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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 





and spiritual life, and treat these phenomena as 

 distinct from the intellectual and the physical 

 life. These methods also recognize the unity of 

 consciousness, the facts of conscience, the sense 

 of identity, and the longing for perpetuation of 

 that identity. They decline to explain these 

 phenomena by the popular hypotheses ; but they 

 neither deny their existence, nor lessen their im- 

 portance. Man, they argue, has a complex exist- 

 ence, made up of the phenomena of his physical 

 organs, of his intellectual powers, of his moral 

 faculties, crowned and harmonized ultimately by 

 his religious sympathies — love, gratitude, vener- 

 ation, submission, toward the dominant force by 

 which he finds himself surrounded. I use words 

 which are not limited to a particular philosophy 

 or religion — I do not now confine my language 

 to the philosophy or religion of Comte — for this 

 same conception of man is common to many phi- 

 losophies and many religions. It characterizes 

 such systems as those of Spinoza or Shelley or 

 Fichte as much as those of Confucius or Buddha. 

 In a word, the reality and the supremacy of the 

 spiritual life have never been carried further than 

 by men who have departed most widely from the 

 popular hypotheses of the immaterial entity. 



Many of "these men, no doubt, have indulged 

 in hypotheses of their own quite as arbitrary as 

 those of theology. It is characteristic of the pos- 

 itive thought of our age that it stands upon a 

 firmer basis. Though not confounding the moral 

 facts with the physical, it will never lose sight of 

 the correspondence and censensus between all 

 sides of human life. Led by an enormous and 

 complete array of evidences, it associates every 

 fact of thought or of emotion with a fact of 

 physiology, with molecular change in the body. 

 Without pretending to explain the first by the 

 second, it denies that the first can be explained 

 without the second. But with this solid basis of 

 reality to work on, it gives their place of suprem- 

 acy to the highest sensibilities of man, through 

 the heights and depths of the spiritual life. 



Nothing is more idle than a discussion about 

 words. But when some deny the use of the word 

 " soul " to those who mean by it this consensus, 

 and not any immaterial entity, we may remiud 

 them that our use of the word agrees with its ety- 

 mdlogy and its history. It is the mode in which 

 it is used in the Bible, the well-spring of our true 

 English speech. It may, indeed, be contended 

 that there is no instance in the Bible in which 

 soul does mean an immaterial entity, the idea not 

 having been familiar to any of the writers, with 

 the doubtful exception of St. Paul. But without 



entering upon Biblical philology, it may be said 

 that for one passage in the Bible in which the 

 word " soul " can be forced to bear the meaning 

 of immaterial entity, there are ten texts in which 

 it cannot possibly refer to anything but breath, 

 life, moral sense, or spiritual emotion. "When the 

 Psalmist says, "Deliver my soul from death," 

 " Heal my soul, for I have sinned," " My soul is 

 cast down within me," " Return unto my rest, 

 my soul," he means by "soul" what we mean — 

 the conscious unity of our being culminating in 

 its religious emotions ; and until we find some 

 English word that better expresses this idea, 

 we shall continue to use the phraseology of 

 David. 



It is not merely that we are denied the lan- 

 guage of religion, but we sometimes find attempts 

 to exclude us from the thing. There are some 

 who say that worship, spiritual life, and that ex- 

 altation of the sentiments which we call devotion, 

 have no possible meaning unless applied to the 

 special theology of the particular speaker. A lit- 

 tle attention to history, a single reflection on re- 

 ligion as a whole, suffice to show the hollowness 

 of this assumption. If devotion mean the sur- 

 render of self to an adored Power, there has been 

 devotion in creeds with many gods, with one God, 

 with no gods ; if spiritual life mean the cultiva- 

 tion of this temper toward moral purification, 

 there was spiritual life long before the notion of 

 an immaterial entity inside the human being was 

 excogitated; and as to worship, men have wor- 

 shiped, with intense and overwhelming passion, 

 all kinds of objects, organic and inorganic, mate- 

 rial and spiritual, abstract ideas as well as visible 

 forces. Is it implied that Confucius, and the 

 countless millions who have followed him, had no 

 idea of religion, as it is certain that thev had 

 none of theology ; that Buddha and the Buddh- 

 ists were incapable of spiritual emotion ; that 

 the Fire-worshipers and the Sun-worshipers never 

 practised worship; that the pantheists and the 

 humanists, from Marcus Aurelius to Fichte, had 

 the springs of spiritual life dried up in them for 

 want of an Old or New Testament ? If this is in- 

 tended, one can only wonder at the power of a 

 self-complacent conformity to close men's eyes to 

 the native dignity of man. Eeligion, and its ele- 

 ments in emotion — attachment, veneration, love 

 — are as old exactly as human nature. They 

 moved the first men, and the first women. They 

 have found a hundred objects to inspire them, 

 and have bowed to a great variety of powers. 

 They were iu full force long before theology was, 

 and before the rise of Christianity; and it would 



