03.02. The Possibility of Immortality

CHAPTER II THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY IN spite of all that we have said about the nonchalance of modern men concerning life to come, the possibility of immortality is far more in question with many of them than is its significance. While they may not have traced through all its implications the meaning of annihilation, they have felt instinctively the difference that is involved for personal hope in the affirmation or denial of life to come. Facing their own death or enduring bereavement in the loss of others, they have found their apathetic attitude dissolved in grief and in unquench able desire for hope ; and when, in addition to this natural reaction in the presence of death, they come to see the baneful mean ing for the whole of life involved in the creed that the grave ends all, they do not ask whether immortality makes a difference to life, but whether it is at all possible for their belief reasonably to follow their desire for immortality. Huxley, although he was ag nostic concerning life to come, wrote to John Morley in 1883: "It flashes across me at all sorts of times with a sort of horror that in 1900 I shall probably know no more of what is going on than I did in 1800. I would sooner be in Hell a good deal, at any rate in one of the upper circles where the climate and company are not too trying. I wonder if you are plagued in this way." Sooner or later, either by personal experi ence of bondage to the fear of death or by insight into the sort of world which dis belief in immortality creates, most men reach the place where the possibility of believing in life to come is an urgent question with them.

When, therefore, we insist, as we have done, that the denial of personal permanence makes a vast difference to the whole mean ing of human life, many a man will turn on us to say : "No one need tell me that the question of immortality involves great con sequences for me now. I have stood beside my dead; I know. With increasing years I have thought of my own mortality and have considered with what irreversible steps I walk to my certain end. It is not easy to think of my loves vanquished, my ideals unattained, my memory quite extinct, and I as though I had never been at all. At times I, too, have brooded over our race, its mysterious birth, its long travail, its strange fight with sin and cir cumstance, and have wondered whether it can be that in the end there will be nothing to show for all this struggle, aspi ration, hope and sacrifice, except new worlds built from the ruins of the old, and in those new worlds no memory even of all that here was attempted, partially achieved, and at last utterly undone. No one need tell me that this makes a difference. I want to believe in immortality, but can I ? Is immortality possible ? What weighty arguments range themselves against it ! Just because I want so to believe it, I will not sell my reason out to my desire. Show me that it is possible." When one sets himself to answer this deeper question and endeavors clearly to discern whether the objections to belief in immortality are conclusive, he faces at the beginning this impressive fact, that plenty of men to-day, thoroughly familiar with all arguments against faith in the world to come, and able to weigh their full sig nificance, still cherish hopes, quite undis mayed, of everlasting life. The fact that men like Sir Oliver Lodge in natural science, Professor William James in Psychology, Professor Hermann Lotze in Philosophy, Dr. William Osier in Medicine have thought it reasonable to cherish hopes of immortality, suggests at once that while immortality may not be proved, it certainly has not been disproved. It is evident in view of such men s faith that nothing which science or philosophy has ever discovered necessarily prevents a man from a reasonable hope of life to come. Personal permanence is possible. This is well worth emphasizing because so often the reverse is urgently insisted on ; because continually we are reminded that no satisfactory demonstration of life beyond the grave has ever yet been found. There are weighty considerations, positive and assuring, which can be adduced to strengthen hope in immortality, but in the nature of the case it cannot be proved with the certainty of a mathematical proposi tion or with the verifiable accuracy of a scientific hypothesis concerning tangible affairs. This, every believer in the world to come must readily admit, but coupled with it is the companion fact that if men have found it difficult satisfactorily to prove immortality, they have found it absolutely impossible to disprove it. When Goldwin Smith concludes his essay in which he surrenders for himself all faith in life beyond the grave, he justly adds these closing sentences: "All this is said on the hypothesis that scientific scepticism suc ceeds in demolishing the hope of a future life. After all, great is our ignorance, and there may be something yet behind the veil." Many men to-day labor under the delusion that to the illumined and initiated man s mortality has now become a certain fact, and for the sake of such it needs to be affirmed that nobody, whose words are to be taken seriously, claims to have dis proved life to come. Although there are many considerable objections, they are admittedly inconclusive.

