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

by William Rounseville Alger

Even, for the moment, admitting it to be true that no argument of irresistible cogency has yet been advanced to prove the immortality of the soul, it is certain that no proof has ever been given of its mortality. The very utmost that can be claimed by any skeptic who fairly understands the whole case, is that the different arguments, for and against, offset one another, and leave the question in a neutral balance of suspense, just where it was before the debate began. Many persons hold that the counter reasonings do thus balance and annul one another. For them the problem remains to be decided on other grounds than those of the logical disputation which has proved inadequate to its settlement. These other grounds are considerations of congruity, probability, the prophetic preparations and demands of present experience. What sort of a figure would the segments which we now see, compose, if they were completed? What in the hidden future portions of our destiny would be harmonic and complementary as related with the parts here experienced? When the other modes of inquiry are abandoned this mode remains. Its teachings are rich and impressive in proportion to the greatness of the faculties and the wealth of knowledge and love brought to its consideration. And thus we come face to face with the fifth and last cause of the failing faith in immortality confessed to characterize the present day.

That cause is the common inability to realize in the thoughts of the mind, and to hold in the faith of the feelings, a conception so vast, so mysterious, so remote from the usual routine of the selfish trifles and petty notions which monopolize the powers and fritter down the faculties of the average people of the nineteenth century. The battle of sensualism, the scramble over material interests, the wearing absorption in the small and evanescent struggles of social rivalry, the irritated attention given to the ever thickening claims of external things, the pulverizing discussions of all sorts of opinions by hostile schools, are fatal to that concentrated calmness of mood, that unity of passion, that serene amplitude of intellectual and imaginative scope, that docile religious receptiveness of soul, requisite for the fit contemplation of a doctrine so solemn and sublime as that of immortality. The grade of thought and scale of emotion ordinarily characteristic of ordinary men are utterly out of keeping with the inexpressible grandeur of themes like that of the divine kinship and eternity of the soul. The reason and fancy, before they can be competent to appreciate such truths, must be trained in the study and worshipful meditation of subjects of commensurate mystery and sublimity. It is no wonder that when minds and hearts familiar only with houses and clothes and food, the trivial gossip and vanity of the hour, are summoned to grasp the idea of spiritual survival and an everlasting destiny of conscious adventures, they are overwhelmed and helplessly fail to represent to themselves the possibility of any such truth. This cause of doubt is very prevalent and effective; for ever more and more in our age conscious attention is turned away from states within and fixed upon things without. The natural consequence is that the objective world is arrogating the first place in consciousness, and the subjective world is sinking into the secondary rank. Whatever exalts the object at the expense of the subject tends to materialism, unbelief in the separate being of the spirit. On the other hand whatever gives the panoramic passage of subjective states in the soul greater apparent vividness and tenacity than belong to outer phenomena, tends to produce faith in the independence and immortality of the spirit. Hence it is quite to be expected that until our modern concentration on objective toil and study and amusement reaches its destined climax and begins the return career to subjective reason and feeling, the skepticism of the age will increase.

Meanwhile the remedy for the evil is, first, to perceive it, and then, to cultivate the kinds of experience calculated to neutralize it. For the logical invalidity and fallaciousness of the doubts concerning immortality, arising from the immense disparity of such a belief with the mental habits of ignorant earthlings and social parasites, appear from the fact that there are others with whose experience and thought the doctrine has no such disparity, but for whose spiritual range and haunt it is as natural to believe it as to breathe. And, in explaining the destiny of man, it is legitimate to take the most finished and furnished specimens, not the abortive ones. There are grounds of knowledge, domains of imagination, heights of nobility, familiar to the most exalted characters, perfectly cognate and harmonious with the conception of eternal life, and making the faith in it fully as credible as the transcendent truths of science and philosophy which have been actually demonstrated. Those who are familiar only with the little affairs of sense, in narrow bounds of time and space, may well gasp in despair and denial when the bewildering contents of the doctrine of immortality are held before them; but for all who have mastered what science reveals of the objective world of nature, and what literature records of the subjective world of soul, both these spheres furnish ample illustrative examples and data to make the faith in every way congruous with what else they know, and as easy as it is pleasing to receive. Assuredly the belief resulting in this latter class from their positive perception and correspondent desire and persuasion, are, on every ground of reason or moral fitness, more than a counterbalance for the unbelief resulting in the former class from their negative experience and incompetency. If we sought to estimate the possibility and destined fulfillment of human nature when all its conditions shall have been perfected, should we choose for the basis of our judgment the incapacity of the lower specimens of man? or the capacity of the higher? After considering the chief achievements of human genius, the mysterious powers of the human soul now, the doctrine of immortality does not seem too great and wonderful for belief; but, on the contrary, it appears the coherent complement of the facts of the present.

