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(1) While making all allowance for the feeling of insignificance and forlornness which is apt to overwhelm us when we begin to realise the immensity of the material universe, a little closer thought should make it obvious that nothing in the nature of mere bulk or bigness furnishes even a reasonable presumption, let alone a convincing argument, against the survival of the soul; it is indeed difficult to perceive what legitimate bearing these physical phenomena are supposed to have upon a purely spiritual question. If we are to argue on a priori grounds, we are on the contrary justified in saying that the human mind, which has discovered and is capable of co-ordinating the myriad facts concerning the world of matter that make up modern science, is itself something far more wonderful than any of its discoveries, or the sum of them. If we are asked, "Is it conceivable that suns and stars shall pass away—as they undoubtedly will—and that man shall persist?" we can but answer, "Yes; it is very conceivable; for man is far more highly organised than suns and stars, moves on an immeasurably higher level, can reason, look before and after, form ideals of conduct, reach out in love, and think the thoughts of God after Him." As soon as we leave the lower reaches of being, bulk is seen to matter very little. The immense proportions of those flying reptiles and other monsters which peopled the earth in pre-historic {227} times did not protect them against dying out, and their places being taken by much slighter creatures which had some more valuable attributes than size; the diplodocus Carnegii in the British Museum measures some seventy-five feet, but that fact did not prevent the species from becoming extinct uncounted ages since—simply because it was lacking in the higher qualities which would have enabled it to survive. And even the diplodocus, with its lumbering body and diminutive brain, was whole worlds superior to inorganic nature. That the marvellous thing called human personality should outlast the decay of what is so much inferior to itself, is therefore not only not inconceivable, but in itself not even improbable. It is a strange sort of modesty—to say the least of it—which would make us think ourselves of less account in the scale of existence or the sight of God than unconscious matter in its cruder and lower stages. One might as sensibly urge that the delicate hairspring of a watch, being of featherweight and almost invisible, must be worth less than a lump of crude iron-ore.
(2) We turn to the supposed argument from evolution, viz., from man's lowly origin, as furnishing a strong presumption against his immortality. This plea, familiar enough in sceptical discussions of the subject, has been put forward with great poetic force by Mr. William Watson; after graphically describing {228} "the gibbering form obscene that was and was not man," as lower in many respects than the beasts and birds in whose midst he dwelt, he suggests that it was
Rather some random throw
Of heedless Nature's die,
'Twould seem, that from so low
Hath lifted man so high.
If, then, our rise from gloom
Hath this capricious air,
What ground is mine to assume
An upward process there,
In yonder worlds that shine
From upward tracts of sky?
No ground to assume is mine
Nor warrant to deny.
Equal, my source of hope, my reason for despair.
But, with great admiration for Mr. Watson as a poet, it is impossible not to recognise that at least two radical flaws lurk in his agnostic argument. In the first place, he makes the mistake of judging issues by origins instead of origins by issues; the sub-human beginnings of man trouble us not at all, since we can see in the subsequent history of the race how great were the possibilities infolded in that "gibbering form obscene," and unfolded in a Plato, a Raphael, a Shakespeare. That such a development from such a lowly initial stage should have been so much as possible, is in itself significant of much; for nothing is evolved that was not first involved. But in the second place, Mr. Watson's assumption that the process which lifted man from the level of the {229} brute to one immeasurably higher was dictated by "hap and hazard" strikes us as wholly gratuitous. On the face of it, that process, in itself so little to be expected, bears the mark, not of chance but of its very contrary. That the cosmic drama should have followed this particular course; that from the cooling down of fiery nebulas there should have come forth the orderly system we behold in nature; that life should have climbed up from the speck of protoplasm "through primal ooze and slime," making its way step by step through all the lower creation until it "blossomed into man"—this, to the unbiassed mind, does not wear the aspect of mere incalculable accident, but of all-embracing wisdom and directivity. And once we have shaken off the delusion that the marvellous order and progress we behold in nature are the outcome of chance, we have the best of reasons for assuming that the same "upward process" will still continue, reaching forward from the seen to the unseen; at any rate, so well-qualified and thorough-going an evolutionist as Professor Fiske gave it as his mature opinion that "in the course of evolution there is no more philosophical difficulty in man's acquiring immortal life, than in his acquiring the erect posture and articulate speech." [4]
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And the reasonableness of this view grows the clearer to us the more we realise the purposive character of the evolutionary process. The unmistakeable purpose of that process is the production of the higher from the lower; all through the ages the vast design works itself out in a ceaseless ascending movement, the theme expanding, its meaning becoming more apparent. Then, when a certain point in this development has been reached, evolution takes a direction such as no one could have forecast: "its operation upon the physical frame is diverted to the mind, the centre of interest transferred from the outward organism to the inner forces of which it is the vehicle"—and man becomes a living soul. Since, then, it has taken all these myriad ages, all this immense expenditure of planning and energy, to produce what is incontestably the crowning work of creation on this globe, must we not say that this was the issue towards which the whole process was set in motion from the very beginning? And if this is so, are we to think that at the end, when its carefully, patiently wrought-out purpose has been attained, this process suddenly turns irrational, and hands over its last and highest product to destruction? As has been well said, "To suppose that what has been evolved at such cost will suddenly collapse, is to suppose that the whole scheme of things is self-stultifying"; and for such a supposition we {231} see not only no necessity, but no shadow of warrant.
