The Destiny of the Soul: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life

by William Rounseville Alger

Freely, then, let us brush aside the mythological extravagance and irrational errors in the entire cosmopolitan doctrine of a future life, but beware of rejecting the fact itself of immortality until we have better grounds than have yet been afforded by the accumulating insight of literary history. As the world moves on, and the human mind develops with it, the crude must give way to the mature, and the false be replaced, not with vacancy, but with the true. The problem of the nature and destiny of the soul will not be solved by tearing away the fictitious drapery thrown around it, but by piercing to the roots of the reality within the drapery.

And now we come to the third reason for the increasing doubt and decreasing faith in regard to a future life: that reason is that the form of the belief in it prevalent in Christendom has become incredible, and the rejection of the form has loosened the hold on the substance. The philosophic mind, which has attained to the idea of the infinite God, without body, or parts, or passions, omnipresent in his total perfection, can reason to the belief in a kindred immortality for its own finite being. But since our experience is here limited to the life now known, we are utterly without data or ability to image forth such a conception of immortality in any form of picture or mental scenery. There seem to be only three ways in which we can give imaginative representation of a future life. The first is the method of the universal barbarian mind, which paints the life to come as a shadowy reflex or copy of the present world and life, an unsubstantial, graspless, yet actual and conscious realm of ghosts, carrying on a pale and noiseless mimicry of their former adventures in the body. Holding fast to that clew of analogy which is the nucleus of philosophy in this view, but rejecting the rest as fantastic figment, we arrive at the next way in which those who are unwilling to leave their thoughts of the future life in empty rational abstraction, portray it in vivid concrete. This they do by means of the doctrine of a general bodily resurrection of the dead.

It is a striking fact that four of the great historic and literary religions have taught the doctrine of immortality under the form of a physical resurrection, namely: Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism. It has been attributed, also, to the ancient religion of Egypt, but erroneously. Its belief there is a mere inference from facts which do not really imply it. The Egyptians plainly believed in a series of individual reincarnations, not in any general resurrection. But it is a sufficiently interesting and impressive fact that over one third of the human race have embodied their expectation of a future eternal life in this concrete and astonishing form. It has not rested on a basis of reason, but on one of asserted revelation and authority. It originated in the fact that the only life of which we now have any experience is a life in the body, and, therefore, this is the life which we instinctively love and prefer; also in the fact that this is the only mode of life which we are able to represent to ourselves in any satisfactory, apprehensible image. It then bolstered itself up by arbitrary theological theorizings, and proclaimed itself with sanctions of a pretended supernatural authority. Slowly the minds of its disciples were drilled to a familiarity with it, and to a habit of implicitly believing it, which grew strong enough to make them hold to it in spite of its difficulty as a sheer and violent miracle having no connection whatever with the natural order of things. Authority and passive habit long maintained the belief in unbroken sway. They still so support it in the Mohammedan world, where there is almost no science, but little skeptical thought, and a common uniformity of abject submission to the word of the Koran. But in Christendom it fares differently. Here, the knowledge of modern science and habits of free inquiry are almost universally diffused. The consequence is, since the chief Christian belief in immortality has been identified with the notion of a general physical resurrection of the dead at the last day, and since all philosophical and scientific thinking refutes that notion by setting its arbitrariness and monstrous abnormality in high and steep relief against the consensus of demonstrated knowledge and moral probability, that the popular belief of Christendom in immortality itself is depolarized and swiftly dropping into decay with a large class of persons. But this spread of doubt and denial, while a natural process, is yet an illogical and unnecessary one. The competent thinker will extricate the question of the immortality of the soul from its accidental entanglement with the doctrine of the resurrection, and, rejecting the latter as incredible, still affirm the former on its own independent grounds. To prove and illustrate these statements we must here give a little additional study, fresh and independent study, to the subject.

The doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh is bound up with the whole fabric of the Catholic and Orthodox dogmatic theology of Christendom, and cannot be removed without logically shaking that system of belief into pieces. And yet the doctrine, as has been shown in a previous chapter, is unscriptural and of a purely pagan origin, the New Testament foretelling a resurrection of spirits from the underworld, not of bodies from the grave. It has no real analogies in the world, but is a figment of fancy, unsupported by reason on any authentic physical or moral grounds. It is, furthermore, a doctrine whose realization is impossible, because it is a self destroying absurdity.

