PARADOXICAL PHILOSOPHY. 759 



Nature is a journal of science, and one of the severest tests of a scientific 

 mind is to discern the limits of the legitimate application of scientific methods. 

 We shall therefore endeavour to keep within the bounds of science in speaking 

 of the subject-matter of this book, remembering that there are many things 

 in heaven and earth which, by the selection required for the application of 

 our scientific methods, have been excluded from our philosophy. 



No new discoveries can make the argument against the personal existence 

 of man after death any stronger than it has appeared to be ever since men 

 began to die, and no language can express it more forcibly than the words 

 of the Psalmist : 



" His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth ; in that very day his 

 thoughts perish." 



Physiology may supply a continually increasing number of illustrations of 

 the dependence of our actions, mental as well as bodily, on the condition of 

 our material organs, but none of these can render any more certain those facts 

 about death which our earliest ancestors knew as well as our latest posterity 

 can ever learn them. 



Science has, indeed, made some progress in clearing away the haze of 

 materialism which clung so long to men's notions about the soul, in spite of 

 their dogmatic statements about its immateriality. No anatomist now looks 

 forward to being able to demonstrate my soul by dissecting it out of my pineal 

 gland, or to determine the quantity of it by the process of double weighing. 

 The notion that the soul exerts force lingered longer. We find it even in the 

 late Isaac Taylor's Physical Theory of a Future State. It was admitted that 

 one body might set another in motion; but it was asserted that in every case, 

 if we only trace the chain of phenomena far enough back, we must come to 

 a body set in motion by the direct action of a soul. 



It would be rash to assert that any experiments on living beings have as 

 yet been conducted with such precision as to account for every foot-pound of 

 work done by an animal in terms of the diminution of the intrinsic energy of 

 the body and its contents; but the principle of the conservation of energy has 

 acquired so much scientific weight during the last twenty years that no physio- 

 logist would feel any confidence in an experiment which shewed a considerable 

 difference between the work done by an animal and the balance of the account 

 of energy received and spent. 



Science has thus compelled us to admit that that which distinguishes a 



