by DANIEL A. LORD, S.J.

A Queen’s Work Publication





Daniel A. Lord, S.J.

REVISED EDITION

APRIL 1947

THE QUEEN'S WORK
3115 South Grand Blvd.



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Seventh printing, April 1947

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Copyright 1939

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Oeacfdlffso



Have You a Soul ?
by

DANIEL A. LORD, S.J.

've just had a horrible thought/'

Bradley pete from his vantage point before the large fire-

place surveyed the group of his intimates, confident that this

utterance would create a sensation.

Sue Bradley, one of the twins, giggled disrespectfully.

She loved to see her father dramatize himself. No man could

resist the temptation to self-dramatization when he stood

with a real log fire behind him and the right sympathetic

audience in front of him, and tonight the audience was both

right and sympathetic.

There was Mrs. Bradley, who had through the years

cultivated a charming receptivity to her husband's conversa-

tion. There was Dick, the other twin, who sat with his

back against the huge lounge and let himself be pleasantly

hypnotized by the snap of the burning logs. There were the

McDermotts and the Fosters, who, peacefully relaxed, sat

sipping their after-dinner coffee—old friends, who dined with

the Bradleys almost every second month, friends with whom
conversation was pleasant and the interchange of experiences

both casual and intimate.

And in a deep corner of the lounge, his face restfully

turned toward the fire, was Father Hall, who had come to

town for a week's negotiations with his publisher.

Horrible Thought

“Yes," said the senior Bradley, for he saw that his line

had fallen on alert ears, and he was quite willing to repeat

it, “I've just had a horrible thought."

“My darling," his wife cried, in mock sympathy, “do say
an ejaculation."

3



"Wrong guess,” he said, swaying on his heels in ap-

proved master-of-the-house fashion* (A pity, mused Sue,

that he isn't wearing tails; he could put his hands under them

and flap them after the fashion of an English duke in a

Broadway comedy of manners*) "In fact horrible as the

thought is, it borders on the devotional*”

"That's your field. Father Hall*” Kevin McDermott, who

looked like a matured tennis champion and was a tobacco

broker, laughed. "Tell Father Hall your horrible thought,”

he said to Mr* Bradley, in mock-patronizing tones*

The rest of the group clamored to hear it, and Mr. Brad-

ley accepted this as proof that he was playing his scene well.

Not at All Sure

"Well,” he explained, "all my life I've been trying to

save my soul. And it just occurred to me that I'm really not

sure that I have a soul.”

"Darling!” cried his wife, in quick protest. "You're one of

the biggest-souled men in the world."

He bowed elaborately.

"Trust my wife to say just the right thing,” he said, with

an all-inclusive gesture. "But — if I may be permitted an
aphorism— to flatter my disposition is not to appeal to my

brain. And I'm darned if I know whether or not I have a

soul.”

Evan Foster waved a coffee spoon in the direction of

Father Hall.

"You're just wasting your time exhorting this doubting

brother to guard against the loss of his soul.”

Not Doubts

"Hey!" protested Mr. Bradley, "don't get me wrong. I

don't doubt that I have a soul; in fact I'm convinced that I

have one. What I meant was this: If anybody stopped me

in the streets and said, Took here, old man, how do you go

about proving that you have a soul?' I'd be as dumb as a

4



turtle. Of course I have a soul. And Father Hall has con-

vinced me that I ought to save the doggone thing. . .
/'

“Better not tie that adjective to your soul/' cautioned

Sheila Foster. “Sounds too much like-^”

Vicious Circle

Her husband raised a warning hand.

“You may skip telling us what it sounds like, honey/' he

said. “We all got it.”

Mrs. Bradley stepped into the situation with her usual

firmness.

“Doesn't the Bible prove that we have a soul?” she asked.

“Didn't Our Lord tell us to save our souls? Didn't He die

so that we wouldn't lose them? That's enough to satisfy me.”

Her husband fixed her with a stern, reproving eye.

“There you go, arguing in a vicious circle.”

“Darling,” she protested, “the circles in which I move are

delightful and not in the least bit vicious.”

“This one is vicious,” retorted her husband. “You use

the Bible to prove that you have a soul by declaring that the

Bible tells you that you ought to save your soul. A equals B
because B clearly equals A.”

“I don't get it,” said Mrs. Bradley, emphatically.

“We do,” cried Sue, who had exchanged a quick glance
with her twin.

“What's more,” added Dick, “dad's absolutely right. I'll

bet that if anybody asked me to prove that I have a soul I'd

start stuttering like a telegraph key. And so”-^he cast a

sweeping glance of accusation about the group around the

fireplace—*“would the rest of you.”

Just Accept It

“I didn't know that you had to prove that you have a

soul.” Alma McDermott was very puzzled. “I just accept

the fact. Why should you want to prove it?”

5



“Because,” explained Bradley, “so dam many people

think that they have no soul. At least they say that they

haven't.” He turned abruptly to Father Hall. “Materialists is

what they're called, isn't it, father?”

The priest nodded in agreement. “Large sections of what

we call civilized nations and many a professor of psychology

think that a soul is as out of fashion as a banshee • . * and

just as fictitious.”

“Oh,” inserted Shelia Foster, who tried hard to live up

to the Irish in her name and her blood, “I believe in banshees.

I had an old aunt who—”

“Don't get started on banshees,” interrupted her hus-

band. He looked at the group in appeal. “If she starts tell-

ing you about that aunt that used to take tea with the good

little people and was on intimate terms with a leprechaun,

she'll never let us get back to talking about souls.”

Confusion Compounded

Kevin McDermott stirred his coffee thoughtfully.

“I had that same thought about souls some years ago. I

suddenly realized that if anybody backed me into a corner

and demanded that I prove that I had a soul—or else— I'd be

obliged to accept the or else. So I looked up some books on

the subject. Lord, what a muddle they threw me into! The „

Catholic books seemed the worst to me. They all started off,

not by proving to me that I had a soul, but by proving to me

that the fellows who said that I didn't have a soul were all

cuckoo. And by the time I was half finished reading about

the things that these non-Catholics hold and don't hold, I

was the guy that was cuckoo.”

His voice was so despairful that they all laughed in

sympathy.

“What a lot of junk I waded through!” he said, ruefully.

“It seems that one set of people say that I haven’t any soul

at all and another set say that I'm nothing but a soul.”

“My big, husky man nothing but a ghostly soul?” his
wife almost shrieked. “How horrible!”

6



All Kinds of Souls

"A lot of ’em seemed to think that there was no such

thing as an individual soul but that the world was full of one

big soul that flowed through our brains as water flows

through faucets/*

"Explaining water on the brain?” wisecracked Evan Fos-

ter. The rest of the group groaned him into silence*

"Some said that thought was merely a nerve vibration/’

Kevin continued, "and some said that thought was a mani-

festation of a world soul* Some said that we thought only

about words and not about universal ideas. I was dizzy when

I’d finished reading the truck, and I’ll be darned if I ever

reached the point where an author proved that I have a soul*

Of course I quit. So when our host begins wondering

whether or not he has a soul. I’m in the same boat/’

The group lapsed into a moment’s silence. It really did

seem silly to think that while they, like all good Catholics,

were busy trying to save their souls, in the face of the thou-

sands of people who claimed that there were no such things

as souls they couldn’t even prove that they had a soul.

Seems Silly

Was there any logical proof that the soul existed? Or
did they simply have to take God’s word for it?

Mr. Bradley walked across the room and sat down in an

easy chair. He was the stage manager; he had set the stage

for the act that he hoped would follow. He was the actor

who had rung up the curtain with a mighty good speech and

who was now content to let someone else take center stage.

He was above all else the puzzled Catholic who had been
made to realize that he was ignorant about a subject that

worried him and left him decidedly troubled. So he had

tossed the problem into the hands of his good friend Father

Hall. Let the priest, who sat pleasantly relaxed, the light

of the fire playing brightly across one side of his keen, alert

face, solve the problem.

7



Not Surprised

Father Hall held a match to the large bowl of his pipe.

He was among friends who understood his after-dinner pref-
erence for his pipe and his disdain of his host's expensive

cigars. He drew the smoke into his mouth appreciatively;
then he flicked out the flame of the match.

‘Tm not surprised," he began.

"Not surprised at what?" demanded Kevin McDermott.

"Not surprised that no one in this crowd of educated

Catholics could in a pinch prove that he has a soul. Of course

one of these days Dick and Sue will be studying in their

Catholic-college psychology class the proofs for the existence

of the soul. But I'm sometimes amazed when I realize how

many people there are who get callouses on their knees, sav-

ing souls whose existence they accept on faith, and how

many there are who have never even stopped to wonder

whether they could prove from reason that they have a soul

to save. It's one of the startling phenomena of Catholic

thinking. Or shall we call it Catholic lack of thinking?"

"Everyone in the group stirred uncomfortably, even

though Father Hall's voice was entirely without reproach.

Their guilty consciences were prodding them.

Can It Be Proved?

"Can it be proved from reason that we have a soul?" put

in Alma McDermott, timidly.

"Certainly it can be proved," came back Father Hall.

The Bible is built up around the fact of a human soul. Gen-

esis recounts the story of God's breathing into the newly-

formed body of man 'a living soul,' thus making him in the

image of his maker. The Gospels end with the stories of

Christ's sending the Apostles into the whole world to save

souls and to bring them into the eternal kingdom of heaven,

where, while the bodies lay sleeping in the earth, the souls

would be endlessly happy . . 'this day . . . with me in para-

dise.’ From beginning to end the Bible accepts the soul as

the second great reality. The first reality is God; the second

is the human soul.
8



“But that’s only the beginning—or rather, to put it more

accurately, it’s a mere confirmation of something that men

would know and understand about themselves even if there

were no Bible. You see, human history is certainly clear on

at least this one point: The vast majority of all men of all

times have believed that they have something that is beyond

and above and independent of—to some extent— the body.

Separated by Death

“The fact of death was and is inescapable. Even the

primitives, the Egyptians and the Assyrians and the prehis-

toric men and the American Indians, laid their dead in some

kind of grave. But though the bodies were dead and though

everyone had learned from grim and often unpleasant expe-

rience how swiftly bodies decayed and became once more

part of the earth, none of these people thought that with

burial came the end of their dear relatives and friends. Some-

where in another world these dead continued to exist; some-

where they could eat the food that was placed on their graves

or could hunt and talk or could enjoy some sort of paradise

or would be punished in some sort of hell.

“The dead bodies were there, rotting; that was obvious.

