A MODERN' "SYMPOSIUM." 



499 



we may be, by reason of the imperfection of our 

 knowledge of paleontology, comparative anat- 

 omy, and embryology, from realizing the precise 

 nature of the chain of connection by which the 

 actual descent has taken place, still there can 

 be little doubt remaining in the minds of any un- 

 prejudiced student of embryology that it is only 



by the employment of such an hypothesis as that 

 of evolution that further investigation in these 

 several departments will be promoted so as to 

 bring us to a fuller comprehension of the most 

 general law which regulates the adaptation of" 

 structure to function in the universe. 



— Nature. 



A MODERN" "SYMPOSIUM." 



THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 1 



MR. R. H. HUTTON.— The imaginative glow 

 and rhetorical vivacity which are visible 

 throughout Mr. Harrison's essays on " The Soul 

 and Future Life " are very remarkable, and should 

 guard thos« of us who recoil in amazement from 

 its creed or no-creed from falling into the very 

 common mistake of assuming that the effect 

 which such ideas as these produce on ourselves 

 is the effect which, apart from all question of the 

 other mental conditions surrounding the natures 

 into which they are received, they naturally pro- 

 duce. It is clear, at least, that if they ever 

 tended to produce on the author of these papers 

 the same effect which they not only tend to 

 produce, but do produce, on myself, that ten- 

 dency must have been so completely neutralized 

 by the redundant moral energy inherent in his 

 nature, that the characteristic effect which I 

 should have ascribed to them is absolutely un- 

 verifiable, and, for anything we have the right to 

 assert, non-existent. There is at least but one 

 instance in which I should have traced any shade 

 of what I may call the natural view of death as 

 presented in the light of this creed, and that is 

 the sentence in which Mr. Harrison somewhat 

 superfluously disclaims — and, moreover, with an 

 accent of hauteur, as though he resented the 

 necessity of admitting that death is a disagree- 

 able certainty — his own or his creed's respon- 

 sibility for the fact of death. " We make no 

 mystical or fanciful divinity of death," he says ; 2 

 "we do not deny its terrors or its evils. We 

 are not responsible for it, and should welcome 

 any reasonable prospect of eliminating or post- 

 poning this fatality that waits upon all organic 



1 See Mr. Frederic Harrison's papers in Nos. III. and 

 IV. of the Supplement. This discussion will be con- 

 tinued and concluded in a future number of this maga- 

 zine. 



2 Supplement No. IV., p. 811. 



nature." After reading that admission, I was 

 puzzled when I came to the assertion that " 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," * a sentence in which Mr. Harrison 

 would commonly be understood to mean that he 

 and all his friends, if they had a vote in the mat- 

 ter, would give a unanimous suffrage against this 

 " perpetuity of sensation," and, so far from try- 

 ing to eliminate or postpone death, would be in- 

 clined to cling to and even hasten it. For, in 

 this place at least, it is not the perpetuation of 

 deteriorated energies of which Mr. Harrison 

 speaks, but the perpetuation of life pure and 

 simple. Indeed, nothing puzzles me more in this 

 paper than the diametrical contradictions, both 

 of feeling and thought, which appear to me to be 

 embodied in it. Its main criticism on the com- 

 mon view of immortality seems to be that the 

 desire for it is a grossly selfish desire. Nay, 

 nicknaming the conception of a future of eternal 

 praise, "the eternity of the tabor," he calls it 2 a 

 conception " so gross, so sensual, so indolent, so 

 selfish," as to be worthy of nothing but scorn. 

 I think he can never have taken the trouble to 

 realize with any care what he is talking of. 

 Whatever the conception embodied in what Mr. 

 Harrison calls " ceaseless psalmody " 3 may be — 

 and certainly it is not my idea of immortal life — 

 it is the very opposite of selfish. No conception 

 of life can be selfish of which the very essence is 

 adoration, that is, wonder, veneration, gratitude, 

 to another. And gross as the conception neces- 

 sarily suggested by psalm-singing is, to those 

 who interpret it, as we generally do, by the sten- 

 torian shoutings of congregations who are often 

 thinking a great deal more of their own per- 



1 P. 314. 



2 P. 314. 



3 P. 313. 



