Permanence of Body
But why should anyone suppose a body of some kind always necessary? Why should they assume a perpetual sort of dualism about existence? The reason is that we have no knowledge of any other form of animate existence; and it may be claimed as legitimate to assume that the association between life and matter here on the planet has a real and vital significance, that without such an episode of earth life we should be less than we are, and that the relation is typical of something real and permanent.
"Such use may lie in blood and breath."—Tennyson
Why matter should be thus useful to spirit and even to life it is not easy to say. It may be that by the interaction of two things better and newer results can always be obtained than was possible for one alone. There are analogies enough for that. Do we not find that genius seems to require the obstruction or the aid of matter for its full development? The artist must enjoy being able to compel refractory material to express his meaning. Didactic writings are apt to emphasise the obstructiveness of matter; but that may be because its usefulness seems self-evident. Our limbs, and senses, and bodily faculties generally, are surely of momentous service; microscopes and telescopes and laboratory instruments, and machinery generally, are only extensions of them. Tools to the man who can use them:—orchestra to the musician, lathe or theodolite to the engineer, books and records to the historian, even though not much more than pen and paper is needed by the poet or the mathematician.
But our bodily organs are much more than any artificial tools can be, they are part of our very being. The body is part of the constitution of man. We are not spirit or soul alone,—though it is sometimes necessary to emphasise the fact that we are soul at all,—we are in truth soul and body together. And so I think we shall always be; though our bodies need not always be composed of earthly particles. Matter is the accidental part: there is an essential and more permanent part, and the permanent part must survive.
This is the strength, as I have said elsewhere and will not now at any length repeat, of the sacramental claims and practices of religion. Forms and customs which appeal to the body are a legitimate part of the whole; and while some natures derive most benefit from the exclusively psychical and spiritual essence, others probably do well to prevent the more sensuous and more puzzling concomitants from falling into disuse.
Footnotes
[36] That a great poet should have represented the meeting between the still incarnate Æneas and his discarnate father Anchises as a bodily disappointment, is consistent:—
"Ter conatus ibi collo dare brachia circum;
Ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago,
Par levibus ventis, volucrique simillima somno."
Æneid, vi. 700
It may be said that what is intangible ought to be invisible; but that does not follow. The Ether is a medium for vision, not for touch. Ether and Ether may interact, just as matter and matter interact; but interaction between Ether and matter is peculiarly elusive.