And the following from a letter to his mother:
“My chief comfort in affliction would be the recognition that there is a Supreme Power manifested in the totality of phenomena, the workings of which are not like the workings of our intelligence, but far above and beyond them, and which are obviously tending to some grand and worthy result, even though my individual happiness gets crushed in the process, so that the only proper mental attitude for me, is that which says: ‘not my will but thine be done.’”
And this on Immortality (Life and Letters, II, 317):
“The materialistic assumption that the life of the soul ends with the life of the body is perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known to the history of philosophy. No evidence for it can be alleged beyond the familiar fact that during the present life we know Soul only in its association with Body, and therefore cannot discover disembodied soul without dying ourselves. This fact must always prevent us from obtaining direct evidence for the belief in the soul’s survival. But a negative presumption is not created by the absence of proof in cases where, in the nature of things, proof is inaccessible. With his illegitimate hypothesis of annihilation, the materialist transgresses the bounds of experience quite as widely as the poet who sings of the New Jerusalem with its river of life and its streets of gold. Scientifically speaking, there is not a particle of evidence for either view.”
On this his biographer justly comments:
“This positive statement will be more seriously questioned now than at the time when Fiske wrote. The many able investigators engaged in probing scientifically the mysteries of psychical phenomena, are bringing forth a mass of evidence which goes to show the presence of a form of existence which transcends mere physical existence.”
And as showing Fiske’s attitude toward the religion around him, his biographer says:
“In Fiske’s mind Christianity was the mightiest drama in human civilization: it was his rare gift that he could appreciate it with the feeling of the poet as well as with the critical judgment of the philosopher.”
The passages quoted will seem almost pathetically limited, in view of the new phenomena of mind which, whether they be or be not found to demonstrate for our souls a longer existence than experience has ever demonstrated before, unquestionably already demonstrate for them a wider scope.