But something that was not the body was judged because

it was the more important part of a man, the part that had

been responsible for his goodness or his badness.

Various Names

“Perhaps not all of these people called this something a

soul. But all of them—from the cave men to the pagans of

modern Jamaica, who 'capture’ the souls of their dead in little

boxes as they depart from the dead bodies— all men were

convinced that there was something in a man that was not

his body, something that was superior to his body—and so

independent of his body that after the body was dead that

something went on living a life that was even more complete

than the life it had lived while it was incased in the body.

In fact that something was so tremendously important that

it was punished or rewarded according as the man lived a

bad or a good life.

9



“Evidently this something was the thing that made man

man.

“So you see, belief in souls is a historic tradition. The

Bible is meaningless unless souls do exist ... as human his-

tory would be meaningless, and human self-analysis/'

Mr. Bradley shook his head.

“Oh weVe given up believing in so many things in which

people always used to believe . . . fairies and ghosts and the

suns moving round the earth. . . . That argument doesn’t im-

press me too much.”

Father Hall nodded in partial agreement.

They Made Other Mistakes, So . .

.

“The fact that a great many people agree on a thing

doesn’t necessarily prove that the thing is right, unless .

.

He paused deliberately and dramatically to catch their
attention, and he pierced that attention with a gesture of his

forefinger.

“.
. . unless their reasons for agreeing on it are compelling,

satisfactory reasons.”

They all seemed very full of thought. Even Dick and

Sue puckered their young brows in an effort at serious rea-

soning. Father Hall gave them time to think.

“Then you believe,” asked Mrs. Bradley at last, unable

to stand the too-protracted silence, “that in the case of the

soul the reasons were satisfactory?”

Clear Observation

“Exactly,” replied Father Hall. “You see, long before

there were laboratories, men did quite a bit of observing.

Sometimes I'm inclined to think that men did more observ-

ing along some lines before the invention of microscopes than

men have done since they’ve had microscopes. But don’t say

that I said so.”

“We’ll tell all our friends the first chance we get,” cried

Sue. “You’re just an old fogey who doesn’t believe in

science.”

10



“Doesn't believe in every scientist/' corrected the priest.

“Science is wonderful. But often scientists are men who

know so much about one thing that they are absolutely blind

to everything else/'

He drew in on his pipe and slowly exhaled a ghostlike

cloud of smoke.

Different From Animals

“Well it didn't take a heap of acute observing to make

men—even very primitive men—realize that they were more

than a little different from the animals around them. The

tiger might be far more powerful physically than men were;

but men had something inside themselves, some cleverness,

some mastery of skill, that let them outwit the tiger that

could knock them cold with a biff of its paw. Men could

build traps. They might be afraid to meet a gorilla in the

jungles, but they would have hooted at the suggestion that

some gorilla was sitting down in a cave and drawing on the

walls pictures of men. Men drew pictures of gorillas; by no

stretch of fancy could they imagine gorillas' drawing pictures

of men.

“Men found that they had within themselves the power to

learn to do almost anything that they saw the animals do.

But the animals learned nothing from men/' Men were not
so swift as was the deer, but men could outwit and kill the

deer. The elephant could crush a man with his trunk or his

forefoot, but a man could dominate an elephant and force

him into slavery. The bird's nest was a masterpiece of

adaptation, but men learned to build houses and temples

and palaces that were not only highly serviceable but ex-

traordinarily beautiful. And if anyone had suggested to a
primitive tribe that it should invite an ape to sit as a fellow

counselor, or train a dog to act as court physician, or have

a chimpanzee as troubadour of the tribe, or make a beaver

the official architect, the men of that tribe would have

laughed boisterous, savage laughter.

“Animals, they knew, were different from men. Animals

lacked something that men had. And that something lifted
man so high above the entire kingdom of animals—strong,
fleet, beautiful, clever though those animals were—that be-

ll



tween a man and an animal there was no possibility of

equality.

Not Their Bodies

4

‘Now these men were shrewd enough to realize that this

superiority was not in their bodies. The deer could outrace

any man. The elephant could outwork him. Unarmed, man

dared not meet the lion or the gorilla. His hair was not so

beautiful as was the plumage of the bird of paradise. His

skin could not resist heat and cold and the darts of an enemy

as could the skin of a hippo. No it was not man’s body that

made him different. Then what was it?

“They argued quite logically—or so it seems to me—that

if it wasn’t their bodies that made the difference it was some-

thing beyond their bodies, something that they possessed in

addition to their bodies, something the animals didn’t have.

They called it their soul, or they gave it some other name.

But whatever they called it, it was the thing that made them

men and, making them men, made them masters.

“All you and I have to do is watch a man and an animal

tackle any problem or meet in any sort of competition in

which the man can use his full manhood and his complete

abilities, and we are very much inclined to think that these

old ancestors of ours were pretty smart.

What a Difference!

“In fact I never read that some materialistic scientist is

working to prove that there is no essential difference between

a man and a monkey without thinking, ‘My friend, I’ll really

be impressed when I hear that a monkey has set out to prove

conclusively that there is no difference between a monkey

and a man.’ Our interest in monkeys is so different from the

monkey’s lack of interest in us that that in itself is almost

enough to prove that we are superior to monkeys.’’

Bradley, their host, was waiting to object.

“Of course animals and men are different,’’ he said.

“Man’s brain is more complicated than that of an animal.

We’re different, we human beings, because our structure is
more elaborate. A monkey is more elaborate than a clam.

12



An ape is more elaborate than an ant. And we are more

elaborate than any of the animals. Doesn’t that elaborate^

ness explain our superiority? Why drag in a metaphysical
thing like a soul?”

A Principle

“Dear! dear!” sighed Father Hall. “You say metaphysi-

cal as if it were a nasty word. You’ve been reading the wise-

cracking unbelievers, my lad. They don’t like the word meta-

physical. But metaphysical is just a term that we apply to

those things that we can’t touch or see. Liberty is something

that nobody ever saw. It’s metaphysical; but believe me it’s

a mighty important thing. Principles are metaphysical. Do

you know what we mean here by a principle?”

They didn’t answer immediately. It sounded like a trick

question. Mr. Bradley took the lead.

“Evidently we’re not supposed to know. So just go ahead

and explain.”

Examples

Father Hall pulled on his pipe.

“Let’s fumble around for some examples,” he said, look-

ing just a little embarrassed. “I really should have been given

a little time to get all this in order,” he continued. “When
a man hasn’t studied psychology for almost twenty years . .

.”

“No apologies,” cried Sue.

“And no alibis,” jibed Dick.

“My pals!” The priest groaned and threw up his hands
in mock despair.

“Some examples,” prompted Mrs. Bradley.

“All right. Let’s say that a crowd of people, strangers

to one another, are sitting in a railroad station. All of a sud-

den a number of things go wrong. A woman faints. A loco-
motive throttle refuses to budge. A man sitting on a bench
grabs his forehead and enthusiastically starts to scribble on a

piece of paper. Two men wax hot in argument. One hits the
other, and a third man runs up and collars the first two.”

13



“Sounds like the last reel of a mystery movie/* mur-

mured Sue*

You Watch

“You are sitting in the station too/* continued Father

Hall, ignoring the interruption. “You know no one there.

You are simply watching. As the woman faints, a man runs

up to her, pulls a stethoscope out of his pocket and expertly

uses it, gives her something to drink, deftly manipulates her

muscles, and presto! the woman is revived. What do you

conclude about the man?**

“Obviously he*s a doctor/* cried Alma McDermott.

“All right. Let*s continue. When word comes that the
locomotive throttle is stuck, a man jumps up, climbs into the

cab, monkeys with a few gadgets, and lo! the throttle works.

He is . . .**

“.
.

.

an engineer,** supplied Sheila Foster.

“Let me continue/* interposed Sue. “The man who runs

up to the men that are arguing is a detective.**

“Correct. And if another man appears on the scene and

offers to get them uncollared .
.**

“He*s a lawyer.**

“.
.

.

if he isn*t a prominent politician with a drag at the

city hall.** Evan Foster was highly ironic.

Judged by Results

“In other words,** said Father Hall, “we don*t know

enough about what this last chap did or how he did it to be

able to tell what he is. But in the other cases you knew pre-

cisely what each man was from watching . . .**

“.
.

.

what he did.** Mrs. Bradley filled in the blank with

an air of embarrassment. It seemed so simple.

“That*s right. But note: You did not see the doctor's

medical knowledge: you just saw the man practicing medi-

cine. You did not see the engineer's mechanical ability: you

simply saw the man successfully monkeying with a machine.

14



And monkeying is a very poor word there. For all the pos-

sible monkeying that a monkey could do wouldn't get the

machine fixed. The policeman made an arrest, but he couldn't

show you or the fighting pair his authority. And nobody

could see the lawyer's legal knowledge or the politician's

pull. You didn't have to see those things. You saw what

we call an effect, something done. You knew what was the

cause of that effect—-and that cause was the knowledge,

skill, special ability of each man. That is roughly what we

mean by a principle. Get it?"

How About the Writer?

They all nodded.

"Now let's do a little looking at the way that some other

things work."

"Hey!" interrupted Dick. "What about the chap who

grabbed his head and started to write."

"You," answered the priest, "picked up the paper that

he eventually threw away."

"Dick being nosey as usual," said Sue.

"And it was a scrap of lovely poetry obviously original,"

added the priest.

"From the moment he grabbed his forehead," Dick mut-

tered, "I knew he was a poet." And to Father Hall, "Sorry

for the interruption. What are we looking at now?"

"Just a group or cluster of bodies, various kinds of them.

In the visible world we have a wide range to pick from,

haven't we? Everything from pebbles to philosophers, from

geraniums to germs to gems, from orchids to oysters, from

crystals to butterflies—"

Bodies

"Oh," cried Sue, "what happened to our alliteration?"

"Sorry," Father Hall corrected himself: "from crystals

to crypts and crustaceans."

15



“Excellent!" applauded the twins.

“Now let's choose a few from this varied range of bodies

and make a picture.

“A rock lies under a wide-reaching tree on the side of

a hill. Near it sheep are feeding. On the rock sits a shep-

herd watching his sheep, counting the profits he'll make when

the ewes have lambed and out of the joy of his heart sing-

ing a song of his own contriving."

“What ho! Watteau!" was Kevin McDermott's contri-

bution.

