Part 7 (2/2)

”How speeds, from in the river's thought, The spirit of the leaf that falls, Its heaven in that calm bosom wrought, As mine among yon crimson walls!

From the dry bough it spins, to greet Its shadow on the placid river: So might I my companions meet, Nor roam the countless worlds forever!”

Moreover, some elements of this theory are too grotesque, are the too rash inferences from a too crude induction, to win sober credit to any extent. It is easy to devise and carry out in consistent descriptive details the hypothesis that the soul has risen, through ten thousand transitions, from the condition of red earth or a tadpole to its present rank, and that,

”As it once crawl'd upon the sod, It yet shall grow to be a G.o.d;”

but what scientific evidence is there to confirm and establish the supposition as a truth? Why, if it be so, to borrow the humorous satire of good old Henry More,

”Then it will follow that cold stopping curd And harden'd moldy cheese, when they have rid Due circuits through the heart, at last shall speed Of life and sense, look thorough our thin eyes And view the close wherein the cow did feed Whence they were milk'd: grosse pie crust will grow wise, And pickled cuc.u.mbers sans doubt philosophize!”

The form of this general outline stalks totteringly on stilts of fancy, and sprawls headlong with a logical crash at the first critical probe.

The final theory of the destination of souls, now left to be set forth, may be designated by the word transition.14 It affirms that at death they pa.s.s from the separate material worlds, which are their initiating nurseries, into the common spiritual world, which is everywhere present. Thus the visible peoples the invisible, each person in his turn consciously rising from this world's rudimentary darkness to that world's universal light. Dwelling here, free souls, housed in frames of dissoluble clay,

”We hold a middle rank 'twixt heaven and earth, On the last verge of mortal being stand, lose to the realm where angels have their birth, Just on the boundaries of the spirit land.”

Why has G.o.d ”broken up the solid material of the universe into innumerable little globes, and swung each of them in the centre of an impa.s.sable solitude of s.p.a.ce,” unless it be to train up in the various spheres separate households for final union as a single diversified family in the boundless spiritual world? 15 The surmise is not unreasonable, but recommends itself strongly, that,

”If yonder stars be fill'd with forms of breathing clay like ours, Perchance the s.p.a.ce which spreads between is for a spirit's powers.”

The soul encased in flesh is thereby confined to one home, its natal nest; but, liberated at death, it wanders at will, un.o.bstructed, through every world and cerulean deep; and wheresoever it is, there, in proportion to its own capacity and fitness, is heaven and is G.o.d.16 All those world spots so thickly scattered through the Yggdrasill of universal s.p.a.ce are but the brief sheltering places where embryo intelligences clip their sh.e.l.ls, and whence, as soon as fledged through the discipline of earthly teaching and essays, the broodlet souls take wing into the mighty airs of immensity, and thus enter on their eternal emanc.i.p.ation. This conjecture is, of all which have been offered yet, perhaps the completest, least perplexed, best recommended by its harmony with our knowledge and our hope. And so one might wish to rest in it with humble trust.

The final destiny of an immortal soul, after its transition into the other world, must be either unending progress towards infinite perfection, or the reaching of its perihelion at last and then revolving in uninterrupted fruition. In the former case, pursuing an infinite aim, with each degree of its attainment the flying goal still recedes. In the latter case, it will in due season touch its bound and there be satisfied,

”When weak Time shall be pour'd out Into Eternity, and circular joys Dance in an endless round.”

14 Taylor, Physical Theory of Another Life, ch. xii.

15 Taylor, Sat.u.r.day Evening, pp. 95-111.

16 Taylor, Physical Theory of Another Life, ch. xvii.

This result seems the more probable of the two; for the a.s.sertion of countless decillions of personalities all progressing beyond every conceivable limit, on, still on, forever, is incredible. If endless linear progress were the destiny of each being, the whole universe would at last become a line! And though it is true that the idea of an ever novel chase attracts and refreshes the imagination, while the idea of a monotonous revolution repels and wearies it, this is simply because we judge after our poor earthly experience and its flagging a.n.a.logies. It will not be so if that revolution is the vivid realization of all our being's possibilities.

Annihilation, absorption, resurrection, conveyance, recurrence, migration, transition, these seven answers to the question of our fate, and of its relation to the course of nature, are thinkable in words. We may choose from among them, but can construct no real eighth. First, there is a constant succession of growth and decay.

Second, there is a perpetual flow and ebb of personal emanation and impersonal resumption. Third, there is a continual return of the same persistent ent.i.ties. Fourth, all matter may be sublimated to spirit, and souls alone remain to occupy boundless s.p.a.ce.

Fifth, the power of death may cease, all the astronomic orbs be populated and enjoyed, each by one generation of everlasting inhabitants, the present order continuing in each earth until enough have lived to fill it, then all of them, physically restored, dwelling on it, with no more births or deaths. Sixth, if matter be not trans.m.u.table to soul, when that peculiar reality from which souls are developed is exhausted, and the last generation of incarnated beings have risen from the flesh, the material creation may, in addition to the inter stellar region, be eternally appropriated by the spirit races to their own free range and use, through adaptations of faculty unknown to us now; else it may vanish as a phantasmal spectacle. Or, finally, souls may be absolutely created out of nothing by the omnipotence of G.o.d, and the universe may be infinite: then the process may proceed forever.

But men's beliefs are formed rather by the modes of thought they have learned to adopt than by any proofs they have tested; not by argumentation about a subject, but by the way of looking at it.

The moralist regards all creation as the work of a personal G.o.d, a theatre of moral ends, a just Providence watching over the parts, and the conscious immortality of the actors an inevitable accompaniment. The physicist contemplates the universe as const.i.tuted of atoms of attraction and repulsion, which subsist in perfect mobility through s.p.a.ce, but are concreted in the molecular ma.s.ses of the planets. The suns are vast engines for the distribution of heat or motion, the equivalent of all kinds of force. This, in its diffusion, causes innumerable circulations and combinations of the original atoms. Organic growth, life, is the fruition of a force derived from the sun. Decay, death, is the rendering up of that force in its equivalents. Thus, the universe is a composite unity of force, a solidarity of ultimate unities which are indestructible, though in constant circulation of new groupings and journeys. To the religious faith of the moralist, man is an eternal person, reaping what he has sowed. To the speculative intellect of the physicist, man is an atomic force, to be liberated into the ethereal medium until again harnessed in some organism. In both cases he is immortal: but in that, as a free citizen of the ideal world; in this, as a flying particle of the dynamic immensity.

PART SECOND.

ETHNIC THOUGHTS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.

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