Again, in regard to the connection of the soul with the organized frame, nothing is better established than the mutual action and reaction between the mind and body. A volume of truth is contained in the simple and hackneyed phrase, Mens sana in corpore sano. A diseased frame is almost invariably accompanied by depression of spirits and a disinclination, if not an absolute disability for profound thought; and, on the other hand, a diseased mind soon makes itself manifest to the outer world in an enfeebled and sickly frame. The merest tyro in medical science recognizes the fact that in sickness no medicine is so effective as cheerfulness, hope, and a determined will; while not unfrequently the direst evil against which the physician has to contend is despondency. And many other instances might be given of this mutual action, which are unnecessary in this connection, since the point is conceded.
Yet, as regards the outer world, it is nevertheless true that the soul cannot directly perceive material objects, but only through the agency of the physical senses. In the matter of sight and sound, the atoms of the elastic medium must first make a material and tangible impression upon the eye and ear, which impression is conveyed by the nerves to the brain, where all human knowledge of the mystic process ceases. We only know that there is an intimate connection between the nerves and the mind established in the brain—which is the fountain head of both—whereby the mind receives this subtile impression and thereby becomes cognizant of the object which is its original cause. The same thing is true of all the other senses. Destroy now any one of these bodily senses, and the soul at once becomes dead to all that class of impressions which before were conveyed through that medium. Destroy the sight, and the mind can have no cognizance whatever of material objects save through the sense of touch—for our knowledge of matter through the senses of hearing, taste, and smell, is one of experience alone, which, aided by sight and touch, has taught us in the past that where sound, taste, or odor exist, there must be matter to produce these impressions. Destroy, then, if it were possible, this sense of touch, and our absolute perception of objects is entirely lost—the connection between the outer world and the perceptive faculties of the mind is dissolved forever. The truth of this position is seen in the fact that in a swoon, when all the senses are benumbed, the mind is utterly unconscious of its surroundings.
Again, to go to the other end of the chain—admitting that the force which resides in the material points and produces the vibration in the elastic medium is spiritual in its nature, do we not find that this force never produces an impression upon the senses, and through them upon the mind, except through the intermediate agency of a material object? The object itself must exist before the force can act, and hence arises our confidence in the evidence of our senses. Were it otherwise, indeed, our whole life would be one of uncertainty, of innumerable deceptions, a mere wandering about in a mist of delusions worse than those of a maniac. And if this force could act upon our perceptions without a material point in which to reside, is it not reasonable to suppose that it would occasionally so do, and that we should sometimes perceive effects for which we could find no cause in the material world—no connection with matter? Yet in the whole range of human experience no such thing is known. Even the phenomena which we call optical illusions arise from certain derangements of the atomic particles of the medium through which the impression is conveyed.
From this course of reasoning two plain deductions arise, either of which is disastrous to the spiritualistic theory. For if we deny, as I have done, that this hidden, mysterious force is spiritual in its nature, we have in all our knowledge and experience no instance of the direct action of spirit upon matter. While, if we acknowledge that fact, we have still no instance of spirit so acting upon the medium through which we receive our physical perceptions as to produce an impression through the senses upon the mind, without the intervention of a material point.
Is it reasonable, then, to suppose that in this our age, for the first time, a single solitary manifestation of this supernatural power should occur, as claimed by the spiritualists, unaccompanied by any analogous contemporary or corroborative fact of the same or of a different nature? To admit this is to admit one of three things: 1st, that both the physical senses and spiritual constitution of humanity have undergone a sudden and wonderful change; 2dly, that the Almighty has entirely altered his mode of communication with mankind; or, 3dly, that the whole world of spirits has been let loose to wander at will over the universe and space!
But admitting, as all must do, that there is in each individual human organism an intimate and mysterious connection, through the nerves and brain, between the spirit and the senses, the fact that this is the only known connection, direct or indirect, between matter and spirit, seems to me to argue that there is no other perceptible one. For, if there were any such, designed in any way to affect our perceptions, mental, moral, or physical, would it not, in some one of its phases, have been made manifest through all the past ages of the world? That such a connection has never been discovered is proof sufficient that no such was ever intended by the Supreme Being to affect mankind in any way, unless we admit that the spiritual and religious necessities of mankind, and, in fact, the very constitution itself of human spirit, are entirely different from what they have been in the ages gone by, and require not only a different pabulum, but also a different mode of dealing at the hands of the Almighty: in a word, that the very essence of religion is progressive.
