"Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realized."
The last weapon of disbelief in a future life is the Scientific Argument from Materialism. Lucretius says, "There is nothing in the universe but bodies and the properties of bodies." This is a characteristic example of the method of the materialists: to assume, as an unquestionable postulate, the very point in debate, and that, too, in defiance of the intelligent instincts of consciousness which compel every unsophisticated person to acknowledge the simultaneous existence of mind and matter as two correlated yet distinct realities. The better statement would be, There is nothing in the universe but forces and the relations of forces. For, while we know ourselves in immediate self consciousness, as personal intelligences perceiving, willing, and acting, all we know of an outward world is the effects produced on us by its forces. Certainly the powers of the universe can never be lost from the universe. Therefore if our souls are, as consciousness declares, causes, and not mere phenomena, they are immortal. To ignore either factor in the problem of life, the material substratum or the dynamic agent, is mere narrowness and blindness.
But the unbelieving naturalist argues that the total man is a product of organization, and therefore that with the dissolution of the living combination of organs all is over. Matter is the marriage bed and grave of soul. Priestley says, "The principle of thought no more belongs to substance distinct from body than the principle of sound belongs to substance distinct from bell." There is no relevancy in the comparison, because the things are wholly unlike. Thought is not, as Hartley's theory avowed it was, a vibration of a cerebral nerve, as sound is a vibration of a sonorous body; for how could these vibrations be accumulated in memory as our mental experiences are? When a material vibration ends, it has gone forever; but thoughts are stored up and preserved. A hypothetical simile, like that just cited from Priestley, is not a cogent argument. It is false science thus to limit the modes of being to what lies within our present empirical knowledge. Is it not pure presumptuousness to affirm that the creative power of Almighty God is shut up so that intelligent creatures can only exist in forms of flesh? When a recent materialist makes the assertion, "The thinking man is the sum of his senses," it is manifest that he goes beyond the data, assuming what should be proved, and confounding the instruments and material with the workman. It is as if one should say, "A working cotton manufactory is the sum of its machines," excluding the persons by whose guiding oversight all is done. Plainly, it may be granted that all which man knows is brought in through the door of the senses, without allowing the same of all that man is. We have no warrant for pronouncing the identical coextensiveness of what man learns to know and what he is created to be. The very proposition, man knows something, presupposes three things, a subject, an act, and an object. Whether the three exist and perish together or not is matter for discussion, and not fairly to be settled by forcibly lumping the heterogeneous three into homogeneous unity.
In the present state of science it must be confessed that all kinds of physical force whether mechanical, chemical, vital, or nervous are drawn more or less directly from the sun, the material reservoir of power for our solar system. This must be admitted, although some recent materialists have pushed the doctrine so far that they may be called the Parsees of the West. Whenever the proper conditions for an animate being are furnished, a force derived from the sun lifts matter from its stable equilibrium to the level of organic existence. In due season, from its wavering life struggle there, it decays back to the deep rest of insensate earth.17 This is a truth throughout the organic realm, from the bulb of a sea weed to the brain of a Casar. So much cannot be denied. Every organism constantly receives from the universe food and force, and as constantly restores in other forms the material and dynamical equivalents of what it receives, and finally itself goes to the sources whence it came. But the affirmation of this for all within the physical realm is not the admission of it for what subsists in an immeasurably higher rank and totally different realm. Entering the psychical sphere, where we deal with a new, distinct order of realities, not impenetrability, weight, extension, but thought, affection, will, why may not this province contain eternities, even though the other holds only mortalities? It is a question to be examined on its own grounds, not to be put aside with a foregone conclusion. In nature the cause endures under all evanescent changes, and survives all phenomenal beginnings and endings: so in spirit the causal personality, if there be one, may outlast all the shifting currents of the outward phenomena in endless persistence. Of course, the manifestation of the mind through the senses must cease when the senses no longer remain. The essence of the controversy, then, is exactly this: Is the mind an entity? or is it a collection of functions? If the soul be a substantial force, it is immortal. If it be a phenomenal resultant, it ceases at death.
