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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



their bodies or their souls, asserting that the visi- 

 ble consequences of death are either an illusion 

 or an artfully-contrived piece of acting on the 

 part of their friends, who have really decamped 

 to the happy hunting-fields. This seems on the 

 whole a more rational theory than that of imma- 

 terial souls flying about space, as the spontaneous 

 fancies of savages are sometimes more rational 

 than the elaborate hypotheses of metaphysics. 



But though we do not presume to apologize 

 for death, it is easy to see that many of the great- 

 est moral and intellectual results of life are only 

 possible, can only begin, when the claims of the 

 animal life are satisfied ; when the stormy, com- 

 plex, and checkered career is over, and the higher 

 tops of the intellectual or moral nature alone 

 stand forth in the distance of time. What was 

 the blind old harper of Scio to his contemporaries, 

 or the querulous refugee from Florence, or even 

 the boon-companion and retired playwright of 

 Stratford, or the blind and stern old malignant 

 of Bunhill Fields ? The true work of Socrates 

 and his life only began with his resplendent 

 death, to say nothing of yet greater religious 

 teachers, whose names I refrain from citing ; and 

 as to those whose lives have been cast in conflicts 

 — the Ciesars, the Alfreds, the Hildebrands, the 

 Cromwells, the Fredericks — it is only after death, 

 ofrenest in ages after death, that they cease to 

 be combatants, and become creators. It is not 

 merely that they are only recognized in after- 

 ages ; the truth is, that their activity only begins 

 when the surging of passion and sense ends, and 

 turmoil dies away. Great intellects and great 

 characters are necessarily in advance of their 

 age ; the Qare of the father and the mother be- 

 gins to tell most truly in the ripe manhood of 

 their children, when the parents are often in the 

 grave, and not in the infancy which they see and 

 are confronted with. The great must always feel 

 with Kepler, " It is enough, as yet, if I have a 

 hearer now and then in a century." John Brown's 

 body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul 

 is marching along. 



We can trace this truth best in the case of 

 great men ; but it is not confined to the great. 

 Not a single act of thought or character ends 

 with itself. Nay, more; not a single nature in 

 its entirety but leaves its influence for good or 

 for evil. As a fact the good prevail ; but all act, 

 all continue to act indefinitely, often in ever- 

 widening circles. Physicists amuse us by tracing 

 for us the infinite fortunes of some wave set in 

 motion by force, its circles and its repercussions 

 perpetually transmitted in new complications. 



But the career of a single intellect and character 

 is a far more real force when it meets with suita- 

 ble intellects and characters into whose action it 

 is incorporated. Every life more or less forms 

 another life, and lives in another life. Civiliza- 

 tion, nation, city, imply this fact. There is 

 neither mysticism nor hyperbole, but simple ob- 

 servation in the belief, that the career of every 

 human being in society does not end with the 

 death of its body. In some sort its higher ac- 

 tivities and potency can only begin truly w hen 

 change is no longer possible for it. The worthy 

 gain in influence and in range at each generation, 

 just as the founders of some populous race gain 

 a greater fatherhood at each succeeding growth 

 of their descendants. And, in some infinitesimal 

 degree, the humblest life that ever turned a sod 

 sends a wave — no, more than a wave, a life — 

 through the ever-growing harmony of human so- 

 ciety. Not a soldier died at Marathon or Sala- 

 mi.^, but did a stroke by which our thought is en- 

 larged and our standard of duty formed to this 

 day. 



Be it remembered that this is not hypothesis, 

 but something perfectly real — we may fairly say 

 undeniable. We are not inventing an imaginary 

 world, and saying it must be real because it is so 

 pleasant to think of ; we are only repeating truths 

 on which our notion of history and society is 

 based. The idea, no doubt, is usually limited to 

 the famous, and to the great revolutions in civili- 

 zation. But no one who thinks it out carefully 

 can deny that it is true of every human being in 

 society in some lesser degree. The idea has not 

 been, or is no longer, systematically enforced, in- 

 vested with poetry and dignity, and deepened by 

 the solemnity of religion. But why is that ? Be- 

 cause theological hypotheses of a new and het- 

 erogeneous existence have deadened our interest 

 in the realities, the grandeur, and the perpetuity 

 of our earthly life. In the best days of Rome, 

 even without a theory of history or a science of 

 society, it was a living faith, the true religion of 

 that majestic race. It is the real sentiment of all 

 societies where the theological hypothesis has dis- 

 appeared. It is no doubt now in England the 

 great motive of virtue and energy. There have 

 been few seasons in the world's history when the 

 sense 'of moral responsibility and moral survival 

 after death was more exalted and more vigorous 

 than with the companions of Vergniaud and Dan- 

 ton, to whom the dreams of theology were hardly 

 intelligible. As we read the calm and humane 

 words of Condorcet on the very edge of his yawn, 

 ing grave, we learn how the conviction of post- 



