A MODERN "SYMPOSIUM." 



31 



everybody in the civilized world is baseless." 

 Let who will believe it, I cannot. 



It may be urged that the idea has strong fas- 

 cination, that man naturally longs for immortali- 

 ty, and gladly catches at any figment which 

 seems to respond to his yearning and to justify 

 his hope. But this belief is among the clearest, 

 broadest, and strongest features of his experience 

 and history. It must flow out of something very 

 deeply imbedded in his constitution. If the force 

 that is behind all the phenomena of life is respon- 

 sible for all that is, it must be responsible for 

 this also. Somehow man, the masterpiece of the 

 Creation, has got himself wedded to the belief 

 that all things here have relations to issues which 

 lie in a world that is behind the shadow of death. 

 This belief has been at the root of his highest 

 endeavor and of his keenest pain ; it is the secret 

 of his chronic.unrest. Now Nature, through all 

 her orders, appears to have made all creatures 

 contented with the conditions of their life. The 

 brute seems fully satisfied with the resources of 

 his world. He shows no sign of being tormented 

 by dreams ; his life withers under no blight of 

 regret. All things rest, and are glad and beauti- 

 ful in their spheres. Violate the order of their 

 nature, rob them of their fit surroundings, and 

 they grow restless, sad, and poor. A plant shut 

 out from light and moisture will twist itself into 

 the most fantastic shapes, and strain itself to 

 ghastly tenuity ; nay, it will work its delicate 

 tissues through stone-walls or hard rock, to find 

 what its nature has made needful to its life. 

 Having found it, it rests and is glad in its beauty 

 once more. Living things, perverted by human 

 intelligent effort, revert swiftly the moment that 

 the pressure is removed. This marked tendency 

 to reversion seems to be set in Nature as a sign 

 that all things are at rest in their natural condi- 

 tions, content with their life and its sphere. Only 

 in ways of which they are wholly unconscious, 

 and which rob them of no contentment with their 

 present, do they prepare the way for the higher 

 developments of life. 



What, then, means this restless longing in 

 man for that which lies beyond the range of his 

 visible world '? Has Nature wantonly and cruelly 

 made man, her masterpiece, alone of all the creat- 

 ures, restless and sad? Of all beings in the 

 Creation must he alone be made wretched by an 

 unattainable longing, by futile dreams of a vi- 

 sionary world ? This were an utter breach of the 

 method of Nature in all her operations. It is 

 impossible to believe that the harmony that runs 

 through all her spheres fails and falls into discord 



in man. The very order of Nature presses us to 

 the conviction that this insatiable longing which 

 somehow she generates and sustains in man, ami 

 which is unquestionably the largest feature of his 

 life, is not visionary and futile, but profoundly 

 significant; pointing with firm finger to the real- 

 ity of that sphere of being to which she has 

 taught him to lift his thoughts and aspirations, 

 and in which he will find, unless the prophetic 

 order of the Creation has lied to him, the har- 

 monious completeness of his life. 



And there seems to be no fair escape from 

 the conclusion by giving up the order, and writ- 

 ing Babel on the world and its life. Whatever 

 it is, it is not confusion. Out of its disorder, 

 order palpably grows ; out of its confusion arises 

 a grand and stately progress. Progress is a sa- 

 cred word with Mr. Harrison. In the progress 

 of humanity he fiDds his longed-for immortality. 

 But, if I may repeat in other terms a remark 

 which I offered in the first number of this review, 

 while progress is the human law, the world, the 

 sphere of the progress, is tending slowly but 

 inevitably to dissolution. Is there discord again 

 in this highest region? Mr. Harrison writes of 

 an immortal humanity. How immortal, if the 

 glorious progress is striving to accomplish itself 

 in a world of wreck ? Or is the progress that 

 of a race born with sore but joyful travail from 

 the highest level of the material creation into a 

 higher region of being, whence it can watch with 

 calmness the dissolution of all the perishable 

 w r orlds ? 



The belief in immortality is so dear to man 

 because he grasps through it the complement of 

 his else unshaped and imperfect life. It seems 

 to be equally the complement of this otherwise 

 hopelessly jangled and disordered world. It is 

 asked triumphantly, " Why, of all the hosts of 

 creatures, does man alone lay claim to this great 

 inheritance ? " Because in man alone we see the 

 experiences, the strain, the anguish, that demand 

 it, as the sole key to what he does and endures. 

 There is to me something horrible in the thought 

 of such a life as ours, in which for all of us, in 

 some form or other, the cross must be the most 

 sacred symbol, lived out in that bare, heartless, 

 hopeless world of the material, to which Prof. 

 Clifford so lightly limits it. And I cannot but 

 think that there are strong signs in many quar- 

 ters of an almost fierce revulsion from the ghast- 

 ly drearihood of such a vision of life. 



There seems to me to run through Mr. Harri- 

 son's utterances on these great subjects — I say it 

 with honest diffidence of one whose large range 