One more preliminary matter, worth remarking, is that in the nature of the case we may well expect belief in immortality to be beset by countless difficulties. Grant ing that we are to live beyond the grave, is it to be supposed that we readily can con ceive it possible ? Must not our minds be thwarted in the attempt to understand the continuance of life under circumstances so alien from those in which life has always been experienced, and must not our imag ination quite break down in the endeavor to conceive how thought and love can still persist, when the conditions which have made thought and love a possibility here have been removed ? An unborn child, even though he were a philosopher, would have no easy time making clear to himself the facts of our earthly life. He lives without air ; how can he live with it ? He never saw light ; how can he conceive it ? He is absolutely dependent upon the cherishing environment in which he finds himself, and he cannot well imagine him self living without it. The crisis of birth would seem like death to an unborn child, if he could foresee himself wrenched from all the conditions which have hitherto sustained his life. If in his unremembered embryonic days, " the days before God shut the doorways of his head," a man had philosophies of hope or hopeless ness, they must have been strikingly like his scepticisms and his hardly cherished expec tations, when now he dreams of life to come. So difficult must we expect to find the task of understanding the possibility of person ality s continuance after death.

II

One difficulty in believing in life eternal does not arise from the nature of the case, but has been created for us by the ignorance, the dogmatism and the superstition of men. In how many minds is life beyond the grave so intimately associated with special ideas of the nature of the future world, that, by a lamentable non sequitur, men deny immortality because they can no longer hold their old ways of conceiving it I The setting is rejected and with it the diamond is thrown away. A cheap and easy method of arguing against life to come is to insist upon some obsolete conception of heaven or hell, and then rail at so absurd a faith. The history of human thought upon the future world lends itself to such derision. There are terrible passages in Christian writers where the desire for ven geance, in most abhorrent forms, gives itself vent, the more unrestrained because the excuse of piety is present. "How shall I admire, * cries Tertullian, "how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs and fancied gods groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates, who persecuted in the name of the Lord, liquefying in fiercer fires than ever they kindled against the Chris tians ; so many sage philosophers blush ing in red-hot flames, with their deluded scholars ; so many celebrated poets trem bling before the tribunal, not of Minos, but of Christ ! " If immortality involves such a belief, then immortality cannot longer be considered seriously by any man of reason able mind. We may well insist, therefore, that immortality may be true, and yet every form of thought in which mankind has hitherto conceived it may be false. Indeed, when one considers how necessarily we use the symbols of our earthly life in every endeavor to portray the life to come ; how in our loftiest flights of descriptive language we have streets of gold and gates of pearl, rivers of water and trees with healing leaves ; how music itself, the most natural symbol of ecstasy, becomes so appallingly tedious when we conceive the joy of heaven in terms of it, that, as Doctor Jowett says, "To beings constituted as we are, the monot ony of singing psalms would be as great an affliction as the pains of hell and might even be pleasantly interrupted by them " ; when one considers the utter inconceivability of a world in which we have never been, whose circumstances by the necessity of the case are alien from anything that we can dream, it is not simply probable, it is inevitable, that all our thoughts of the future are more unlike the facts than a child s house of blocks is unlike the Taj Mahal. Wooden blocks and marble minarets are at least in the same plane of existence, but this world and the next are unimaginably different. No one but a charlatan pretends to know the circumstances of the world to come. The best description of the future life yet written is to be found in the New Testa ment, What eye hath not seen, what ear hath not heard, and what hath not entered into the heart of man." The truth of immortality, therefore, does not depend upon the acceptance of any thoughts of it which ever have been believed by men. The tides are no less facts because mankind once thought that they were caused by a leviathan who swallowed up the sea and gulped it out again ; nor are the eclipses a delusion because the Chinese beat tom toms to scare the dragon that devours the sun. No truth depends upon the accept ance of man s inadequate ideas of it. The permanence of personality may involve the continued memory of all that has happened here on earth, or it may involve no more recollection than we have of our own embry onic days or of our earliest infancy. Our best imaginations of the soul s adventure, when through death we pass into another world, are surely all inadequate, perhaps so inadequate that not a detail of them is true, and yet immortality may be a fact, and the soul s adventure no delusion. No objection to a future life, therefore, based upon aversion to some special conception of the nature of the world to come, can hold its ground.