Pastoral

“So whether they were assembled by a pastoral painter

or by our imagination, we have in one spot a rock, a tree,

sheep, and a shepherd. Each of these is quite obviously very

different from the others. The rock is being slowly corroded

by the passing storms and the heat of the sun; it is, as we say,

inanimate. The sheep browse about; they feed on the grass,

which by the power of their digestion is turned into flesh and

bone and the curling wool upon their backs. They will breed

lambs that will be reproductions of themselves, complete in

all details. And if these sheep have some accident or other,

a little care and nursing will restore their health.

“Over them hangs the beautiful tree. Its roots reach far

down into the soil, and the chemical elements that it pulls

out of the earth are incorporated into its growing branches.

It drops acorns to the ground, and these acorns are capable

of becoming other trees. An ax may damage its bark; but

if the damage is not too great, the wound will heal and the

tree will continue to thrive.

Sheep and Shepherd

“Yet the sheep have things which the tree doesn’t have.

The sheep recognize their master when he calls. They have

a thousand instincts that they exercise without training or

experience of any sort. They move about under the impulse

of cold and heat and hunger and the desire for water. They

follow their master with the fidelity of Mary’s famous lamb.

16



“Finally we come to the man. He is a po£t at heart, a

maker of songs. He sees the sheep as a means to make

money, and for that reason he has decided to breed them. He

sits in the shade and thinks of profit, of God, of the sheep

he'll have ten years from now (sheep that have no present

existence), of love and beauty—the while he creates a new

song out of the sounds that he's heard around him."

,
i

Enter the Cat

While Father Hall was talking, a sleek Persian cat wan-

dered into the living room. The cat moved toward Mrs.

Bradley and with a spring was in her lap and curled purring

on her knee.

“Why bother," the priest said, suddenly, “with imaginary
pictures? Everyone please look at Mrs. Bradley."

“Easy assignment," said her husband, gallantly.

“How nice," she murmured. “I'm either Exhibit A, lab-
oratory experiment number 26 , or the center of the stage."

“You are a charming proof for the existence of the soul,"

said the priest. He looked around at the guests. “There is

the beautiful chair in which Mrs. Bradley is sitting; there is

the corsage of roses that she is wearing; there is the purring

cat on her knee; and there is our hostess herself.

“That comes close to being a fair summary of the visible

world:

“The inanimate world—the chair.

“The vegetable world—the roses.

“The animal world—the cat.

“The world of human beings—our hostess herself."

They laughingly applauded the picture, and Mrs. Brad-

ley looked immensely pleased.

17



Ninety-Eight Cents' Worth

Father Hall continued.

"Now as for the chemical elements that go to make up

the human parts of our two pictures—the shepherd on the

hillside and the hostess in the midst of her guests—there is

not a great deal of difference. You remember the old chemi-

cal analysis of a man, don’t you? The fat in his body would

make half a dozen bars of soap; the sulphur would furnish

heads for a box of matches; the chalk would whitewash a

chicken coop; the iron would make a tenpenny nail. I think

the total value of my body, chemically speaking, is about

ninety-eight cents."

"Horrible!" murmured Sheila Foster.

"If that were all that there was to it, it would be horrible.

And according to the men who deny that man has a soul,

that is all, and it is horrible."

Not the Same
rv/

-

i #

The priest held up his hand emphatically.

"But all you have to do is study the various kinds of

objects, and you’ll see that they are not the same and that

chemistry cannot explain the whole of man. The rock is ex-

plained by inorganic chemistry. Rocks are acted upon; they

do not act. There is no principle in them to make them act.

Dirt may pile on a rock and make it larger, but the rock

does not feed on that earth. If a rock is cracked or smashed,

it stays broken. By no stretch of the imagination can you

conceive of a little chip off a rock taking root and growing

into another large rock. Nor can you conceive of the rock’s

giving birth to a litter of little stones while it itself remains

unchanged.

Alive

"Let’s glance at the tree under which the sheep are

pasturing. That tree does things that the rock cannot pos-

sibly do. We say that it falls within the field of organic
chemistry. The tree grows by taking into itself chemicals

that it makes part of itself. It has the power to heal its own

18



wounds if those wounds are not fatal—as when some lover

carves a heart and initials in its side, or when an automobile

crashes into it and destroys branches and bark. Finally the

tree drops seeds that are capable of becoming like the tree

from which they fell.

What is true of the rock is true of the chair in which

our hostess sits. And what is true of the tree was true of

our hostess's roses until they were picked from their bush.

44

Now let's look at the sheep. The grass that they eat,
they make part of themselves. A cut they receive from a
barbed-wire fence is healed by the quick action of their own

blood. And in time they will be nuzzling the little lambs that

they have developed inside their bodies.

4

'Again what is true of the sheep is true of the cat.

Instinct

"Did you notice that cat enter the room, move toward

the lire, single out his mistress—though she is wearing a new

dress that he perhaps never saw before—and go where he

knew he'd be petted and played with? Did you ever see a

cat stalk a mouse? or hunt a bird? or protect its newborn

kittens? or do any of the thousand other things that we call

instinctive? Did you ever see an ant build its city? an oriole

build its nest? a duck find its way from the north to the far

south? a dog sniff his master and fawn upon him? a bear go

into his hole for the winter?

4 4We maintain that these things that a tree does but that
a stone cannot do show that the tree is alive and the stone

dead. There is a life principle in the tree which makes the

tree capable of actions that a stone could never perform. We
see that cats and sheep have instincts that no tree or plant

possesses. Hence there is some principle in animals that

makes them different from vegetation. We watch effects, and
we see that those in the animal are so different from those in

vegetation that we conclude that the cause must be different.

We recognize the doctor's medical knowledge by watching
him act. We recognize the life principle in a tree by observ-
ing the effects in that tree. When we watch a dog in action,
we know that a dog differs from a tree. And in each case we
come to know the cause from the effects we see. Remember

19



that a principle really means a source, a cause, a beginning.

Clear?’

’

Easy to See, But

They all seemed to take a deep breath. Father Hall

laughed with them. The thing was fundamentally simple,

the sort of thing one recognized just by looking at it. It was

not easy to make easy things seem easier. Anybody looking

at a lizard knew that it was different from a rosebush, just

as the cow surely was different from the moon over which

it jumped, and Jack’s dog was different from the beanstalk

that Jack climbed.

Father Hall wondered whether he had made it clear that

chemically these apparently different things were not vastly

different. Yet what they did was so different that some

essential principle in each of them must make them different

'—the rosebush different from the rock, the lizard very dif-

ferent from the rosebush it used for its sunny promenades.

"May I go on?” he asked, at last.

They nodded.

We Come to Man

"Looking at the shepherd on the rock and, more pleas-

antly, at Mrs. Bradley here, we find that both of them are

capable of things that we never even vaguely associate with

an animal, much less with a rock, a rose, or an oak tree.”

Mr. Bradley nodded in agreement. "Do you know of a

rock or a rose that ever threw a dish at its husband’s guilt-

less head?”

"How vulgar!” protested his wife. "Anyhow if I had

done any throwing, I can assure you that the head would not

have been guiltless.”

"Keep family squabbles out of this,” ordered McDer-

mott, with authority. "Imagine any wife’s throwing plates

at a husband’s head and not hitting somebody else.”

"Never mind them, father,” said Mrs. Bradley. "Tell me

what I do that makes me so different.”

"Not merely so different, Mrs. Bradley, but so different

from rocks, roses, and the cat in your lap. The things you

20



do are really very much the same as the things other human

beings do.

All and More

"You have first of all the essential chemicals of the

mineral kingdom.

"You have the power to grow and heal and produce off-

spring like yourself, all of which is characteristic of the ani-

mal kingdom and the vegetable kingdom too.

"You have instincts that are like the instincts of the dog

and the cat.

"But everything that you have beyond that is different.

"For you are capable of thinking."

"I'm glad you saved it by the word capable," said Mr.

Bradley.

"You have free will," continued Father Hall. "You find

in your soul a divine discontent. And you are by nature a

creator. You want to create things, fashion things, be an

artist, a builder of anything from a knitted sweater to a

great novel, from a glass of jelly to an airplane, from a suit

to a symphony, from a miniature to a house of which you

will be mistress.

"And these things make you very, very different from

any mere animal that pastures in the fields or walks the

roads or haunts the jungles of earth.

The Something More

"And because even the simplest and most primitive men

have realized in themselves divine discontent and the desire

to improve on earth, men have always known that they were

different. That is why they were so sure that their body,

which is akin to that of the animal, was not all. That is why

they knew that they had some principle which produced the

effects that we call thinking, willing, improving, creating.
That is why men were so sure that they had a soul."

Suddenly Kevin McDermott began to talk, and the con-

versation became general. Kevin spoke of the Egyptian

hieroglyphics that he had seen in the Smithsonian, particu-

21



larly the little soul of a man being weighed in a balance scale

by the god of the dead. His wife supplemented this by re-

calling that she had heard somewhere that the Greeks

thought the soul to be located in the brain, “living there in a

kind of advanced penthouse/' she suggested. Evan Foster

recalled out of some faint memory of his Latin studies that

soul and spirit were not the same word, and that spirit

originally meant wind. And Dick added that anima , also a

Latin word for soul, originally meant breeze.

Soul and Breath

“That’s not too difficult to explain,’’ said Father Hall.

“The Greeks and the Romans both knew that at the moment

of death the principle by which the body thought, willed, was

discontent, and was capable of creation departed. Its de-

parture was precisely what made the body dead and hence

different from a living body. They noticed that at the very

end there was a final sigh, a sort of last breath, like the pass-

ing of a wind from the mouth of the dying man. That, they

thought, might be the soul departing. So they used to signify

soul by both spiritus and anima, a natural enough mistake

but a rather beautiful one. At least it indicates very clearly

that these early people were sure that something in them was

beyond and different from the body.’’

“But of course they were wrong,’’ was Kevin McDer-

mott’s comment. “And since they were wrong about the

thing that makes man different, isn’t it possible that they

were wrong about man’s being different at all?’’

Father Hall shook his head.

“They knew from what man did that he must have some-

thing that distinguishes him from other creatures that have

bodies not much unlike his own, some principle ...”

What Makes It Work?

Little Mrs. McDermott sighed wistfully.

“That principle you talk about . . . it’s not clear to me/’

They could feel Father Hall rummaging around in his

mind for some comparison. The quick light that flashed in

his eyes told them that he had found it.

