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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



more ? It is enough for any creed that it can 

 teach non omnia moriar ; it would be gross ex- 

 travagance to say omnia non moriar, no part of 

 me shall die. Death is the one inevitable law of 

 Life. The business of religion is to show us what 

 are its compensations. The spiritualist ortho- 

 doxy, like every other creed, is willing to allow 

 that death robs us of a great deal, that very 

 much of us does die; nay, it teaches that this 

 dies utterly, forever, leaving no trace but dust. 

 And thus the spiritualist orthodoxy exaggerates 

 death, and adds a fresh terror to its power. We, 

 on the contrary, would seek to show that much 

 of us, and that the best of us, does not die, or at 

 least does not end. And the difference between 

 our faith and that of the orthodox is this : we 

 look to the permanence of the activities which 

 give others happiness ; they look to the perma- 

 nence of the consciousness which can enjoy hap- 

 piness. Which is the nobler ? 



What need we then to promise or to hope 

 more than an eternity of spiritual influence ? 

 Yet, after all, 'tis no question as to what kind of 

 eternity man would prefer to select. We have no 

 evidence that he has any choice before him. If 

 we were creating a universe of our own and a 

 human race on an ideal mould, it might be ra- 

 tional to discuss what kind of eternity was the 

 most desirable, and it might then become a ques- 

 tion if we should not begin by eliminating death. 

 But as we are, with death in the world, and man 

 as we know him submitting to the fatality of his 

 nature, the rational inquiry is this — how best to 

 order his life, and to use the eternity that he has. 

 And an immortality of prolonged activity on 

 earth he has as certainly as he has civilization, 

 or progress, or society. And the wise man in the 

 evening of life may be well content to say: "I 

 have worked and thought, and have been con- 

 scious in the flesh ; I have done with the flesh, 

 and therewith with the toil of thought and the 

 troubles of sensation ; I am ready to pass into 

 the spiritual community of human souls, and 

 when this man's flesh wastes away from me, may 

 I be found worthy to beeome part of the influence 

 of humanity itself, and so 



' . . . . join the choir invisible 

 Whose musio is the gladness of the world.' " 



That the doctrine of the celestial future appeals 

 to the essence of self appears very strongly in its 

 special rebuke to the doctrine of the social fu- 

 ture. It repeats : " We agree with all you say 

 about the prolonged activity of man after death, 

 we see of course that the solid achievements of 

 life are carried on, and we grant you that it sig- 



nifies nothing to those who profit by his work 

 that the man no longer breathes in the flesh : but 

 what is all that to the man, to you, and to me ? 

 we shall not feel our work, we shall not have the 

 indescribable satisfaction which our souls now 

 have in living, in effecting our work, and profit- 

 ing by others. What is the good of mankind to 

 me, when I am mouldering unconscious ? " This 

 is the true materialism ; here is the physical 

 theory of another life ; this is the unspiritual 

 denial of the soul, the binding it down to the 

 clay of the body. We say, "All that is great in 

 you shall not end, but carry on its activity per- 

 petually and in a purer way;" and you reply: 

 " What care I for what is great in me, and its 

 possible work in this vale of tears ? I want to 

 feel life, I want to enjoy, I want my personality" 

 — in other words, " I want my senses, I want my 

 body." Keep your body and keep your senses 

 in any way that you know. We can only wonder 

 and say, with Frederick to his runaway soldiers, 

 " Wollt ihr burner leben ? " But we, who know 

 that a higher form of activity is only to be reached 

 by a subjective life in society, will continue to 

 regard a perpetuity of sensation as the true hell, 

 for we feel that the perpetual worth of our lives 

 is the one thing precious to care for, and not a 

 vacuous eternity of consciousness. 



It is not merely that this eternity of the tabor 

 is so gross, so sensual, so indolent, so selfish a 

 creed ; but its worst evil is that it paralyzes 

 practical life, and throws it into discord. A life 

 of vanity in a vale of tears to be followed by an 

 infinity of celestial rapture, is necessarily a life 

 which is of infinitesimal importance. The in- 

 congruity of the attempts to connect the two, 

 and to make the vale of tears the antechamber 

 or the judgment-dock of heaven, grows greater 

 and not less as ages roll on. The more we think 

 and learn, and the higher rises our social phi- 

 losophy and our insight into human destiny, the 

 more the reality and importance of the social 

 future impresses us, while the fancy of the 

 celestial future grows unreal and incongruous. 

 As we get to know what thinking means, and 

 feeling means, and the more truly we understand 

 what life means, the more completely do the 

 promises of the celestial transcendentalism fail 

 to interest us. We have come to see that to 

 continue to live is to carry on a series of corre- 

 lated sensations, and to set in motion a series of 

 corresponding forces ; to think is to marshal a 

 set of observed perceptions with a view to cer- 

 tain observed phenomena ; to feel implies some- 

 thin"; of which we have a real assurance affect- 



