1- 
 
 EXCHANGE 
 
 The Belief in Immortality 
 
 BY 
 
 SIMEON SPIDLE, B. D. 
 
 Fellow in Psychology, Clark University 
 
 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF 
 CLARK UNIVERSITY. WORCESTER. MASS.. IN PARTIAL 
 FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE 
 DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY. AND ACCEPTED 
 ON THE RECOMMENDATION OF G. STANLEY HALL 
 
 N 
 
 Reprinted from the Journal of Religious Psychology 
 January, 1912, Vol. 5, No. i, pp. 5-51 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/beliefinimmortalOOspidrich 
 
The Belief in Immortality 
 
 BY 
 
 SIMEON SPIDLE, B. D. 
 
 Fellow in Psychology, Clark University 
 
 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF 
 CLARK UNIVERSITY. WORCESTER. MASS.. IN PARTIAL 
 FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE 
 DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY. AND ACCEPTED 
 ON THE RECOMMENDATION OF G. STANLEY HALL 
 
 •V 
 
 Reprinted from the Journal of Religious Psychology 
 January, 1912, Vol. 5, No. i, pp. 5-51 
 
S7 
 
 *..*'::♦: ^ 
 
THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY. 
 
 By SIMEON SPIDLE, B. D., 
 Fellow in PsycJiology, Clark University. 
 
 Introductory. 
 
 The present writer makes no claim to having any special light 
 to shed upon the age-long question of immortality. He is rather 
 an inquirer than an illuminator. Having been for a number of 
 years interested in this subject, there has grown up in his mind 
 a desire to make somewhat of a first-hand study of it. Others 
 have worked in this same field and have given us, from time to 
 time, the results of their investigations. All this is necessary in 
 order to know how the current of thought concerning the belief 
 in an after life is tending. No one cross-section of the belief 
 can tell us this. We need several such cross^sections in order 
 to indicate the direction of its flow. If the study made in 
 this paper shall in any small degree contribute to this end, the 
 writer's purpose will be abundantly fulfilled. 
 
 The subject will be treated under four general heads. First 
 of all we shall attempt an analysis of the concept of immortality 
 with a view to determining the different senses in which that 
 concept is used. Next we shall outline the different theories 
 which have been advanced to account for the origin of the belief. 
 Then we shall make a brief survey of the grounds upon which 
 the belief rests. And, finally, we shall give the results of our 
 own empirical study regarding the present status of the belief. 
 
 The numbers included in brackets refer to the corresponding 
 numbers in the bibliography at the end. Where the letter p is 
 prefixed to the number, the reference is to the page of the book 
 quoted. 
 
 I. Types op Immortality Concepts. 
 
 1. Plasmic Immortality: 
 
 No part of the furnishings of the human mind is endowed 
 with greater plasticity than the concept of immortality. It is 
 capable of being moulded into a great variety of forms. Not 
 infrequently do we hear the word used with reference to the 
 rejuvenating power of protoplasm. Not long since, while in 
 
 255770 
 
6 JOURJSPAi, OJP RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 conversation wrtn a- proinment biologist, I made some inquiry- 
 regarding the work being done in his class room. The reply 
 that I received was that he was just then engaged in carrying 
 his class through a course on the ''immortality of protoplasm." 
 This may seem like a strange application of the term to one 
 who is unacquainted with the facts of biology, but to one who 
 is cognizant of those facts the application seems entirely justi- 
 fiable. As every one knows, it is a truism of biology that "no 
 protozoa have any dead ancestors." These creatures, lowest in 
 the scale of animal life, and composed of one tiny cell of proto- 
 plasm, never die under normal conditions. The whole mass of 
 the cell is, in a sense, reproductive in its function, the mode of 
 reproduction being that of cell-division. Taking the case of the 
 amoeba, which is the lowest form of all, each parent cell divides, 
 without loss or death of any of its material, into two equal parts. 
 We have then two creatures instead of one, each having half of 
 the protoplasm of the original cell from which they were pro- 
 duced. Here no part of the original cell can be said to be the 
 corpse of a being that has perished. No being has perished. It 
 has simply transformed itself into two beings. The only pos- 
 sible way of looking at such a process as this is to say that the 
 substance and life of the original cell are continued on under 
 changed conditions without loss or death. 
 
 And this fact of plasmic immortality is not confined solely 
 to the protozoan level of life. Modern embryology has revealed 
 to us that, in a limited sense, this same principle obtains also on 
 the higher levels of life, including man himself. Physical death, 
 or "the birth of the corpse," took place in the animal series, as 
 a normal experience, only when in the metazoans the cells began 
 to divide themselves into two specialized groups, the somatic, or 
 vegetative cells, and the reproductive cells. The vegetative cells 
 then assumed the function of forming for the animal a body. 
 In doing so, they lost their original power of perpetual rejuvena- 
 tion and thus became subject to dissolution and death. Why 
 they should have done so is still one of the unsolved problems 
 of biology. Far different, however, was it with the reproduc- 
 tive cells. They still retained their rejuvenating power. Both 
 in the case of viviparous and oviparous reproduction, the off- 
 spring is simply a fusion of two parent cells which have detached 
 themselves from the reproductive cells of the parent bodies. 
 The whole chain of animal life, therefore, from the amoeba up 
 
SMDLE; IMMORTALITY 7 
 
 to man, is simply the product of one continuous chain of death- 
 less protoplasm which is "eternally young, eternally reproduc- 
 tive, eternally forming new individuals to grow up and perish, 
 while it remains in its progeny always youthful, always increas- 
 ing, and always the same. Thousands upon thousands of gen- 
 erations which have risen in the course of the ages were its pro- 
 ducts, but it lives on in the youngest generations with the power 
 of giving origin to coming millions. The individual organism 
 itself is transient, but the embryonic substance which produces 
 this transient organism preserves itself to all ages imperishable, 
 everlasting, and constant." 
 
 2. Influential Immortality. 
 
 But, rising to a somewhat higher level, we meet with an en- 
 tirely different use of the term immortality. This time it is 
 applied to the permanent character of human influence. If we 
 designate the former use of the word as denoting a strictly 
 biological conception, we may designate this latter use as denot- 
 ing a strictly positivistic conception. 
 
 Perhaps no better statement of this use of the term could be 
 formulated than that given by Biichner, the famous exponent 
 of German materialism during the last century. In speaking 
 of death and immortality in his Man in the Past, Present and 
 Future (p.225), he says: 
 
 ** Great philosophers have called death the fundamental cause of all 
 philosophy. If this be correct, the empirical or experimental philosophy 
 of the present day has solved the greatest philosophical enigmas, and has 
 shown (both logically and empirically) that there is no death, and the 
 great mystery of existence consists in perpetual, uninterrupted change. 
 Everything is immortal and indestructible — the smallest worm as well as 
 the most enormous of celestial bodies; the sand-grain and the water-drop, 
 as well as the highest being in creation, man and his thoughts. Only the 
 forms in which being manifests itself are changing. Being itself remains 
 eternally the same and imperishable. When we die, we do not lose our- 
 selves, but only our personal consciousness or the causal form which our 
 being, in itself eternal and imperishable, had assumed for a short time. 
 We live on in nature, in our race, in our children, in our descendants, in 
 our deeds, in our thoughts, in short, in the entire material and psychical 
 contribution which, during our short personal existence, we have furnished 
 to the subsistence of mankind and of nature in general.'* 
 
 Comte taught the same doctrine. He held that the only im- 
 mortality which any individual can reasonably expect to attain 
 is the perpetuation of his memory and influence in the race. 
 
8 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 This abiding influence he called ''subjective immortality," and 
 held it up in true Thanatopsis fashion as the great incentive to 
 noble living, the mighty motive to admission into the Company 
 of the Saints made perfect by Positivism. A similar view is that 
 of George Eliot, George Meredith, and numerous other writers 
 of note. In his poems entitled Earth and Man, and A Faith on 
 Trial, Meredith constantly exhorts men to live in their offspring 
 and to dismiss forever from their minds the fictitious desire for 
 a personal existence beyond this life. There is no such exist- 
 ence. The only immortality to which any man shall ever attain 
 is the immortal mark which his influence makes upon the race 
 in which he has, for a time, lived and moved and had his being. 
 