Ill

Perhaps the most familiar difficulty in the way of belief in immortality is that appearances are against it. Whoever has seen a man grow gradually old, his mind failing as his body drooped, until, the mind a blank, the body slept itself away, under stands the insistent argument of appearance against immortality. All that we can see dies, and because to us the most convincing evidence is the direct testimony of our senses, there is interposed between our minds and faith in personality s continuance the obstacle of looks. Our eyes bear wit ness to the dead and crumbling body; our ears bear witness to the fact that the voice is still ; our hands bear witness that no longer can response be won, even by a hand clasp, to our most urgent and affec tionate appeals. All our senses rise up and cry that our friend has perished. For most men, this simple fact is the greatest single difficulty in the way of faith. This obstacle, however, even to casual thought is manifestly inconclusive. If we were to live by looks, we should live in grossest ignorance of all the most important facts, not only of the spiritual, but of the physical world. The sun looks as though it were moving, but it is not ; the earth looks as though it were flat, when it is round, and as though it were standing still, when it is moving over a thousand miles a minute. At noon the stars seem to be gone, but they are there. Put a straight stick in a calm pool and it appears to be crooked, while it still is straight. Put a blue glass upon one eye and a yellow glass upon the other and, going into a white room, you will see it all as green. All prog ress in knowledge of the physical universe has been won through criticism of the senses testimony, by going behind the way things look to the way things are. When first the new astronomy proposed its revolutionary conception of the world, endeavoring to persuade men of a spherical earth describing ellipses about the sun, the traditional view took refuge in manifest appearance, as in an impregnable citadel.

Said Melanchthon, in condemnation of Copernicus, "The eyes are witnesses that the heavens revolve in the space of twenty-four hours. But certain men, either from love of novelty or to make a display of ingenuity, have concluded that the earth moves." All men of common sense arose in contemptuous certainty to assert the plain evidence of sight. So persistent is the power of appearance over the minds of men that even within the last half century the old arguments have been countless times presented, in a famous sermon, to applauding audiences. In the morning the sun is on one side of the house, said the preacher, and in the afternoon it is on the other side, and since the house has not moved, the sun has. So valuable is the argument of looks. The substitution of judgment for sight, of verified realities for the appearance of things, is an achievement involved with every step of progress in the knowledge of the world. No more in physical science than in the search for spiritual truth, may a man walk by sight ; he must walk by insight. Sight says that a man grows smaller as he recedes into the distance ; insight says he does not. Sight sees only unconnected series of events ; insight perceives governing laws, dominant and irreversible. Sight sees a flat earth, circled by planets, and all that science teaches does not change the looks one whit ; but insight knows that all the looks are false. So universal is this criticism of sight by insight that the presumption always is that the superficial appearance of anything is inadequate or quite untrue. The analogy of all our other knowledge would be fulfilled, if sight said that man dies and insight declared that he lives beyond the grave. This general consideration gains point for our problem, when we perceive that, grant ing the truth of immortality, it stands to reason that we cannot see the truth with our physical eyes. In a great observatory, when the clock that moves the telescope in time with the movement of the earth chances to stop, it is possible to see the earth go round. For then the stars and planets in a stately march move across the face of the lens, and as one watches, the truth of insight is made clear even to physical vision. By such ingenuity of invention can the movement of the earth be seen, but who can hope by any means to carry the function of the eye out of the realm where it properly belongs, and expect it to bring him witness of the life to come? Save possibly in the realm of psychic inves tigation, he must admit the utter inappli cability of sight to the problem of immor tality. The only valuable testimony in any mooted matter is the testimony of those powers of perception and of understanding which are appropriate to the case in hand. The truth of immortality is a matter of thought not of appearance, of reason not of looks ; the organ of perception fitted to deal with immortality is the mind and not the eye. Looks, therefore, are an utterly inconclusive argument, and he who dis believes immortality because of appearances is essentially in the same intellectual class as the young child, who, after the fashion of Alice in Wonderland, supposes that folks really grow small or large in proportion to their distance from the eye of the beholder, because it looks that way.

