THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 



309 



and, if by chance I was more greedy than he 

 thought proper, would get up, nudge me, and lie 

 down again, reminding me of his presence, and 

 that he must have his share. 



In January of 1872 one evening Cap had gone 

 for his walk ; my sister passing through the hall 

 heard a faint rap, and, going to the door, Cap 

 came in and up -stairs. Noticing something 

 strange in his walk, she called father, who came 

 out of the library and spoke. Cap hearing his 

 voice, ran to the stairs, and on attempting to de- 



scend fell headlong, and only stopped at the land- 

 ing. We all knew what was the matter. Going 

 up-stairs my father put his arms uuder him, I 

 behind, and we brought him down. There he 

 lay, and could not bear to have us leave him, 

 growing worse all the time, but responding to 

 our caresses by a wag of the tail — less and less 

 — till the very last, when only an inch moved, 

 the rest of the body being quite stiff and rigid, 

 and as the day left us, so did Captain. — Macmil- 

 lan's Magazine. 



THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 



By FREDERIC HARRISON. 



II. 



THE rational view of the soul (we insisted in 

 a previous paper) would remove us as far 

 from a cynical materialism as from a fantastic 

 spiritualism. It restores to their true supremacy 

 in human life those religious emotions which 

 materialism forgets ; while it frees us from the 

 idle figment which spiritualism would foist upon 

 human nature. 



We entirely agree with the theologians that 

 our age is beset with a grievous danger of mate- 

 rialism. There is a school of teachers abroad, 

 and they have found an echo here, who dream 

 that victorious vivisection will ultimately win 

 them anatomical solutions of man's moral and 

 spiritual mysteries. Such unholy nightmares, it 

 is true, are not likely to beguile many minds in a 

 country like this, where social and moral prob- 

 lems are still in their natural ascendant. But 

 there is a subtiler kind of materialism, of which 

 the dangers are real. It does not, indeed, put 

 forth the bestial sophism that the apex of philos- 

 ophy is to be won by improved microscopes and 

 new batteries. But, then, it has nothing to say 

 about the spiritual life of man ; it has no partic- 

 ular religion ; it ignores the soul. It fills the air 

 with paeans to science ; it is never weary of 

 vaunting the scientific methods, the scientific 

 triumphs. But it always means physical, not 

 moral science; intellectual, not religious con- 

 quests. It shirks the question of questions — to 

 what human end is this knowledge ? — how shall 

 man thereby order his life as a whole ? — where 

 is he to find the object of his yearnings of spirit ? 

 Of the spiritual history of mankind it knows as 



little, and thinks as little, as of any other sort of 

 Asiatic devil-worship. At the spiritual aspira- 

 tions of the men and women around us, ill at 

 ease for want of some answer, it stares blankly, 

 as it does at some spirit rapping epidemic. 

 " What is that to us ? — see thou to that" — is all 

 that it can answer when men ask it for a religion. 

 It is of the religion of all sensible men, the reli- 

 gion which all sensible men never tell. With a 

 smile or a shrug of the shoulders it passes by into 

 the whirring workshops of science (that is, the 

 physical prelude of science) ; and it leaves the 

 spiritual life of the soul to the spiritualists, theo- 

 logical or nonsensical as the case may be, wishing 

 them both in heaven. This is the materialism to 

 fear. 



The theologians and the vast sober mass of 

 serious meu and women who want simply to live 

 rightly are quite right when they shun and fear a 

 school that is so eager about cosmology and biol- 

 ogy, while it leaves morality and religion to take 

 care of themselves. And yet they know all the 

 while that before the advancing line of positive 

 thought they are fighting a forlorn hope; and 

 they see their own line daily more and more de- 

 moralized by the consciousness that they have no 

 rational plan of campaign. They know that their 

 own account of the soul, of the spiritual life, of 

 Providence, of heaven, is daily shifting — is grow- 

 ing more vague, more inconsistent, more various. 

 They hurry wildly from one untenable position to 

 another, like a routed and disorganized army. In 

 a religious discussion years ago we once asked 

 one of the Broad Church, a disciple of one of its 

 eminent founders, what he understood by the 

 Third Person of the Trinity ; and he said, doubt- 



