Darwin remarks, that "man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future."
The belief in a future life amongst the civilized race of mankind is almost universally prevalent. The proofs of immortality are various. The desire that man has to live forever and his horror of annihilation is one; the good suffer in this world and the wicked triumph—this would indicate the necessity of future retribution. The infinite perfectibility of the human mind never reaches its full capacity in this life; the faculty of insight which sees in an individual all its past history at a glance is the immortal attribute and is continually on the increase; and it is possible that Aristotle was right so far as he stated that the lower faculties of the soul, such as sensation, imagination, feeling, memory, etc., are perishable. No matter if this be so or not, it is certain that in the next life, where all is perfection, only the fittest attributes will exist, the others would have perished. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has been defended by Marhemeke, Blasche, Weisse, Hinnichs, Fecham, J. H. Fichte, and others.
Let us look for a moment at the visible universe and see if it is not reasonable, on a scientific basis, to admit of the existence of another universe, although it remains unseen to us. One can not help but be struck with the fact that energy is being dissipated in this visible universe, that the visible universe is apparently very wasteful. Look at the sun which pours her vast store of high-class energy into space, at the rate of 185,000 miles per second. What will be the result of this? The answer is simple: The inevitable destruction of the visible universe. Yes, just as the visible universe had its beginning it will have its end. But there existed a power before the visible universe came into existence, and which is acting in the visible universe as the ultimate cause of all phenomena. "For we are obliged," says Herbert Spencer in his First Principles, "to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation of some power by which we are acted upon; though omnipresence is unthinkable, yet, as experience discloses no bounds to the diffusion of phenomena, we are unable to think of limits to the presence of this power, while the criticisms of science teaches us that this power is incomprehensible." And so we should expect, for a finite cannot comprehend an infinite. It is for this and other reasons one is led to believe that the visible universe is only an infinitesimal part of "that stupendous whole which is alone entitled to be called The Universe."[77] As there existed an invisible universe before the visible one came into existence, we can conclude that there still exists an invisible universe now, and that this invisible universe will still exist when the present visible one has passed away. Let us see what light our finite senses can throw on this. It is well known that all our senses have only a certain narrow gauge within which they are able to bring us into sensible contact with the world about us. All outside this range we are unable to reach. For example, we do not see all forms and colors; we do not hear all sounds; we do not smell all odors; we cannot conscientiously touch all substances; we cannot taste all flavors. Vision depends on the wave motion of light. The length of a wave of mean red light is about 1⁄39000th of an inch, that of violet 1⁄57500th of an inch. But the number of oscillations of ether in a second, necessary to produce the sensation of red, are 477,000,000,000,000, all of which enter the eye in one second. For the sensation of violet, the eye must receive 699,000,000,000,000 oscillations in one second, as light travels 185,000 miles in one second. But when waves of light having all possible lengths act on the eye simultaneously, the sensation of white is produced. So, as has been previously stated, without eyes the world would be wrapped in darkness, there being no light and color outside of one's eye. So we see our sense of sight has its limits, and we know how finite these are. That there are vibrations of the ether on each side of our limits of vision cannot be doubted; and if our eyes were acute enough to receive them, we could have the sensation of some color, which must under present conditions remain forever blank. The owl and bat can see when we cannot; their eyes can receive oscillations of ether, which pass by without affecting us. So with sound, which "is a sensation produced when vibrations of a certain character are excited in the auditory apparatus of the ear."[78] The longest wave which can give an impression has a length of about 66 ft., which is equal to 16½ vibrations per second; when the wave is reduced to three or four tenths of an inch, equal to from 38,000 to 40,000 vibrations per second, sound becomes again inaudible. The piano, for instance, only runs between 27½ vibrations in a second up to 3,520. Sound travels about 1,093 feet per second, and the human voice can be heard 460 feet away, whilst a rifle can be heard 16,000 feet (3.02 miles), and very strong cannonading 575,840 feet, or 90 miles. That there are vibrations above and below 16½ and 40,000, there is no room to doubt, as there exist ears which can hear them, such as the hare; but to us they are as though they did not exist.
Of all our senses, the sense of smell far surpasses that of the other sense. Valentine has calculated that we are able to perceive about the three one-hundred-millionth of a grain of musk. The minute particle which we perceive by smell, no chemical reaction can detect, and even spectrum analysis, which can recognize fifteen-millionths of a grain, is far surpassed. But this sense in man is far surpassed by the hound.
Our sense of taste is also limited, and as has been already stated, cannot distinguish all flavors. We can recognize by taste one part of sulphuric acid in 1000 parts of water; one drop of this on the tongue would contain 1⁄2000 of a grain (3⁄400 of a grain) of sulphuric acid. The length of time needed for reaction in sensation has been determined by Vintschgau and Hougschmied, and in a person whose sense of taste was highly developed, the reaction time was, for common salt, 0.159 second; for sugar, 0.1639 second; for acid, 0.1676 second; and for quinine, 0.2351 second.
Reviewing, then, the above, it is evident there are eyes which can see what we cannot, there are ears which can hear what we cannot, and there are animals who can smell and touch what we cannot. "For anything we know to the contrary, then," says Savage, "a refined and spiritualized order of existences may be the inhabitants of another and unseen world all about us." As Milton has said:
"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep."
If there is a life very much different from and very much higher than our present one, it is not strange we are ignorant of it. It is impossible to make a person understand anything which is entirely unlike all that has ever been seen or heard, for every idea in the world that man has came to him by nature. Man[79] cannot conceive of anything the hint of which has not been received from his surroundings. He can imagine an animal with the hoof of a bison, with the pouch of a kangaroo, with the wings of an eagle, with the beak of a bird, and with the tail of a lion; and yet every point of this monster he borrowed from nature. Everything he can think of, everything he can dream of, is borrowed from his surroundings—everything. "So, if an angel should come and tell of another life, it would mean nothing to us, unless we could translate it into terms of our own experience. We could not understand a 'light that never was on land or sea.' Our ignorance is not even then a probability against our belief."[80]
As has already been stated, the visible universe must have its doom, must end as it began, by consisting of a single mass of matter; but is there not a more primitive state of matter than the matter such as we know it? Yes; and the so-called ether is that matter. It is unlike any of the forms of matter which we can weigh and measure. It is in some respects like unto a fluid, and in some respects like unto a solid. It is both hard and elastic to an almost inconceivable degree. "It fills all material bodies like a sea in which the atoms of the material bodies are as islands, and it occupies the whole of what we call empty space. It is so sensitive that a disturbance in any part of it causes a 'tremor which is felt on the surface of countless worlds.' It exerts frictions; and although the friction is infinitely small, yet as it has an almost infinite time to work in, it will diminish the momentum of the planets, and diminish their ability to maintain their distance from the sun, the consequence of which will be the planets will fall into the sun, and the solar system will end where it begun."[81]
According to Sir William Thompson, the ultimate atoms of matter are vortex rings, which Professor Clifford describes as being more closely packed together (finer grained) in ether than in matter. And he says, "whatever may turn out to be the ultimate nature of the ether and of molecules, we know that to some extent at least they obey the same dynamic laws, and that they act on one another in accordance with these laws. Until therefore it is absolutely disproved, it must remain the simplest and most probable assumption that they are finally made of the same stuff, that the material molecule is in some kind of knot or coagulation of ether."[82]