Büchner. “Eternal life is said to be a perfectioning, a further development, of earthly life, from which it would follow that every soul should have arrived at a certain degree of culture, which is to be perfected. Let us think, now, of the souls of those who died in earliest childhood, of savage nations, of the lower classes of our populations! Is this defective development or education to be remedied beyond? ‘I am weary of sitting on school-benches,’ says Danton. And what is to be done with the souls of animals?” (pp. 208, 209).
Reader. Indeed, doctor, the ignorance of the unbeliever is astounding! Our children and the lower classes of our populations are not half as ignorant as you are. They would tell you that the light of the beatific vision dispels with equal facility all degrees of darkness which may remain in our souls in consequence of imperfect education, without any need of your “school-benches” or other imaginary devices. They would tell you also “what is to be done with the souls of animals,” on which you most stupidly confer “the same rights” as are possessed by the human soul. If beasts have the same rights as men, it is a crime to kill them; or, if this is no crime, it must be as lawful to kill and devour men! Are you ready to accept this doctrine?
Büchner. “There is no essential and natural distinction between man and animal, and the human and animal soul are fundamentally the same” (p. 209).
Reader. Do you understand what [pg 415] you say? What do you mean by “fundamentally”?
Büchner. I mean that the animal soul is only distinguished from the human soul “in quantity, not in quality” (ibid.).
Reader. Then you yourself must have the qualities of an ass, and there will be no difference between you and the ass, except in this: that the asinine qualities are greater in you than in the ass. Your efforts to prove that beasts are endowed with intellect, reason, and freedom are very amusing, but lack a foundation. It would be idle to examine minutely your chapter on the souls of brutes; it will suffice to state that your reasoning in that chapter is based on a perpetual confusion of the sensitive with the intellectual faculties. Sense and intellect do not differ in quantity, but in quality. No sensation can be so intensified as to become an intellectual concept or a universal notion. Hence no intellect can arise from any amount of sensibility. Brutes feel; but, although their sensitive operations bear a certain analogy to the higher operations of the intellectual soul, nothing gives you the right to assume that brutes can reason. So long as you do not show that asses understand the rules and the principles of logic, it is useless to speak of the intellect of beasts. Their cognitions and affections are altogether sensitive; reasoning, morality, and freedom transcend their nature as much as your living person transcends your inanimate portrait in the frontispiece of your book.
But reverting to the immortality of the human soul, I wish you to understand that in the course of your argumentation you have never touched the substantial points of the question. You not only have not refuted, but not even mentioned, our philosophical proofs of immortality. You have been prating, not reasoning. To crown your evil work a couple of historical blunders were needed, and you did not hesitate to commit them. The first consists in asserting that “the chief religious sects of the Jews knew nothing of personal continuance,” while it is well known that the chief religious sect of the Jews was that of the Pharisees, who held not only the immortality of the soul, but also the resurrection of the body. The second consists in asserting that “among the enlightened of all nations and times the dogma of the immortality of the soul has had ever but few partisans” (p. 213), while the very reverse is the truth.
Büchner. “Mirabeau said on his death-bed, ‘I shall now enter into nothingness,’ and the celebrated Danton, being interrogated before the revolutionary tribunal as to his residence, said, ‘My residence will soon be in nothingness!’ Frederick the Great, one of the greatest geniuses Germany has produced, candidly confessed his disbelief in the immortality of the soul” (p. 213).
Reader. You might as well cite Moleschott, Feuerbach, yourself, and a score or two of modern thinkers, all enlightened by Masonic light, celebrated by Masonic pens and tongues, and great geniuses of revolution. But neither you nor your friends are “among the enlightened of all nations and times.” Before you can aspire to this glory you must study your logic, and, I dare say, the Christian doctrine too.
Büchner. If the soul survives the body, “we cannot explain the fear of death, despite all the consolations religion affords” (p. 214).