 3. Cosmic Immortality. 
 
 Leaving now these rather arbitrary uses of the word, we come 
 next to a somewhat more consistent and more metaphysical ap- 
 plication of the term. This time it is applied to the permanent 
 character of the universe itself. This is the pantheistic notion 
 of immortality, and as such may be designated as cosmic immor- 
 tality. The whole universe, it is said, is one great being which 
 is eternal and immortal. Out of this one unconscious cosmic 
 being has come the whole train of individual things, including 
 man himself. Each individual plays his part in his own day 
 and generation and then sinks back again into this great uncon- 
 scious world-soul out of which he originally sprang. In doing 
 so, he loses his distinctive personal identity but not his essen- 
 tial existence. Just as the drop of rain which falls into the 
 sea loses its own particular individual form in the great indis- 
 tinguishable mass of water, yet not its essential existence, so 
 does man fall back at death, soul and body, intot the one imper- 
 sonal essence of the universe, which is the great eternal God from 
 whom all came and to whom all return. 
 
 The great philosophic exponent of this view in modern times 
 was Spinoza, although the view is as old as philosophy itself. 
 Its first distinctive advocate was Xenophanes, the founder of 
 the Eleatic School of pre-Socratic philosophy. Religiously, it 
 may be said that the great exponent of this view is Buddha. The 
 heaven, or Nirvana, of Buddhism has long since been a bone of 
 contention, but for all practical purposes of thought it can be 
 regarded as identical with the heaven of the pantheist. It is 
 sometimes erroneously affirmed that Nirvana means annihilation. 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 9 
 
 But this is true only with reference to finite personality. Nir- 
 vana, in the true Buddhistic sense, does not mean the annih ilation 
 of existence itself. It means rather the annihilation of finite 
 individuality through the infinite unfolding of individuality 
 until it shall lose its finite limitations in becoming coexistent with 
 the universe itself. It is the annihilation of personality through 
 growth, just as the seed loses itself in the higher existence of the 
 plant, or the ovum in the higher existence of the fuU grown man. 
 Of course, the line of development toward this goal is by no 
 means straight-forward. It is a singularly sinuous one, with 
 numerous backward curvings of repeated reincarnations by 
 means of which the soul is purged of its egoistic impulses and 
 desires and thus made to take on the larger life of an impersonal, 
 cosmic existence. A very clear and sjnnpathetic exposition of 
 this view is given by W. S. Bigelow (7). 
 
 For the ethical import of this conception of a future existence 
 the reader is referred to C. L. Slattery's Life Beyond Life (61). 
 While not accepting this view of the future as his own, Mr. Slat- 
 tery is nevertheless forced to recognize in it a very lofty ethical 
 principle, the principle of moral solidarity. According to this 
 view the highest ethical effort of man consists in the elimination 
 of all his purely personal and egoistic impulses and desires by 
 merging them into the wider altruistic interests of the race. To 
 quote his own words, Mr. Slattery says: 
 
 "The selfishness of some forms of the Christian doctrine of immortality 
 is little short of ghastly. The smug satisfaction of the mediaeval saint, 
 leaving the world to its misery and sin that he might fit his own miserable 
 and puny soul for heaven, is not edifying, is not Christian. We have 
 grown to think the saint a truer saint if, with some little flecks from the 
 naughty world, he has stayed in the world and helped to raise others with 
 himself toward the heavenly vision. It is the great and growing sense of 
 brotherhood, of mutual responsibility, that is making us feel that we must 
 reach that other country with the rest of mankind, or it will after aU be 
 a sad and mournful abode for our loving, unselfish hearts. That is the 
 ideal toward which we strive. It is the kernel of vital truth hid within 
 the Buddhist's doctrine of Nirvana.'* 
 
 In passing, it may be said that we are here dealing with a view 
 of immortality which is widely held today by minds of great 
 refinement and culture. The reason for this we are told is noc 
 far to seek. Besides the ethical charm of an ever-expanding 
 altruism, already referred to, there is inherent in this view the 
 philosophic charm of a monistic conception of the universe 
 
10 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 which tends to satisfy the irresistible propensity of the human 
 mind to mentally construct its material into a universe rather 
 than a multiverse. There is, furthermore, inherent in this 
 view, it is said, the religious charm of a monotheistic conception 
 of the soul's relation to its God, and also the psychological charm 
 of a unifying conception of life which tends mightily to the 
 solidifying of personality, to the knitting together of psychic 
 experiences against the inroads of abnormal dissociations. With 
 all these features to commend it, we are not at all surprised to 
 find this the cherished view of many highly cultivated minds. 
 
 4. Personal Immortality. 
 
 There still remains another use of the term immortality to be 
 considered. This time it is applied to the survival of person- 
 ality itself. It is the theistic conception of the after life, and, 
 as such, is known as ''personal immortality." According to 
 theism, God is not the impersonal soul of the universe, as pan- 
 theism affirms, but is a transcendent personal Being, existing 
 independently of the universe and yet imminent in it as its 
 upholder and providential Ruler. Neither is the human soul 
 a part of the essence of deity, as pantheism affirms. It is rather 
 a secondary essence, a thing derived from the creative activity 
 of deity, which will ever retain its own essential, personal exist- 
 ence apart from, yet in ethical relations with, deity. As to the 
 exact nature of this personal identity there is a wide divergence 
 of opinion among theists. Some hold that the after life will be 
 a continuation of the present but under more favorable condi- 
 tions. Others hold to a sort of cataclysmic conception of death 
 by means of which the soul is to undergo at the moment of its 
 departure from the body a sudden and radical transformation 
 such as will purge out of it all traces of moral imperfection and 
 thus enlarge and intensify its capacities and powers beyond the 
 limit of anything which the most vivid imagination can now 
 envisage. 
 
 In general, it may be said that there are now held by theists 
 two radically different conceptions of personal immortality. 
 According to the one, the human soul is essentially immortal, 
 immortality being an inherent quality of soul-essence. Accord- 
 ing to the other, the human soul is not inherently immortal but 
 immortable, that is, capable of being made immortal. Those who 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 11 
 
 hold to the former view are driven by the logic of the situation 
 to postulate the personal survival of all human beings, good and 
 bad alike, while those who hold to the latter view escape the per- 
 plexing problem of caring for moral degenerates in the after life 
 by affirming that through lack of moral and spiritual cultivation 
 these souls never arrived at the state of actual immortality, the 
 result being that at death they simply go out of existence. In- 
 herent immortality, it may be said, is the orthodox view of pres- 
 ent-day Christian theology. It is held universally in the Greek 
 and Roman Catholic Churches and also by the great majority of 
 Protestant denominations. Whether or not the New Testament 
 teaches inherent immortality is a mooted question. Naturally 
 enough, the advocates of this view say that it does, and adduce 
 not a few passages in its support. On the other hand, the advo- 
 cates of immortability, or ''conditional immortality" as it is com- 
 monly called, say that it does not, and in like manner adduce a 
 respectable array of passages in support of their view. They 
 tell us that the New Testament holds out the hope of immor- 
 tality only to those who receive eternal life through faith in 
 Christ and devotion to that ideal of life by which he lived and 
 for which he died. The idea of inherent immortality, it is said, 
 crept into Christian theology during the Middle Ages at the 
 time when the teachings of Plato played so large a role in the 
 formation of Christian doctrine. The first outstanding voice in 
 modern times to be raised against this so-called relic of mediaeval 
 theology was Rev. Edward White of England. In 1846 he pub- 
 lished a book entitled Life in Christ, in which the conception 
 of attainable, as over against inherent, immortality was strongly 
 advocated. The logic of White's arguments is not generally 
 accepted today. But his book served to call attention to the 
 subject aiid to crystallize certain vague stirrings which were 
 then at work in the minds of men and which have since then, 
 especially within the last few years, taken shape in the well- 
 formed eschatological doctrine of conditional immortality. 
 