IV

Another obstacle in the way of accepting immortality, not so common as the fore going, but full of impressiveness for many minds, is the lowly origin of man s belief in the future world. A primitive savage, safely housed in his home village, goes forth in dreams at night to visit hunting- grounds or to wage war in countries far removed from the place where his body lies. How inevitable, then, is his assump tion that he has a soul, separable from his body, which can leave the house of flesh at will, traverse great distances and return again ! Such, says Herbert Spencer, is the lowly origin of the idea of soul. To many it is a disconcerting thought that man s belief in his invisible self takes its rise so superstitiously in an assumption which now is negatived by the psychology of sleep. And even more disconcerting is it when, upon this basis, the rise of belief in immortality is circumstantially described. For when the primitive savage loses his chief in battle, and on the very night after the funeral sees in his dreams the honored warrior return, hears him speak and speaks to him in answer, how inevitable is the as sumption that the soul, absent from the body in death as in sleep, still exists and pos sesses the powers which here belonged to it ! Therefore, among all primitive people, the abode of the dead was definitely imagined, and from that place of shadows the friends who had gone came back in dreams to warn and counsel their descendants. To the North American Indian the abode of the dead was a happy hunting-ground away in the west ; to the Maori it lay at the base of a great precipice ; to the Finns and Australians the dead inhabited a distant island ; to the Polynesians they dwelt in the moon ; to the Mexicans and Peruvians in the sun ; and, most popular idea of all, to the ancient Teutons, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Hebrews a subterranean cavern, from which mysterious, well-guarded passages led to the surface of the earth, was the destina tion of the dying. From these residences, the shades of the deceased could sometimes be summoned as the Witch of Endor summoned Samuel ; from them resurrec tions oftentimes occurred, with which the records of all religions are replete ; and continually in dreams the living were counseled by the dead. Such, say the anthropologists, is the origin and early history of man s belief in immortality. Among all people everywhere such ideas of a future world have arisen, and all our hopes of immortality are the lineal descend ants of these early superstitious dreams. "It is true," says Max Muller, "and I believe has never been contested, that even the lowest savages now living possess words for body and for soul. If we take the Tas- manians, a recently extinct race of savages, we find that, however much different observ ers may contradict each other as to their intellectual faculties and acquirements, they all agree that they have names for soul and souls ; nay, that they all believe in the im mortality of the soul." What confidence can we place in a faith that has arisen among all primitive savages through the mistaking of dreams for realities ?

It is true, to be sure, that there are many differences of opinion among scholars regarding this fascinating story of man s growing belief in immortality, but it is clear that along some path, however hard now to trace, we must follow the faith of man in life eternal back to lowly origins. Al though like a butterfly, with gorgeous wings, our hope may now be free to fly, it was once a crawling worm. Of that, the facts of history, the evidences of litera ture and custom, the testimony of psychol ogy definitely assure us. The reasons on account of which mankind first began to believe in life beyond the grave are reasons that we would count the grossest supersti tions. When, however, this patent fact is urged, as in many minds it is, as a cause for distrusting immortality, how clearly inconclusive the objection is ! All things have a lowly origin. Conscience itself which so imperiously commands us now ; capacity for thought by which our scien tific investigations are themselves made pos sible ; all our faculties and endowments have lowly origins. Are ethical ideals to be e valued, and their validity to be deter mined, in the light of the earliest stages of them which can be discovered ? Though each stage in the development of ethical responsibility be exquisitely traced, until from the most rudimental form of moral feeling to the loyalty of Savonarola or the patient self-sacrifice of Lincoln not a fibre is missing in the reconstruction of the pro cess, the real problem has not thus been touched. Can a man explain an oak by tracing it back into the acorn ? Does he not rather have the task of explaining how an acorn came to be an undeveloped oak ? The interpretation of any process must be sought in its issue, not in its genesis, for the outcome only makes manifest what was involved in the germ. Therefore, could the most rudimental moral consciousness be discovered, its appreciation must always be in terms of that imperious sense of obli gation, which was inherent in it and which now, developed from it, has become the chief est concern of the world. No tracing of origins can effect the real significance of anything. We do not judge the man by the embryo ; we judge the embryo by the man. When we perceive that with the first dawning of intelligence men question about the sun, whether it is the same orb to-day that was here yesterday, or is some different body created anew daily by the gods, we do not, because this is the beginning of astronomy, rule out of court our Galileos and Keplers, taunting them with the abo riginal beginnings of their science. Rather we watch with pride the dawning mind of man, dimly perceiving problems on which the intelligence of the wisest of the race shall yet exert itself, and vaguely reaching for solutions, which, however primitive, are prophetic of centuries of growing knowl edge. When cathedrals are outlawed be cause our aboriginal ancestors built only straw huts ; when Bach and Mozart are laughed at because early music was coaxed from conch-shells or beaten sticks ; when poetry and love, science and education, are railed at because of their crude origins, - then man s faith in immortality may trem ble before the undeveloped ways in which the earliest men we know conceived it. We must not compel larks to live under water because their forefathers were fishes.

