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

by William Rounseville Alger

In the first place, by the very structure of our being, by the very necessity of our experience, the universe is divided into two irreconcilable classes of realities, namely, spiritual subjects and material objects. Sensations, perceptions, emotions, thoughts, volitions, all qualities of mind, all states of consciousness, are absolutely immaterial. They are more real to us, that is to say, they more inexpugnably assert and maintain themselves, than material things do: and it is only hopeless vulgarity and incompetence of thinking which can ever confuse or merge them with material things. Matter is that which proves itself to spirit by the effects it produces on spirit. Spirit is that which is its own evidence. The center of consciousness in us is its own proof of its own being, and all that occurs within it is its own proof, and is unsusceptible of any other or foreign demonstration. Hope, fear, love, imagination, reason, are absolutely unthinkable as forms of material substance, however exquisitely refined and exalted. There is no conceivable community of being between a sentiment and an atom, a gas and an aspiration, an idea of truth in the soul and any mass of matter in space. Each of these facts, conscious thought and material extension, has its own incommunicable and incomparable sphere of being and laws of action, which can be confused only by ignorance and sophistry.

So clear has this become to all profound reflection, that the ablest supporters of the theory of evolution, with all their preponderant bias in favor of physical science, declare, in the words of Herbert Spencer, that if compelled to choose between thinking of spirit in the terms of matter and thinking of matter in the terms of spirit, they should take the latter alternative and give an idealistic interpretation to nature rather than a materialistic interpretation to the soul. It is logically clear, then, despite the fallacious influences of habit to the contrary, that no progress of the physical sciences, no conceivable amount of induction and generalization as to the composition or decomposition of material bodies, can throw any new light or darkness on the nature and destiny of the immaterial soul.

The incessant flux of phenomena constructing and destroying apparent things, though studied till the observing eye sees nothing but mirage anywhere, has nothing to do with the steady persistence of spiritual identity. To force it to discredit our claim to a divine descent and an endless inheritance is a glaring sophism. The question must be snatched back from the assumption of the retort and crucible, the observational and numerical methods of the physical realm, and relegated to the legitimate tests of the moral and metaphysical realm.

Again, there is furnished in the results of the study of physical science itself, as pursued by its most gifted masters, a glorious overthrow and neutralization of the moral and religious doubts called out in its shallower votaries by their absorption in its more superficial phases. The scientific men of the most profound intellectual power and the most brilliant original genius, the supreme heads of chemistry, dynamics and mathematics, have applied to the phenomena of the material creation modes of observation and instruments of reasoning before whose compelling efficacy the whole frowning vastitude of the outer universe melts into ideal points of force and forms of law. Everything in time and space is reduced to molecular vibrations, regulated by the mental conceptions of number, weight and measure. The reasonings of such men as Oersted and Faraday on electricity and magnetism; of Sir William Thomson and Clerk Maxwell on thermodynamics; the theories of the greatest mathematicians, grasping all things in heaven and earth with their irresistible calculus, literally using infinites as toys, creating imaginary quantities, and, going through certain operations with them, actually discovering new truths in the solid domain of reality yield conceptions of order, beauty and sublimity, and emotions of wonder, awe and delight, nowhere else surpassed. They exalt the spectacle of nature into a vision of poetic intelligence, and show the theorizing mind of man to be akin to the creating mind of God. Thus, if skepticism as to the deathless royalty of soul is bred in the physicist who constantly stoops with the scalpel and the microscope, it is offset in him who, with as steady a judgment, soars to the contemplation of the ethereal medium with its lines of force traversing immensity and vibrating timelessly along their whole length, loaded, for those who can interpret them, with tidings of all that happens. Instead of spirit being materialized, matter is spiritualized and nature transfigured into the ideal home of ideal entities. Dumas, years ago, asserted that hydrogen gas is but an etherealized metal. Just now, it is said, Pictet has succeeded, under a pressure of six hundred and fifty atmospheres, in actually crystallizing oxygen and hydrogen. One has only to read such papers as those of Stallo on the fundamental concepts of science to learn that if matter or mind is ever to be lost, it will not be mind.

