Besides the freethinkers, who will not yield to authority, but insist upon standing apart from the crowd, and the satirists, who level their shafts undiscriminatingly against what they perceive associated with absurdity, and the worldlings, who prefer the pleasures of time to the imaginarily contrasted goods of eternity, there is a fourth class of men who oppose the doctrine of a personal immortality as a protest against the burdensome miseries of individuality. The Gipseys exclaimed to Borrow, "What! is it not enough to have borne the wretchedness of this life, that we must also endure another?" 8 A feeling of the necessary limitations and suffering exposures of a finite form of being has for untold ages harassed the great nations of the East with painful unrest and wondrous longing. Pantheistic absorption to lose all imprisoning bounds, and blend in that ecstatic flood of Deity which, forever full, never ebbs on any coast has been equally the metaphysical speculation, the imaginative dream, and the passionate desire, of the Hindu mind. It is the basis and motive of the most extensive disbelief of individual immortality the world has known. "The violence of fruition in these foul puddles of flesh and blood presently glutteth with satiety," and the mortal circuits of earth and time are a round of griefs and pangs from which they would escape into the impersonal Godhead. Sheerly against this lofty strain of poetic souls is that grovelling life of ignorance which, dominated by selfish instincts, crawling on brutish grounds,
8 The Zincali, part ii. ch. i.
cannot awaken the creative force of spiritual wants slumbering within, nor lift its head high enough out of the dust to see the stars of a deathless destiny; and a fifth group of disbelievers deny immortality because their degraded experience does not prophesy it. Many a man might say, with Autolycus, "For the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it." A mind holy and loving, communing with God and an ideal world, "lighted up as a spar grot" with pure feelings and divine truths, is mirrored full of incorporeal shapes of angels, and aware of their immaterial disentanglement and eternity. A brain surcharged with fires of hatred, drowsed with filthy drugs, and drenched with drunkenness, will teem, on the contrary, with vermin writhing in the meshes of decaying matter. Cleaving to evanescent things, men feel that they are passing away like leaves on waves; filled with convictions rooted and breathing in eternity, they feel that they shall abide in serene survival, like stars above tempests. Turn from every obscene sight, curb every base propensity, obey every heavenly vision by assimilation of immortal things, sacred self denials and toils, disinterested sympathies and hopes, accumulate divine treasures and kindle the mounting flame of a divine life, and at the same time consciousness will crave and faith behold an illimitable destiny. Experiences worthy of being eternal generate faith in their own eternity. But the ignorant and selfish sensualist, whose total experience is of the earth earthy, who has no realization of pure truth, goodness, beauty, is incapable of sincere faith in immortal life. The dormancy of his higher powers excludes the necessary conditions of such a faith. His ignoble bodily life does not furnish the conscious basis and prophecy of a glorious spiritual life, but shudderingly proclaims the cessation of all his experience with the destruction of his senses. The termination of all the functions he knows, what else can it be but his virtual annihilation? When to the privative degradations of an uncultivated and earthy experience, naturally accompanied by a passive unbelief in immortality, are added the positive coarseness and guilt of a thick insensibility and a wicked life, aggressive disbelief is quite likely to arise, the essay of an uneasy conscience to slay what it feels would be a foe, and strangle the worm that never dies. The denial springing from such sources is refuted when it is explained. Its motive should never by any man be yielded to, much less be willingly nourished. It should be resisted by a devout culture courting the smiles of God, by rising into the loftier airs of meditation and duty, by imaginative sentiment and practical philanthropy, until the eternal instinct, long smothered under sluggish loads of sense and sin, reached by a soliciting warmth from heaven, stirs with demonstrating vitality.
The last and largest assemblage of dissenters from the prevailing opinion on this subject comprises those who utter their disbelief in a future existence out of simple loyalty to seeming truth, as a protest against what they think a false doctrine, and against the sophistical and defective arguments by which it has been propped. It may be granted that the five previously named classes are equally sincere in their convictions, honest assailants of error and adherents of truth; but they are actuated by animating motives of a various moral character. In the present case, the ruling motive is purely a determination, as Buchner says, to stand by the facts and to establish the correct doctrine. The directest and clearest way of giving a descriptive account of the active philosophical history of this class of disbelievers will be to follow on the lines of their tracks with statements and criticisms of their procedures.9 Disbelief in the doctrine of a future life for man has planted itself upon bold affirmation, and fortified itself with arguments which may most conveniently be considered under five distinct heads.
