unregenerate human nature has been bullied and badgered into something like humility; so that now, at the end of the greatest and most bewildering of centuries, we may fitly pause for a moment and ask how fares it, in these exacting days, with that Unseen World which man brought with him when he was first making his appearance on our planet? And what has science to say about that time-honoured belief that the human soul survives the death of the human body?

The position that science irrevocably condemns such a belief seems at first sight a very strong one and has unquestionably had a good deal of weight with many minds of the present generation. Throughout the animal kingdom we never see sensation, perception, instinct, volition, reasoning, or any of the phenomena which we distinguish as mental, manifested except in connection with nerve-matter arranged in systems of various degrees of complexity. We can trace sundry relations of general correspondence between the increasing manifestations of intelligence and the increasing complications of the nervous system. Injuries to the nervous structure entail failures of function, either in the mental operations themselves or in the control which they exercise over the actions of the body; there is either psychical aberration, or loss of consciousness, or muscular paralysis. At the moment of death, as soon as the current of arterial blood ceases to flow through the cerebral vessels, all signs of consciousness cease for the looker-on; and after the nervous system has been resolved into its elements, what reason have we to suppose that consciousness survives, any more than that the wetness of water should survive its separation into oxygen and hydrogen?

So far as our terrestrial experience goes there can be but one answer to such a question. We have no more warrant in experience for supposing consciousness to exist without a nervous system than we have for supposing the properties of water to exist in a world destitute of hydrogen and oxygen. Our power of framing conceptions is narrowly limited by experience, and when we try to figure to ourselves the conditions of a future life we are either hopelessly baffled at the start or else we fall back upon grossly materialistic imagery. The savage's ghost-world is a mere repetition of the fights and hunts with which he is familiar. The early Christians looked forward to a speedy resurrection from Sheol, followed by an endless bodily existence upon a renovated earth. Dante's pictures of the Unseen World are often so intensely materialistic as to seem grotesque in our more truly spiritual age. Popular conceptions of heaven to-day abound in symbolism that is confessedly a mere reflection from the world of matter; insomuch that persons of sufficient culture to realize the inadequacy of these popular images are wont to avoid the difficulty by refraining from putting their hopes and beliefs into any definite or describable form. Among such minds there is a tacit agreement that the unseen world must be purely spiritual in constitution, yet no mental image of such a world can be formed. We are all agreed that life beyond the grave would be a delusion and a cruel mockery without the continuance of the tender household affections which alone make the present life worth living; but to imagine the recognition of soul by soul apart from the material structure in which we have known soul to be manifested, apart from the look of the loved face, the tones of the loved voice, or the renewed touch of the long vanished hand, is something quite beyond our power. Even if you try to imagine your own psychical activity as continuing without the aid of the physical machinery of sensation, you soon get into unmanageable difficulties. The furniture of your mind consists in great part of sensuous images, chiefly visual, and you cannot in thought follow yourself into a world that does not announce itself to you through sense impressions. From all this it plainly appears that our notion of the survival of conscious activity apart from material conditions is not only unsupported by any evidence that can be gathered from the world of which we have experience but is utterly and hopelessly inconceivable.

The argument here summarized is in no way profound or abstruse; it is extremely obvious, and as its propositions cannot well be controverted, it has had great weight with many people. I dare say it may be held responsible for the larger part of contemporary skepticism as to the future life. People have grown accustomed to demanding scientific support for doctrines, whereas this doctrine is not only destitute of scientific support but lands us in inconceivabilities; is it not, then, untenable and absurd? Such is the common argument. There are those who seek to meet it with inductive evidence of the presence of disembodied spirits or ghosts which hold direct communication only with certain specially endowed persons known as mediums. Concerning such inductive evidence it may be said that very little has as yet been brought forward which is likely to make much impression upon minds trained in investigation. If its value as evidence were to be conceded, it would seem to point to the conclusion that the grade of intelligence which survives the grave is about on a par with that which in the present life we are accustomed to shut up in asylums for idiots. On the whole the mediumistic ideas and methods are frankly materialistic, their alleged communications with the other world are through sights and sounds, and if their pretensions could be sustained the result would be simply the rehabilitation of the primitive ghost-world. Their theory of things moves on so low a plane as hardly to merit notice in a serious philosophic discussion.

To return to the argument that the doctrine of the survival of conscious activity apart from material conditions is unsupported by experience and is inconceivable, we may observe that it is inconceivable just because it is entirely without foundation in experience. Our powers of conception are narrowly determined by the limits of our experience, and when that experience has never furnished us with the materials for framing a conception we simply cannot frame it. Hence we cannot conceive of the conscious soul as entirely dissociated from any material vehicle.

Now we are prepared to ask, How much does this famous argument amount to, as against the belief that the soul survives the body? The answer is, Nothing! absolutely nothing. It not only fails to disprove the validity of the belief, but it does not raise even the slightest _prima facie_ presumption against it. This will at once become apparent if we remember that human experience is very far indeed from being infinite, and that there are in all probability immense regions of existence in every way as real as the region which we know, yet concerning which we cannot form the faintest rudiment of a conception. Within the past century the study of light and other radiant forces has furnished us with a suggestive object-lesson. The luminiferous ether combines properties which are inconceivable in connection. How curious to think that we live and move in an ocean of ether in which the particles of all material things are floating like islands! But how amazing to learn that this ocean of ether is also an adamantine firmament! Is not this sheer nonsense? an ocean firmament of ether-adamant! Yet such seems to be the fact, and our philosophy must make the best of it. Now suppose that all this world were crowded with disembodied souls, an infinite throng most aptly called "the majority," a thousand or more on every spot in space as broad as the point of a cambric needle, in what way could we become aware of their existence? Clearly in no way, since we have no organ or faculty for the perception of soul apart from the material structure and activities in which it has been manifested throughout the whole course of our experience. There we will suppose are the countless millions, the existence of any one of whom, could we detect it, would suffice to demonstrate the doctrine of a future life, and yet, for lack of the requisite means of communication, all this evidence is inaccessible. Such an illustration shows that "the entire absence of testimony does not even raise a negative presumption except in cases where testimony is accessible." The reason is obvious. Until we can go wherever the testimony may be, we are not entitled to affirm that there is an absence of testimony. So long as our knowledge is restricted by the conditions of this terrestrial life, we are not in a position to make negative assertions as to regions of existence outside of these conditions. We may feel quite free, therefore, to give due weight to any considerations which make it probable that consciousness survives the wreck of the material body.

We are now in a position to see the fallacy of Moleschott's often-quoted aphorism, "No thought without phosphorus!" When this saying was a new one, there were worthy people who felt that somehow it was all over with man's immortal soul. With phosphorus you light your candle, and with phosphorus you discover Neptune and write the Fifth Symphony; how charmingly simple and convincing! And yet was anything save a bit of rhetoric really gained by singling out phosphorus among the chemical constituents of brain tissue rather than nitrogen or carbon? Suppose the dictum had been, "No thought without a brain." The obvious answer would have been, "If you refer to the present life, most erudite professor, your remark is true, but hardly novel or startling; if you refer to any condition of things subsequent to death, pray where did you obtain your knowledge?"