The question is reduced to this: are man's highest spiritual qualities, into the production of which all this creative energy has gone, to disappear with the rest? Has all this work been done for nothing? Is it all ephemeral, all a bubble that bursts, a vision that fades? Are we to regard the Creator's work as like that of a child, who builds houses out of blocks, just for the pleasure of knocking them down? For aught that science can tell us, it may be so, but I can see no good reason for believing any such thing . . . The more thoroughly we comprehend that process of evolution by which things have come to be what they are, the more we are likely to feel that to deny the everlasting persistence of the spiritual element in man is to rob the whole process of its meaning. It goes far towards putting us to permanent intellectual confusion, and I do not see that anyone has as yet alleged, or is ever likely to allege, a sufficient reason for our accepting so dire an alternative.[5]
If belief in the soul's persistence must always be an act of faith, it is for the evolutionist an act of reasonable faith, based on his experience of the rationality, and what has been called the integrity, of the cosmos.
(3) Of the hostility of physical science to belief in life beyond the grave it is perhaps sufficient to say that the somewhat dogmatic attitude of denial which flourished in certain scientific circles somewhere about a quarter of a century ago has to-day made room for a very different temper, at once more sympathetic and more willing to acknowledge {232} that a belief is not necessarily disproved because the methods of the chemical or biological laboratory fail to substantiate it. As for the crude proposition that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile, and that the life of the soul must cease with that of the body, this was characterised by the eminent thinker whom we quoted a moment ago as "perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known to the history of philosophy." Admitting that to every state of consciousness, to every minutest transition in our thoughts, there corresponds a cerebral change, it is yet nothing less than a childish blunder to confound correspondence with causality. The materialist has positively no good ground for stating that cerebral changes are the causes of the mental states corresponding to them; indeed, the contrary proposition is far more inherently probable, since it is spirit, and not matter, that "possesses the power of purpose," and may therefore be regarded as the final cause of matter.[6] When Professor Haeckel urges that "the various functions of the soul are bound up with certain special parts of the brain," and cease when the latter are destroyed, the reply is quite simple: non sequitur. He has apparently forgotten his own warning against the "dangerous error" of a "one-sided over-estimation of experience." [7] {233} The utmost that experience can prove is that the brain is the transmitting apparatus for flashing forth and making intelligible the messages of the soul, and that, when this apparatus breaks down, further transmission of messages becomes impossible; but no experience can prove that when the instrument is destroyed, the soul which used it for purposes of communication and self-manifestation ceases to be, and only slipshod logic would draw such an inference. In discussing the Divine Personality, we already quoted Mill, a far more careful reasoner than Haeckel, who laid it down that while experience furnished us with no example of any series of states of consciousness without a material brain, yet it was "as easy to imagine such a series of states without as with this accompaniment"; indeed, he saw no valid reason to preclude us from supposing that "the same thoughts, emotions, volitions, and even sensations which we have here, may persist or recommence somewhere else under other conditions"—i.e., without such an apparatus as is at present at our disposal. It is only a dogmatic materialist of Haeckel's almost extinct pattern who could fail to make the simple distinction between visible instrument and invisible player.