IV.
The spirit of man is simple. It is an ultimate and indivisible unity. Death divides, breaks up, and disintegrates. The nature of the human spirit is such, however, that it cannot be divided, broken up, or disintegrated. We see it maintain its identity through the storms and mutations of eighty years. All things change about it. The very body that constitutes its temporary abiding place is torn down and rebuilt many times in the course of a long life. It advances in knowledge and experience; grows larger and richer in hope and love, but all its accumulations of thought and increasing wealth of life are stored in the same self-conscious, self-determining, personal spirit. In the evening of life the old man sits in the midst of his grandchildren and recounts the scenes of his boyhood days. All the waves of time contained within the sweep of three score years and ten have left their labels of drift and storm on the shores of his life. But they have not worn, or wasted, or altered his spirit.
A rock wears away, or is crumbled to dust, when it is a rock no longer. A tree is cut down and split into cord wood and burned in the engine, and it is a tree no longer. In the furnace it is turned back into its original elements. In the fire it is altered or othered. The other of a tree is oxygen, hydrogen, etc. The bird in the thicket is shot by the heartless sportsman. It falls to the ground and its little heart ceases to beat. Soon its body is changed back into earth and air. The other of a bird is not a bird, but the particles which were organized under the process of natural law to form its body. The images which fell on its vision in the grove, faded away when the objects which caused them were removed. The sounds which came to its ears from here and there in the forest passed from its sense when the air that caused them ceased to vibrate. In the bird there was no inner self, abiding, self-conscious, determining, and active, that was capable of grasping and holding and recreating the visions and the notes which came to it. It may have had a sort of sentient consciousness, but it was not much above the consciousness of the sea, which holds the images of the stars in its dark blue waves, as long as they stand above it.
By comparing man with the classes of individuals below him, we may see the respects in which he rises infinitely above them. And we may see, too, by this comparison, that immortality is not something to which man is to come beyond death, but something that he has already in the very constitution of the personal spirit. The same may be said of man’s body, that is said of the bodies of trees and birds, its other is the original elements which compose it. The life in a tree cannot other itself, because it is not conscious. The life in a bird cannot other itself because its consciousness is not self-consciousness. But in man’s body there resides a spirit that can other itself. Man, as a personal spirit, can project himself out of himself, and reason with himself and commune with himself. The self he projects out of himself is another self, but not a different self. The other of man’s spirit, then, is not something else, but it is the same spirit. Man is subject and object, active and passive, determiner and determined. Man, as subject, may externalize himself, and thus make of himself his own object, and by this self-separation enrich himself and advance within himself. Beethoven, as a thinking subject, objectified his thought in the symphonies, and thus regaled and thrilled his own spirit. By putting his own thought into the form of sound waves, it came back to him in the rain, and storm, and thunder, and sigh, and murmur of music. As a thinking subject Raphael objectified his own thought in the transfiguration, and thus had it come back to him in a vision as immortal as the spirit that created it. Michael Angelo objectified his own thought in the Last Judgment, and by this self-separation of his spirit, advertised its indestructibility. Homer, as a thinking subject, objectified his thought into the Iliad. This great epic poem has already lived, even on this side of the grave, where the order is change and decay, nearly three thousand years. Are we to conclude that a personal spirit that could deposit itself in numbers never to die, was itself subject to dissolution? This would be to have an effect greater than the cause. The sunbeam may deposit itself in a tree, and thus secure to itself life in embodied form for hundreds of years. But in order that this may be, the sun must send his beams to warm and nourish the tree all the days of its life. The Iliad has lived, however, nearly three thousand years, without the daily ministrations of Homer’s spirit. For a bubble on the sea of life to lift itself into imperishable form and then fall back to mingle with the waves and the waters, is to contradict the principle of the correlation of forces, which declares that action and reaction must always be equal. The expression a spirit makes of itself cannot be more enduring than the spirit itself.
“The ship may sink and I may drink
A hasty death in the bitter sea;
But all that I leave in the ocean grave
May be slipped and spared, and no loss to me.
“What care I, though falls the sky,
And the shriveled earth to a cinder turn?
No fires of doom can ever consume
What never was made nor meant to burn.
“Let go the breath! There is no death
For the living soul, nor loss nor harm.
Nor of the clod is the life of God;
Let it mount, as it will, from form to form.”
When a train of cars stops suddenly at the depot, the energy that caused it to fly along the track is not lost, it is only transformed. When a tree is cut down, the energy that expressed itself in its trunk and branches is not lost, it will only take other forms. When a horse dies, the energy of which its life was the expression is not lost, it is transformed. When a tree or a horse passes from the living world into the world of inorganic things, the exact amount of energy in the body of the living tree or horse takes other forms. The amount on the side of death is equal to the amount on the side of life. If we consider man only as a physical organism, the same may be said of him. The amount transformed into earth and air, will be the equivalent of the organized fund of bone, and sinew, and muscle, turned over to death. If we thus estimate man, however, as we do a tree or a horse, have we taken into account the entire sum of assets that were in his possession during life? What of his thought, affection, and volition? When Kepler died, what became of the intelligence that discovered the “Three Laws,” which constitute the arches of the sublime bridge that spans the vast chasm between Ptolemaic and modern astronomy? When Laplace died, what became of the spirit that solved the problems of the Mécanique Céleste, by the aid of which the irregularities of the heavenly bodies were reduced to order? When Adams died, what became of the massive spirit that built in the depths of his own study the planet Neptune, with no other raw material to work from than the perturbations of Uranus? When Moses died, what became of the affection that expressed itself in the training and civilization of a race? When Jesus Christ died, what became of the love that sacrificed itself for a sinful world?
When we begin to talk about human life, we find all that has made civilization is not physical. In the death of human beings, the energies of thought, and affection, and volition are not represented in the transformations which take place with reference to their bodies. Yet all the energies man has put forth that give any evidence of his record on the earth are such as come from thought, and affection, and volition. As these energies are not transformed at death, as are the forces of the body, they must continue. For to suppose they ceased at death would be to break the law of the correlation and the conservation of forces. If they are not transformed at death, along with the forces of the body, they must reside in another than the material world, and must not, therefore, be subject to its changes.