 Scientifically considered, this view has much in its favor. It 
 is the exact counterpart in the theological world of the doctrine 
 of the "survival of the fittest" in the scientific world. As ap- 
 plied to the question of immortality, the doctrine of the ** sur- 
 vival of the fittest" affirms that only those survive death who 
 are morally fit. The rest drop out of the race and become ex- 
 
12 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 tinct. Seizing upon this scientific postulate in support of his 
 view, the advocate of conditional immortality has only to tell us 
 who the morally fit are, who shall survive. They are the spirit- 
 ually renewed, he tells us, the recipients of the immortal life 
 through filial relations with God. It will be observed, of course, 
 that throughout this discussion the standpoint is religious and 
 philosophical. The existence of a spiritual entity called the soul 
 is taken for granted. The only question at stake is this, is this 
 spiritual entity inherently immortal or is it not. One camp of 
 theists says it is, while the other camp says it is not but that it 
 may become immortal. To this latter view one serious objec- 
 tion is raised. It is assumed by the advocates of immortability 
 that the soul is essentially mortal or subject to dissolution and 
 death, but that, by an ethical and spiritual readjustment of its 
 relations to God, it may be made essentially immortal. How, it 
 is asked, can any ethical and spiritual readjustment of relation- 
 ship between God and man effect a change in the essential con- 
 stitution of the human soul? Can love and obedience to God 
 reorganize, so to speak, the constituent elements of the soul so 
 as to ensure it against dissolution and death? What is this 
 essential change which takes place in the soul when it passes 
 from a state of mortality over into a state of immortality? Is 
 it not a pure fiction of the imagination born of a superficial cast 
 of metaphysical thinking ? Such is the objection offered by the 
 advocates of inherent immortality to the doctrine of immorta- 
 bility. And so the battle rages, each side holding its ground 
 with dogmatic tenacity, yet both agreed that whatever of future 
 survival there is, it must be of a personal character. 
 
 Such then are the four chief uses of the word immortality, the 
 biological, the positivistic, the pantheistic, and the theistic. The 
 first two can hardly be classed under the head of beliefs. A be- 
 lief is a conviction based upon considerations of greater or less 
 probability but falling short of actual knowledge based upon 
 experience. Plasmic and influential immortality are matters 
 of every-day knowledge. We know from experience that these 
 things are so. Cosmic and personal immortality, on the other 
 hand, are matters of belief. They rest not upon experience, but 
 upon presumptive evidence only. It is in these latter two 
 senses, therefore, and especially in the sense of personal immor- 
 tality, that we shall use the term in the remaining part of this 
 paper. 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 13 
 
 II. Theories Concerning the Origin of the Belief. 
 
 It is needless to say that in dealing with the matter of origin 
 we lose ourselves in an exceedingly dense maze of prehistoric 
 uncertainty. The precise point at which, in the unfolding of 
 the human mind, the idea of an after life first dawned upon the 
 threshold of human consciousness cannot be definitely deter- 
 mined. There may be little evidence of its presence during the 
 Palaeolithic age, but there is clear evidence of its presence during 
 the Neolithic period. The ornaments, weapons, tools and food 
 placed by the side of the dead, as well as the sacred drawings 
 upon tombs, etc., all seem to indicate some conception of sur- 
 vival. Especially true is this of the position of the body in the 
 tomb. One of the peculiar features of Neolithic burial was the 
 bent-up posture of the body to represent, apparently, the posi- 
 tion of the foetus in the womb. This fact is now regarded by 
 some ethnologists as a rather strong evidence of a Neolithic belief 
 in human survival. The grave may have been looked upon as 
 the womb of mother-earth from which the soul of the dead was to 
 be born anew into an after life. Some such motive, it is thought, 
 must have induced these early peoples to have placed their dead 
 in such an unnatural position. 
 
 The question now arises, whence came this belief? How did 
 man ever come to have awakened within him this conviction of 
 an after life? As already stated, we are here dealing with a 
 question that lies entirely outside the sphere of demonstrable 
 certainty. Our best knowledge is wholly a matter of conjecture, 
 based, of course, upon considerations of greater or less proba- 
 bility. Three such conjectures have been advanced. 
 
 1. Nativistic Hypothesis. 
 
 The first theory purporting to explain the origin of the belief 
 in immortality is that known as the ''nativistic" hypothesis. 
 According to this view, man came upon the stage of his earthly 
 existence with the idea of immortality ingrained into the very 
 structure of his mental constitution. Plato, of course, is the 
 classical exponent of this view. His theory is rather unique. 
 He held to the pre-existence of the human soul. Man *s earthly 
 life is a brief span, during which an eternal and immortal soul 
 links itself up for a time with a temporal and perishable body. 
 This spiritual voyager from the other world, in coming over into 
 this tenement of clay, brought with it a full stock of knowledge 
 
14 JOURNAL OP RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 acquired during its earlier existence. This epistemological outfit 
 then furnished the basis of all earthly advancement. The acqui- 
 sition of knowledge for Plato was simply and wholly a process 
 of reminiscence, a lifting up into the focus of clear consciousness 
 that which was previously known but which the process of rein- 
 carnation had for a time obscured. How has man come to the 
 idea of an after life? Plato answers, by calling to mind the 
 fact of his former life. The fact that he has lived carries with 
 it the necessary implication that he will live. And so, out of the 
 depths of his own soul, man fishes up his belief in immortality. 
 This, to be sure, is innateness with a vengeance, and, in the 
 crass form in which Plato held it, is not popular today except 
 among those who still believe in the doctrine of reincarnation, 
 notably the theosophists. 
 
 But there is a less drastic form of this hypothesis which has 
 been and is held very widely by those who do not believe in 
 reincarnation. Emerson may be cited as a good exponent of 
 this type. In speaking of the origin of the belief in immortality 
 he says: 
 
 ^'I know not where we draw the assurance of prolonged life, of a life 
 which shoots the gulf we call death and takes hold of what is real and 
 abiding. Here is the wonderful thought. But whence came it? Who put 
 it into the mind. It was not I, it was not you. It is elemental. It belongs 
 to thought and virtue, and whenever we have either we see the bearers of 
 this light. Whenever the Master of the universe has points to carry in his 
 government, he impresses his will in the structure of minds." 
 
 That expresses very clearly the essence of the nativistic hy- 
 pothesis. Man believes in his own future existence because the 
 idea of such an existence is imprinted upon each human soul by 
 the hand of its Creator. 
 
 The advocates of this hypothesis are very fond of quoting the 
 experience of Huxley in support of their view. As is well 
 known, Huxley was an avowed agnostic on the subject of immor- 
 tality. He neither affirmed nor denied it. He simply lived a 
 good life and wrought a good work in utter disregard of the 
 future. But strange to say, while he disregarded the future, the 
 future did not disregard him. In spite of all his agnosticism, 
 the thought of an after-life forced itself in upon him with sin- 
 gular persistency. In a letter written to Morley near the close 
 of his life Huxley makes this frank confession. He says : 
 
 ^ ' It is a curious thing that I find my dislike to the thought of extinction 
 increasing as I get older and nearer the goal. It flashes across me at all 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 15 
 
 sorts of times and with a sort of horror that in 1900 I shall probably know 
 no more of what is going on than I did in 1800. I had sooner be in hell a 
 good deal — at any rate in one of the upper circles where the climate and 
 company are not too trying. I wonder if you are plagued in this way." — 
 {Life and Letters, Vol. II, p. 67.) 
 
