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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



anticipation. One remark more : When Mr. Har- ' 

 rison says 1 that it is quite as easy to learn to 

 long for the moment when you shall become "the 

 immaterial principle of a comet," or that you 

 " really were the ether, and were about to take 

 your place in space," as to long for personal im- 

 mortality — he is merely talking at random on a 

 subject on which it is hardly seemly to talk at 

 random. He knows that what we mean by the 

 soul is that which lies at the bottom of the sense 

 of personal identity — the thread of the continuity 

 running through all our checkered life ; and how 

 it can be equally unmeaning to believe that this 

 hitherto unbroken continuity will continue un- 

 broken, and to believe that it is to be trans- 

 formed into something else of a totally different 

 kind, I am not only unable to understand, but 

 even to understand how he could seriously so 

 conceive us. My notion of myself never had the 

 least connection with the principle of any part 

 of any comet, but it has the closest possible con- 

 nection with thoughts, affections, and volitions, 

 which, as far as I know, are not likely to perish 

 with my body. I am sorry that Mr. Harrison 

 should have disfigured his paper by sarcasms so 

 inapplicable and apparently so bitter as these. 



Prof. HUXLEY.— Mr. Harrison's striking 

 discourse on " The Soul and Future Life " has a 

 certain resemblance to the famous essay on the 

 snakes of Iceland. For its purport is to show 

 that there is no soul, nor any future life, in the 

 ordinary sense of the terms. With death, the 

 personal activity of which the soul is the popular 

 hypostasis is put into commission among pos- 

 terity, and the future life is an immortality by 

 deputy. 



Neither in these views nor in the arguments 

 by which they are supported is there much nov- 

 elty. But that which appears both novel and in- 

 teresting to me is the author's evidently sincere 

 and heart-felt conviction that his powerful advo- 

 cacy of soulless spirituality and mortal immortal- 

 ity is consistent with the intellectual scorn and 

 moral reprobation which he freely pours forth 

 upon the " irrational and debasing physicism" of 

 materialism and materialists, and with the wrath 

 with which he visits what he is pleased to call 

 the intrusion of physical science, especially of 

 biology, into the domain of social phenomena. 



Listen to the storm : 



" We certainly do reject, as earnestly as any 

 school can, that which is most fairly called mate- 

 rialism, and we will second every word of those 

 who cry out that civilization is in danger if the 

 1 No. IV., p. 315. 



workings of the human spirit are to become ques- 

 tions of physiology, and if death is the end of a 

 man, as it is the end of a sparrow. We not only 

 assent to such protests, but we see very pressing 

 need for making them. It is a corrupting doctrine 

 to open a brain, and to tell us that devotion is a 

 definite molecular change in this and that convolu- 

 tion- of gray pulp, and that, if man is the first of 

 living animals, he passes away after a short space 

 like the beasts that perish. And all doctrines, 

 more or less, do tend to this, which offer physical 

 theories as explaining moral phenomena, which 

 deny man a spiritual in addition to a moral nature, 

 which limit his moral life to the span of his bodily 

 organism, and which have no place for ' religion ' 

 in the proper sense of the word." » 



Now, Mr. Harrison can hardly think it worth 

 while to attack imaginary opponents, so that I 

 am led to believe that there must be some body 

 who holds the " corrupting doctrine " " that de- 

 votion is a definite molecular change in this and 

 that convolution of gray pulp." Nevertheless, 

 my conviction is shaken by a passage which oc- 

 curs at page 239 : " No rational thinker now pre- 

 tends that imagination is simply the vibration of 

 a particular fibre." If no rational thinker pre- 

 tends this of imagination, why should any pre- 

 tend it of devotion ? And yet I cannot bring 

 myself to think that all Mr. Harrison's passion- 

 ate rhetoric is hurled at irrational thinkers : 

 surely he might leave such to the soft influences 

 of time and due medical treatment of their " gray 

 pulp " in Colney Hatch or elsewhere. 



On the other hand, Mr. Harrison cannot pos- 

 sibly be attacking those who hold that the feel- 

 ing of devotion is the concomitant, or even the 

 consequent, of a molecular change in the brain ; 

 for he tells us, in language the explicitness of 

 which leaves nothing to be desired, that 



" To positive methods every fact of thinking re- 

 veals itself as having functional relation with 

 molecular change. Every factor of Mill or feel- 

 ing is in similar relation with kindred molecular 

 facts." 2 



On mature consideration, I feel shut up to 

 one of two alternative hypotheses. Either the 

 " corrupting doctrine " to which Mr. Harrison 

 refers is held by no rational thinker — in which 

 case, surely, neither he nor I need trouble our- 

 selves about it— or the phrase, " Devotion is a 

 definite molecular change in this and that convo- 

 lution of gray pulp," means that devotion has a 

 functional relation with such molecular change ; 

 in which case it is Mr. Harrison's own view, and 

 ' No. III., p. 241. 2 P. 239. 