But there remains a more direct and more important way of correcting the dismal or defiant doubts of immortality caused by the inferior phases of materialistic study; and that is, by bringing up to a correspondent fullness and intensity the counter activity of the ideal powers. Let justice be done to the subject as well as to the object. Over against the watching of clouds and waves, the sorting of herbs, the weighing of metals, the measuring of quantities, bring up the exercise of the mind on the treasures of qualitative substance in its own proper sphere of reason and love and faith. Admire the beautiful, love the good, obey the true, worship the right, aspire to the highest, subordinate or sacrifice everything base or wrong in a generous service of duty, and thus nourish a consciousness of those ontological relations by which the soul is rooted in the Godhead, and stimulate that intuitive efflorescence of faith which grows out of progressive fulfillment and which prophecies perpetuity of fulfillment. To say the least, the subject is as real as the object, the contemplating faculty as valid as the phenomenon it confronts. The teachings of the soul rightly construed are as authentic as the teachings of nature. And, some day in the future, a complete system of truth developed from the central principle of the one by the subjective method will be found to correspond perfectly with the complete system of truth developed by the objective method from the central principle of the other. As the objective scientific principle is the persistence of force, the subjective scientific principle is the potential infinity of individual spirit, each one the equivalent of the all. What else than this can be the ultimate meaning of the primal, universal, indestructible antithesis or dual classification of being, the ego and the non ego, self and not self, the former including each individual in his own apprehension, the latter including all besides?

There is a philosophical authority which, for those incompetent to judge for themselves, should properly take the place vacated by the ecclesiastical authority, which, in our day, is plainly on the wane. Multitudes no longer believe in the immortality of their souls on the ground of the resurrection of Christ, or the assertion of Scripture or creed. Shall they, then, deny it altogether because the materialistic band clamor that it is a delusion, and they themselves see no sufficient evidence for it? There is a more appropriate alternative. Many theories in natural philosophy have been exploded by the proof of their absurdity, and the correct explanations are accepted on trust by the multitudes incompetent to master their logical and mathematical grounds. Very few understand the proofs of the chief laws of nature, but the vast majority of men implicitly trust the assertions of those who do know them. In like manner there is a legitimate sphere for authority in moral and religious beliefs; only it should be the authority of the competent and disinterested. Now, it is a fact that the very greatest philosophers who have ever lived, the preeminently imperial thinkers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Anselm, Hegel, and the resplendent group of their peers, have asserted as a necessary principle the real being and eternal substantiality of the soul. Besides all the combinations of matter that dissolve, all the phenomena that pass, they affirm the existence of enduring entities, individual spirits, thinkers conscious of their thoughts. In central calm, far within the struggle and vex of the rolling elements, throned in its own serene realm of law, lives the free, conscious soul, and will live eternally, actualizing its potentialities. Nothing can disintegrate it, because it is not an aggregate but a unity, not a quantitative mass of matter, but a spaceless monad of power. It is a closed circuit of thinking activity, impenetrable to everything else. Spirits are the only solids, matter being endlessly penetrable and transmutable.

We are all obliged to think of ourselves as entities, and not as mere phenomenal series of states. There must be a substratum for the affections of consciousness. All changes are changes of something. It is true there is a mystery involved here which no words can make clear; yet the more deeply one thinks and feels the more intense will be his assurance that there is something in him which thinks and feels, or rather that he himself is a something which thinks and feels. The best conception we can get of the soul is that it is a subject which is its own object and a mirror for the inner reflection of all other objects. God is not an object, because He is the actualized infinite Subject. His thoughts are concrete creations, the objective realities of the universe phenomenal and substantial. We are actually finite subjects, but with a potential infinity, patterned in free correspondence with Him. Our thoughts are subjective reflections of His, modified by the contents of our facultative constitution and the peculiarities of our historic experience. What constitutes my soul is the potentiality of all states of consciousness, actual and latent, past, present and future. It reveals itself to me, so to speak, in my actual thoughts and feelings. So far as these are true and good, they correspond with and represent the will of God, and must share the fortunes of the Divine Reality with which they are implicitly joined. Then my soul cannot be annihilated unless the will of God is so far annihilated. But God is infinite being, and there is nothing outside of or counter to infinite being to destroy it. All evil is but defect or negation. I am only in so far as I am positive reality. Nothing of me, therefore, can ever perish, except my imperfections; and the thought of the perishing of imperfections is a thought of joy. Welcome, then, be the approach of death which shall cleanse and dislimit me into unimprisonable divineness of being, the crystalline sphere of pure intelligence and immortality!