V The doctrine of evolution has its more discouraging effect on man s belief in immor tality, not when it traces the rise in the human mind of faith in the future world, but when it traces the rise of the human mind itself. When science discloses to us a vast physical universe, unfolding in unimaginable ways through age-long cos mic changes, and, in one corner of this immeasurable expanse, puts man upon a world so small that its total conflagration would be invisible to the strongest telescope upon the nearest star, it prepares us for a disparagement of man that makes his ultimate annihilation seem entirely reason able. An angel commissioned by God to discover the earth amid the innumerable hosts of stars, says an astronomer, would be like a child sent out upon a vast prairie, to find a speck of sand at the root of some blade of grass. When on this insignificant planet science pictures a process of growth that has lifted inorganic matter into organic life, has moved organic life from plants through ascending series of animal forms to the erect mammals, and has at last raised this organic life in man to the functions of thought and speech and character, science, so emphasizing our kinship with the brutes and our personalities intimate dependence on our physical structure, has made immor tality seem to multitudes utterly impos sible. Here we face an objection to faith in the future life, in comparison with which the obstacles which we have hitherto con sidered are superficial. Man is a lineal descendant of the beasts; as they are dependent on their bodies for life and all its functions, so is he ; and his capacity for thought, however far-ranging and exalted, has grown like a blossom out of that won derfully organized stalk, his brain. Such is the picture which in many minds to-day creates an insuperable objection to faith in immortality. In mitigation of the effect of this idea of man s origin, it is worth noting that the evolution of the race does not create a sin gle difficulty in the way of believing in a self, separable from the body, that is not really present in the evolution of each indi vidual. Whatever may be the facts about the race, every one of us evolved from a primal cell. All the mystery of the race s origin, and all the difficulties in the way of believing in an immortal self, are present in the familiar facts of each man s development from his conception to his maturity. From an original cell, through the compli cated building of physical structure, until at last the capacity for thought emerges, and personality is slowly gained as the brain is organized, such is the life-story of each individual and of the race. In any text -book on theology one will find the pos sibility of a separable soul discussed, in view of the evolution not of the race but of the individual. Four theories have been ad vanced to explain the presence of the spirit ual element in man, and its relationship with his growing physical organism: that the soul is preexist ent, and that when the body is prepared the soul inhabits it ; that God creates the soul complete and places it in a body prepared for its residence; that soul and body together grow, the first developing as the second gives it opportu nity ; and last, that the body creates the soul and functions mentally on one side as it does physically upon the other. Such are the speculations with which men have endeavored to explain the mysterious co ordination of mind and brain. "When did the race become immortal?" asks the materialist in derision, as he points out the imperceptible gradations by which animal existence has passed into human life. But that same question has always been appli cable to the growing embryo or the new born babe. When does any man become immortal ? Such difficulties, immense and elemental, are all present in the plain fact of each individual s growth from a primal* cell, and the evolution of the race adds not a single essential factor to the problem. The gradual development of all mankind from lowly forms of life simply presents in general the same question which in par ticular the mind of man has always faced, when he has considered the relation of his invisible self to his mysteriously evolving body.

When, therefore, we grant all that scien tists affirm concerning the evolution of the race, we are facing the same elemental facts, in the light of which immortality has always been discussed. Personality and body, whether in single men or in mankind as a whole, grow in intimate correlation. They mutually condition each other. The wisdom of the sage is not expected in a child because the brain is not yet organized to make it possible, and in the newly born we know that there is nothing to be looked for save capacity for sensation and response to simple outward stimuli. Some form of mutual dependence exists between the mind and brain, and upon the nature of that de pendence rests the possibility of immortal life. Does the organization of the brain produce personality, or does personality endeavor to express itself through brain? The effect of the doctrine of evolution upon the problem of immortality is simply to drive home with more urgent emphasis the ancient question upon the answer to which belief in life everlasting always waits : what is the nature of the mind s dependence upon the brain ?

Indeed, so far are the facts of racial evo lution from being conclusive against life to come, that many of our most scholarly and thoughtful men have found in the impli cations of evolution a strong argument for immortality. The manifest trend of the whole creative process is toward the build ing of personality. The story of humanity s evolving life, traced backward from the present toward the unknown beginnings, presents a record of successive derivations from forms of existence ever simpler and less complicated ; but the same story traced from the remotest origins onward toward to-day, presents a record of ascent, in which all physical changes seem to be intended for a psychical result. God in evolution no less than in Genesis, appears to be taking the dust of the earth, and breathing into it the breath of life until man becomes a living soul. If a man insists that there is no purpose in the universe at all, that the entire process means nothing, he must do it now not alone in the face of an opposing theology, but in the face of an evolutionary science which presents an ascending series of physical forms, ending with a being in whom evolution has changed from progress in physical structure to growth in intelli gence and character. If, on the other hand, a man believes that the universe means anything, he must, in the light of manifest facts, believe that it has been aiming at personality. If, then, the entire labor of the universe, culminating in spiritual per sons, is to be thrown away and nothing come of it, we indeed are "put to permanent intellectual confusion." Such considera tions as this have made evolution the strong ally of belief in immortality to many minds. At least it is evident that the facts of evolution are not conclusive against immortality. Professor Fiske, one of Amer ica s leading evolutionists, states the truth with less restraint. "The materialistic as sumption," he says, "that the life of the soul ends with the life of the body, is per haps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known to the history of philosophy."

