The flame of a burnt out candle twinkling in the socket is not numerically the same with that which appeared when it was first lighted; nor is a river at any two periods numerically the same. Different particles constantly feed an ever renewed flame or stream, just like the former but never the same. A totally new element appears when we contemplate mind. Here, although the whole molecular substance of the visible organism is in perpetual flux, the same conscious personality persists through all, growing ever richer in an accumulating possession of past experiences still held in living command. The Arethusa of identity threads the blending states of consciousness, and, passing the ocean bed of death, may emerge in some morning fount of immortality. A photographic image impressed on suitable paper and then obliterated is restored by exposure to the fumes of mercury. But if an indefinite number of impressions were superimposed on the same paper, could the fumes of mercury restore any one called for at random? Yet man's memory is a plate with a hundred millions of impressions all cleanly preserved, and he can at will select and evoke the one he wants. No conceivable relationship of materialistic forces can account for the facts of this miraculous daguerreotype plate of experience, and the power of the mind to call out into solitary conspicuousness a desired picture which has forty nine million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine latent pictures lying above it, and fifty millions below it. It has been said that "the impressions on the brain, whether perceptions or intellections, are fixed and retained through the exactness of assimilation. As the mind took cognizance of the change made by the first impression of an object acting on the brain through the sense organs, so afterwards it recognises the likeness of that change in the parts inserted by the nutritive process.18 This passage implies that the mind is an agent, not a phenomenon; and it describes some of the machinery with which the mind works, not the essence of the mind itself. Its doctrine does not destroy nor explain the presiding and elective power which interprets these assimilated and preserved changes, choosing out such of them as it pleases, that unavoided and incomprehensible power, the hiding place of volition and eternity, whose startling call has often been known, in some dread crisis, to effect an instantaneous restoration of the entire bygone life, making all past events troop through the memory, a swiftly awful cavalcade marching along the fibrous pavement of the brain, while each terrified thought rushes to its ashy window to behold. We here leave the material realm behind and enter a spiritual province where other predicates and laws hold, and where, "delivered over to a night of pure light, in which no unpurged sight is sharp enough to penetrate the mysterious essence that sprouteth into different persons," we kneel in most pious awe, and cry, with Sir
18 Paget. Surgical Pathology, Lecture II.
Thomas Browne, "There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something that was before the elements and owes no homage unto the sun!"
The fatal and invariable mistake of materialism is that it confounds means and steps with causes, processes with sources, organs with ends, predicates with subject.19 Alexander Bain denies that there is any cerebral closet or receptacle of sensation and imagery where impressions are stored to be reproduced at pleasure. He says, the revival of a past impression, instead of being an evocation of it from an inner chamber, is a setting on anew of the current which originally produced it, now to produce it again.20 But this theory does not alter the fact that all past impressions are remembered and can be revived at will by an internal efficiency. The miracle, and the necessity of an unchanging conscious entity to explain it, are implied just as they were on the old theory. "The organs of sense," Sir Isaac Newton writes, "are not for enabling the soul to perceive the species of things in its sensorium, but for conveying them there." 21 Now, as we cannot suppose that God has a brain or needs any material organs, but rather that all infinitude is his Sensorium, so spirits may perceive spiritual realities without any mediating organism. Our physical experience in the present is no limit to the spiritual possibilities of the future. The materialistic argument against immortality fails, because it excludes essential facts. As anterior to our experience in the present state there was a power to organize experiences and to become what we are, so none of the superficial reasonings of a mere earth science can show that there is not now a power to organize experiences in a future state and to become what our faith anticipates we shall be. And this suggests to speculative curiosity the query, Shall we commence our future life, a psychical cell, as we commenced our present life, a physical cell?
It will be well, perhaps, to reply next to some of the aggressive sophistries of disbelief. The following lines by Dr. Beddoes are striking, but, considered as a symbol of life, seem almost wilfully defective:
"The body is but an engine Which draws a mighty stream of spiritual power Out of the world's own soul, and makes it play A while in visible motion."
Man is that miraculous engine which includes not only all the needful machinery, but also fuel, fire, steam, and speed, and then, in climacteric addition to these, an engineer! Does the engineer die when the fire goes out and the locomotive stops? When the engine madly plunges off the embankment or bridge of life, does the engineer perish in the ruin, or nimbly leap off and immortally escape? The theory of despair has no greater plausibility than that of faith.
Feuerbach teaches that the memento mori of reason meets us everywhere in the spiritual God's acre of literature. A book is a grave, which buries not the dead remains, but the quick
19 Frauenstadt, Per Materialismus, seine Wahrheit und sein Irrthum, s. 169.
20 The Senses and the Intellect, p. 61.