 Here, it is said triumphantly by the advocates of nativism, is 
 a striking confirmation of our position. Why was Huxley un- 
 able to shake ofi: this haunting idea of an after life? Simply 
 because it was a part and parcel of the native stock of his soul- 
 furniture. So far, all is plain sailing. Nothing could be more 
 simple and self-evident. We believe we are immortal because 
 the Creator has implanted the idea of immortality into the very 
 texture of our natures. Such is the theory, and so it might 
 stand were it not for the destructive weapons of the restless 
 critic. As all must see, the whole theory rests upon the philo- 
 sophic assumption of the validity of innate ideas, a philosophic 
 bark that has had a stormy sea on which to sail ever since the 
 days of Locke. As it is not within the scope of our present pur- 
 pose to discuss this basal principle on which the theory rests, it 
 must suffice to say that at best it is only an assumption, and, as 
 such, any theory resting upon it can carry weight only in so far 
 as the assumption itself is well grounded. 
 
 2. Revelatory theory. 
 
 A second conjecture which attempts to explain the origin of 
 the belief in an after life is that known as the "revelatory hy- 
 pothesis." According to this theory, the human race did not 
 come into existence with the idea of a future life imbedded 
 within the texture of its psychical operations, but received this 
 idea at a later date through the mediation of a divine revelation. 
 This revelation, it is said, was not an isolated experience of the 
 race, but was a part and parcel of a larger revelation which 
 marks the origin of religion itself. Referring to this view, Dr. 
 Brinton says, in his Religions of Primitive Peoples (p. 43) : 
 
 **A strong school of Christian writers, led early in this century by 
 Joseph de Maistre and Chateaubriand, and represented in our own tongue 
 by Archbishop Trench, have asserted that all faiths, even the most savage, 
 are fragments and reminiscences, distorted and broken indeed, of a primi- 
 tive revelation vouchsafed by the Almighty to the human race everywhere 
 at the beginning. These have occupied themselves in pointing out the 
 analogies of savage and pagan creeds and rites with those of Christianity 
 in proof of their theory." 
 
16 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 Here, then, we have a view which postulates the origin of the 
 belief in immortality as an integral part of a larger revelation 
 ''vouchsafed by the Almighty to the human race everywhere 
 at the beginning." But what about this original revelation, 
 asks the critic, both as to its historic validity as well as its psy- 
 chological possibility? Here again, it is said, we are standing 
 on the slippery ground of a great philosophic assumption, the 
 assumption of the possibility and validity of a supernatural reve- 
 lation, and with the credibility of this basal assumption, stands 
 or falls the credibility of any theory that is built upon it. 
 
 3. Genetic hypothesis. 
 
 A third conjecture purporting to explain the origin of the 
 belief in a future life is that known as the ' ' genetic hypothesis. ' * 
 According to this view, the belief originated not as the result of 
 an innate idea nor yet as the result of a divine revelation, but 
 rather as the product of man's whole mental reaction to his 
 environment during the early, plastic stages of his psychic de- 
 velopment. 
 
 The factors involved in this early experience of the race which 
 conspired to produce this belief are variously estimated by the 
 different supporters of this hypothesis. It is generally con- 
 ceded, however, that the tap root of the belief is to be found in 
 the fact of death itself. The human race has never taken kindly 
 to the idea of death. There seems to be a deep-seated desire in 
 every normal human being to live. In fact, so irrepressible and 
 universal is this desire in the whole gamut of life, that Darwin 
 was led to postulate the "struggle for existence" as one of the 
 bed-rocks on which to build his whole theory of evolution by 
 natural selection. ' ' The-will-to-live, " as it has been called, and 
 its counterpart, the dread of death, is regarded, according to 
 the genetic hypothesis, as the basal motivation out of which 
 the belief in immortality originated. 
 
 In this process of belief -making, dreams are thought to have 
 played an important role. The supposition is that at first primi- 
 tive man looked upon death merely as a deep, prolonged sleep 
 from which the slumberer would sooner or later awaken. Not 
 finding this expectation fulfilled, naturally enough a psychic 
 tension was produced, which issued in dreams concerning the 
 dead. Visions of them were seen. These visions naturally led 
 to the impression that these slumberers left their dwellings at 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 17 
 
 night and roamed abroad. Hence arose the idea of a double 
 or second self, which lingered around and was in some way- 
 dependent for its existence upon the same kind of nourishment 
 which had supported the body previous to death. Consequently, 
 food was taken at regular intervals to the tombs of the dead in 
 order to nourish the soul of the departed. 
 
 Haeckel emphasizes a somewhat different factor. In his Rid- 
 dle of the Universe, he seeks to account for the idea of immor- 
 tality in what he calls a "necessity of emotion." Taking his 
 cue from Kant, that the conviction of immortality is not a postu- 
 late of the pure or theoretical reason but of the practical or 
 ethical reason, he demolishes, to his own dogmatic satisfaction, 
 all the arguments hitherto advanced in support of a rational 
 belief in an after-life, and then, having done so, raises the 
 question, how did this transcendent delusion ever gain its grip 
 upon the human mind. His answer is that it sprang up out of 
 two fundamental emotional cravings of the human soul, the de- 
 sire for a better condition of life than is here enjoyed, and the 
 desire for a happy reunion with loved ones in this better land by 
 and by. Being pressed on every hand by innumerable adversi- 
 ties, and being denied a thousand delights which the heart most 
 eagerly desires, the crucified emotions are said to have taken 
 refuge in consoling dreams of a blissful existence beyond the 
 grave. 
 
 Others emphasize the element of aspiration as the fundamental 
 motive in giving rise to the belief in an after life. Primitive 
 man, it is said, launched out upon some great undertaking, but 
 before completing his task he is brought face to face with the 
 benumbing fact that he is about to die. Not being allowed to 
 carry out his cherished plan, he commits the execution of it to 
 the hands of another. This, however, fails to satisfy the lofty 
 aspirations of his heart. Proxy attainment will not do. With- 
 out himself his undertaking will be spoiled. No other mind can 
 adequately conceive his ideal, and no other hand can adequately 
 execute its attainment. He must complete the task himself. 
 And so, the wish being father to the thought, as is always the 
 case, there arises in his mind the settled conviction that he will 
 complete his task, that the present life with all its golden possi- 
 bilities is but an earnest of a future life in which all the broken 
 efforts of to-day shall be brought to a successful issue in the 
 larger attainments of to-morrow. 
 
18 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 But, someone asks, how can such a theory of the origin of the 
 belief in immortality explain the universality of this belief as it 
 exists among primitive peoples 1 Granted that such an idea did 
 by some happy accident strike its roots into the soil of some im- 
 aginative soul which was especially favored by native endowment 
 and local environment for the reception of it, how did it come 
 to disseminate itself so universally and at so early a date as the 
 Neolithic Age? The answer given by the genetic hypothesis is 
 that the universality of this belief rests upon a broad psycho- 
 logical principle, the unity of action in human intelligence. 
 Upon this fact the whole science of psychology rests. Unless 
 all normal minds functioned in a somewhat similar fashion, 
 there could be no such a thing as a science of psychology. There 
 could be psychologies of individuals, but no psychology of man as 
 such. Speaking of this law of unitary mental activity, Dr. 
 Brinton says, in his Religions of Primitive Peoples (p. 6) : 
 
 ''And here I must mention a startling discovery, the most startling, it 
 seems to me, of recent times. It is that these laws of human thought are 
 frightfully rigid, are indeed automatic and inflexible. The human mind 
 seems to be a machine. Give it the( same materials and it will unfailingly 
 grind out the same product. So deeply impressed by this is an eminent 
 modern writer that he lays it down as a fundamental maxim of ethnology 
 that 'we do not think, thinking merely goes on within us.' " 
 
 The bearing of this broad psychological principle upon the 
 universality of the belief in immortality among primitive peo- 
 ples is clear. The same fundamental laws of psychic activity 
 operated everywhere, giving to all men a like reaction to the 
 data of experience out of which the belief originated. 
 