VI

We come, therefore, in our discussion of the possibility of life beyond the grave, to that difficult question in which all other ob jections to immortality have their culmina tion : is not the mind absolutely dependent on the brain ? Not the evolutionary doc trine, but the modern laboratory study of the physical basis of personality, most urges this query on us. There is no longer any doubt about the facts to be interpreted. A continuous layer of gray matter, varying in thickness from one-twelfth to one-eighth of an inch, and folded upon itself "as one would crumple up a handkerchief," forms the outer surface of our brains. No think ing is ever done by men without the cooperation of this delicate and highly or ganized nervous tissue. Each psychical function has some special lobe or convolution in the gray matter, without which the cor responding mental activity is utterly impos sible. In many cases the exact location of the sensitive surface, where the special forms of intellectual activity are carried on, is known to the psychologists. They know the area in the brain with which we hear, the area with which we see ; they know the lobes by which we move our arms and legs, our lips and tongues and eyes ; they know the convolution where the function of speech is carried on and without which abstract thinking is impossible. They can even distinguish the surface with which we hear words from the surface with which we read them. Nothing is clearer than that for every functioning of the minds of men there is a corresponding molecular activity in the gray matter of the brain. The conelusion at first seems inevitable, that the mind is absolutely dependent on the physi cal structure and is inseparable from it.

It is well to note that as the doctrine of racial evolution only makes more urgent a problem always faced by those who watched the development of any individual, so here the discoveries of physiological psychology only assert with greater particularity and assurance what is the common experience of every man. We know that we are de pendent on our brains. Every fever that congests our nervous systems ; every para lytic stroke that attacking the right hemis phere of the brain cripples the left side of the body ; every illness that reduces our power of thought by disabling the machin ery with which our thinking must be done, says in popular speech what the psycholo gists assert in scientific terms, that we are dependent on our brains. When a good character is altered by a blow upon the skull, and is restored again by surgeons who trephine the bone and relieve the press ure upon the convolution underneath, that fact only makes more vivid and explicit what every ordinary man has known, that the healthy condition of his nervous system is prerequisite to a healthy personality. The essential problem has not been altered by the modern discoveries of the physio logical investigators ; it has only been made more manifest, more circumstantial and more urgent. The intimate relationship between the mind and the brain has been so illustrated in detail, so proved by experi ments verifiable and clear, that the modern man has come to say with a definiteness and an assurance which his own experience never would have wrought in him, that his per sonality is absolutely dependent on his brain. How can we be separable selves, when we and our nervous systems are so intermeshed and apparently indissoluble ? Our initial fear that the dependence of our minds upon our brains must conclu sively banish the hope of immortality is mitigated somewhat when we turn to books, such as Doctor Thompson s work on "Brain and Personality." Here is a man who knows the facts, and in the elucidation of them and the practice of the inferences drawn from them, has played no inconsider able part. So far, however, is he from being convinced that they imply the anni hilation of a man at death, that to him the details of the brain s organization and the way in which the centres of psychical func tioning are built up in the gray matter of its surface, seem clearly to indicate, not that the brain makes the person, but that the person is using the brain as his instrument and is educating it to serve his will. If the gray matter made the person, he argues, the more gray matter the more possibility of personal power. But on the contrary, not only are many of the greatest minds asso ciated with brains of less than medium weight, but in every brain only one hemis phere is used for thinking, as one eye may be used for seeing, so that a paralytic stroke may utterly destroy one hemisphere, and the man still think on as clearly as he thought before. The gray matter does not make the person, he asserts, the person organizes a small portion of the gray mat ter, and uses it as an instrument for think ing. However one may disagree with special aspects of this argument, or however one may be unable to comprehend the argu ment at all, when one considers the eminent investigators whose knowledge of the facts is comprehensive and exact, and whose hope of immortality is yet unshaken, he sees that there must be a possible inter pretation of the mind s dependence on the brain, which does not necessarily negative the hope of life eternal. That the present contingency of a living being upon a physical structure does not by itself argue that such a relationship must exist forever, is clear. The worm in the cocoon, or the babe in the womb, or the bird in the egg, depends on the warm and nourishing environment in which he is enclosed, and with which he is connected by ties that condition the possibility of his existence. But this present relation ship is not permanent. A life is being wrought in the temporary matrix which some day will outgrow the old necessities. Such an analogy is no argument at all for the immortality of man, but it is a clear dis closure of the fact that the absolute depen dence of life upon a physical structure may be of such a nature that the dependence is a temporary preparation for a future independence. This suggestion is entirely pertinent to the problem of man s future life. The present contingency of mind on brain nega tives the hope of immortality only under one condition : that the brain creates the mind. If the man s invisible self is conditioned by his physical structure as the blossom is by its stalk and cusp, then his annihilation is assured ; but what if the dependence of his personality upon his nervous system were like the dependence of a telegrapher upon his instruments ? Every fact known to science is at least as satisfactorily explained by the latter idea as by the former. In either case any injury to the physical structure means a corresponding disability to the life that is dependent on it for its expression. A man cannot see with out eyes, but the eyes are not the man; he cannot see without the optic nerve, but the nerve is not the man ; he cannot see without the visual lobe of the brain, but the lobe is not the man. Why are they not alike instruments which the man uses, upon which his present activities are con tingent, but apart from which he can still exist ? For all that any investigation ever has ascertained, such may be the case. Science has discovered only that for every activity of the mind there is a corresponding molecular change in the brain, and that is equally true whether we regard the brain as an agent that creates the mind, or as an instrument on which the mind is playing. If a man is riding in his limousine, he is dependent on the windows for his impression of the outside world. If the glass is cov ered by curtains or besmeared with mud, he cannot see. All that happens to the windows affects his power either to receive impressions from without or to signal to his friends. Yet the man is not thereby proved to be the glass, nor is it clear that he may not some day leave his limousine and see all the better because the old mediums are now discarded. A man s dependence on his instruments can never be used to prove that he is his instruments or is created by them. Every man who is acquainted with the exact discoveries of physiological psy chology, understands that they leave the question of immortality where they found it, unanswered still. Science is sure that thought and the brain s activity now go hand in hand ; but whether the brain is the creator of the mind or is simply the tem porary instrument of mind, must be deter mined by considerations with which the physiological laboratory cannot deal. All objections to eternal life, based upon the present dependence of the mind upon the body, are admittedly inconclusive. "How much does this argument amount to," asks Professor Fiske, "as against the belief that the soul survives the body? The answer is, Nothing ! absolutely nothing ! It not only fails to disprove the validity of the belief, but it does not raise even the slightest prima facie presumption against it."