Nothing can be more marvelous or imply greater glory for the destiny of the individual being than the fact that each consciousness is to itself the antithetical equivalent or balance of the totality of being beside; since the whole universe, all other beings, God himself, are known to the individual consciousness only as revealed in itself through its personal faculties. The slightest change in the subject is reported by a correspondent change in objects. Heighten the internal activities of the soul to a certain pitch, and the convictions they engender will be so intense, and the experience so absorbing, as irresistibly to sweep away all opposing doubts and fill every craving with the triumphant flood of life. What overwhelming revelations of the providence of God and eternal life, crowding the cosmos at every point with the workings of poetic justice, may thus be made to prepared spirits, only those who receive them know. Paul said he was caught up into the third heaven and heard unspeakable words. It is to be believed that such visions, while often illusory, are sometimes genuine. A test to discriminate the spurious and the authentic will one day be secured. Meanwhile it is either a faithless faintheartedness or a vulgar arrogance to omit from the data of our expected fate those thoughts, which, though beyond the reaches of our souls, nevertheless irresistibly allure our attention and enchain our affection; ideas belonging to our nature, though transcending our experience, and, while surpassing our faculties, still attracting us to our destiny. What are presentiments but divine wings of the spirit fluttering toward our unseen goal?

Again, the great metaphysicians, who have elaborated the idealistic philosophy in so many forms, exhibit the mind of man to us as superior to the cosmic spectacle it contemplates projected in immensity. They portray the material creation as a phantasmal show of mind, a phenomenal process and aspect of spirit, indissoluble centers of consciousness alone having solid verity and stay, while matter and force and times and places whirl and pass, combine and dissolve.

Likewise the mathematicians, with their mighty calculus, translate all quantities and qualities, all objects and operations, into numerical symbols, and with these intellectual toys play the same miraculous tricks that the Creator himself plays with the originals. They symbolize purely imaginary quantities, bring them into relations and pass them through certain operations, and thereby discover truths which are found to have permanent objective validity. It demonstrates, as said before, that the filial mind which thus wanders in thought through the house of the Father, and, everywhere making itself familiarly at home, disports among His treasures, is of the same type with the parental Mind.

And now, still farther, that the cultivators of physical science are pushing their discoveries and their theories to ultimates, we begin to see the adamantine structure of material nature melting into a system of ideal equivalents, vaporizing into an undulatory ether, vanishing before our microscopes in immaterial bases of thought, reason, law and will. The gases have just been first liquified and then actually solidified, confirming the speculative announcement long before made that oxygen and hydrogen are metals volatilized. Many valuable and strange discoveries have been reached in physical science by following prophetic declarations made a priori on grounds of pure reason. The same proofs of intellectual design and purpose are discerned in the order of atomic combination, in the beauty of crystals and dewdrops and snowflakes, in the perfect geometrical symmetry of minerals and flowers, and in the same spiral adjustment of the leaves on a tree and of the orbits of the planets in the sky, as in the artistic works of man. Intellect and will are as much shown in the production of a palm tree as they are in the production of a poem And so, before the gaze of the accomplished and devout scientist, matter is translated into terms of mind, rather than the reverse, and the whole cosmos is transmuted into a divine laboratory of ideal powers, a divine gallery of ideal pictures, a divine theater for the eternal adventures of conscious spirits.

In mental conception man deals with mathematical infinites as easily as with the pettiest objects, dilates a point to the universe and shrinks the universe to a point, condenses eternity into a moment or stretches a moment to eternity. It has been shown that if correspondent diminution or enlargement in the faculties of sense and intelligence and in all the forces concerned were made, the whole stellar system and its contents might be dwarfed into the bulk of a grain of sand, or so magnified that each grain would fill the space now occupied by the whole, and no one would perceive any change whatever in the scale. In reply to the statement that nothing can act where it is not, it has been proved that every atom is virtually omnipresent. It takes the entire universe to constitute an atom, since the forces centered in each atom are connected with the whole by the insunderable continuity of all the laws of being. The science of molecular physics as expounded by its latest masters is not less astounding than the wildest soarings of transcendental metaphysics. For instance, it is proved that if there be ultimate atoms their size must be so small that it would require at least five hundred millions of them to an inch in length. In a cubic inch of hydrogen gas, then, for example, there are 125,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 one hundred and twenty five septillions of atoms, moving with the inconceivable velocity that is implied by their making thousands of millions of changes of direction every second. The view of the dynamic s tructure of the universe opened in this direction is as appalling as that unveiled in the opposite direction by the largest extension of the nebular hypothesis. He who can gaze here with steady reason need not be staggered by the sublimest doctrine of religion. Amazed at the spectacle of creative power and wisdom, equally amazed at the discovering faculty of man, we feel it to be incredible that he should have been made capable of such thoughts only to be annihilated after a brief tantalization. Confronting the immeasurable wilderness of divine glory, strewn all through with prizes before which his soul burns with the unconsumable fire of a god like ambition, man lifts his eye to worship and reaches out his hand to receive. Is he merely taunted with the starry sky, and mocked with an infinite illusion of progress, suddenly barred with endless night and oblivion? Behold him emerging out of nothingness, mastering his self conscious identity, climbing over the rounds of symbolic experience and language through the heights of knowledge and love. Strange, helpless, sublime prince of the universe, beggar of God, when he has attained the summit of illimitable perception, holding immortal joys in full prospect, shall he be dashed back into nonentity? Is it not fitter that he be welcomed by triumphant initiation into the family of the deathless Father?