A reductio ad absurdum immediately occurs. If the psychical totality of man consists of states of feeling, modes of volition, and powers of thought, not necessitating any spiritual entity in which they inhere, then, by parity of reasoning, the physical totality of man consists of states of nutrition, modes of absorption, and powers of change, implying no body in which these processes are effectuated! Qualities cannot exist without a subject: and just as physical attributes involve a body, spiritual attributes involve a mind. And, if a mental entity be admitted, its death or cessation with that of its outer dress or case is not a fair inference, but needs appropriate evidence.
The soul of a man has been defined as the sum of his ideas, an idea being a state of the consciousness. But the essence of mind must be the common ground and element of all
17 Moleschott, Licht and Leben.
different states of consciousness. What is that common ground and element but the presence of a percipient volitional force, whether manifested or unmanifested, still there? That is the germinal core of our mental being, integrating and holding in continuous identity all the phenomenal fluctuations of consciousness. It is clear that any other representation seems inconsistent with the most central and vivid facts of our knowledge. In illustration of this, let us see how every materialistic exposition omits utterly, or fails to account for, the most essential element, the solitary and crowning peculiarity, of the case. For example, it is said that thought or consciousness is a phenomenal process of changes sustained in the brain by a correlation of forces, just as the rainbow appears, but has no ontological subsistence of its own: the continuous spectrum hangs steady on the ceaselessly renewed substratum of the moving mist rack and the falling rain. But the comparison is absolutely inapplicable, because the deepest ground principle of the mind is wanting in the rainbow, namely, conscious and continuous identity holding in each present moment all the changes of the past moments. If the rainbow were gifted with consciousness, it could not preserve its personal identity, but merely its phenomenal identity, for any two successive moments, since its whole being would consist of an untied succession of states.
Traversing the body from its extreme tissues to the gray vesicular substance composing the spinal cord and covering the surface and convolutions of the brain, are two sets of white, fibrous nerves. One set, the afferents, bring in sensation, all kinds of tidings, from the out world of matter. The other set, the efferents, carry out volition, all kinds of decrees, from the in world of mind. Without an afferent nerve no influence of the world can reach the mind; and without an efferent nerve no conclusion of the mind can reach the world. As we are now constituted, this machinery is necessary for the intercommunication of the mind and the material universe. But if there be something in the case besides live machinery and crossing telegrams, if there be a monarch mind inaccessible to the vulgar crowd of things and only conversing with them through the internuncial nerves, that spirit entity may itself be capable of existing forever in an ideal universe and of communing there face to face with its own kingly lineage and brood. And we maintain that the account of the phenomena is grossly defective, and that the phenomena themselves are palpably inexplicable, except upon the supposition of such an entity, which uses the organism but is not the organism itself nor a function of it. "Ideas," one materialist teaches, "are transformed sensations." Yes; but that does not supersede a transforming mind. There must be a force to produce the transformations. "The phenomena of mind," says another, "consist in a succession of states of consciousness." Yes; but what is it that presides over, takes up, and preserves this succession? The phenomena of the mind are not the mind itself. "The actions of the mind are the functions of the cerebrum," adds a third. Yes; but the inquiry is, what is the mind itself? not, what are its acts? The admission of the gray nerve cells of the brain, as the material substratum through which sensations are received and volitions returned, does not exclude the necessity of a dynamical cause for the metamorphosing phenomenon. That cause must be free and intelligent, because the products of its action, as well as its accompanying consciousness, are marked by freedom and intelligence. For example, when a cylindrical and
fibrous porter deposits his sensitive burden in the vesicular and cineritious substance, something examines it, tests its import, reflects on what shall be done, forms an intelligent resolution, and commands another porter to bear the dynamic load forth. The reflective and determining something that does this is the mind. Thus, by the fact of an indissoluble dynamic will, is the broad lineal experience of man grasped and kept from dissipating into crumbled psychical states, as when the dead kings of ancient India were burned their corpses were wrapped in asbestos shrouds to hold the ashes together.