SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY. 



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intuitions of the human mind, all the glowing aspirations enshrined in 

 Greek poetry, legend, and art, all the natural theology contained in 

 the works of Socrates and Plato, had come at last. Will any reason- 

 able man affirm that an age, which breathes the very air of material- 

 ism, and whose children suck in the notions of changeless law with 

 their mother's milk, will arrive at any thing better if it has no facts 

 tvpon which to rely as proofs that its hopes are not unfounded ? And 

 how can that be called a truth of human nature, or be allowed to ex- 

 ercise a real influence upon men's minds, which is capable of being 

 either entirely suppressed, or earnestly striven against, or contemptu- 

 ously rejected ? 



3. The remaining two arguments need not detain us long ; indeed, 

 I should not have mentioned them, were it not that very eminent 

 divines have based the belief in immortality upon the existence of 

 God or the necessities of man. Let it once be granted that we are 

 the creatures of a personal, loving, and sustaining God, concerning 

 whom it is possible to form adequate conceptions, and then doubts 

 as to our immortality would be vain indeed. But the rejoinder from 

 the scientific view is plain enough. This, it w r ould be said, is a mere 

 obscurum per obscurius. The belief in God is simply the working 

 of the human mind striving to account for the beginning of its own 

 existence, exactly as the belief in immortality is the result of the 

 attempt to think about the end thereof. If the definition of God be 

 a stream or tendency of things that we cannot otherwise account for, 

 then it will not help us to a belief in immortality. It is surprising 

 indeed to see how the plain conditions of the case are evaded by 

 enthusiastic controversialists ; and I am almost ashamed of being 

 obliged to make statements that have an inevitable air of being the 

 baldest truisms. 



4. The idea that immortality is essential to the moral development 

 of man, and that therefore it is demonstrably true, seems to receive 

 some little countenance from Prof. Max Muller in the close of his 

 article on Buddhism, in which he thinks it improbable that 



"The reformer of India, the teacher of so perfect a code of morality, .... 

 should have thrown away one of the most powerful weapons in the hands of every 

 religious teacher, the belief in a future life, and should not have seen that, if the 

 life was sooner or later to end in nothing, it was hardly worth the trouble which 

 he took himself, or the sacrifices which he imposed upon his disciples." 



The true bearing, in all its immense importance, of man's morality 

 upon his belief in immortality will have to be considered hereafter; 

 but, when used as a demonstration, it is at once seen to belong to the 

 class of arguments from final causes which science resolutely rejects. 

 A much more fatal answer, however, is found in a simple appeal to 

 history, from which it will be found that, in Mr. Froude's words, no 

 doctrine whatever, even of immortality, has a mere "mechanical 

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