 In an article in Harper's Magazine (13), on ''The Survival 
 of Human Personality," Dr. Alexander F. Chamberlain has 
 given, from the genetic point of view, a very clear presentation 
 of the supposed transmutations through which the idea of sur- 
 vival passed > in its early development in the race. At first, 
 primitive man had no conception of a personal immortality. 
 The surviving spirit had little or nothing in common with the 
 personality previous to death. Oftentimes it was looked upon, 
 even, as an evil spirit full of malevolent restlessness. But as 
 the idea and appreciation of personality became clearer in the 
 minds of men, the tendency arose to postulate personal identity 
 in the after life: 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 19 
 
 ''One great step was taken when man began to look upon himself as 
 something more than a mere reproductive being. As von Negelein has 
 pointed out, so long as man was regarded as a reproducer of offspring 
 simply, personality and its high implications were impossible and unthought 
 of. The perpetuation of the race having been assumed, the individual 
 might drop out of sight without concern or damage. The birth of his son 
 made the father a mere cipher in the community. The extent to which 
 such a belief could be carried is seen in the ancient Hindu practice, in 
 accordance with which the father who has repeated himself in his son, after 
 imparting to the latter the sacred veda-knowledge, which constitutes him 
 the very image of his parent, retreats soulless, as a beggar, into the forest. 
 His personality has become extinct on earth, and its survival in another 
 world would be a superfluity. At this stage of human thought self -repe- 
 tition, not the evolution of personality, was the care of mankind. And 
 woman fared much worse than man, whose appendage she was. She is con- 
 ceived of at this period as soulless often and devoid of all personality, as 
 also is her child until the soul and the personality of his father are trans- 
 mitted to him.'' 
 
 The writer then proceeds to show how this impersonal idea 
 was transmuted by slow degrees so as to take on the idea of a 
 personal survival. The first motivation to such a change he 
 finds in hero-worship, and, according to some, the first class of 
 heroes to be immortalized with personal survival was the warrior 
 class. In an age when the dominant interest of man was 
 physical prowess, naturally enough the warrior came to be 
 regarded with special veneration. His worthship to the com- 
 munity was supreme. Indeed, of such transcendent value was 
 his personality to the life of the community, that when he died 
 upon the battlefield fighting for his people it was an easy 
 transition in thought to follow him on in imagination into the 
 other world where he was supposed to survive in full posses- 
 sion of his personal powers to complete the struggle which he 
 had here begun. Having thus risen by slow degrees from the 
 plain of a belief in a mere impersonal survival to the exalted 
 plain of a belief in the personal immortality of the warrior, it 
 was an easy movement in human thought to extend this honor 
 to other great benefactors of the community. And so priests, 
 doctors, poets, and artists all came at an early date to be can- 
 didates for this glorious distinction of personal immortality. 
 Once having started in this direction, there was no obstacle to 
 impede progress until all men were included within its embrace, 
 and thus by slow but sure degrees the race came to its noon-day 
 conviction of a universal, personal survival. 
 
20 JOURNAL OP RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 Such, in brief, are the three leading hypotheses set forth to 
 account for the origin of the belief in an after life. Which of 
 these views best accords with the facts of the case must be left 
 for each individual to decide for himself. And this, we ar«? 
 happy to say, is an entirely safe proposition, for no man's wel- 
 fare either here or hereafter is in any way conditioned by thrr 
 validity of the theory which he may hold with regard to the 
 birth of humanity's idea of an after life. If the idea itself 
 can bear the pragmatic test, the manner of its origin has, after 
 all, only a theoretic interest. 
 
 III. Grounds Upon Which the Belief Rests. 
 
 In the interest of clearness we shall divide the arguments 
 advanced in support of immortality into three groups, the phUo- 
 sophicalj the scientific, and the religious. 
 
 1. Philosophical grounds. 
 
 At what particular time in the psychic development of the 
 race man began to philosophize concerning his belief in an 
 after life, seeking to buttress his sentiments and convictions 
 with more or less well-reasoned arguments, we do not know. 
 So far as we do know, it remained for Plato to be the first to 
 formulate arguments which carried with them the authority of 
 a rational demonstration of an after life. The crucial thing 
 in Plato's position was his belief in inherent immortalty. 
 Primitive man, as we have seen, was long in coming to this 
 conception. To him, personality was immortable rather than 
 immortal. But with Plato the idea of inherent immortality 
 stepped out from the shadows of primitive vagueness and once 
 for all made itself felt as a determining factor in the relig- 
 ious and philosophical thought of all succeedages. In a some- 
 what recent work Dr. J. A. Beet (5) traces out the influence of 
 Plato's views upon the formulation of the Christian doctrine 
 of a future life. In a brief resume of the ground over which he 
 has travelled he says : 
 
 '*We have now traced the popular and traditional doctrine of the end- 
 less permanence of all human souls to the teaching of Plato and to the 
 school of philosophers of which he is the most illustrious representative; 
 and have endeavored to prove that it was altogether alien from the phrase 
 and thought of Christ and his apostles so far as his teachings and theirs 
 are embodied in the New Testament; and that it entered into, and subse- 
 quently became prevalent in, the church mainly through the influence of 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 21 
 
 Plato, apparently in the latter part of the second century. We have also 
 considered the teaching of several modem theologians, but have not found 
 any one who seriously endeavors to prove that the immortality of the soul 
 is taught in the Bible" (p.88). 
 
 With this background of Plato's importance in the field of 
 philosophical argumentation for immortality, let us ask, what 
 were the grounds on which Plato based his belief and whence did 
 he derive it? It is commonly understood that Plato was in- 
 debted for his views regarding an after life chiefly to Pytha- 
 goreanism, the Greek religion, and the Greek mysteries which 
 were essentially immortality cults. The nerve of his argiunent 
 is contained in his **Phaedo.'' In this dialogue Plato has put 
 into the mouth of Socrates his mature thought concerning a 
 future life. In prison, on that fatal day when Socrates drank 
 the poison hemlock, he tells those around him why it is that 
 he can face death so cheerfully. It is because death has no 
 power to destroy his soul. Analyzing the arguments advanced 
 by Plato's Socrates, they are as follows: The soul is seen to 
 be immortal from the fact of its capacity and desire for knowl- 
 edge which it cannot attain in this life; from the law of con- 
 traries which runs all through life and according to which rest 
 prepares for labor and labor for rest, day ends in night and 
 night disappears in day, and so life terminates in death and 
 death in life; from the intuitive character of knowledge, all 
 knowledge being a product of recollection ; from the simple and 
 indivisible nature of the soul, only compound substances being 
 capable of dissolution and death; and finally, from the immu- 
 table goodness of God, God being too good to destroy so beau- 
 tiful a thing as the human soul. 
 
 These arguments carry little weight with them today. The 
 second, third, and fourth, namely, those based upon the law 
 of contraries, the reminiscent character of knowledge, and the 
 indivisibility of the soul, are the merest ghosts of the human 
 imagination. They rest upon the most arbitrary sort of assump- 
 tions. Only the first and last, namely, that based upon the 
 capacity and desire for unattainable knowledge, and that based 
 upon God's appreciation of the aesthetic value of the human 
 soul, carry any sort of weight for present-day thinking. 
 
 From the time of Plato on, Greek philosophy ran a zig-zag 
 course in its attitude toward the doctrine of immortality. Aris- 
 totle was ambiguous on the subject, the Epicureans denied it. 
 
22 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 the Stoics accepted it in the cosmic sense, and the Neo-Platonists 
 virtually deified it. Throughout the Middle Ages, and up to 
 our own day, numerous philosophical arguments have been ad- 
 vanced in support of the belief in an after life, all more or less 
 colored with Platonism. In a general way these can be grouped 
 under six different rubrics. 
 
 The first is the metaphysical argument. It assumes that mind 
 and matter are two distinct entities, each capable of existing 
 apart from the other. 
 
