And again, in the same article—that on "Transcendentalism," first printed in the Radical Review for November, 1877, and afterwards included in the volume of "Lectures, Sermons, and Essays":
What we conceive these schools to have misprized is the living substance and function of mind itself, conscious of its own energy, productive of its own processes, active even in receiving, giving its own construction to its incomes from the unknown through sense, thus involved in those very contents of time and space which, as historical antecedents, appear to create it; mind is obviously the exponent of forces more spontaneous and original than any special product of its own experience. Behind all these products must be that substance in and through which they are produced.
And again, for we cannot be too explicit on this point:
It is certain that knowledge involves not only a sense of union with the nature of that which we know, but a real participation of the knowing faculty therein. When, therefore, I have learned to conceive truths, principles, ideas, or aims which transcend life-times and own no physical limits to their endurance, the aforesaid law of mind associates me with their immortal nature. And this is the indubitable perception or intuition of permanent mind which no experience of impermanence can nullify and no Nirvana excludes.
It will be observed that Mr. Johnson does not make himself answerable for specific articles of belief on God or immortality, but confines his faith to the persuasion of indwelling mind, sovereign, eternal, imperial. "Immortality," he says, "is immeasurable chance for all. In its light, all strong, blameless, heroic lives—divine plants by the wayside—tell for the nature they express. God has made no blunder in our spiritual constitution. Power is in faith." This intense belief in the soul, in all the native capacities of our spiritual constitution, in the supremacy of organic feelings, ideas, expectations over merely private desires, this burning confidence in divinely implanted instincts, this absolute certainty that every promise made by God will be fulfilled, explains the tone of exulting hope in which he writes to bereaved friends.
I wish I could tell you how firmly I believe that feelings like these (that the absent one cannot be dead), so often treated as illusion, are true, are of God's own tender giving; that in them is the very heart of his teaching through the mystery that we call death. Our affections are forbidden by their maker to doubt their own immortality.... Immortal years, beside which our little lives are but an hour—what possibilities of full satisfaction they open! And we sit in patience, knowing that they must bring us back our holiest possessions—those which have ever stood under the shield of our noblest love and conscience and so are under God's blessing forever.
How far such a declaration as this comports with the demand for general immortality made in behalf of those who are conscious of no noble love, who have attained to no conscience, and have no holy possessions, we are not told. Perhaps Mr. Johnson would seize on the faintest intimations of mind as evidencing the presence of moral being, as Mr. Weiss does. But he did not dwell on that side of the problem. Plainly he ascribed little value to mere personality, viewed abstractly and apart from its spiritual development. He wrote to those whom he knew and loved, to remarkable people.
Yet it would not be fair to conclude that immortality was denied to the basest. If immortality is "opportunity," a "chance for all," it is for those who can profit by it or enjoy it. If any are debarred, the cause must be their own incompetence. They simply decease. There is no torment in store for them; no hell is possible.
Samuel Johnson was an enthusiastic evolutionist, but of mind itself, not of matter as ripening into mind. The ordinary conception of evolution,—that the higher came from the lower,—was exceedingly repugnant to him. Every kind of materialism he abhorred as illogical and irrational. The theories of Comte,—that "mind is cerebration;" of Haeckel,—that it is a "function of brain and nerve;" of Strauss,—that "one's self is his body;" of Taine,—that a man is "a series of sensations," were to him as absurd, in science or philosophy, as they were fatal to aspiration and progress.
The crude definition of evolution as production of the highest by inherent force of the lowest is here supplanted by one which recognizes material parentage as itself involving, even in its lowest stages, the entire cosmic consensus, of whose unknown force mind is the highest known exponent.