First is the sensational Argument from Appearance. In death the visible functions cease, the organism dissolves, the mind disappears; there is apparently a total scattering and end of the individual. That these phenomena should suggest the thought of annihilation is inevitable; to suppose that they prove the fact is absurd. It is an arrant begging of the question; for the very problem is, Does not an invisible spiritual entity survive the visible material disintegration? Among the unsound and superstitious attempts to prove the fact of a future life is that founded on narratives of ghosts, appearances and visions of the dead. Dr. Tafel published at Tubingen in 1853 a volume aiming to demonstrate the immortality and personal identity of the soul by citation of ninety cases of supernatural appearances, extending from the history of the ghost whose address to Curtius Rufus is recorded by Tacitus, to the wonderful story told by Renatus Luderitz in 1837. Such efforts are worse than vain. Their data are so explicable in many cases, and so inconclusive in all, that they quite naturally provoke deeper disbelief and produce telling retorts. While here and there a credulous person is convinced of a future life by the asserted appearance of a spirit, the well informed psychologist refers the argument to the laws of insanity and illusions, and the skeptic adds as a finality his belief that there is no future life, because no ghost has ever come back to reveal and certify it. The argument on both sides is equally futile, and removed from the true requisitions of the problem.
To the philosophical thinker a mere appearance is scarcely a presumption in favor of a conclusion in accordance with it. Science and experience are full of examples exposing the nullity or the falsity of appearances. The sun seems to move around the earth; but truth contradicts it. We seem to discern distances and the forms of bodies by direct sight; but the truth is we see nothing but shades and colors: all beyond is inference based on acquired experience. The first darkness would seem to the trembling contemplator absolutely to blot out the universe; but in truth it only prevented him from seeing it. The first thorough unconscious sleep would seem to be the hopeless destruction of the soul in its perfect oblivion. Death is forever for the first time, shrouded in the misleading obscurities of an unknown novelty. Appearances are often deceitful, yielding obvious clews only to mistakes and falsehoods. They are always superficial, furnishing no reliable evidence of the reality.
"Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal'd
Within thy beams, O Sun! Or who could find,
Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood reveal'd,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind?
Why then do we shun death with anxious strife?
If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life?"
9 Spazier, Antiphadon, oder Prufung einiger Hauptbeweise fur die Einfachheit und Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele.
When the body dies, the mind is no longer manifested through it. That is all we immediately know by perception. The inference that the mind has therefore ceased to be at all, is a mere supposition. It may still live and act, independently of the body. An outside phenomenon can prove nothing here. We must by some psychological probe pierce to the core of the being and discern, as there concealed, the central interpretation of truth, or else, in want of this, turn from these surface shadows and seek the solution in some other province. Millions of appearances being opposed to the truth or inadequate to hint it, we must never implicitly trust their suggestions. What microscope can reveal the organic life in a kernel of corn, and show that through the decay of that kernel a stalk will spring up and bear a thousand kernels more? But if a new mental life emerges from the dying form of man, it lies in a spiritual realm whereinto we have no instruments to gaze. Every existent thing has its metes and limits. In fact, the only final weapon and fort of a thing is its environing limitation. It goes into nothing if that be taken down, the atheist says; into infinity, the mystic says. The mistake and difficulty lie in discerning what the last wall around the essence is. "The universe is the body of our body." The boundary of our life is boundless life. Schlegel has somewhere asked the question, "Is life in us, or are we in life?" Because man appears to be wholly extinguished in death, we have no right whatever in reason to conclude that he really is so. The star which seemed to set in the western grave of aged and benighted time, we, soon coming round east to the true spirit sky, may discern bright in the morning forehead of eternity. There can be no safe reasoning from the outmost husk and phenomenon of a thing to its inmost essence and result. And, in spite of any possible amount of appearance, man himself may pass distinct and whole into another sphere of being when his flesh falls to dust. That science should search in vain with her finest glasses to discern a royal occupant reigning in the purple chambered palace of the heart, or to trace any such mysterious tenant departing in sudden horror from the crushed and bleeding house of life, belongs to the necessary conditions of the subject; for spirit can only be spiritually discerned. As well might you seek to smell a color, or taste a sound, tie a knot of water, or braid a cord of wind.
Next comes the abstract Argument from Speculative Philosophy. Under this head are to be included all those theories which deny the soul to be a spiritual entity, but reduce it to an atomic arrangement, or a dependent attribute, or a process of action. Heracleitus held that the soul was fire: of course, when the fuel was exhausted the fire would go out. Thales taught that it was water: this might all evaporate away. Anaximenes affirmed that it was air, of which all things were formed by rarefaction and condensation: on such a supposition it could have no permanent personal identity. Critias said it was blood: this might degenerate and lose its nature, or be poured out on the ground. Leucippus maintained that it was a peculiar concourse of atoms: as these came together, so they might fly apart and there be an end of what they formed. The followers of Aristotle asserted that it was a fifth unknown substance, with properties of its own, unlike those of fire, air, water, and earth. This might be mortal or immortal: there was nothing decisive in the conception or the defining terms to prove which it was. Accordingly, the Peripatetic school has always been divided on the question of the immortality of the soul, from the time of its founder's immediate disciples to this day. It cannot be clearly shown what the mighty Stagyrite's own opinion really was.