ON IMMORTALITY: COUNTERTHESIS. 195 



such thing. Science herself rather whispers that there 

 is no creation, nor destruction, but only change. This is 

 what she implies in her postulate of the indestructibility 

 of matter, and in her proof of the conservation of energy. 

 Further, even of the kind of existence of the stone, the 

 wind, or the wave, of inorganic nature in general, we 

 know nothing. To know, we should be, as the poet in 

 his invocation to the West Wind " Be thou, spirit 

 fierce, my spirit " desires to be. There may be a par- 

 ticular spirit even here, which we cannot perceive or 

 fathom, even as we believe, without doubt, that there is 

 one universal, mighty, all-pervading spirit, under these 

 and all things, "a motion and a spirit that impels all 

 thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls 

 through all things." 



And we are by no means certain that the best ex- 

 ponents of scientific doctrine would be disposed to con- 

 test these conclusions. Scarcely would Herbert Spencer, 

 with his doctrine of the unknowable, and his various 

 express declarations regarding the many and various 

 possible forms of manifestation of the ultimate and 

 transcendent power, which has only thrown out man as 

 one of these manifestations, but who, with his marvels, 

 will pass away, to be followed by other and unimaginable 

 forms of existence. Nor could Haeckel, who affirms 

 that the soul question is in a wholly different position 

 from what it occupied twenty years ago; who thinks 

 that " all matter is in a certain sense alive ; " and who 

 quotes Bruno approvingly to the effect that "a spirit 

 exists in all things, and no body is so small but contains 

 a part of the divine substance within itself, by which it 

 is animated." These admissions allow room for a future 

 existence different from annihilation, as they even allow 

 for [further conscious life ; the only questions of differ- 