 The second is the analogical argument. On the basis of 
 numerous analogies drawTi from nature, such as the transforma- 
 tion of energy, the metamorphosis of the chrysalis, and the 
 winter slumber of certain hibernating animals, it is argued that 
 the soul will certainly survive the changes involved in physical 
 death. The classical exponent of this mode of argumentation 
 is Bishop Butler, of whom Huxley said, '' Read Butler and see 
 to what drivel even his great mind descends when he has to 
 talk about the immortality of the soul." 
 
 The third is the teleological argument, which regards man as 
 purposefully endowed with capacities and powers which fit him 
 for attainments far in advance of anything to which he can 
 possibly achieve in this present life. 
 
 Closely related to this is the moral argument. This world, it 
 is said, is a scene of injustice. Not infrequently do the virtuous 
 die unrewarded and the vicious unpunished. If death ended 
 all, human life would be a tragedy. But death does not end 
 all. It is the dropping of the curtain between the scenes of one 
 continuous drama of soul-life. It will require the second scene 
 to even up the moral situation to the complete satisfaction of 
 man's deepest sense of injustice, and since justice demands such 
 a scene, we are assured on the ground of the moral argument 
 that such a scene is forthcoming. Kant's argument for the 
 immortality of the soul falls under this same general rubric. 
 To Kant, obedience to an inner sense of duty, the "Categorical 
 Imperative," as he called it, is the supreme obligation resting 
 upon man. Obedience to this inward moral monitor should 
 always lead to happiness, and in a perfect state of existence 
 always does lead to happiness. But man's present state, says 
 Kant, is not one of perfection, and so, as a matter of fact, 
 virtue and happiness do not always go hand in hand in this 
 life. But thej^ are intended to do so, and since their perfect 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 23 
 
 unity is not attained here there must be another life in which 
 this unity is attained. Such was the argument of Kant. The 
 weakness of it is clear. On the ground of moral progress, sup- 
 posing the day should ever come when in this present life vir- 
 tue and happiness should always go together, what need then 
 would there be, on the basis of Kant's argument, for an after- 
 life? The goal of attainment for which that life was posited 
 would be reached here and now, and Kant's heaven would be 
 left dangling in mid-air with all of its logical underpinning 
 knocked out from under it. 
 
 The other argument set forth in support of the belief in 
 immortality is the ethnological. Mankind the world over, holds 
 the idea of an after life. This fact, it is thought, carries with 
 it a very strong presumptive argument in favor of immortality. 
 This mode of reasoning is, of course, as old as the Eleatics. It 
 lies at the very roots of Parmenides' great philosophic assump- 
 tion, an assumption which held its place in the foreground of 
 philosophic thought all the way down to the time of Hegel, 
 namely, that ' ' the thinkable is the real, ' ' But if this were true, 
 says the critic of the ethnological argument, then my latch-key 
 should always be in my pocket whenever I reach for it, for 
 whenever I do reach for it I think it is there. But as a matter 
 of fact it is quite often not there. In such a case the thinkable 
 is certainly not the real. My latch-key is not in my pocket 
 because I think it is there. Neither is my soul immortal, says 
 the same critic, because I think it is or because all men may 
 think it is. On the same ground, it is said, we should be able 
 to prove the reality of ghosts and witches. 
 
 So far, then, philosophical speculation has helped us but little 
 in the laying of a solid foundation on which to build our hopes 
 for an after life. If such a foundation can be found, it must 
 evidently be sought for elsewhere. 
 
 2. Scie7itific grounds. 
 
 Turning now from philosophy to science in search for light 
 concerning the possible grounds on which to rest a rational 
 belief in immortality, we are confronted with a great variety 
 of personal attitudes. In a general way, scientists can be 
 grouped into three classes on the basis of their attitude toward 
 the subject of immortality. One is the unhelieving class. Re- 
 flecting upon the particular group of scientific data with which 
 
24 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 they are especially familiar, those who constitute this class have 
 come to the settled conviction that there is no such thing as 
 personal immortality. Science, for them, furnishes not only 
 no suggestion of such a thing, but, what is more, it furnishes 
 suggestions which are somewhat opposed to such a view. In 
 the interests of intellectual honesty, therefore, they are obliged 
 to affirm that they do not and can not accept the traditional 
 teachings of religion which posit the personal survival of man 
 beyond this life. 
 
 Opposed to this group stands the believing class. For them 
 the data of science are but a fragment of the sum-total of all the 
 data upon which human beliefs are to rest. What and if sci- 
 ence does not warrant a belief in personal immortality, it is 
 said. Science is but a late comer upon the field of human his- 
 tory. Its best findings in any department of knowledge are as 
 yet very limited. To make all beliefs square to its present dis- 
 closures would be a hasty step indeed. It has yet much to 
 learn which may greatly modify its present findings. Besides, 
 there are other interests than those of science which demand 
 our serious attention. To cast them aside is to play the foolish 
 part. We need to be progressive, but our progress should always 
 be conservative, holding fast to all that is valuable in our inheri- 
 tance from the past while we push ever onward into new fields 
 of investigation. Religion, while it may not have had a stain- 
 less career, is not altogether an unmixed evil. It has its claims, 
 and these should be recognized. For the most part, the belief 
 in immortality has been a great moral blessing to the race. It 
 has comforted the sorrowing and guided the aspiring. And 
 since there is as yet no positive disproof of the belief, eithei" 
 scientific or otherwise, we do well, it is said, to hold fast to it, 
 conserving it as one of the efficient agencies making for the 
 highest moral development of the race. 
 
 Midway between these two extremes stands the agnostic class. 
 They neither affirm nor deny the fact of an after life. They 
 simply say, we know nothing about it, it is an open question, it 
 may be true and it may not. If there is such a thing, it is barely 
 possible that some day we shall be fortunate enough to have 
 clear evidence of it. That being so, let us possess our souls in 
 patience, waiting the day of larger disclosures toward which 
 our present age is rapidly advancing. And so we have, as 
 already stated, these three attitudes among scientists, the nega- 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 25 
 
 tive believer who says there is no future life, the positive be- 
 liever who says there is a future life, and the neutral believer 
 who says there may and there may not be a future life, I know 
 nothing about it, I stand on absolutely neutral ground and shall 
 continue to stand there until more positive evidence is forth- 
 coming. Clearly enough, to the first and last of these three 
 classes, the negative and neutral believer, science in its present 
 state has no suggestion whatever to offer in support of a rational 
 belief in an after life. But to the second class the matter stands 
 somewhat differently. While not accepting any of the data of 
 science as furnishing a positive proof of immortality, yet they 
 regard some of its findings as furnishing more or less presump- 
 tive evidence in that direction. 
 
 (a) The conservation of energy. 
 
 Chief among the postulates of science which are looked upon 
 as pointing toward the possibility of a future life is the doc- 
 trine of the conservation of energy. As all know, it is one of 
 the basal assumptions of science that the sum total of all energy 
 in the universe is a constant factor. Amid the multitudinous 
 changes of nature, energy, we are told, is constantly being 
 changed from one form into another but without any increase 
 or diminution of its quantity. Energy in the form of mechan- 
 ical work may successively pass over into electricity, light, and 
 heat, and in turn be reconverted again into mechanical work, 
 and when the process is completed, we have exactly the same 
 amount of energy with which we started, provided no loss has 
 been sustained on the way. Working inductively on the basis 
 of such experiments as these, the far-reaching inference has 
 been drawn that no change in the whole great universal flux of 
 things ever creates or destroys any energy. It simply converts 
 energy from one form into another. And the same, we are 
 told, is true of mass. As yet we know nothing that can effect 
 the quantity of a given mass. We may subject it to all manner 
 of changes, mechanical or chemical, and yet its quantitative value 
 remains constant. It must be admitted, of course, that such a 
 doctrine as this is nothing short of a far-reaching scientific 
 assumption. As yet, no one has subjected all energy and all 
 matter to the test. But so far as experimentation has been 
 carried the assumption holds, and for all practical purposes it 
 may be regarded as possessing universal validity. 
 
