ON IMMORTALITY : COUNTERTHESIS. 167 



nature omitted from the scientific map of the mind, the 

 omission of which nullifies or vitiates the positive argu- 

 ment, the consideration of which would justify our title 

 to immortality. The poet, the mystic, the spiritualist, 

 the moral idealist, whoever has deeply loved, whoever 

 has greatly suffered, will not hear of a conclusion which 

 forbids the hope in a future of redress, of reunion, of 

 happiness; and we should not be doing justice to our 

 theme of debate if we did not grant a hearing to some 

 of these dissidents, who moreover can put their objec- 

 tions into words, not merely founded on fancy, as the 

 men of science are wont to affirm, but apparently 

 founded on fact, appealing to the reasoning faculty, and 

 sometimes carrying conviction with them. Let us, then, 

 hear the reply of the spiritualist. 



According to your argument, urges the latter, all 

 thought is bound up with the bodily machine or or- 

 ganism, and disappears with it, and if all organisms dis- 

 appear, as Science teaches they will, then all mind would 

 also vanish from the universe. Either this must be, or 

 mind can exist without the bodily machinery, which 

 scientific materialism does not grant. And is this ex- 

 treme scientific conclusion credible ? Is it possible that 

 mind, the thing so splendid in its higher manifesta- 

 tions, with its vision of beauty, its depths of tender 

 affection, its godlike apprehension of truth, its divine 

 enthusiasm for right, this subtle and wonderful essence, 

 so slowly gathered and distilled through countless ages, 

 as evolution teaches, should be thus recklessly spilt and 

 lost again out of the universe ? Is this wonderful and 

 potent extract from matter, rising through life, through 

 animal sensations, till, thrice sublimed, it became thought 

 and spirit, which searches the secret of the universe, 

 and through Philosophy and Science herself has partly 



