THE SOUL AXD FUTURE LIFE. 



21-1 



hung on a metaphysical hypothesis, which itself 

 has been in vogue for only a few centuries in the 

 history of speculation, and which is now become 

 to those trained in positive habits of thought a 

 mere juggle of ideas. 



We have in all this sought only to state what 

 we mean by man's soul, and what we do not 

 mean. But we make no attempt to prove a 

 negative, or to demonstrate the non-existence of 

 the supposed entity. Our purpose now is a very 

 different one. We start out from tins — that this 

 positive mode of treating man is in this, as in 

 other things, morally sufficient; that it leaves no 

 voids and chasms in human life; that the moral 

 and religious sequelae which are sometimes as- 

 signed to its teaching have no foundation in fact. 

 We say that, on this basis, not only have we an 

 entrance into the spiritual realm, but that we 

 have a firmer hold on the spiritual life than on 

 the basis of hypothesis. On this theory, the 

 world beyond the grave is in closer and truer re- 

 lation to conduct than on the spiritualist theory. 

 We look on man as man, not as man plus a hete- 

 rogeneous entity. And we think that we lose 

 nothing, but gain much thereby, in the religious 

 as well as in the moral world. We do not deny 

 the conceivable existence of the heterogeneous 

 entity. But we believe that human nature is ade- 

 quately equipped on human and natural grounds 

 without this disparate nondescript. 



Let us be careful to describe the method we 

 employ as that which looks on man as man, and 

 repudiate the various labels, such as materialist, 

 physical, unspiritual methods, and the like, which 

 are used as equivalent for the rational or positive 

 method of treating man. The method of treat- 

 ing man as man insists, at least as much as any 

 other method, that man has a moral, emotional, 

 religious life, different in kind from his material 

 and practical life, but perfectly coordinate with 

 that physical life, and to be studied on similar 

 scientific methods. The spiritual sympathies of 

 man are undoubtedly the highest part of human 

 nature; and our method condemns as loudly as 

 any system physical explanations of spiritual 

 life. We claim the right to use the terms " soul," 

 "spiritual," and the like, in their natural mean- 

 ing. In the same way, we think that there are 

 theories which are justly called "materialist," 

 that there are physical conceptions of human 

 nature which are truly dangerous to morality, to 

 goodness, and religion. It is sometimes thought 

 to be a sufficient proof of the reality of this 

 heterogeneous entity of the soul, that otherwise i 

 we must assume the most spiritual emotions of 

 16 



man to be a secretion of cerebral matter, and 

 that, whatever the difficulties of conceiving the 

 union of soul and body, it is something less diffi- 

 cult than the conceiving that the nerves think, 

 or the tissues love. We repudiate such language 

 as much as any one can, but there is another 

 alternative. It is possible to invest with the 

 highest dignity the spiritual life of mankind by 

 treating it as an ultimate fact, without trying to 

 find an explanation for it either in a perfectly 

 unthinkable hypothesis or in an irrational and 

 debasing physicism. 



We certainly do reject, as earnestly as any 

 school can, that which is most fairly called mate- 

 rialism, and we will second every word of those 

 who cry out that civilization is in danger if the 

 workings of the human spirit are to become 

 questions of physiology, and if death is the end 

 of a man, as it is the end of a sparrow. We not 

 only assent to such protests, but we see very 

 pressing need for making them. It is a corrupt- 

 ing doctrine to open a brain, and to tell us that 

 devotion is a definite molecular change in this 

 and that convolution of gray pulp, and that if 

 man is the first of living animals, he passes away 

 after a short space like the beasts that perish. 

 And all doctrines, more or less, do tend to this, 

 which offer physical theories as explaining moral 

 phenomena, which deny man a spiritual in addi- 

 tion to a moral nature, which limit his moral life 

 to the span of his bodily organism, and which 

 have no place for " religion " in the proper sense 

 of the word. 



It is true that in this age, or rather in this 

 country, we seldom hear the stupid and brutal 

 materialism which pretends that the subtilties of 

 thought and emotion are simply this or that agi- 

 tation in some gray matter, to be ultimately ex- 

 pounded by the professors of gray matter. But 

 this is hardly the danger which besets our time. 

 The true materialism to fear is the prevailing ten- 

 dency of anatomical habits of mind or specialist 

 habits of mind to intrude into the regions of 

 religion and philosophy. A man whose whole 

 thoughts are absorbed in cutting up dead monkeys 

 and live frogs has no more business to dogmatize 

 about religion than a mere chemist to improvise 

 a zoology. Biological reasoning about spiritual 

 things is as presumptuous as the theories of an 

 electrician about the organic facts of nervous life. 

 We live amid a constant and growing usurpa- 

 tion of science in the province of philosophy ; of 

 biology in the province of sociology ; of physics 

 in that of religion. Nothing is more common 

 than the use of the term science, when what is 