22



"A number of years ago the magician Hermann the

Great had a marvelous clock. It was made of transparent

glass with a brass pivot in the center. Around the edges of

the face were figures that ran like the figures of any clock,

from one to twelve. Hermann would take a minute hand and

stick it on the pivot. Then the audience was asked to men-

tion any date in history— let's say someone mentioned Octo-

ber 17, 1833. Hermann spun the minute hand; and when it

stopped, it pointed to the number that corresponded to the

day of the week on which that date had fallen.

"Anyone watching that clock knew very clearly that the,

glass and the brass couldn't make a calculation like that. I

saw the clock at close range and could see nothing that might

point to an explanation of how it worked. Yet it demanded

that someone do a fairly complicated bit of calendar research.

Therefore it was someone with a mind that had to stop that

hand at the right number. Who? What?

Too Simple

"The trick didn't hold its place on Hermann's program

very long, because it really was too simple. Off stage there

was an assistant who had before him the necessary informa-

tion and charts. He also had a series of electrical connec-
tions, one attached to each of the numbers. A person in the
audience shouted out a date. As Hermann placed the minute

hand on the pivot, the assistant consulted the proper chart

and found the correct day of the week. Hermann spun the

hand. The assistant touched the connection that shot elec-

tricity into the correct number. And by the power of electro-
magnetism the hand was stopped dead on the correct

number."

"How ridiculously simple!" exclaimed Mrs. Foster.

"Yes isn't it? But the audience saw only the glass-and-

brass clock. They had to argue to a principle that they could

not see, a principle that did two things: From a given date

it calculated the day on which that date fell, and it exercised

some force that stopped the clock."

"Don't look at me when you say that stopped-the-clock
stuff," thundered the host.

23



It Needed a Principle

“Well ignore that outburst/' said Father Hall, mildly.

“The audience knew that glass and brass can't reason, calcu-

late, or will. So there had to be some principle—even though

they didn't know what it was—that thought and willed.
Simple, but no more simple than the reasoning process that

taught men that chemical elements however complicated don't

think or will, and that there must be some principle capable

of performing these extremely difficult processes."

“Then," said Mr. Bradley, feeling that because he had

started all this he should come into the picture seriously, “all

men, looking at their own bodies and comparing them with

the nonthinking stone, the nonfeeling tree, the nonrational

animal, argued that they themselves must surely have a prin-

ciple that thought and willed, was not part of their body, and

lived even after their body had died. Is that right?"

“That is right," agreed Father Hall.

“Interesting," continued Mr. Bradley, “but that still

doesn't prove anything, does it? There may be other

explanations.

The Process Called Thinking

“Just a minute," said Father Hall. “Let’s look at this

process called thinking."

“This is going to be a novel experience for my wife,"

jibed Evan Foster.

“Darling," retorted his wife, “as long as there's a power-

ful mind like yours in the family, I can feel free to devote

myself to the sole business of being beautiful."

“Modest little thing, isn't she?" demanded Mr. Foster of

the company in general.

“Go on with your thinking processes," urged Mrs.

Bradley.

The Writer at Work

“Let's say," resumed Father Hall, “that a writer is sitting

at his desk deep in the process of creating a book. Now

24



creating is hardly the correct word, for creating means mak-

ing something out of nothing—”

“—whereas too many writers make nothing out of some-

thing,” broke in Kevin McDermott, who evidently didn’t like

some of the modern writers.

“No. That’s not what I was going to say,” countered

Father Hall. “A writer doesn’t make something out of noth-

ing, but he does make something out of a good many other

somethings. Writing a book is a most elaborate process. The

author draws on his memory; he uses some of his own expe-

riences; he refers to books that he has read and observes the

actions of people in various localities; he puts together words

the meanings of which he has learned in a thousand different

ways. And when he is finished, this one man has built out of

a thousand different sources a unit which is his book.

“That’s a pretty elaborate process. We can reduce it to
something that looks simpler but really isn’t. Will somebody

here give me a sentence?”

Wanted: a Sentence

They all thought elaborately. You could almost hear the

wheels going round.

Mr. Bradley walked over to the table and picked up the

evening newspaper. He turned to the editorial page.

“How’s this?” he demanded. He read aloud:
“
’Man’s

liberty is so much the white light of his life, the greatest gift

of God, that we feel like crying aloud, “Let’s fight for it”!’
”

They all applauded the oratorical way in which he had

read it.

“Dad ought to run for Congress,” whispered Sue, audibly.

“Senate or nothing,” retorted her twin.

“Excellent,” cried the priest. And with that remarkable

memory that he sometimes displayed, he repeated the sen-

tence verbatim.

“
’Man’s liberty is so much the white light of his life, the

greatest gift of God, that we feel like crying aloud, “Let’s

fight for it”!’
”

25



They all began to meditate on the sentence.

‘‘Now/' said the priest, “the human brain is not unlike

an intricate filing case. Into the various sections a man slips

the experiences of his life—sounds, colors, nouns, verbs,

pleasures, motor reflexes that he has developed through prac-

tice. Part of his brain is working while he is talking; another

part works when he walks. The brain is so compartmented

that injury to it often results in queer twists. One small

sector of the brain is hurt, and suddenly the man can't dis-

tinguish colors, or he loses the power to recall nouns."

Pigeonholes

“Like Alice in the mysterious woods," interposed Sue.

She couldn't even remember the noun tree. Remember?"

“Sh-sh!" hissed her twin, and she shushed.

“Really the brain is like a desk full of pigeonholes; and

the more the specialists come to know about the brain, the

better are they able to localize in definite sections definite

types of memories, experiences, factual data, and the like.

“Let's go back to our author for a minute. Let's say that

he is sitting before a desk that has pigeonholes. His filing

cabinets are along the wall. He keeps notebooks in which

he jots down names, descriptions, bits of unusual conversa-

tions that he means to use in his book. Let's watch him: He

pulls some notes out of a cubbyhole, he roots around until

he gets precisely what he wants out of a file; he thumbs

through his notebooks in search of data; he goes to his library

and jerks a quotation out of a book.

“Then he, the one person, puts all this together and

makes the one, unified, coherent, logical book, a book so

uniquely his own that we can, by observing its style, know

precisely who wrote it.

Quite a Process

“Let's take that sentence again. It's really an excellent

one. To put that sentence together, the man who wrote it

and we who understood it had to pull a good many things

out of our minds.

26



First we pulled out some nouns: man, liberty, light, life,

gift, God, and so on.

“Then from another part of our brain we jerked the color

white and our experience with light.

“From our auditory memory, our memory of sounds, we

pulled the idea of crying aloud.

“We have never seen God, but we pulled out a concept
of Him.

“And finally we issued a call to battle, to do something

about it, to get the good old will in operation: 'Let’s fight

for it’!”

“Why!” cried Sheila Foster, “I hadn’t any idea that that

sentence had so much in it.”

“Trust me to find a good one, just the right one in fact,”

boasted her host.

Packed

Father Hall looked at them with a sharply questioning

glance.

“Our author was the only one who compiled all the data

in his book. All right. Who compiled all the data that we’ve
just checked over in that one sentence?’’

“The writer of the editorial of course. And you and I.”

Mrs. Bradley sounded just a little impatient.

“Which part of the author? Which part of you? From

various parts of your brain, from various emotional expe-

riences something pulled together into a single sentence the

most varied ideas, concepts, brain phantasmas. Who? What?’’

“Still a little foggy,’’ said Mrs. McDermott, wrinkling

her brow.

Words Into Messages

“Let’s take another comparison,’’ said the priest. “You’ve

seen teletype machines in telegraph offices. Over the wire

comes a message. It is printed out word by word. It rolls

out of the machine and into a basket. But it becomes a mes-

sage only when someone picks it up and reads it, putting the

words together to make a completed piece of news.

27



“All right* The words are lying around up there in your

brain; phantasms, we call them. What power in you puts
these phantasms together into a message? What power takes
out of the different compartments of your brain experiences,

colors, sounds, words, and so on, and unites them into one

logical, intelligible message?

“We call that power the soul. And unless you grant the
existence of the soul, it is simply impossible to explain the

fact that we can listen to or read separate words and unite

them into a single clear sentence.

“But if we have a soul that acts like the author who pulls

out of the filing cabinet of his brain memories, experiences,

impressions, words, pictures, then everything is simple. The

soul is the power by which we think. It is the principle of

unity that pulls all our scattered experiences together into

intelligible thoughts. It is the real author of our books and

our sentences. It is the source of our intelligent thinking/'

Chemical Brain

“Hey!" demanded Evan Foster. “Why couldn't it be the
brain that does the thinking?"

“Why couldn't the filing cabinet put the novel together
without any help from the novelist?" countered Father Hall.

“That isn't the same. The brain is alive. The filing

cabinet is dead, inanimate," answered Evan Foster.

“Our brain is still essentially a composite of chemicals,"

emphasized Father Hall. “More than that: The various parts

of the brain are very much parts, that is, they are separated

one from another. There has to be some power, some faculty,

that pulls together into one spot one sentence, one idea, one

judgment or message that lies in these various parts. The

author is the power that pulls the parts from his filing cabi-

nets and makes his unified book. The soul is the power that

unifies what lies in our brain, which is our very elaborate

filing case."

“I suppose that's why while we say, 'my heart beats' and

'my feet dance,' we say simply, 'I think'," suggested Mr.

Bradley.

28



“Correct.”

“But we also say, 'I dance’,” argued Dick.

“Quite right,” said the priest. “Thinking is particularly

applied to the soul, to the essential someone that is I. We
don’t say,

4

my brain thinks.’ But because the soul in man is

the principle not only of his thought processes but of all his

vital activities, the source of his natural life, we simply say,
*1 dance’ or

4

I walk’ and even ‘I sleep,’ though we know that

it is primarily our feet that dance and walk and our body

that sleeps.”

Did You Ever See Liberty?

Father Hall wanted to get back to that sentence. With

a little prayer of gratitude he wondered how it had happened

that a chance glance at a newspaper had given him a sen-

tence so to his purpose.

“By the way there were some rather remarkable words

in that sentence,” he prefaced.

They all looked surprised. It seemed to them that the

words were as a matter of fact pretty commonplace, pretty

much of the vocabulary of any fairly well-educated man.

“Let’s take the word liberty,” said Father Hall. “Did

you, any of you, ever see liberty?”

“I saw the Goddess of Liberty when I returned from

Europe,” said Evan, lightly. “And did I love her!”

“Not the Goddess of Liberty. . . . Did you ever see just

liberty? You’ve all seen free men; you live under free institu-

tions; you boast that you have rights that nobody can take

away from you. But liberty? freedom? rights? Did any of

you ever see, taste, touch, smell, or hear liberty or freedom

or rights?”

