Speculative conceptions as to the nature of the soul like the foregoing, when advanced as arguments to establish its proper mortality, are destitute of force, because they are gratuitous assumptions. They are not generalizations based on careful induction of facts; they are only arbitrary hypotheses. Furthermore, they are inconsistent both with the facts and phenomena of experience. Mind cannot fairly be brought into the category of the material elements; for it has properties and performs functions emphatically distinguishing it from every thing else, placing it in a rank by itself, with exclusive predicates of its own. Can fire think? Can water will? Can air feel? Can blood see? Can a mathematical number tell the difference between good and evil? Can earth be jealous of a rival and loyal to a duty? Can a ganglion solve a problem in Euclid or understand the Theodicee of Leibnitz? It is absurd to confound things so distinct. Mind is mind, and matter is matter; and though we are now consciously acquainted with them only in their correlation, yet there is as much reason for supposing that the former survives the close of that correlation as for supposing that the latter does. True, we perceive the material remaining and do not perceive the spirit. Yes; but the differentiation of the two is exactly this, that one is appreciable by the senses, while the other transcends and baffles them. It is absolutely inconceivable in imagination, wholly incredible to reason, intrinsically nonsensical every way, that a shifting concourse of atoms, a plastic arrangement of particles, a regular succession of galvanic shocks, a continuous series of nervous currents, or any thing of the sort, should constitute the reality of a human soul, the process of a human life, the accumulated treasures of a human experience, all preserved at command and traversed by the moral lines of personal identity. The things lie in different spheres and are full of incommunicable contrasts. However numerously and intimately correlated the physical and psychical constituents of man are, yet, so far as we can know any thing about them, they are steeply opposed to each other both in essence and function. Otherwise consciousness is mendacious and language is unmeaning. A recent able author speaks of "that congeries of organs whose union forms the brain and whose action constitutes the mind." 10 The mind, then, is an action! Can an action love and hate, choose and resolve, rejoice and grieve, remember, repent, and pray? Is not an agent necessary for an action? All such speculative conceptions as to the nature of soul as make it purely phenomenal are to be offset, if they can be, by the view which exhibits the personal ego or conscious selfhood of the soul, not as an empty spot in which a swarm of relations centre as their goal point, but as an indestructible monad, the innermost and substantial essence and cause of the organization, the self apprehending and unchangeable axis of all thinking and acting. Some of the most free, acute, learned, wise, and powerful thinkers of the world have been champions of this doctrine; especially among the moderns may be named Leibnitz, Herbart, Goethe, and Hartenstein. Jacobi most earnestly maintained it both against Mendelssohn and against Fichte.
10 Bucknill and Tuke, Psychological Medicine, p. 371.
That the mind is a substantial entity, and therefore may be conceived as immortal, that it is not a mere functional operation accompanying the organic life, a phantom procession of conscious states filing off on the stage of the cerebrum "in a dead march of mere effects," that it is not, as old Aristoxenus dreamed, merely a harmony resulting from the form and nature of the body in the same way that a tune springs from the consenting motions of a musical instrument, seems to be shown by facts of which we have direct knowledge in consciousness. We think that the mind is an independent force, dealing with intellectual products, weighing opposing motives, estimating moral qualities, resisting some tendencies, strengthening others, forming resolves, deciding upon its own course of action and carrying out its chosen designs accordingly. If the soul were a mere process, it could not pause in mid career, select from the mass of possible considerations those adapted to suppress a base passion or to kindle a generous sentiment, deliberately balance rival solicitations, and, when fully satisfied, proceed. Yet all this it is constantly doing. So, if the soul were but a harmony, it would give no sounds contrary to the affections of the lyre it comes from. But actually it resists the parts of the instrument from which they say it subsists, exercising dominion over them, punishing some, persuading others, and ruling the desires, angers, and fears, as if itself of a different nature.11 Until an organ is seen to blow its own bellows, mend its shattered keys, move its pedals, and play, with no foreign aid, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," or a violin tunes up its discordant strings and wields its bow in a spontaneous performance of the Carnival, showing us every Cremona as its own Paganini, we may, despite the conceits of speculative disbelief, hold that the mind is a dynamic personal entity. That thought is the very "latch string of a new world's wicket."