26 JOUENALi OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 And now for the bearing of this fact upon the belief in 
 immortality. Granting that mind is a form of energy, why, it 
 is asked, should the human mind present an exception to this 
 universal law of the conservation of energy which holds through- 
 out the entire domain of the physical universe? If it is reason- 
 able to believe that all the energy entering into the physiological 
 processes of the body during the course of a life-time is con- 
 served without loss, even after death has disintegrated the ele- 
 ments of the body, is it not equally reasonable to believe that all 
 the energy entering into the psychical processes of the mind, 
 which ran their course parallel with the physiological processes 
 of the body, is also conserved even after the dissolution of the 
 body by death? Present day physiology, of course, forbids us 
 assuming any such thing as an interchange of energy between 
 body and mind. Carefully conducted experiments seem to have 
 shown conclusively that the law of the conservation of energy 
 holds within the realm of the human body. No process of 
 thought nor act of will ever creates any energy in the nervous 
 system. The only source of energy for that system is physical 
 nourishment, and it has been clearly shown that the amount of 
 energy expended by the different physiological processes is 
 exactly proportionate to the amount of energy obtained through 
 nourishment. This being so, we are at present obliged to con- 
 ceive of a human being as constituted of two parallel streams 
 of energy, which run side by side throughout the whole course 
 of life, each keeping pace with the other yet neither overflowing 
 its banks at any time to empty its waters into the other. If, now, 
 we are justified in saying that one of these streams is conserved 
 after death, and we know that it is, are we not justified in sup- 
 posing that the other is conserved also ? This, we are told, is a 
 much more scientific view of the case than the opposite, which 
 affirms the conservation of the stream of physical energy and 
 the annihilation of the stream of psychical energy. If one per- 
 sists, and we know that it does, then why not the other ? 
 
 So far, the advocates of the belief in immortality on the ground 
 of the doctrine of the conservation of energy seem to have the 
 logic of the situation on their side. But, says the opponent of 
 this view, even though the logic of the situation be granted, at 
 best it can argue only for an impersonal immortality. While 
 it is true that the energy of the body does persist after death, 
 yet it does so not as the formative principle of a distinct indi- 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 27 
 
 vidual, but in a disorganized condition. So for the psychical 
 side, it is said. Even though the energy of the mind may per- 
 sist after death, yet, on the basis of the analogy assumed, we are 
 allowed to postulate at most its persistence only in a disorgan- 
 ized, impersonal condition, for if these two streams of energy 
 run their course in a perfectly parallel fashion all though the 
 life of the individual what warrant have we for assuming that 
 at death they enter upon divergent courses? Such a supposi- 
 tion, we are told, begs the whole question and is at heart utterly 
 unscientific. And so, there we are. On the basis of the doc- 
 trine of the conservation of energy cosmic immortality, there- 
 fore, seems highly probable, while personal immortality seems 
 highly improbable. 
 
 (h) The conservation of value. 
 
 But there is another principle operative in the field of science 
 which is sometimes quoted as favoring a belief in human sur- 
 vival. It is the principle of the conservation of value. Science 
 tells us that this earth on which we live came to its present con- 
 dition through the operation of certain definite forces which 
 worked by slow degrees through millenniums of ages. Beginning 
 with a sort of undifferentiated ball of gaseous nebulae, it is 
 assumed that accretions and condensations gradually took place 
 giving rise to our solar system with its great network of revolv- 
 ing planets. In the course of time the temperature lowered, a 
 rocky core was formed, the surface of this core crumbled into 
 soil, the waters collected into deep basins to form the seas which 
 in turn become the cradle of life. This life, at first a mere uni- 
 cellular speck of protoplasm, slowly evolved into multicellular 
 forms of life, giving rise at last to the highly organized verte- 
 brate, the fish. One day this daring Columbus of the sea in one 
 of its bold innovations ventured out upon the land, took to 
 breathing, developed lungs out of gills, legs and wings out of 
 fins, and thus arose reptiles and birds. Some of these land 
 creatures then improved their condition by becoming viviparous, 
 and thus was ushered in the reign of mammals. Finally, out of 
 mammalian development came the flower of the animal series, 
 man himself. At first he was hardly distinguishable from his 
 twin brothers, the apes, but very soon he began to show his dis- 
 tinctively human qualities by his unique intellectual and moral 
 advancement, until behold him in this twentieth century the 
 
28 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 lord and master of creation. All through this process of devel- 
 opment, we are told, there was present one very distinctive 
 factor, namely the conservation of values. Wherever nature 
 was fortunate enough to hit upon some quality that had in it 
 special worth for the higher ends toward which the whole pro- 
 cess was blindly moving, there attention, as it were, was focused 
 until that quality became a fixed factor in the great evolving 
 system. Labors in this direction were, of course, not always 
 successful. Numerous species on which untold ages of patient 
 toil had been expended, eventually retrograded and became 
 extinct. Devolution as well as evolution marked the whole 
 course of the movement. As one has aptly put it, "The privi- 
 lege of going to hell has ever existed throughout the whole pro- 
 cess of organic evolution." And yet, in spite of all these blind 
 alleys of partial retrogression, the general trend of the whole 
 movement was ever onward and upward, so that the forces of 
 the universe have not labored in vain but have attained sublime 
 success in the conservation and reinforcement of their best 
 productions. 
 
 Such has been the course of events so far. Each new age has 
 been a distinct advance upon the preceding one, reaching, as we 
 have, the present age with highly refined moral personality as 
 the ripest product of the whole process. And now comes the 
 question as to the ultimate goal of all this. Is the process to 
 stop here? Is moral personality, with all of its marvellous pos- 
 sibilities, and for the production of which all the creative energy 
 of the universe has worked with infinite patience through mil- 
 lenniums upon millenniums, a mere transient bubble to be burst 
 by the hand of physical death ? Is this supreme value of the uni- 
 verse, for the creation of which all other values have been merely 
 auxiliary, a mere will-o-the-wisp which the forces of nature have 
 been vainly chasing through all the ages ? Was Heraclitus right ? 
 Is the universe nothing more than a grinding mill with an empty 
 hopper? Is no grist ever ground out? Does nothing of per- 
 manent value ever emerge out of thic gigantic process of ** be- 
 coming '^ with all of its sacrifice and suffering? Where in all 
 the universe have we ever yet seen this developing process turn 
 back upon itself, and what grounds have we for assuming that 
 it ever will do so ? Is it not far more reasonable to suppose that 
 death, instead of being the annihilation of personality, is but 
 an incident in a great cosmic process of evolution, and that this 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 29 
 
 highest value so far attained, instead of becoming extinct, is 
 conserved and made the nexus of union with another order of 
 existence which is as much in advance of the present as the 
 human is in advance of the animal? Unless this be so, then 
 the universe is indeed a ' ' riddle ' ' as Haeckel has denominated it. 
 And so, the belief in personal immortality, we are told, is the 
 necessary correlate of the scientific doctrine of the conservation 
 of value which lies at the very basis of the whole evolutionary 
 hypotheses. As T. H. Green has expressed it, "it is impossible 
 to believe without intellectual confusion that a system whose 
 visible goal is the evolution of personality ends in the extinction 
 of personality." 
 