Unseen But Precious

Mr. Bradley looked thoroughly puzzled.

“Doggone it!” he muttered, “you’re right. Nobody’s ever

seen liberty, but a lot of men have died for it.”

“Everybody knows what freedom is,” supplemented Evan

Foster. “But you certainly can’t stuff it and hang it in your

library.”

29



“Quite right* It’s amazing really. We human beings talk
about, love, die for, and rate as most important in our lives

things that nobody has ever seen, touched, heard, tasted, or

smelled. WeVe seen free men, but never freedom. We know
what our rights are, but we can’t lay our hands on them, even

though we may lay down our lives for them. Our language

is full of words that denote such ideas. Indeed those ideas

are the most important, the most precious that we possess.

Beauty

“We know a beautiful woman when we see her, but we
can’t see beauty as such. Beauty in a woman makes that

woman beautiful. Beauty in itself is merely an idea. Honor

is something that you find in honorable men; but nobody has

ever seen honor. Justice, purity, the virtues of faith, hope,

courage, nobility, uprightness, honesty . . . we could go on with

that list forever. Really there’s no limit to the catalogue of

things that are so important to us that we strive for them

and die for them—even though we can’t lay our hands on

them, no matter how hard we might try.”

“It seems to me,’’ protested Mr. Bradley, “that when I

see an honorable man I see honor. When I visit a free coun-
try, I experience freedom.”

“All right. Go ahead and tell me what honor looks like.

Tell me how freedom feels.”

“Why ... I ... oh ... I see.” He suddenly grinned. “I
can describe an honorable man. And I can tell you the effects

of freedom. But you’re right. I can’t give you a picture of

honor or of freedom.”

A Tough Point

The priest spread his hands as if accepting the admission

as conclusive.

“I don’t see,” cried Mrs. Foster, with a slight pout, “ex-

actly what this has to do with our souls.”

“This,” apologized the priest, “is, I’ll admit, just a little

bit hard. We’ve some easier proofs that we’ll come to in a

minute. So if you want to doze or skip

30



“Don't cast aspersions on our intelligences/' Dick

threatened.

“If we can't follow the argument, who can?" triumphed

Sue.

Abstract

“All right; it's your own risk.

“The world is full of beautiful women and honest men.

It has free institutions and noble people. We have a power
inside us that enables us to do something most remarkable.

We look at a beautiful woman; we see her lovely face, her
finely chiseled nose, her lustrous eyes. We note about her
all that the eye can see. And then this power within us does

something most astonishing. From this beautiful woman it

pulls something that is entirely different form those physical

features—the idea beauty. That power enables us to take

that idea and match it against things that are totally unlike

a woman. Her beauty is like that of a rose, we say. This

landscape has the beauty of a woman, the poet thinks. The

beauty of a woman is like a melody.

“What have we done? From the concrete beautiful

woman we have managed to take the abstract idea beauty.

And that idea beauty is so universal in its application that

it can be referred to a rose, a landscape, a melody, a gazelle,

a swan, a graceful pine tree—yes and another woman.

Let’s take another example.

“We have dealings with an honest man. Our experiences
with that man lead us to say, ‘Honesty is a magnificent

thing.' So we go around trying to match the idea honesty

against governments, literature, weights and measures, the

piece of goods we buy, a picture that depicts some landscape.

We've abstracted the idea honesty from the honest man, and

the power inside us has made the idea so universal that we

swing it out and apply it to a thousand things that are really

unrelated."

Not Material

“I’d never really thought of that," said Sheila Foster to

her husband.

31



"Darling," he said, "why should you want to abstract

ideas from individuals when you can spend your time ab-

stracting money from your devoted husband?"

They were all alert, making a visible effort to follow the

argument as Father Hall was outlining it* But thus far they

could not see to what his argument was leading*

"Now," he said, "let's go to the next step* If anything

is clear, it is the fact that beauty, honor, freedom, justice,

rights and privileges are not material things."

"What does that mean?" demanded Mrs* Bradley.

"It means," her husband interposed, "that you can't buy

'em at a store and have 'em weighed and wrapped up and

brought home."

Beyond the Senses

"Not bad," nodded the priest, approvingly. "It means

that all these things never have been and never will be

seen, tasted, smelled, heard, or touched; they are above and

beyond the range of our senses.

"They are spiritual things, which is just another way of

saying that they are not material. You can't make a chemical

analysis of justice or send beauty to the laboratory to be re-

duced to so much carbon and sugar and starch. You can die

for liberty, but you can't put it in a safe-deposit vault. Yet

these things are tremendously important. In fact they are

the most important things in life.

"A mirror can reflect only the material object that is

placed in front of it* An eye can register only the color and
line that are before it. An ear can register only those sounds
that are within its range. I can feel the smoothness or rough-

ness, the heat or cold of the object under my hand.

What Power Knows?

"What power is it in me that knows justice, beauty,

honor, nobility? It's not any of my five senses, which termi-

nate in my brain and register there. It must be something

above my senses, something beyond the powers of my brain.
It must be a power that can pull out of material things the

spiritual ideas that we've been talking about. And a power

32



that can perform this operation that we know as abstraction
has to be spiritual.

That power in us is our soul. And since that power rises

above matter and pulls out of matter spiritual concepts that

cannot be seen, touched, tasted, smelled, or heard, it must be

spiritual too.”

4

What do you mean, spiritual?” demanded Dick.

"For the present let's put it as simply as possible: some-

thing that is beyond and above matter, a force that cannot

be reduced to chemistry and physics, a principle that has

powers wider than the powers of, let us say, a brain. A brain
registers sounds, colors, smells, tastes, pleasurable and pain-

ful experiences. The spiritual soul pulls out of these expe-

riences the wider, nonmaterial, universal ideas: beauty, grace

charm, pleasure, painfulness, and so on, indefinitely.”

Beyond Experience

"In other words,” supplemented Mr. Bradley, “we know

that we have a soul because we can think of things that our

brain has not experienced. Because the brain is chemical and

physical, it can handle only chemical and physical things.

But these abstract ideas are not chemical or physical; they

are above and beyond chemistry or physics. Therefore . .
.”

"Q. E. D.,” cried the twins, in one voice, and everyone

laughed.

"The more you analyze this thing,” continued the priest,

"the more convincing it becomes. We are constantly thinking
about things that do not come within range of our eyes or

ears or hands or tongues. We base our lives on ideas and
ideals that do not actually exist in the world of bodies in the

form under which we think about them. The brain is a body

and hence can deal only with bodies. But we are constantly

thinking about and concerned with things that are not bodies.

And so . .
.”

"I think I have it,” said Mr. Bradley. The rest nodded

in understanding, so Father Hall continued.

Spiritual Words

"Let's go back to that editorial sentence once more. Into

that sentence the writer wrote a most important word. He

33



wrote the word God. Certainly no one has ever seen God.

except of course those who saw Christ, the Incarnate God.

But by definition God is NOT material; God is spiritual. He
is above and beyond matter. He has no body, and hence our

*

senses cannot register Him on our brain—we cannot see,
hear, taste, touch, or smell Him.

“Yet here we are talking about God and thinking about

God. That is the same as saying that we have within us a

power that enables us to think of the most spiritual of beings.

Dogs don't go down on their knees and worship God.

Gorillas don't erect altars to a spiritual being. Ants may

have kings, and bees may have queens; but neither ants nor

bees have gods that they adore.

“It is left for man, and for the highest types of intellectual

man at that, to conceive of God, to think about Him and dis-

cuss Him—even when he denies Him—as a being without a
body, above the reach of our senses, on a plane that can be

thought of only by a nonmaterial principle. We could not
think of the spirit God unless we had a spirit within us to do

that thinking. Matter works on matter. Force works on

force. And only spirit can work on (in the sense of think-

ing of) spirit."

“Let's Fight"

“That sounds clear enough and reasonable enough," said

Father pere, and he found pleasant agreement among his

guests.

“Now let's take the last part of that important sentence,"
Father Hall went on. “Here we hit a relatively easy proof

for the existence of the soul. The sentence ends with the com-

mand, ‘Let's fight for it!'

“That command is the clearest possible indication that

the writer believes, even if he does not realize that he be-

lieves, that he and his readers have a soul."

The group was clearly interested and waited for the

explanation.

“When he wrote the sentence, the writer implicitly stated

that there were several alternatives, of which two were most

34



obvious. When their freedom was imperiled, free men could
determine to fight for it. Or they could grow slack and sit

back while their freedom was taken away from them. In

other words the author clearly indicated, when he begged

them to fight, that he knew they were free to fight or not to

fight. They might choose to struggle for their liberty, or they

might with a shrug of the shoulders let that liberty be lost.

Free Wills

“That is just another way of saying that men have free

wills/

*

Kevin McDermott suddenly exploded.

“Of all the nutty theories in the world the theory that

there is no free will is the nuttiest. We go through life con-
stantly exercising free choice. I pick out one particular tie

from among a dozen. I’m driving, and I decide to go down

this road instead of that one. I go to a restaurant, and I make

a choice between roast chicken and braised beef. I choose

a school to which to go, a club, friends, even—though she

had something to say about that—my wife. When I'm
tempted to sin, I know doggone well that I don’t have to sin.

And if I do sin, I don’t say to the priest, ’Sorry; but of course

I couldn’t help it’; I say, ’Sorry; I did wrong; I could have

done right, and I won’t do this sort of thing again’.’’

Bradley, their host, grew interested.

What a World Without . *

“Gosh! suppose men didn’t have free wills. Think of all

the men who have had an impulse to kick their annoyers in

the pants, or shoot a crying child, or rob a bank, or cheat at

bridge. They’d simply follow those impulses and alibi,

’Couldn’t help it. I’m not free’.’’

Mrs. Bradley laughed gaily.

“What possibilities that opens up!’’ she cried. “Imagine

using that as an excuse for telling people what you think of

them . . . and never doing anything you don’t want to do . .

.

and not paying your bills . . . and driving your automobile

through all the stop signs. .

.

35



“Wow! what a world that would be!” Kevin McDermott

looked positively worried.

“Don't worry, dear,” his wife assured him. “You won't

get away with it. If ever you come home three sheets to the

wind, or if ever you start to flirt with your stenographer,

don't tell me you have no free will. You may be able to tell

that to some psychology prof, but you won't get away with

it where I'm concerned.”