Think of the advancement man has made since the time when he was a cannibal cave dweller, shivering out of the glacial epoch, and contending with wild beasts for a foothold on the earth, till now that he enjoys the idealism of Berkeley, wields the quaternions of Hamilton, uses the lightnings for his red sandaled messengers, holds his spectroscope to a star and tells what elements compose it, or to an outskirting nebula and declares it a mass of incandescent hydrogen. From such a background of accomplished fact he seems really to have a right to peer forth into the unbounded future and promise himself an unbounded destiny. The repetition of such a progress, nay much less, it may not unreasonably be imagined would raise the curtains from unsuspected secrets, bring the family of intelligences scattered over all worlds into conscious communication, and accomplish the deliverance of the whole creation travailing and groaning together unto this day for the redemption of the creature. What a splendid, almost incredible task man has already achieved in disentangling the apparent astronomic motions and converting them into the real ones. How immensely sublimer and more complex is the position of man on this planet than it seemed to the primitive savage, who knew only what his crude senses taught him, although, all the while, the moon was circling about him twenty five hundred miles an hour, and he was whirling with the revolving earth a thousand miles an hour, and spinning around the sun over thirty thousand miles an hour, and swooping with the whole solar system through the blue void with a still swifter gyre in a yet vaster cycle! This is demonstrated physical fact. Its harmonic correlate in the spiritual sphere would be nothing less than a lease of eternal existence for the soul which sees endless invitations ahead, and exults at the prospect of an eternal pursuit of them, its reason and affection affiliated with those of the whole divine household of immortals. Two or three generations ago it would have been more inconceivable that men a hundred miles apart could audibly converse together, as they now do by means of the telephone, than it is at this day to believe that communication may at some future time be opened between the inhabitants of the earth and the inhabitants of Sirius through the vibrations of the ethereal medium.

Futhermore, the idea of the infinite God, in possession of which man finds himself, is a warrant for his immortality. There cannot be more in an effect than was in its cause, though there may be less. We perceive intelligence, orderly purpose, as well as power, in nature. We find in ourselves all the explicit attributes and treasures of consciousness. Reasoning back by indubitable steps we come to an uncaused, unlimited, infinite Being, the underived and eternal source of all that is. This idea in our minds of a Being of absolute perfection, whose boundless consciousness as being necessarily indivisible must be totally present at every point of infinitude, is the charter of our own divine nature and heirship. For we can become, even here, friends and companions of this omnipresent One, of whose essence and attributes everything below is but a defective transcript or dimmed revelation. This idea of Himself is the gift of God to us. To suppose that we are capable of originating it implies a greater miracle than the one it seeks to account for, and really puts ourselves in the place of God. Can we imagine that we are the creators of God? If the absolute noumenal Power beyond all phenomena be unknowable, it cannot contain less, but must contain more than all the attributes of the material and spiritual creation which has proceeded thence. The noblest and best spirits of all lands and ages have walked in full fellowship with this Being, seeking supremely to serve and love Him in the subjection of self will and in the doing of good. Many a nameless saint, in a pure consecration, has heroically thought and suffered and aspired, worn out life in slow toils or offered it up in sharp sacrifice, for the good of fellow creatures, as a tribute to God, and exhaled the last breath in a prayer of love and trust. Such faithful servants and comrades must be dear to the Infinite Spirit, and it is natural to believe that He will keep them with him forever. When Christ, in self sacrificing love, submitted to death on the cross, saying, "Father, into Thy hands I commit my spirit," he who can believe that the magnanimous sufferer was disappointed, blotted out and extinguished, thus reveals the grade of his own insight, but does not refute the greater hope of nobler seers. It seems as if the idea of God, with loving faith and obedience to its requirements, planted in a soul which had not inherited immortality would straightway begin to develop it there. The atmosphere of eternity alone befits a nature which feels itself living in the companionship of God. Everything subject to decay cowers into oblivion from before the idea of that august, incorruptible presence. The fear of death is but the recoil of the immortal from mortality. When man voluntarily faces death without fear, even courting martyrdom with a radiant joy, it is because there is in him, deeper than consciousness, a mystic knowledge that he is essentially eternal and cannot perish. He who freely sacrifices anything thereby proves himself superior to that which he sacrifices. Man freely sacrifices his life. Therefore he is immortal.