Before the latest discoveries of physical science, as before the highest philosophical analysis, the cruder distinctions of soul and body, spirit and matter, tend to disappear. The nature of the universe is proved too subtle for this dichotomy. Only a coarse intelligence will, therefore, run to the conclusion that so-called matter, with its supposed finality, is absolute; or that so-called thought, with its supposed infinity, is universal. The finer intelligence, convinced of the correlation between these apparently antagonistic moments, must pause to contemplate the everlasting sequences of time past extended into time to come, and in the end must feel persuaded of its own indissoluble connection with that, whatever it may be, which is permanent in the universe. The moment Now is a potential eternity. That we are is a sufficient proof that we have been and that we shall be. Each act, as it has had immeasurable and necessary antecedents, will be fruitful of immeasurable and necessary consequents; for the web of the world is ever weaving, and to drop a thread in it is utterly impossible. That we are such or such is, again, the proof that our qualities have in them something significant, both for that which has been, and for that which will be for everlasting. We have been, we are, we shall be, a part of the eternal complex. Not, therefore, are we at liberty to assume definite propositions concerning what is called the immortality of the soul. To do so in the present state of knowledge would be as much a begging of the question as to dogmatize upon the so-called personality of God. Suspension of judgment is as imperatively required of us by science as faith in the unintelligible was demanded by the Catholic Church. As then trial of the faith wrought patience, so now wise abstinence from dogmatism is the attitude of faith.
Following this course of thought into particulars, we have no reason to apprehend that personal license should result from a system of purely positive ethics based upon that conception of our relation to the universe which science is revealing. On the contrary, we may expect from the establishment of such a system a code of conduct more stringent in all that can concern the well-being of the individual than any that has yet been conceived. In the future, sensual excess will surely be reckoned a form of madness, and what we now dignify by the name of vice will be relegated, shorn of Satanic lustre, to the lazar-house. Nor need we fear that purely mental problems should lose their value or become less interesting. No amount of demonstration that the mind is dependent on the brain can so confuse the reason of a lucid thinker as to make him conclude that, therefore, there is no mind. Reduce all our emotions, our habits, our thoughts, to modes of cell-existence—prove that thinking and feeling are functions of nerve-centres—the mystery has only shifted its centre of gravity; we are still ourselves for better or for worse; thought and feeling are still the essential part of us; man remains, in spite of all, the only known being to whom the command γνῶθι σεαυτὸν has been given, together with the faculty of obeying this command. Physical Science does not exclude her elder sisters Philosophy and Religion, though she may compel religion to abandon mythology, and supply philosophy with new worlds for analysis. What she does is to substitute solid, if slowly discovered, knowledge for guesses, and a patient but progressive method for the systems which ontologist after ontologist has built and pulled to pieces. Will not the men of the future look back with wonder on the ages in which religion, philosophy, and the science of nature were supposed to be at war, instead of being, as they will be then, one system?
FOOTNOTES:
[297] "General conceptions in which a series of similarly recurring natural processes may be embraced."—Helmholtz.
[299] By science here and elsewhere, when used without a qualifying epithet, I mean to include what is also known as philosophy. In science, thus understood, thought embraces the whole field of knowledge in a survey that has less in common with the metaphysics of the schoolmen than with the analytic method of the natural sciences.
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