Chaos

The possibilities opened up by the thought of a world

without free will suddenly dawned on them ... a world in

which criminals would never be punished or even put in jail,

because the poor fellows couldn't help themselves ... a world

where a murderous kidnapper would be given a pat on the

head and sent on his blithe way ... a world in which men

could justify their stealing by saying they had no liberty of

choice . .

.

and roues could wreck the lives of their victims

and grin and say, ‘Sorry; I just couldn't help myself'. . . and

traitors to their country could no more be made to face the

firing squad than could heroes who had risked all for their

country . . . and wives would take their husbands' infidelity

for granted . . . and married women would be quite justified

in running off with the handsome chauffeur . . . and nobody

could blame or condemn a man who impulsively burned down

an orphanage . . . and Bluebeard would not be a villain or

even a particularly interesting case for the doctors . . . and

vice and villainy and crime in all their forms could simply

plead that since they were not free they had the same right

to respect and honor as did virtue and goodness and unselfish

love of fellow men.

Free Choice

“Anyhow,” summarized Mrs. Bradley, who thought very

intensely on the subject, “I know I'm free. I know that I'm

responsible for what I do. And all the arguments in the

world wouldn't convince me that I can't be good if I want to

be, or naughty if I want to be, and that I can't pick out this

dress in preference to that one, and can't chose to do my

duty as a mother or to walk out on my children because I've

decided they bore and annoy me.”

36



“Oh, mother!” cried Sue. “Please don’t do that”

“My darling,” replied her mother, “I know I’m stupid to
give my life to ungrateful brats like you two. But just the

same I keep on doing it. A chump, if you wish; but a free
chump, a chump from choice.”

The maid entered and served fresh coffee and pepper-

mints. It was a pleasant break. Depleted cups were replen-

ished, and colored wafers were deposited within easy reach

as Father Hall continued.

No Soul, No Freedom

“Unless we have a soul, free will is absolutely impossible,

so impossible that when men refuse to admit the existence of

of a soul they are inevitably forced into the absolutely ridicu-

lous position of refusing to admit free will.”

“That is the height of absurdity, against all our expe-

rience, against the practice of all men—who blame the villain
and praise the hero—against our courts of law—which pun-

ish misdeeds—against common sense.” Mr. Bradley spoke

with real conviction. “But why is the soul necessary?”

“Science,” Father Hall explained, “insists, if it insists on

anything, on the laws of nature. In chemistry, physics, astron-

omy—once you’ve learned the laws, you know that every-
thing follows with no more freedom than the freedom of an

electric current running along a copper wire. Put certain

chemicals together, and they have to unite, just as surely as

rust has to form on wet iron. Put water into a container that

is set in some odd position, and the water has to seek its own

level. Our railroads operate on the principle that steam must

do certain things if it is placed in cylinders.

Man Is Different

“Chemistry laws can be written into absolute formulas.

Given the correct circumstances, principles of physics always

work.

“But man? Well if man were made up just of chemicals,

he’d always have to act the way those chemicals act. If he

could be completely explained by physical laws, then under

a given circumstance he would have to do this or that. In

37



fact his body does act in just this way. Put his body too

close to the fire, and we have the chemical reaction known

as burning. Put his body at too acute an angle, and it obeys

the laws of gravity/'

"A polite way," suggested Dick, "for saying that when

a chap falls out of an airplane he isn't going to decide to fall

up toward the moon."

"Quite right. His body is completely physical, and it

obeys the rules of physics exactly.

Something Enters In

"But in every man there is something else besides the

body, something that says to the body, 'Do this,' and the

body obeys; 'Don't do this,' and the body refuses to move.

So though the flames may be burning the body of the martyr

to carbon ash, his free will holds back his cry of surrender

and orders his body to remain in the fire when a slight

gesture of renouncing the faith would mean freedom. All the

chemistry of the saint's body may be clamoring for some sin

of the flesh; his strong will refuses to yield, though that re-

fusal means a struggle that almost tears the man apart—the

struggle of the spirit against the flesh, we call it.

"My fingers may be itching to strike my enemy; I can
hold back the blow, even though I'm bigger and stronger

than he. Money or jewels may be a powerful lure for me; I

can refuse to steal, even though I may know that I could get

away with it.

"So you see in each of us there is something that is not

bound by the physical and chemical laws that bind our body.

I make choices that my body has to follow. It is not my body

that is free; my body is governed entirely by laws of chem-
istry and physics; my body is something that can be analyzed
in a laboratory and reduced to its elements in a retort. The

source of my freedom is something above and superior to my

body. That is precisely what we mean by a soul."

Powerful

Evan Foster nodded.

"That's a powerful argument," he agreed. "No soul, no

freedom. But the one thing we're sure of is that we have

38



freedom. We do things because we want to. We don't do
things because we don't want to. Hence we're free; there-

fore we have a soul."

The argument struck them as completly satisfactory. The

world couldn't go on unless men were free. All society acts

on the supposition that men are free. No soul, no freedom;

freedom, soul.

Divine Discontent

"Now there is in human beings another factor that I have

already referred to in passing," Father Hall went on. "Divine

discontent."

"I thought that was just something that lecturers talked

about at afternoon teas," said Mrs. Foster, mildly.

"Something that popular novelists use to explain why

heroines go wrong," added her husband.

"No," said Father Hall, "it's something we all have. And

if we didn't have a soul .

.

"Well?"

".
.

.

we wouldn't have divine discontent; that’s all."

Unique Man

They waited for an explanation.

"Despite the fact that we say of nature that she is rest-

less, nature is singularly restful. Certain elements like to

combine with other elements. Once hydrogen has united

with oxygen, the two elements become water and remain that

way in restful content. Animals are singularly happy. The

swallow built his nest in a certain way last year—in precisely

the same way that swallows thousands of years ago built

their nests in the ear of an Egyptian Sphinx—and the swal-

low next year will build his nest in the same way. The salmon

find their way back to the same spawning grounds year after

year. An old race horse turned loose in the Bluegrass doesn’t
pine for the snap of the starting barrier. He is utterly con-
tent with what he has.

"The whole history of man however is a story of his dis-

content. He has none of the peaceful power of combination

39



that chemicals have. He is eternally discontented with what
he possesses. Make his body strong, and he may develop

mental quirks. Give him bodily comforts, and he starts get-

ting into scrapes. Give him riches, and he breaks into the

scandal columns. He is earth's only dissatisfied animal.

He Improves

"Beyond that he has within himself the power to improve

his own lot and the lot of others. A beaver's instinct leads
the beaver to build his dam in a certain way. But a master

beaver does not become discontented with the way that

things are being done, does not go off and start making a

streamlined dam with air conditioning. Monkeys live in the

same sort of tree houses or caves that their remotest ancestors

found satisfactory. No animal has ever invented a tool, built
a new-type bridge, constructed a garage (much less a ship),

changed radically his form of housing, acquired any skill in

preparing food, developed the simplest form of art, or done

anything that its original instinct did not confer upon it as

an essential of its species.

"But man? Man is always making things different. He
changes the style of his house. He dresses differently today

from the way men dressed ten, a hundred, a thousand years

ago. He is always increasing his power by inventing new

tools. He is endlessly experimenting with new methods, new

ideas, new inventions. Not so long ago, having the earth

pretty well in hand, he started off through the air to show

the eagles and the homing pigeons a few tricks about long-

distance fast flying.

Entirely Different

"If all this doesn't indicate that there is in man something

that makes him very different from even the wisest and most

skillful and most powerful of animals, then I'm afraid that

nothing would show the difference.

"But note: This ability to improve requires the most elab-

orate sort of abstract spiritual thinking. The thinker sits

down and studies his problem— let’s say the problem of

throwing a bridge across the bay. No animals, except those
that are by nature bridgebuilders, even think of attempting

40



the problem. Animals die of starvation when there is food

on the other side of a narrow river.

“But the man who is faced with a problem like the build-

ing of a bridge does some marvelous things.

“He starts by making a statement of the problem in the

most abstract mathematical terms— feet and inches and yards

and pounds and logarithms and the terms of calculus. Please

remember that nobody ever saw in nature a foot, an inch, a

yard, or a pound—much less any of the mathematical equa-

tions with which the bridgebuilder works. Man pulled those

terms right out of the bodies in which they exist only in a

remote sense.

“Then the man deals with the problems of chemistry and

physics, the structure of steel, the stress of wind and weight.

Out of his brain he pulls facts about all these things, com-

bines them into new arrangements, and produces at the end

of all this work a unified, simple equation that balances steel

against strain, wire against wind, the laws of physical science

(laws that nobody has ever touched or handled) with the

laws of mathematics that the genius of mankind has pulled

out of the invisible world.

“Finally this man starts to work. He matches his solution

against his problem, and in the end he walks across a bridge,

a bridge which existed as an idea and ideal in his mind long

before the first shovelful of earth was turned.

Means to an End

“Nobody has ever begun to understand the amount of

abstract thinking required for a feat of this kind. All we

know is that no animal ever even pretends to attempt it or

to consider the possibility of attempting it. Yet Bushmen of

the Congo make primitive bridges skillfully enough to excite

the admiration of the civilized bridgebuilder.

“All this creative work we call adapting means to an end.

That is a uniquely human act. Only human beings can see

the end that they want to achieve, go after it decisively, ex-

periment and observe and abstract until they have found the

way to handle the problem, and then carry the solution

through.

41



4

‘The only animals who even remotely approach having

this process have only an instinctive method that was clearly

given them when their species came into existence. They

can instinctively do things beautifully one way. Change that

way, and they are as lost as a spider would be if it had to

start spinning a cocoon instead of a web, or as a beaver

would be if it had to start building anthills instead of dams.

Man builds both web and cocoon, dam and anthill, and he
learns, sometimes swiftly, sometimes slowly, to imitate every-

thing that he sees in nature. Whenever he faces a problem,

he calls on his ability to think, which ability cannot possibly

be explained by anything but a principle that is higher than

material nature and hence is master of material nature. And

that principle is his soul.

Discontented

“Bodies are satisfied; not so souls. Though bodies are

content just to be surrounded by other bodies, souls are

constantly trying to change, to improve, to create, to domi-

nate, to adjust, to build bigger, finer, more elaborate struc-

tures. Bodies are content with food and sleep and love. Souls

quickly weary of all these things. Souls want things they've

never seen and sounds they've never heard and beauty

they've never discovered and conquest of nature that no man

has ever made.

