TEE SOUL AND FUTURE LITE. 



311 



have not the slightest reason to suppose that the 

 consciousness of the organism continues, for we 

 mean by consciousness the sum of sensations of a 

 particular organism, and the particular organism 

 being dissolved, we have nothing left whereto to 

 attribute consciousness, and the proposal strikes 

 us like a proposal to regard infinity as conscious. 

 So, of course, with the sensations separately, and 

 with them the power of accumulating knowledge, 

 of feeling, thinking, or of modifying the existence 

 in correspondence with the outward environment. 

 Life, in the technical sense of the word, is at an 

 end, but the activities of which that life is the 

 source were never so potent. Our age is familiar 

 enough with the truth of the persistence of ener- 

 gy, and no one supposes that with the dissolution 

 of the body the forces of its material elements 

 are lost. They only pass into new combinations 

 and continue to work elsewhere. Far less is the 

 energy of the activities lost. The earth, and 

 every country, every farmstead, and every city on 

 it, are standing witnesses that the physical activi- 

 ties are not lost. As century rolls after century, 

 we see in every age more potent fruits of the 

 labor which raised the pyramids, or won Holland 

 from the sea, or carved the Theseus out of mar- 

 ble. The bodily organisms which wrought them 

 have passed into gases and earths, but the activ- 

 ity they displayed is producing the precise results 

 designed on a far grander scale in each genera- 

 tion. Much more do the intellectual and moral 

 energies work unceasingly. Not a single mani- 

 festation of thought or feeling is without some 

 result so soon as it is communicated to a similar 

 organism. It passes into the sum of his mental 

 and moral being. 



But there is about the persistence of the moral 

 energies this special phenomenon. It marks the 

 vast interval between physical and moral science. 

 The energies of material elements, so far as we 

 see, disperse, or for the most part disperse. The 

 energies of an intellectual and moral kind are 

 very largely continued in their organic unities. 

 The consensus of the mental, of the moral, of the 

 emotional powers may go on, working as a whole, 

 producing precisely the same results, with the 

 same individuality, whether the material organ- 

 ism, the source and original base of these powers, 

 be in physical function or not. The mental and 

 moral powers do not, it is true, increase and 

 grow, develop or vary, within themselves. Nor 

 do they in their special individuality produce 

 visible results, for they are no longer in direct 

 relations with their special material organisms. 

 But the mental and moral powers are not dis- 



persed like gases. They retain their unity, they 

 retain their organic character, and they retain 

 the whole of their power of passing into and 

 stimulating the brains of living men ; and in these 

 they carry on their activity precisely as they did, 

 while the bodies in which they were formed ab- 

 sorbed and exhaled material substance. 



Nay, more : the individuality and true activ- 

 ity of these mental and moral forces is often not 

 manifest, and sometimes is not complete, so long 

 as the organism continues its physical functions. 

 Newton, we may suppose, has accomplished his 

 great researches. They are destined to trans- 

 form half the philosophy of mankind. But he is 

 old, and incapable of fresh achievements. We 

 will say he is feeble, secluded, silent, and lives 

 shut up in his rooms. The activity of his mighty 

 intellectual nature is being borne over the world 

 on the wings of Thought, and works a revolution 

 at every stroke. But otherwise the man Newton 

 is not essentially distinguishable from the nearest 

 infirm pauper, and has as few and as feeble rela- 

 tions with mankind. At last the man Newton 

 dies — that is, the body is dispersed into gas and 

 dust. But the world, which is affected enormous- 

 ly by his intellect, is not in the smallest degree 

 affected by his death. His activity continues the 

 same ; if it were worth while to conceal the fact 

 of his death, no one of the millions who are so 

 greatly affected by his thoughts would perceive 

 it or know it. If he had discovered some means 

 of prolonging a torpid existence till this hour, he 

 might be living now, and it would not signify to 

 us in the slightest degree whether his body 

 breathed in the walls of his lodging or mouldered 

 in the vaults of the Abbey. 



It may be said that, if it does not signify much 

 to us, it signifies a great deal to Isaac Newton. 

 But is this true ? Bie no longer eats and sleeps, 

 a burden to himself; he no longer is destroying 

 his great name by feeble theology or querulous 

 pettiness. But if the small weaknesses and 

 wants of the flesh are ended for him, all that 

 makes Newton (and he had always lived for his 

 posthumous, not his immediate fame) rises into 

 greater activity and purer uses. We make no 

 mystical or fanciful divinity of Death ; we do not 

 deny its terrors or its evils. We are not respon- 

 sible for it, and should welcome any reasonable 

 prospect of eliminating or postponing this fatal- 

 ity, that waits upon all organic Nature. But it 

 is no answer to philosophy or science to retort 

 that Death is so terrible, therefore man must be 

 designed to escape it. There are savages who 

 persistently deny that men do die at all, either 