The only real proof of immortality in the sight of the intellect, is the perception of the necessity of self determining entities as the causes and grounds of the facts of experience. A series of states implies something of which they are states. There seems to be no possible explanation or understanding of the phenomena which confront our experience without the conception of ultimate individualities, indestructible subject objects, centers of spiritual activity, monistic selfhoods, conscious egos, each of which distinguishes itself from every other, and contrasts itself with the All. Now it is claimed that every thinker who reaches the maturest stage of thought attains to this insight. It is the imperial mark of a certain stage of knowledge. Here the supreme thinkers, sceptered with final perception of the truth of their own eternity, sit at ease, enthroned in the serene and lucid realm of law, beyond the reach of the dark tempest of cavils and doubts. And there is a larger company who on easier terms have attained the same result. For, without this wearisome metaphysical hewing of conclusions from the quarries of ontology, the good and pure, who, in their loving obedience and aspiration, keep the harmonic quickness and innocence of their intuitions uninjured, also have an unshaken assurance that they live in God and shall share his life forevermore. The mystics of every period seem in feeling to have an immediate grasp of all that the greatest philosophers have painfully conquered by speculation. These two classes may claim to possess direct certitude of eternal life. All others must either attain to the stage of development and mount of vision of these, or receive the faith on their authority, or else be subject to doubt and unbelief.

To accept the doctrine of the immortality of the soul on the authority of the wisest philosophers and the purest saints, is a legitimate procedure perfectly in keeping with what the human race does in all other provinces of thought where it is incapable of proving what its teachers have demonstrated, but can easily appreciate and make practical application of the truths they have affirmed. The great laws of science in all its domains are scientifically mastered by very few, but their empirical rules are implicitly followed by the common multitude. One form or receptacle of authority after another may be superseded; but authority itself always remains. And the true course for those to pursue who have come to repudiate the authority of scripture, or church creed, or the resurrection of Christ, as a proof of the future life of man, is not at once to abandon all belief in a future state, but to accept the guidance of the most competent independent thinkers in place of that of the most arbitrary dogmatists. For unto all who do not arrogate to themselves a transcendent competency to judge, the general consensus of the thought and feeling of the world, clarified and interpreted by the fittest few, will always be a grateful ground of reliance and trust. And the verdict thus revealed is unequivocally in favor of the doctrine of immortality.

There can be no changes independently of something which is changed. Amidst all the changeable in us which passes and is forgotten, there is something which stays and is inexpugnable. It is our identity. That which appears in consciousness first, which recurs oftenest, and which persists longest, is the most valid object of belief. And what is that but the very consciousness, or the subject as its own object? Surely, the one invariable accompaniment of all the shifting states of consciousness is the bare essential consciousness itself: this is, so to speak, the unitary vessel containing all their varieties. This unquestionably exists now. The burden of proof, then, as Bishop Butler long ago showed, is on those who affirm its destruction in the article of death. Consciousness is purely immaterial, as every one who has passed beyond the most ignorant and childish stages of thought must see. Merely because it is, in our present experience, associated in time and space with a material organism, therefore to declare that it is a dependent production of matter, or a transient concomitant of the transient body, is a gratuitous assertion with not one scintilla of evidence.