“If we were just bodies, we'd be as content as the cow in

the meadow or the pig in the sty or the eagle volplaning

across the sky or the bee gathering honey in a hidden hollow

tree. But we are not just bodies. So we make the cow serve

our purpose; we fatten the pig for our table; we learn from

the eagle how to conquer the sky; and we rob the bee of his

honey. In the midst of plently we are not content; we are

constantly, eternally seeking the things we haven't, and we

seek them by methods that no man has ever tried before.''

Simple Proof

Father Hall picked up his coffee cup. But the coffee was

long since cold, and he set the cup aside without regret;

coffee might keep him awake later on. He filled his pipe and

pulled at it once more.

42



“Yes,” mused Alma McDermott, aloud, “I rather think

I have a soul. Not,” she hastened to add, “that I ever really

doubted it. But it's nice to be sure, to know that there are

proofs, that common sense is on our side.”

“Why should people want not to have a soul?” demanded
Mrs. Bradley. “Truth to tell. I'd hate to think that I was

exactly like an ape . . . even though a little more decorative.”

“Very convincing, very convincing,” Kevin McDermott

conceded, nodding toward Father Hall. “But is there any

simple proof for the existence of the soul . . . something one

could flash on a friend who has doubts about the subject?”

Father Hall puffed out a balloon of smoke; gradually his

smiling face reappeared through the haze. He pointed a

finger at the inquirer.

Cross-question

“What's your name?”

McDermott blinked.

“Hey! what's the idea? Playing district attorney?”

“Never mind. Answer the question.”

“Kevin McDermott, age forty-two, white, free (though

married), American.”

“Forty-two, eh? Remember by any chance a little kid

named Kevin McDermott age six, who ran around barefooted

during the summer, climbed trees, used a slingshot perilously,

and was a general nuisance to the neighbors?”

“That”—Kevin nodded—“was me all over.”

“And do you remember the thirteen-year-old Kevin Mc-

Dermott that graduated from grammar school in his first pair

of long pants and wanted to be a big-league baseball player?”

“Also present and accounted for.”

Through the Years

“Let's see . .

.

the young bridegroom Kevin McDermott

is about twenty-three, and he's as nervous as a freshly-

landed trout.”

43



" Perfect figure of speech for a newly-married man/'

"Remember that young married Kevin McDermott who

came to Lakeside when he was in his early thirties? He

played a wicked game of tennis in those days before he grew

sedate enough for golf* And he had just acquired the new

job as secretary of his company*"

"Heavens!" sighed Kevin* "Seems like yesterday*"

"Suppose I told you that those four people I described,

all of whom you think were yourself, were really not you at
all but were four completely different, four other people."

"You’d forgive me if I laughed, I hope*"

The Same Man

"And suppose that back in your early twenties you had

committed a crime—robbed a bank, let’s say, or kidnapped

a millionaire’s baby—and that just as you stepped out of the

house this evening the law finally caught up with you."

"Hey! stay out of my sordid past."

"Would you go on the witness stand and say, 'Sorry, but

though that criminal bore the same name as I do and looked

like me. I’m an entirely different fellow from him’? Would

you?"

"I might, but I wouldn’t expect to get away with it."

"Then you, Kevin McDermott, are sure that you’re the

same chap that spent a summer at Lakeside for the first time

ten years ago, that married Alma when you were in your

early twenties, that graduated from grammar school, that

played around in your bare feet?"

"Why certainly* I know I’m the same fellow* I think
the same thoughts* I remember the experiences that I had.

And if I had committed a crime, believe me. I’d know, even

after the lapse of twenty years, that I was the guilty person."

Father Hall leaned back with a smile.

"Then you’ve proved conclusively that you have a soul."

McDermott looked puzzled.

"No can follow," he said.

44



Demands a Soul

"The argument is simply this: You know that you at six,

at thirteen, at twenty, at thirty, at forty—-yes at one hundred

and ten, if you live that long—are the same person, Kevin

McDermott. If anyone told you that you weren’t, you’d hoot

in his face.’’

"Rather!’’

"Yet at thirteen nothing remained of your body as it was

at six. Every seven years the food you eat has completely

replaced in your body every least fragment of bone, every

inch of tissue, every drop of blood. At twenty you have a

different body from that which you had at thirteen; at thirty

your body is again different from your body as it was at

twenty; and so on, every seven years.’’

"But I’m still the same me.’’

"That’s the point. You are, and you know you are. And

if anyone tried to tell you that you weren’t, you’d know he

was crazy. But do you see why that proves that you have a

soul?’’

The Arguments

McDermott thought rapidly.

"If my body changes every seven years and nothing of
my old body remains in my new one . . . and if I have nothing
but a body . . . then every seven years I’m an entirely new

person. Is that it?’’

"Go on,’’ ordered the priest.

"So since I have a new body every seven years and my

old body is gone . . . and if I have nothing but a body .

.

He looked up in triumph. "Why I have to have something
permanent, unchanging, something that remains when the

body changes . . . otherwise .
.’’

McDermott hesitated.

"You’re on the right track. Push ahead,” urged Father

Hall.

"Otherwise I’d be a different person every seven years;

and when I thought that Kevin McDermott today was the

45



same chap that he was at thirty, at twenty, at thirteen, at six.

I'd be wrong* But doggone it, I know I'm the same person!

And since my body isn't the same, the thing that makes me

the same must be a permanent, unchanging soul/'

The priest grinned triumph.

“Perfect! So an author can change his desk, put in new

filing cabinets, throw away the old clippings and old notes,

and as long as he is there in the center of these things, he is

the same author. And the unchanging soul in the center of
our constantly changing body keeps us the same person and

gives us the assurance that we are the same person. Simple
and conclusive/'

What About the Brain?

Evan Foster struck a match and thoughtfully lit a dgaret.

He had a question in his mind—as they all had, though thus
far they had not brought it out.

“What about the brain in all this?"

Bradley pere looked up in sharp interest.

“Yes. What about the brain?"

Then they all shot into the argument: If the brain is

defective, thinking is defective. ... If a man is hit on the head,

he's knocked unconscious and stops thinking. ... If he has a

brain lesion, he goes crazy. ... If one section of his brain

stops functioning, he stops remembering and stops using the

data in that section of his brain.

Then suddenly they all fell silent.

“So clearly the brain and thinking go together," Foster

summarized. “And if it's the brain that thinks, I don't see

why we need a soul."

Father Hall stretched out his legs comfortably.

Violin and Violinist

“Let's take another comparison. Fritz Kreisler the violim-

ist comes to town. He goes to the concert hall, takes out his

Stradivarius, and gives a magnificent concert. When it is

46



over, the audience applauds. Are they applauding Kreisler or

the Stradivarius?"

“Why Kreisler of course/' Sheila Foster loved to answer
simple questions.

“Now let us suppose that when Kreisler is halfway
through his concert, the E string of his violin breaks. He
continues playing, improvising as best he can. Does he stop

being a violinist because his violin lacks the E string?"

“Certainly not," said Evan Foster. “He's still a violinist

even if .

.

“.
. . even if," Father Hall went on, as Foster hesitated,

“he should come to the hall and have no violin. Let's say that

the Stradivarius has been run over by a truck and been

smashed. Kreisler comes to the concert hall, reaches down

into the orchestra pit, and borrows an inexpensive violin from

one of the men in the orchestra. What would happen?"

“I suppose the tone wouldn't be so good as the tone of the

Stradivarius would have been," said Foster. “But Kreisler

would still be a great musician."

Working Together

Father Hall smiled in approval.

“Excellent. And that isn't a bad parallel to explain the

brain's function. Man is a creature composed of body and
soul."

“That's not too original," jeered Dick, with mock

impertinence.

“Be respectful, young man," cried Sue, severely.

“And because man is not an angel," continued the priest,

“his creator intended that his body and soul work together.

Man's soul is the higher factor, but his body is still an essen-

tial element in his make-up. Angels are different; they are

pure spirits, having no bodies. But even when we are in

heaven, waiting for the resurrection of our bodies, our souls

will be incomplete and in a sense unfinished until they are re-

united with our bodies.

47



"We -think with our soul. Or, putting it more concisely,
our soul is the thinking principle. But because we are com-

posed of body and soul, while we are on earth the soul uses

the brain as an instrument. The great Kreisler is a violinist

even if he has no violin. He is a perfect violinist even when
the E string on his violin is broken. With an inferior violin
he plays inferior music. But that isn't the fault of the player;

it's the fault of the instrument.

The Instrument

4

4

So our soul is the thinking principle. It uses the brain as

the instrument. If something cracks in the brain, the instru-

ment is less perfect and thinking is impaired. If the instru-

ment is smashed, the thinking for the time stops, but the

thinker does not cease to be. When finally the soul is sepa-
rated from the body, God supplies for the brain— if after

death there is (and there probably isn't) any need for an

instrument; the thinking principle, still complete, resumes

thinking and willing according to God's plans until the day

when body and soul, brain and mind, are again united. Then

the thinking musician again has his brain-violin, and he be-

comes again the complete man, a creature composed of body

and soul.

44

That's a crude figure of speech. But it may serve to

make clear the fact that the brain is the instrument that the

thinking soul uses. Without the brain the thinking soul may

be as lost as an author would be if his files were destroyed

or his desk completely disarranged. But the soul would still

be the thinking principle, as the author would still be the

writer, and the violinist the great musician."

Quiz

Father Hall looked at the group speculatively.

"May we have a little examination?" he asked, almost

with hesitation.

"Why not?" returned Dick. "After the things dad's said

about my grades. I'd like to see him flunk a psychology quiz."

"Let me listen," pleaded Sheila Foster. "The rest of you

are so much brighter than I."

48



“Shoot,” said Mr. Bradley, and the others nodded with

more or less enthusiasm— chiefly. Father Hall noted, less.

“Well,” he began, “how do you know that you have

something besides a body?”

That's easy,” replied Sue, grabbing what she felt would

be the simplest question. “Because I know I'm me, and I'm

conscious that the person who is me is the same person who

used to be me. But my body changes every seven years. So
in order for the present me to be the same as the me that I

used to be, I must possess something permanent. That's my

soul.”

All Agree

“She would take a snap question,” scoffed her brother.

I’ll bet I land a lulu and get stuck for a flunk or a condition.”

Father Hall surveyed the group.

“Any other answers?”

“All men of all races,” began Mrs. Bradley, tentatively,

“have been sure that besides their body they had something

else, something we call the soul.”

Father Hall shook his head.
i

“Men have a way of being frequently wrong.”

Kevin McDermott put in his oar.

