doctrine which a keen reasoner may not credit and a person of the most refined feelings find pleasure in embracing. In their serene catholicity and divine sympathy, science and religion exclude pride and contempt.
But admitting that there is no surviving psychical entity in the brute, that is in no way a clear postulate for proving that the same fact holds of man. The lower endowments and provinces of man's nature and experience may correspond ever so closely with the being and life of brutes whose existence absolutely ceases at death, and yet he may be immortal. The higher range of his spiritual faculties may elevate him into a realm of universal and eternal principles, extricating his soul from the meshes of decay. He may come into contact with a sphere of truths, grasp and rise into a region of realities, conferring the prerogative of deathlessness, not to be reached by natures gifted in a much lower degree, although of the same kind. Such a distinction is made between men themselves by Spinoza.26 His doctrine of immortality depicts the stupendous boon as contingent, to be acquired by observance of conditions. If the ideas of the soul represent perishable objects, it is itself mortal; if imperishable, it is immortal. Now, brutes, it is probable, never rise to the apprehension of pure and eternal truths; but men do. It was a mean prejudice, founded on selfish ignorance and pride, which first assumed the total destruction of brutes in death, and afterwards, by the grovelling range of considerations in which it fastened and the reaction it naturally provoked, involved man and all his imperial hopes in the same fate. A firm logical discrimination disentangles the human mind from this beastly snarl.27 The difference in data warrants a difference in result. The argument for the immortality of brutes and that for the immortality of men are, in some respects, parallel lines, but they are not coextensive. Beginning together, the latter far outreaches the former. Man, like the animals, eats, drinks, sleeps, builds; unlike them, he adorns an ideal world of the eternal future, lays up treasures in its heavenly kingdom, and waits to migrate into it.
There are two distinct methods of escaping the fatal inference of disbelief usually drawn by materialists. First, by the denial of their philosophical postulates, by the predication of immaterial substance, affirming the soul to be a spaceless point, its life an indivisible moment. The reasonings in behalf of this conception have been manifold, and cogent enough to convince a multitude of accomplished and vigorous thinkers.28 In Herbart's system the soul is an immaterial monad, or real, capable of the permanent formation of states in its interior. Its life consists of a quenchless series of self preservations. These reals, with their relations and aggregations, constitute at once the varying phenomena and the causal substrata of the universe. Mamertius Claudianus, a philosophical priest of Southern Gaul in the fifth century, wrote a treatise "On the Nature of the Soul." He says, "When the soul wills, it is all will; when it recollects or feels, it is all recollection or feeling. Now, will, recollection, and feeling, are not bodies. Therefore the soul is incorporeal." This makes the conscious man an
26 Jouffroy, Introduction to Ethics: Channing's trans., vol. ii. pp. 189-191.
27 Schaller, Leib und Seele, kap. 13: Der Psychische Unterschied des Menschen vom Thiere.
28 Crombie, Natural Theology, vol. ii.: Essay on the Immortality of the Soul. Brougham, Discourse of Nat. Theol., sect. 5.
imperishable substantial activity. An old English writer, with quaint eloquence, declares, "There is a proportion between an atom and the universe, because both are quantitative. All this excesse vanisheth into nothing as soon as the lowest substance shineth out of that orbe where they reside that scorn divisibility."
From this brief statement of the position of the immaterialists, without arguing it, we pass to note, in the second place, that nearly all the postulates ordinarily claimed by the materialist may be granted without by any means proving the justice of their disbelief of a future life.29 Admit that there can be no sensation without a nerve, no thought without a brain, no phenomenal manifestation without an organ. Such an admission legitimates the conclusion, on empirical grounds, that our present mode of life must cease with the dissolution of our organism. It does not even empirically prove that we may not survive in some other mode of being, passing perhaps to an inconceivably higher stage and more blessed kind of life. After the entire disintegration of our material organs, we may, by some now unknown means, possess in a refined form the equivalents of what those organs gave us. There may be, interfused throughout the gross mortal body, an immortal body of exquisitely delicate structure invisibly extricating itself from the carious ruins at death. Plattner develops and defends this hypothesis with plausible skill and power.30 The Hindus conceived the soul to be concealed within several successive sheaths, the innermost of which accompanied it through all its transmigrations.31 "The subtile person extends to a small distance over the skull, like the flame of a lamp above its wick." 32 The later Pythagoreans and Platonists seem to have believed that the same numerical ethereal body with which the soul was at first created adhered to it inseparably during all its descents into grosser bodies, a lucid and wingy vehicle, which, purged by diet and catharms, ascends again, bearing the soul to its native seat.33 The doctrine of Swedenborg asserts man to be interiorly an organized form pervading the physical body, an eternal receptacle of life from God. In his terminology, "constant influx of life" supersedes the popular idea of a self contained spiritual existence. But this influx is conditioned by its receiving organ, the undecaying inner body.34 However boldly it may be assailed and rejected as a baseless theory, no materialistic logic can disprove the existence of an ethereal form contained in, animating, and surviving, the visible organism. It is a possibility; although, even if it be a fact, science, by the very conditions of the case, can never unveil or demonstrate it.
When subjected to a certain mode of thought developed recently by Faraday, Drossbach, and others, materialism itself brightens and dissolves into a species of idealism, the universe becomes a glittering congeries of indestructible points of power, and the immortality of the soul is established as a mathematical certainty.35 All bodies, all entities, are but forms of
This has been ably shown by Spiers in his treatise, Ueber das korperliche Bedingtsein der Seelenthatigkeiten.