Part 4 (2/2)

The emblematic correspondence is striking, and the inference is obvious and beautiful. Nor is the change, the gain in endowments and privileges, greater in the supposed case of man than it is from the slow and loathsome worm on the leaf to the swift and glittering insect in the air.

Secondly, in the material world, so far as we can judge, nothing is ever absolutely destroyed. There is no such thing as annihilation. Things are changed, transformations abound; but essences do not cease to be. Take a given quant.i.ty of any kind of matter; divide and subdivide it in ten thousand ways, by mechanical violence, by chemical solvents. Still it exists, as the same quant.i.ty of matter, with unchanged qualities as to its essence, and will exist when Nature has manipulated it in all her laboratories for a billion ages. Now, as a solitary exception to this, are minds absolutely destroyed? are will, conscience, thought, and love annihilated? Personal intelligence, affection, ident.i.ty, are inseparable components of the idea of a soul. And what method is there of crus.h.i.+ng or evaporating these out of being? What force is there to compel them into nothing? Death is not a substantive cause working effects. It is itself merely an effect. It is simply a change in the mode of existence. That this change puts an end to existence is an a.s.sertion against a.n.a.logy, and wholly unsupported.

Thirdly, following the a.n.a.logy of science and the visible order of being, we are led to the conception of an ascending series of existences rising in regular gradation from coa.r.s.e to fine, from brutal to mental, from earthly composite to simply spiritual, and thus pointing up the rounds of life's ladder, through all nature, to the angelic ranks of heaven. Then, feeling his kins.h.i.+p and common vocation with supernal beings, man is a.s.sured of a loftier condition of

3 Sir Humphry Davy, Proteus or Immortality.

4 Bakewell, Natural Evidence of a Future State.

5 Butler, a.n.a.logy, part i. ch. 1.

of existence reserved for him. There are no such immense, vacantly yawning chasms, as that would be, between our fleshly estate and the G.o.dhead. Nature takes no such enormous jumps. Her scaling advance is by staid and normal steps.

”There's lifeless matter.

Add the power of shaping, And you've the crystal: add again the organs Wherewith to subdue sustenance to the form And manner of one's self, and you've the plant: Add power of motion, senses, and so forth, And you've all kinds of beasts: suppose a pig.

To pig add reason, foresight, and such stuff, Then you have man.

What shall, we add to man To bring him higher?”

Freedom from the load of clay, emanc.i.p.ation of the spirit into the full range and masterdom of a spirit's powers!

Fourthly, many strong similarities between our entrance into this world and our departure out of it would make us believe that death is but another and higher birth.6 Any one acquainted with the state of an unborn infant deriving its sole nutriment, its very existence, from its vascular connection with its mother could hardly imagine that its separation from its mother would introduce it to a new and independent life. He would rather conclude that it would perish, like a twig wrenched from its parent limb. So it may be in the separation of the soul from the body. Further, as our latent or dimly groping senses were useless while we were developing in embryo, and then implied this life, so we now have, in rudimentary condition, certain powers of reason, imagination, and heart, which prophesy heaven and eternity; and mysterious intimations ever and anon reach us from a diviner sphere,

”Like hints and echoes of the world To spirits folded in the womb.”

The Persian poet, Buzurgi, says on this theme,

”What is the soul? The seminal principle from the loins of destiny. This world is the womb: the body, its enveloping membrane: The bitterness of dissolution, dame Fortune's pangs of childbirth. What is death? To be born again, an angel of eternity.”

Fifthly, many cultivated thinkers have firmly believed that the soul is not so young as is usually thought, but is an old stager on this globe, having lived through many a previous existence, here or elsewhere.7 They sustain this conclusion by various considerations, either drawn from premises presupposing the necessary eternity of spirits, or resting on dusky reminiscences, ”shadowy recollections,” of visions and events vanished long ago.

Now, if the idea of foregone conscious lives, personal careers oft repeated with unlost being, be admitted, as it frequently has been by such men as Plato and Wordsworth, all the

6 Bretschneider, Predigten uber Tod, Unsterblichkeit, und Anferstehung.

7 James Parker, Account of the Divine Goodness concerning the Pre existence of Souls.

connected a.n.a.logies of the case carry us to the belief that immortality awaits us. We shall live through the next transition, as we have lived through the past ones.

Sixthly, rejecting the hypothesis of an anterior life, and entertaining the supposition that there is no creating and overruling G.o.d, but that all things have arisen by spontaneous development or by chance, still, we are not consistently obliged to expect annihilation as the fate of the soul. Fairly reasoning from the a.n.a.logy of the past, across the facts of the present, to the impending contingencies of the future, we may say that the next stage in the unfolding processes of nature is not the destruction of our consciousness, but issues in a purer life, elevates us to a spiritual rank. It is just to argue that if mindless law or boundless fortuity made this world and brought us here, it may as well make, or have made, another world, and bear us there. Law or chance excluding G.o.d from the question may as easily make us immortal as mortal. Reasoning by a.n.a.logy, we may affirm that, as life has been given us, so it will be given us again and forever.

Seventhly, faith in immortality is fed by another a.n.a.logy, not based on reflection, but instinctively felt. Every change of material in our organism, every change of consciousness, is a kind of death. We partially die as often as we leave behind forgotten experiences and lost states of being. We die successively to infancy, childhood, youth, manhood. The past is the dead: but our course is still on, forever on. Having survived so many deaths, we expect to survive all others and to be ourselves eternally.

There is a third cl.u.s.ter of reasonings, deduced from the distinctive nature of spirit, const.i.tuting the psychological argument for the existence of the soul independent of the body. In the outset, obviously, if the soul be an immaterial ent.i.ty, its natural immortality follows; because death and decay can only be supposed to take effect in dissoluble combinations. Several ingenious reasons have been advanced in proof of the soul's immateriality, reasons cogent enough to have convinced a large cla.s.s of philosophers.8 It is sufficient here to notice the following one. All motion implies a dynamic mover. Matter is dormant. Power is a reality entirely distinct from matter in its nature. But man is essentially an active power, a free will.

Consequently there is in him an immaterial principle, since all power is immaterial. That principle is immortal, because subsisting in a sphere of being whose categories exclude the possibility of dissolution.9

Secondly, should we admit the human soul to be material, yet if it be an ultimate monad, an indivisible atom of mind, it is immortal still, defying all the forces of destruction. And that it actually is an uncompounded unit may be thus proved. Consciousness is simple, not collective. Hence the power of consciousness, the central soul, is an absolute integer. For a living perceptive whole cannot be made of dead imperceptive parts. If the soul were composite, each component part would be an individual, a distinguishable consciousness. Such not being the fact, the conclusion results that the soul is one, a simple substance.10

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