VII

Many men compelled by the testimony of the experts and the obvious evidence of the facts, to acknowledge that even this strongest argument against immortality is indecisive, take final refuge, as an expla nation of their disbelief, in the incon ceivable mysteriousness of an invisible self using a visible body. The unimaginable nature of such a relationship between the mind and brain urges them to deny its possibility. Granted that, as a matter of theory, science never has proved, and in the nature of the case never can prove, the indissoluble connection between the body and the self ; yet the ties that bind the two are so obviously close and intimate that one cannot easily conceive them torn asun der. A disembodied self is an unpictur- able thing. What I would be without my instruments of perception and my nervous organism, is beyond my power to appre hend, and what is unimaginable can only with difficulty be believed. But if the brain conceived as the instrument of personality is an enigma, what is the mystery of the brain, conceived as the creator of person ality ! That is the alternative. Either mind uses brain or is produced by it. If our physical structure is not the instru ment on which we play, our physical struc ture is our originator, and we are creatures whose builder and maker is brain. If, therefore, the difficulty of conceiving a mind that uses gray matter as a means of thinking seems insuperable, it is well to face the alternative, and see the mystery which we necessarily prefer when we, denying that personality uses flesh, thereby assert that flesh produces personality. How much less mysterious is gray matter creating mind, than is mind making an instrument of gray matter ? The lobe of the brain with which the function of thought is associated is made up of a definite number of physical cells, reticulated by innumerable nervous av enues of communication. How can these cells be pictured as conspiring to write " Hamlet" or to compose the sonatas of Beethoven ? Has each cell a mental aspect ? If each cell has, how can it com municate its mental power, and arrange with its neighbors so to contribute theirs, that altogether they shall produce an Emancipation Proclamation or a deter mination to die on Calvary rather than be untrue ? The thing is inconceivable. It is not the brain as a whole that is associated with thinking ; it is a special lobe in one hemisphere of the brain ; and because that lobe is compounded of distinguishable cells, the function of the lobe must be a sum made up of the functions of the parts. In the last analysis, therefore, we have a single cell, made out of subtile matter and infin- itesimally minute, and in the physical vi bration of this cell and others like it, lies the potency that has written all our literature, achieved all our knowledge, composed all our music, dreamed all our ideals, and attained all our spiritual character. How incredible a mystery is this!