If these positions be correct, the discussion is narrowed down to the consideration of the relations of the spirit as connected with the organized frame. And this brings us to another very natural deduction.
Every schoolboy knows the story of the wonderful clock whose inventor was blinded by the order of his sovereign, that he might not be able to repeat his work for any rival power; and how, many years afterward, when the memory of his person had passed away from those who had known him in his younger days, he groped his way back to the scene of his former labors, and, guided by a lad to the tower which enclosed the already famous work of art, under pretence of listening once more to its chimes, he suddenly, with his scissors, severed a single small wire, and the wonderful performances were closed forever. No artist thereafter could be found to restore the work, for none other than the inventor was acquainted with its mechanism, or could discover the secret of its operation. And so it remained a silent monument to the ingratitude of a sovereign and the revenge of a victim of the most barbarous cruelty. And yet the principle was still there uninjured, and as capable of operation as ever before, yet forever dead to that complicated mechanism, since the single connecting rod was severed which bound the idea to its only means of action—the immaterial to the material—the soul to the body. The mechanism too was as perfect as ever, in all its constituent parts, but forever silent and inoperative from lack of connection with the idea upon which it depended. Side by side lay the principle and its means of manifestation, separated only by the infinitesimal portion of space which divided the parts of the broken wire, yet as effectually separated as if worlds had rolled between them. Unite again these slender fragments, and both would again spring to life, unimpaired in their workings, and as brilliant as ever; but without this restoration both must remain forever dead.
Even such is the connection between the soul and body. A system of slender wires—more slender by far than the most attenuated thread of human construction—connects the more than ethereal spirit with the wonderful mechanism of the human body. And so long as this intimate connection is maintained intact we have the living, breathing, reasoning being, the image of his Creator, the most wonderful manifestation of Almighty power. But once these slender wires are parted, and the soul separated from the body by death, the relation of that man's spirit with the material world is dissolved forever. The senses of the body are the only medium through which the soul can act upon or receive impressions from the world of matter, and between them and it, once so intimately associated, there is now a great gulf fixed—the gulf which separates time from eternity. Henceforth the body, deprived of the lifegiving principle, its end accomplished, which was only to serve as a temporary dwelling for the soul in its time of trial and probation, goes swiftly to decay, and returns to its original dust. But the soul lives on for another world and a different stage of existence, entirely free from the trials and sufferings and sorrows of this. Its mission here is fully accomplished, and it has nothing further to do with the material. Only that Almighty Power which created it can restore its association with a perception of matter, and that by reuniting the broken chord—the silver chord which bound it to its prison walls of clay. Henceforth it is to deal only with pure spirit and as pure spirit; it has a nobler destiny before it, and higher and more glorious objects to employ its powers and engross its emotions and affections than any that earth can afford; and to maintain that it can again return and mingle in the affairs of a sordid world is to degrade it from its new and more glorious eminence—to drag it down from the sublime, the eternal, and the godlike, to the insignificant, the ephemeral, and the human.
Yet it is not to be assumed that matter and spirit are opposed to each other in any other respect than that of constitution—of construction, if the term is allowable. As in color white and black are the opposite extremes of a long line of causes and effects, and as one is the synonyme for utter absence of the other, so, and so only, are matter and spirit opposite poles to each other; and we frequently use the terms ethereal, spiritual, to denote the strongest contrast to the substantial, the material. And so, in just the degree in which any object departs from the substantial and lacks the properties of the material, do we say that it approaches the spiritual. Yet, even as in nature we find not only objects, but even forces, of entirely different and even opposite origin and construction working in perfect harmony, so matter and spirit may exist together, and work in harmony, though acting independently of each other, and incapable of producing upon each other what, for lack of a better word, we may call physical effects.