262 WISCOJ^^SIN" ACADEMY SCIEJ7CE3, ARTS, AND LETTERS. 



profit and fame; and from his devotion to principle the very nature of his religiouf5 

 belief, removed all taint or suspicion of selfishness, even of the most refined and 

 spiritual sort, for he was an uncompromising materialist. 



Forced to the conclusion, that so far as human reason, arguing from the facts of 

 life, can form any judgment on the suhject, a self-conscious existence hereafter is 

 an impoFsibilily; he declined to follow these who assume that there is a higher 

 mode of apprehending these facts than reason supplies. He would allow no attri- 

 butes — cherish no hopes that demanded the sanction of something higher than his 

 understanding; and whatever may be our private beliefs, it is difficult to see how 

 (he logical soundness of this position can be assailed. 



His belief gives the clue to his aims iind his labors. Feeling that the assump- 

 tions of the S!j-calied, higher modes of cognition were gratuitous and mischievous, he 

 woiked so far as he could for tiieir dowi,fdl— but he did not stop here, he was not 

 a mere iconoclast. He saw, what all must see, that there is a growing disposition 

 to question these assumptions, and he was not blind to the dangers of states of trans- 

 ition. He could use no other tlian the nuiterialislic formula, but with that he did 

 what in him lay to revolutionize and humanize political and social life, so as to fi^ 

 it to a liigher creed. He woiked tutlie end that v/hen men should no longer obey, 

 through fear or hope, the mystical, e.xternal commands, that they should already 

 be, through a love of goodness for itself, obedient to the liigher, internal commands. 



He apprehended no danger to morality, for he well knew that morality is not the 

 fruit of any creed, but the sum of human experience. His last work in this direc- 

 tion, was an answer to an attempt, by one Pastor Streissguth, io prove that material- 

 ism was error and tended to immorality. The pamphlet has been publislied since 

 his death, by the Wisconsin Union of Liberal Societies; he therein refutes by unan- 

 swerable arguments, as he had by his piure and blameless life, the silly and incon- 

 sequent slander, that the morality which flows from scientific materialism can be 

 comprehended in the words, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." If a 

 man believes that his sentient existence is restricted to the three-score years on 

 earth, will he iheitfjre aniioipate the nothingness of the future by becoming a sot 

 in the present? or will he use his best endeavor to husband this liandful of years 

 and make them yield to him the greatest measure of spiritual life? 



To say nothing of the many good and able men who cannot base their theory of 

 life upon a belief in a f.iture in lividuality; there are outside the limits of Christen- 

 dom millions of human beings who look forward to forgetfulness, and whose lives are 

 by no means marked by a devotion to the grosser pleasures of the world. The as- 

 sertion, or rather the inference — for it oftene.st comes in that shape — that a man will 

 be good only in proportion as he has a lively sense of the pleasures of a coming 

 heaven, or the pains of an inevitable hell, is a rank calumny upon our moral nature. 

 It is safe to assert that no man of noble instincts, pure asj^irations, or liigh moral 

 principle will be deniHralized by the contemplation of a limited existence; nor will 

 tiie brute be ennobled by the prospect which the church presents to his debased im- 

 agination. 



I will make no apology for thus lamely intruding these truisms. There is need of 

 their occasional reiteration. 