Thirdly, we have the fanciful Argument from Analogy. The keen champions of disbelief, with their athletic agility of dialectics, have made terrible havoc among the troops of poetic arguments from resemblance, drawn up to sustain the doctrine of immortality. They have exposed the feebleness of the argument for our immortality from the wonderful workmanship and costliness of human nature, on the ground that what requires the most pains and displays the most skill and genius in its production is the most lovingly preserved. For God organizes the mind of a man just as easily as he constructs the geometry of a diamond. His omnipotent attributes are no more enlisted in the creation of the intelligence of an elephant or the gratitude of a soul than they are in the fabrication of the wing of a gnat or the fragrance of a flower. Infinite wisdom and power are equally implied in each and in all. They have shown the gross defectiveness of the comparison of the butterfly and psyche. The butterfly, lying in the caterpillar neatly folded up like a flower in the bud, in due time comes forth. It is a material development, open to the senses, a common demonstration tosensible experience. The disengagement of a spirit from a fleshly encasement, on the other hand, is a pure hypothesis wholly removed from sensible apprehension. There is no parallel in the cases. So the ridiculousness has been made evident of Plato's famous analogical argument that by a general law of nature all things are produced contraries from contraries; warmth dies into the
11 Plato, Phado, 98.
life of cold, and lives out of the death of cold; night is born from the death of day, and day is born from the death of night; and thus everywhere death springs from life, and life from death.12 The whole comparison, considered as evidence of human immortality, is baseless and full of astonishing sophistry. When one hemisphere of the earth is turned away from the sun, it is night there; when it is turned towards the sun, it is day again. To this state of facts this revolving succession there is obviously no parallelism whatever in the two phenomenal phases of man, life and death, whereof one finishes its course and then the other seems fixed forever. In like manner, when Jeremy Taylor,13 after the example of many others, especially of old Licetus, argues soberly, as he does in a letter to Evelyn, for the immortality of the soul from the analogy of lamps burning in tombs for centuries with no waste of matter, there is no apposite and valid similarity, even if the instances were not a childish fable. An equally baseless argument for the existence of an independent spiritual body within the material body, to be extricated from the flesh at death and to survive in the same form and dimensions, we recollect having seen in a work by a Swedenborgian author.14 He reasons that when a person who has suffered amputation feels the lost limb as vividly as ever before, the phenomenon is palpable proof of a spirit limb remaining while the fleshly one is gone! Of course, the simple physiological explanation is that the mind instinctively refers the sensations brought in by the severed nerves to the points where, by inveterate custom, it has hitherto learned to trace their origination. The report being the same, it is naturally attributed to the same source.
But those skeptics who have mercilessly exposed these fallacious arguments from analogy have themselves reasoned in the same way as fallaciously and as often. When individual life leaves the physical man, say they, cosmical life immediately enters the corpse and restores it to the general stock of nature; so when personal consciousness deserts the psychical man, the universal spirit resumes the dissolving soul. When certain conditions meet, a human soul is formed, a gyrating current of thought, or a vortex of force: soon some accident or a spent impulse breaks the eddy, and the individual subsides like a whirl in the air or a water spout in the sea. When the spirit fuel of life is exhausted, man goes out as an extinguished candle. He ceases like a tone from a broken harp string. All these analogies are vitiated by radical unlikeness between the things compared. As arguments they are perfectly worthless, being spoiled by essential differences in the cases. Wherein there is a similarity it falls short of the vital point. There is no justice in the conception of man as a momentary gyre of individual consciousness drawn from the universal sea by a sun burst of the Spirit. He is a self ruling intelligence, using a dependent organism for his own ends, comprehending his own destiny, successively developing its conditions and acquiring the materials for occupying and improving them, with a prevision of eternity. A flower may just as well perish as live, a musical sound cease as continue, a lamp be put out as burn on: they know not the difference. Not so with the soul of man. We here overpass a discrete degree and enter upon a subject
12 Crawford, On the Phadon of Plato.
13 Heber's Life and Works of Jeremy Taylor, vol. i. p. 69.
14 Dee Guays, True System of Religious Philosophy, Letter V.