It is sufficiently strange that man should build a violin and play upon it, but that a violin should fortuitously build itself, organ ize its atoms, shape its body and make taut its strings, and then with no one to play upon it, should play upon itself Joachim s "Hungarian Concerto," how shall a man make that seem reasonable ? Just such an unimaginable thing must one believe, who asserts that brain creates the mind. This affirmation of materialism is the one unbe lievable mystery. A mobile cosmic ether, as Haeckel calls it, that can arrange itself into mothers and music and the laughter of children at play: a "mobile cosmic ether * that can compose itself into Isaiah and Jesus and Livingston and Phillips Brooks ; a "mobile cosmic ether" that can organize itself into the Psalms of David and the dramas of Shakespeare, into Magna Chartas and Declarations of Independence ; what intellectual gymnastics must a man per form to make such a process thinkable ? And this materialistic explanation of per sonality nowhere appears so incompre hensible as when from vague generalities like Haeckel s ether it is driven to the plain assertion that a visible, ponderable, gray tissue with its little cells is the transient creator of all the character and intelligence of the race. If one desires to avoid mystery, he does ill to deny that mind uses brain, in order that he may assert that brain creates mind.

Indeed, the consequences of affirming that flesh, however finely organized, is the producer of personality, are far wider than the comparatively insignificant matter of mystery. Everything physical always tends to act along the path of least resist ance. In a world, therefore, where mind is the creature of nervous organization, when a man asserts a universal truth, such as that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line joining them, he is not saying this because it is true, but because the molecules of his brain al ways find that the path of least resistance leads them to function towards such an affirmation. If truth is thus a matter of the physical paths of least resistance in the brain, one can readily understand the suspended judgment of the man, of whom Macaulay tells, who was inclined to think that parallel lines would never meet, but who would not be dogmatic on the subject. A man may well suspend his judgment on every axiom, if axioms are simply nervous discharges along lines of least resistance. This unaccountable enigma confronts us in a world where mind is made by brain, that everybody who can think at all believes that three times three make nine. How did it happen in a universe where no one ever thought this truth until man thought it, that the material substance of human brains has so organized itself that it always finds the path of least resistance leading to this conclusion ? For in such a world, all truth, as well as all beauty and goodness, is reduced to a question of brain avenues and cellular functions. When Haydn composed "The Creation," saying, "Not from me, but from above it all has come," he was mistaken about the source of his inspiration, for the fact was that his gray matter had merely executed a neurosis along the lines of least resistance in the brain ; when John Napier discovered the process of logarithms, it was because his unusually agile brain cells achieved a for tunate manoeuvre whereby they reached an unforeseen result ; and when Latimer, burning at the stake in Oxford Square, said to his companion in martyrdom, "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out," the cause was that by a happy conspiracy among the molecules in his Brocca convolution, they had succeeded in pooling their psychical aspects and producing the heroic words. Perhaps most strange of all, the hope of immortality itself, that has made men die singing, that has inspired poems like "In Memoriam" and music like Christendom s Easter hymns and anthems, and that into the commonplace endurance of innumerable humble men has put cheer and courage, is at bottom nothing but an explosion of excitable nerve cells. This interpretation of the beauty, knowledge, goodness and faith of mankind cannot be disproved. As Paulsen says, "The proposition that thoughts are in reality nothing but move ments in the brain, that feelings are nothing but bodily processes in the vaso-motor system, is absolutely irrefutable ; not be cause it is true, however, but because it is meaningless. The absurd has this advan tage in common with truth, that it cannot be refuted." At any rate, the old fable of the fish that leaped from the frying-pan into the fire, because the pan was hot, is a mild simile for the estate of the man who gives up belief in immortality and accepts its alternative, because immortality is mys terious. One is reminded, in this wild attempt to escape mystery, of George Sand s character, Gribouille, "who threw herself into the river at the approach of rain, for fear of getting wet ! " When thus a man has canvassed all the standard objections to belief in personal permanence, he finds them manifestly inconclusive. So far as anything that science has discovered is concerned, immortality is as possible as it is significant. The as surance of its truth must rest on consider ations that overpass the boundaries of scientific investigation, but when the stream of a human life turns the great bend in its banks which we call death, and passes out of sight, there is no fact known to man which negatives our right to seek those further reasons which may assure us that the stream flows on.