THE IMMOKTALITY OF THE SOUL. 307 



to admit that it has just as valid a claim to immor- 

 tality as man himself. 



The proofs of the immortality of the soul, which 

 have been adduced for the last two thousand years, 

 and are, indeed, still credited with some validity, 

 have their origin, for the most part, not in an effort 

 to discover the truth, but in an alleged " necessity of 

 emotion " — that is, in imagination and poetic conceit. 

 As Kant puts it, the immortality of the soul is not an 

 object of pure reason, but a "postulate of practical 

 reason." But we must set " practical reason " entirely 

 aside, together with all the " exigencies of emotion, or 

 of moral education, etc.," when we enter upon an 

 honest and impartial pursuit of truth ; for we shall 

 only attain it by the work of pure reason, starting 

 from empirical data and capable of logical analysis. 

 We have to say the same of athanatism as of theism ; 

 both are creations of poetic mysticism and of tran- 

 scendental "faith," not of rational science. 



When we come to analyse all the different proofs 

 that have been urged for the immortality of the soul, 

 we find that not a single one of them is of a scientific 

 character ; not a single one is consistent with the 

 truths we have learned in the last few decades from 

 physiological psychology and the theory of descent. 

 The theological proof — that a personal creator has 

 breathed an immortal soul (generally regarded as 

 a portion of the divine soul) into man — is a pure 

 myth. The cosmological proof — that the "moral 

 order of the world " demands the eternal duration 

 of the human soul — is a baseless dogma. The 

 ideological proof — that the " higher destiny " of man 

 involves the perfecting of his defective, earthly soul 

 beyond the grave — rests on a false anthropism. The 