“But before you can say that they were right or wrong,

you have to find out why they hold what they hold. In this

case they investigated and observed. They found that there

was in them a principle that made them different from the

rock, the tree, the sheep.”

“What do you mean by a principle?”” demanded the

priest, sternly.

“Why it's the source from which something flows. It's
the power that we see working in some sort of manifestation.”

What Man Does

Father Hall beamed.

“What a bright class!” he murmured.

49



“.
. . said the teacher, with a bow to himself,” said Sue,

in a loud aside.

“Well what precisely does a man do that marks him off

from the rock, the tree, and the sheep?”

“My turn,” cried Alma McDermott, seizing an easy one.
“He thinks; he wills; he is a creator; he has a bad attack of

divine discontent.”

Her husband regarded her with admiration.

“To think that I married a genius and all these years

never even suspected it!”

“Darling,” replied his wife, brightly, “it’s still not too late

to appreciate what you got when you got me.”

Spiritual

Father Hall surveyed the group sternly.

“I don’t see any difference between the thinking that a

man does and the thinking that’s done by, let’s say, an in-

telligent dog—one of these seeing-eye dogs—or an educated
*»

ape.

“Oh you don’t, don’t you?” retorted Mr. Bradley. “Well

a man has the ability to think spiritual thoughts.”

“Spiritual thoughts?” mocked his inquisitor. “Never heard

of ’em.” He fixed Bradley with a cold eye. “What's a

spiritual thought?”

“A spiritual thought, as far as I understand it—” BracU

ley began.

“Oh dear!” interrupted his wife, with a wail, “here’s

where we get a little psychological heresy.”

“—is a thought,” persisted Bradley, “that cannot be per-

ceived through the senses. It’s a thought about something

that you cannot touch or see or hear or taste or smell.”

“Example, please,” commanded Father Hall.

“Justice, loyalty, beauty . .
.”

50



"You would drag in beauty," said his wife.

"Living with you, my dear, how could I fail to? And
then there's the great spiritual idea of God."

New Light

Evan Foster got a sudden light.

"Just a minute. If we didn’t have souls, how in thunder

could we possibly be discussing them? A soul is spiritual.
When we start arguing about the spiritual thing called a soul,

it means that we have to have a spiritual power in order to

think about it at all, don't we?"

"Excellent!" Father Hall beamed. It was such an intelli-

gent comment, and he loved a thinker who pushed ahead of

what the teacher had taught.

Alma McDermott took the floor.

"You all missed an argument that I liked-—about the

author's writing the book."

Father Hall turned toward her. She was very eager and

looked particularly charming as she sat forward, the light of

the fire on her keen face.

The Unifying Principle

"Let’s hear it," he said.

"Well in order to write a single book, an author gathers

all sorts of odds and ends out of his experience, memory,

library, notebooks—various sources. And because he’s one
person, he can put these odds and ends together to make a

unified book."

She paused. They nodded approval and encouragement.

"Well," she went on, "it seems that our brain is a kind

of filing case. And if there weren't something to pull out of
the various nooks and crannies of our minds ..."

"Don't you like that nooks-and-crannies idea?" purred

her husband. "I'm surprised she didn’t do a Doc Dwarf and

have crooks and nannies."

51



“Please,” said she, severely, “don't interrupt my flow of
thought.” He wilted elaborately. “As I was saying, some-
thing in us has the power to pull things out of our brain, get

them together, and present them in logical sentences and

complete unified statements. There!”—she glowed at the

rest— “if I'm not a star pupil!”

“Line forms at the left for medals,” announced her

husband.

“I'll let you wear mine sometime,” she said, benignly.

Free Will

They were all silent for a moment.
i

“No more?” asked Father Hall.

“Oh yes,” cried Sue. “There's free will."

They gave her the floor.

“Chemical and physical substances haven't free will.

They have to obey the natural law. Our bodies are com-

posed of chemical and physical substances; they should obey

the laws. But we know that there is something in us that is

free.”

“I'll tell the world!” agreed her twin. “Just try to make

me do what I don't want to do!”

“So since our bodies aren't free, we must have something

else, something superior to our bodies. That something is

what we call the soul.”

Bradley pete took up the theme.

“The thing that hits me hardest is the clear difference

between men and animals, all that stuff about man the creator,

man the discontented. That knocks me flat. And I'm darned

if I can see how anyone can get around that. When monkeys
start building automobiles or even making themselves a good

pair of roller skates, I'll start believing that I'm not essentially

different from the monkey.”

Father Hall spread his hands in a gesture of conclusion.

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“Well simply and without any of the more difficult argu-

ments, that's that.”

What's Simple?

But Mrs. Bradley was not quite satisfied.

“Somewhere I've heard,” she said, “that a human soul is

simple.” She looked her puzzlement. “Exactly what does

that mean?”

Father Hall seemed a little nonplussed.

“I wonder whether I can make that clear in a few words,”

he said, half to himself. “Suppose we all work together on

this. Hold out your right arm, each of you.” They obeyed,

each one thrusting his right arm well out into space. “Note

that the characteristic thing about matter, about anything

material, is that it has parts outside of parts.”

“Meaning which?” demanded McDermott.

“Well look at your forefinger. That is material. So it

has a first joint and a second joint and a third joint. Now
bend your forefinger toward you; it touches your palm.” He

looked up to see them all actually doing it. “And if you bend

your elbow, you have your forearm moving toward your

upper arm and your closed fist touching your shoulder . .

.

parts outside of parts. That is what we mean by matter. It's

true of all matter—the smallest molecule, its atoms one out-

side the other; the biggest solar system, the suns and the

planets all outside one another.”

Matter Vs* Spirit

He thought quickly.

“Now a spiritual thing is something that has no parts.
It has no parts outside of parts.”

“I can't get a picture of that,” protested Sheila.

‘Don't try,” said the priest. “You know what we mean

even though you can't get a picture of it. You know with

your spiritual soul; you can't get a picture because you get

pictures in your brain, and your brain can't present a picture

of a thing that is essentially spiritual.”

53



“Ouch!” said Evan. “Think, darling; don't go in for

movies.” Father Hall resumed.

“We say that the soul has no parts. It is simple, without
any parts outside of parts. There are many proofs for that.

But there is one proof that is rather easy and, I think, satis-

factory. Everyone kindly look at his forefinger again.”

They all concentrated.
*

No Parts

“Now,” said the priest, “touch your right forefinger with

your right forefinger.” He looked around the group. “No

cheating there. I mean touch the tip of that forefinger with

the tip of that same forefinger.”

“You're kidding us,” cried Bradley pere. “I can touch my

right forefinger with my left forefinger. I can touch the third

joint with the first joint. But of course I can't touch the first

joint with that same first joint.”

“That,” said the priest, “is because your forefinger is

matter, because it has parts outside of parts.”

They looked at their forefingers as if they were seeing

them for the first time.

“All of us have the most peculiar experience when we

think. If we should stop to think about our thinking, we

would realize that a marvelous thing was happening: We
have touched ourselves in the process of thinking. While

a forefinger can't touch the same forefinger, a thought can

touch the thought.”

“Hey!” cried Mr. Bradley. “Again, and slower. That's

pretty thick.”

Consciousness

“We've all been sitting here tonight,” explained the

priest, “doing some quite elaborate thinking. As we thought,

every once in a while it occurred to us, 'Isn't this astonish-

ing? I’m thinking all these unusual thoughts.' That's what

we call consciousness. Consciousness means that not only

54



are we thinking but we know that we are thinking; we turn

back on ourselves and say, 'I am thinking, and these thoughts

are mine/ That's a most marvelous performance, marvelous

because we do it all the time without realizing that we are

doing it, without pausing to think about how we do it. I

think; my thoughts touch themselves thinking; I am conscious

that I think. I have a double action as I think; I know my

thoughts, and with those same thoughts I know myself

thinking."

“Whew!" whistled Dick.

"In other words my forefinger can't touch my forefinger

because it has parts outside of parts. But my soul can think

and touch itself thinking. My thoughts know that they are
thoughts and that I am thinking. And only with a simple

thing, a thing without parts, can that be possible."

They looked a little bewildered.

Late Hour

"Think it over," he said. "The more you think about it,

the clearer it becomes. Remember that you can't touch your

forefinger with the same forefinger. But remember that while

your soul is thinking it touches itself thinking. That is con-

sciousness, and consciousness is possible only in something

that has no parts."

He glanced at his wrist watch.

"Why it's almost midnight," he cried. "I'm terribly sorry.
I'll have to race away. This is no hour for an ancient clergy-

man to be alone in a big city."

Mr. Bradley lifted a detaining hand.

"How do you prove that our souls are immortal?"

Father Hall shook his head.

"You're not going to get me into that tonight," he said.

"That’s too big a question. We'll talk about that some other

night. It'll be enough for this evening if you realize that you

55



have a soul and that Christ told you that that soul was going

to live as long as God lives and that you'd better save it—

or else.

Reasonable Faith

“But do," he pleaded, “remember that the Catholic faith

is as reasonable in this question of the soul as she is in all

else. She has accepted and has made her own all the reason-

able proofs for the existence of the soul. Belief in the exist-

ence of the soul rests on common sense, on experience, on

sound philosophy, on our consciousness and observation, on

proofs that have never been thrown down under even the

most vicious attacks. In admitting the existence of the soul,

we take our place among all the greatest thinkers of all the

greatest ages of history.

“We go even further. Having proved the existence of
our soul, we come to Christ to learn the incredible value of

souls. We see God purchasing men's souls with His death.
We see souls drawing God from heaven to dwell with them.
We see souls dignified to the position of God's bright saints
in the kingdom of His glory. We see souls receiving a share
of the divine life through the sacraments and nurtured with

the body and soul of the Incarnate God through the Eucharist.

“Philosophically and scientifically speaking, belief in the

existence of souls is a profoundly reasonable belief, proved

to the hilt. But beyond that, in the teaching of Jesus Christ

souls become the dearest concern of the Blessed Trinity:

They are cradled in the infinite love of the eternal Father,

redeemed by the blood of the divine Son, lifted to divine

possibilities by the spirit of God.

“It is a glorious thing to prove that we have souls. It is

a far more glorious thing to realize that those souls are our

guarantee of eternal happiness in the living presence of

divine beauty and truth.''

They all said their good nights, happy in the warm con-

sciousness that they were not animals, not just earthborn and

earthbound creatures destined for an ugly grave, but the

precious sons and daughters whose souls, ennobled by sanc-

tifying grace, made them very like their creator and Father,

56



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