All that we need for demonstrating its absolute incredibility, is simply to ultimate its implications, carry it out in thought to the necessary results which its ignorant originators never foresaw. The doctrine of a physical resurrection presupposes that our race was originally intended to be immortal on earth, and that death was a penalty for sin. Fill out the theory. Adam and Eve, made male and female, were commanded to multiply and replenish the earth. Their descendants, doubling every twenty five years, would, after sixty or seventy generations had accumulated, have covered the whole earth so thickly that they would be packed in one immovable mass, the whole planet carpeted with their forms and paved with their upturned faces. Not an inch of room on the globe for any harvest to grow or any creature to move; the world, crowded and imbedded at every point with one continuous multitude of immortal human beings, would have then rolled around the zodiac, presenting this chronic and motionless picture, to all eternity!

If it be maintained that had it not been for sin and its penalty, the successive generations would neither have died nor have remained forever on the earth, but would have been translated bodily to some other world, the absurdity just exposed is escaped only to introduce another one equally glaring. For in time, the entire solid contents of the globe would thus be removed, and the disappearance of our planet unhinge the solar system and produce a general cataclysm. The solid contents of the earth have been estimated at about thirty nine trillions of cubic feet. Seventy five doublings of the primal pair would reach to over seventy trillions of human beings, each containing more than a solid cubic foot.

It is perfectly clear, therefore, in any view, that the only way in which the human race, with their reproductive constitution, could permanently inhabit the world is by the present system of successive births and deaths; a system, furthermore, which science shows to have been in working existence among the preceding races of creatures for innumerable ages before the mythical sin of Adam and Eve, with its mythical consequences.

The fabulous scheme of an intended bodily immortality on the earth is a discordant and disagreeable one in every respect, asthetic, rational, and moral. It jars incongruously with the great order of nature and providence, which everywhere interpolates a night between two days, a sleep between two wakings, to keep the edge of consciousness fresh and the possibilities of pleasure alive. Imprisoned in this carcass of flesh with its ignoble necessities for endless ages, the contemplation of the fearful burden of monotony would be insufferable to any one who had thought the case out in all its details with vivid realization. And yet, so unthinking are most persons in regard to the conventional beliefs prevalent in society, Parsees, Jews, Christians and Mohammedans, professedly base their entire faith in immortality on this dogma with the resurrection involved in it.

When carried out in its particulars by the imagination, the doctrine is self evidently untenable, contradictory to the essential facts of human nature under the given conditions of the material creation. It had its theologic birth in the speculations of the dualistic religion of Persia, whence it was first borrowed by the Jews, then secondarily adopted into Christianity, and thence finally impacted into the mongrel creed of Mohammed and his followers. It is philosophically irreconcilable with a pure monotheism; for, if God be infinite, no enemy could subvert his original scheme and force Him to an arbitrary miracle to restore it. It is a creaking and dissonant artifice, every way repugnant to all whose reason and sentiment have learned to love the smooth and continuous evolution of the order of the cosmos and the connected destinies of conscious beings. It is absolutely refuted by the double reductio ad absurdum shown above to be contained in it.

Yet, while the grounds on which the common belief in a destined general resurrection of the dead rests have really lost their validity to the mind of the nineteenth century, the millions of Islam and Christendom retain the article unchanged in their creeds, and to question it is a heresy. No wonder skepticism flourishes and genuine faith decays. This clinging to an outgrown scheme is not only from the strong drift of a passive mental conformity, as the train of cars keeps on for some time after the dynamic locomotive has been taken off. Another reason is that the tenet is so centrally imbedded in the dogmatic ecclesiasticism that it cannot be extricated without involving all the associated dogmas. Therefore, one portion of this knowing generation repeat the formula and blink the difficulties, while another portion go over to open disbelief of any future life. The doctrine of the literal resurrection of the body from the grave is incredible to the educated and free intelligence of the age. In continuing to affirm it ecclesiastical Christendom brands itself with frivolity, not earnest enough to carry its thought in loyalty to truth as far as possible, or with hypocrisy, consciously dishonest to its doubts.