To neither saint nor sinner is death a cessation of being. This we maintain, against the advocates of annihilation:
1. Upon rational grounds.
(a) The metaphysical argument.—The soul is simple, not compounded. Death, in matter, is the separation of parts. But in the soul there are no parts to be separated. The dissolution of the body, therefore, does not necessarily work a dissolution of the soul. But, since there is an immaterial principle in the brute, and this argument taken by itself might seem to prove the immortality of the animal creation equally with that of man, we pass to consider the next argument.
The Gnostics and the Manichæans held that beasts had knowledge and might pray. The immateriality of the brute mind was probably the consideration which led Leibnitz, Bishop Butler, Coleridge, John Wesley, Lord Shaftesbury, Mary Somerville, James Hogg, Toplady, Lamartine, and Louis Agassiz to encourage the belief in animal immortality. See Bp. Butler, Analogy, part i, chap. i (Bohn's ed., 81-91); Agassiz, Essay on Classification, 99—“Most of the arguments for the immortality of man apply equally to the permanency of this principle in other living beings.” Elsewhere Agassiz says of animals: “I cannot doubt of their immortality any more than I doubt of my own.” Lord Shaftesbury in 1881 remarked: “I have ever believed in a happy future for animals; I cannot say or conjecture how or where; but sure I am that the love, so manifested by dogs especially, is an emanation from the divine essence, and as such it can, or rather, it will, never be extinguished.” St. Francis of Assisi preached [pg 985]to birds, and called sun, moon, earth, fire, water, stones, flowers, crickets, and death, his brothers and sisters. “He knew not if the brotherhood His homily had understood; He only knew that to one ear The meaning of his words was clear” (Longfellow, The Sermon of St. Francis—to the birds). “If death dissipates the sagacity of the elephant, why not that of his captor?” See Buckner, Immortality of Animals; William Adams Brown, Christian Theology in Outline, 240.
Mansel, Metaphysics, 371, maintains that all this argument proves is that the objector cannot show the soul to be compound, and so cannot show that it is destructible. Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 259—“The facts which point toward the termination of our present state of existence are connected with our physical nature, not with our mental.” John Fiske, Destiny of the Creature, 110—“With his illegitimate hypothesis of annihilation, the materialist transgresses the bounds of experience quite as widely as the poet who sings of the New Jerusalem, with its river of life and its streets of gold. Scientifically speaking, there is not a particle of evidence for either view.”John Fiske, Life Everlasting, 80-85—“How could immortal man have been produced through heredity from an ephemeral brute? We do not know. Nature's habit is to make prodigious leaps, but only after long preparation. Slowly rises the water in the tank, inch by inch through many a weary hour, until at length it overflows, and straightway vast systems of machinery are awakened into rumbling life. Slowly the ellipse becomes eccentric, until suddenly the finite ellipse becomes an infinite paraboloid.”
Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 206—“The ideas of dividing up or splitting off are not applicable to mind. The argument for the indestructibility of mind as growing out of its indiscerptibility, and the argument by which Kant confuted it, are alike absurd within the realm of mental phenomena.” Adeney, Christianity and Evolution, 127—“Nature, this argument shows, has nothing to say against the immortality of that which is above the range of physical structure.” Lotze: “Everything which has once originated will endure forever so soon as it possesses an unalterable value for the coherent system of the world; but it will, as a matter of course, in turn cease to be, if this is not the case.” Bowne, Int. to Psych. Theory, 315-318—“Of what use would brutes be hereafter? We may reply: Of what use are they here?... Those things which have perennial significance for the universe will abide.” Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 203—“In living beings there is always a pressure toward larger and higher existence.... The plant must grow, must bloom, must sow its seeds, or it withers away.... The aim is to bring forth consciousness, and in greatest fulness.... Beasts of prey and other enemies to the ascending path of life are to be swept out of the way.”
But is not the brute a part of that Nature which has been subjected to vanity, which groans and travails in pain, and which waits to be redeemed? The answer seems to be that the brute is a mere appendage to man, has no independent value in the creation, is incapable of ethical life or of communion with God the source of life, and so has no guarantee of continuance. Man on the other hand is of independent value. But this is to anticipate the argument which follows. It is sufficient here to point out that there is no proof that consciousness is dependent upon the soul's connection with a physical organism. McLane, Evolution in Religion, 261—“As the body may preserve its form and be to a degree made to act after the psychic element is lost by removal of the brain, so this psychic element may exist, and act according to its nature after the physical element ceases to exist.” Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 19—“If I am in a house, I can look upon surrounding objects only through its windows; but open the door and let me go out of the house, and the windows are no longer of any use to me.”Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 295—“To perpetuate mind after death is less surprising than to perpetuate or transmit mind here by inheritance.” See also Martineau, Study, 2:332-337, 363-365.
William James, in his Essay on Human Immortality, argues that thought is not necessarily a productive function of the brain; it may rather be a permissive or transmissivefunction. Thought is not made in the brain, so that when the brain perishes the soul dies. The brain is only the organ for the transmission of thought, just as the lens transmits the light which it does not produce. There is a spiritual world behind and above the material world. Our brains are thin and half transparent places in the veil, through which knowledge comes in. Savage, Life after Death, 289—“You may attach a dynamo for a time to some particular machine. When you have removed the machine, you have not destroyed the dynamo. You may attach it to some other machine and find that you have the old time power. So the soul may not be confined to one body.”These analogies seem to us to come short of proving personal immortality. They [pg 986]belong to “psychology without a soul,” and while they illustrate the persistence of some sort of life, they do not render more probable the continuance of my individual consciousness beyond the bounds of death. They are entirely consistent with the pantheistic theory of a remerging of the personal existence in the great whole of which it forms a part. Tennyson, In Memoriam: “That each, who seems a separate whole, Should move his rounds and, fusing all The skirts of self again, should fall Remerging in the general Soul, Is faith as vague as all unsweet.” See Pfleiderer, Die Ritschl'sche Theologie, 12; Howison, Limits of Evolution, 279-312.
Seth, Hegelianism: “For Hegel, immortality is only the permanence of the Absolute, the abstract process. This is no more consoling than the continued existence of the chemical elements of our bodies in new transformations. Human self-consciousness is a spark struck in the dark, to die away on the darkness whence it has arisen.” This is the only immortality of which George Eliot conceived in her poem, The Immortal Choir: “O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end in self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man's search To vaster issues.”Those who hold to this unconscious immortality concede that death is not a separation of parts, but rather a cessation of consciousness; and that therefore, while the substance of human nature may endure, mankind may ever develop into new forms, without individual immortality. To this we reply, that man's self-consciousness and self-determination are different in kind from the consciousness and determination of the brute. As man can direct his self-consciousness and self-determination to immortal ends, we have the right to believe this self-consciousness and self-determination to be immortal. This leads us to the next argument.