 To be sure, strenuous opposition has been offered to this idea 
 of personal immortality, as supported by the conception of the 
 conservation of values. The principal point of attack has been 
 the fact of the correlation between mind and brain. Physiolog- 
 ical psychology has shown us that all mental processes, so far 
 as we know anything about them, are intimately correlated with 
 corresponding brain processes. What the exact nature of this 
 correlation is no one as yet knows. But whatever its exact 
 nature may be, it is there. Destroy those centers in the brain 
 that function for speech or sight or hearing and you render at 
 once the subject mute or blind or deaf, as the case may be. The 
 evident conclusion seems to be that if you destroy all the centers 
 of the brain, as is the case in death, you thereby destroy all the 
 psychical operations which have been correlated with those cen- 
 ters. In his little book on Human Immortality (38), the late 
 Professor William James has sought to clear the ground of this 
 objection. He recognizes two kinds of functional dependence, 
 a productive and a transmissive function, and in his judgment 
 the functional dependence of the mind upon the brain is not a 
 productive but a transmissive function. Thought is not a pro- 
 duct of brain activity in the sense that bile is a secretion of the 
 liver. If it were, then, of course the destruction of the brain 
 would involve the annihilation of the mind. But thought, he 
 holds, is rather transmissively dependent upon brain activity. 
 It may exist quite independent of all neural processes and yet 
 without those processes be utterly unable to make itself known. 
 In such a case the destruction of the brain would in no wise 
 involve the annihilation of the mind. In the thought of Pro- 
 fessor James, the nervous system stands related to the physical 
 
30 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 world on the one hand, and to the mental world on the other 
 hand somewhat as the Atlantic cable stands related to Europe 
 and America. You may destroy the cable, but in so doing you 
 do not destroy either Europe or America. You simply cut off 
 their means of inter-communication. So for the nervous sys- 
 tem. Destroy it and the line of communication between mind 
 and the external world is gone, but mind itself is in no sense 
 destroyed thereby. 
 
 A less scientific, but somewhat ingenious, attempt has been 
 made by various other writers to solve this problem attempted 
 by Professor James. The view assumes that there is encased 
 within the visible body a semi-material body of like shape and 
 size, which serves as the connecting link between the physical 
 and the mental. At death this transparent duplicate takes its 
 departure from the body with the soul, and serves thereafter 
 as the material basis of the soul's activity. If the reader is 
 interested in this solution of the problem, he will find a good 
 discussion of it in D'Albe (17), Bjorklund (8), and Frank (22). 
 
 (c) Spiritism. 
 
 In recent years science has interested itself in seeking to 
 establish objective demonstration of the validity or invalidity of 
 the belief in immortality. Assuming that there are surviving 
 spirits, the aim has been to get into speaking communication 
 with them. To this end, certain individuals are chosen as ' ' me- 
 diums" through whom these spirits communicate their thoughts 
 to certain inhabitants of earth. The supposition is that in some 
 way, quite unknown to us of course, the soul of the medium 
 vacates the body for a time during which period some spirit 
 from the other world takes its place as the "control" of the 
 medium, making use of the physiological mechanism of the body 
 as a means of communicating its thought either by vocal utter- 
 ance or by written language. Claims to performances of this 
 sort have been in existence for a long time, but no scientific 
 attention was given to them until within recent years. The 
 first systematic effort to study them was made by the British 
 Society for Psychical Research. When this Society was organ- 
 ized in 1882, one of its aims was the investigation of the claims 
 of spiritism. This aim it has pursued with much diligence. 
 Its findings, not only in this field but also in the fields of tele- 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 31 
 
 pathy, crystal-gazing, hypnotism, clairvoyance etc. are simply 
 enormous. 
 
 Out of all that has been done by this Society, both in England 
 and America, have evolved three distinct attitudes with refer- 
 ence to the subject of spiritism. One is the attitude of implicit 
 faith in an objective demonstration of the existence of spirits. 
 It is believed by not a few that clear evidence has been estab- 
 lished of actual communication with departed spirits through 
 the agency of mediums. A second attitude is that of suspended 
 judgment. To the members of this class, much of the evidence 
 collected by the Society seems to warrant a belief in the validity 
 of spirit-communication, and yet the possibilities of error are 
 sufficiently great to act as a counter-balance, leaving the mind 
 in a state of suspended judgment. A third attitude is that of 
 radical scepticism. It is held by the members of this class that 
 all the data of the Society bearing upon the subject of spiritism 
 can be adequately explained on the basis of multiple person- 
 ality. The exit of a medium's soul out of the body and the 
 entrance of a departed spirit in its place is said to be nothing 
 other than the splitting off for the time being of a fragment of 
 the medium's normal personality and causing it to function 
 in an abnormal way. This role it very soon learns to play with 
 singular skill. Clues of knowledge suitable for its purposes 
 which are carried over from the normal state, suggestions re- 
 ceived from those present at the time of the seance, and venture- 
 some guesses some of which fit while many do not, these form 
 the stock in trade of the split-off personality or assumed "Con- 
 trol." Of all the mediums studied by the Society, none has 
 been more baffling than Mrs. Piper of Boston. Professor James 
 called her his "white crow," with reference to the whole sub- 
 ject of spiritism. While fraud has been repeatedly discovered 
 in other mediums, no fraud has as yet been made out in connec- 
 tion with the seances of Mrs, Piper. A careful study of her 
 case has been made of late by Dr. G. Stanley Hall and Dr. Amy 
 E. Tanner. The results of their investigations have appeared 
 in a recent book by Dr. Tanner (64). The book is a wholesale 
 slaughter of the spiritistic hypothesis. It seeks to explain not 
 only Mrs. Piper 's case but also the whole body of spiritistic data 
 gathered by the Society for Psychical Research on the basis of 
 multiple personality. Naturally enough, the book has called 
 
32 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 down upon its authors a volley of criticism from certain mem- 
 bers of the Society. What effect the book will ultimately have 
 upon this whole movement yet remains to be seen. It is hoped, 
 however, by many who agree with its interpretation of the facts, 
 that it will serve, at least, to counter-balance certain extrava- 
 gances which have manifested themselves in connection with 
 this study of spiritistic phenomena. 
 
 Taken as a whole, what has the study of spiritism done by 
 way of confirming the belief in immortality? Its chief service 
 has been to call attention to the subject, and in an age of mate- 
 rialistic tendencies this has had its value, no doubt. But so far 
 as furnishing positive evidence of immortality is concerned, its 
 results are of a doubtful character to say the least. And what 
 else could be expected? The world of disincarnate spirits is 
 rather an awkward sphere for science to investigate. It is a 
 sufficiently difficult task to gather valid scientific data on this 
 mundane world of ours, but to collect valid scientific data from 
 a super-mundane world, and have it transmitted to earth through 
 the channel of a pathological personality, seems like a hopeless 
 task indeed. And further, supposing that a considerable body 
 of trustworthy scientists should succeed in gaining what to them 
 would be incontrovertible evidence of communication with spirits, 
 and supposing they should couch their findings in a permanent 
 literary form, how much weight would their testimony have for 
 the generations following them, by way of settling once for all 
 the fact of immortality? Would it have any more weight than 
 the evidence for the resurrection of Christ, contained in the 
 New Testament, has for the average scientist to-day ? He snaps 
 his finger at such evidence. To him it is a case of establishing 
 miracle on the basis of human testimony, a task which Hume 
 convinced most of the scientific world years ago can not be 
 accomplished. Strange conceit this is of the scientist that he 
 should regard his own word as of so much more value than that 
 of a company of honest fishermen two thousand years ago. Free 
 communication with disembodied spirits can never be a common- 
 place of human experience. If such a thing is possible, and 
 possible only through certain select mediums, then it must ever 
 remain a sweet luxury for the few, and, as such, an extraordi- 
 nary and rather miraculous occurrence. That being so, it can 
 never carry with it the weight of a universally convincing proof 
 of human survival, according to the verdict of science itself. We 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 33 
 
 would not under any consideration put a handicap upon scien- 
 tific investigation in any field, but it does seem as though there 
 must be a better way for a noble soul to build up its assurance 
 of immortality than by raking among the pathological abnor- 
 malities of multiple personalities. 
 
 So far, then, the scientific grounds for a belief in immortality 
 are on about the same footing with those of philosophy. Neither 
 one is conclusive. While there are certain phenomena which 
 seem to point in the direction of personal survival, there are 
 others which seem to point just as definitely in the opposite 
 direction, leaving us, from a scientific point of view, in a state 
 of suspended judgment. 
 
 3. Religious grounds. 
 
 But philosophy and science are not the only points of view 
 from which the belief in an after life may be considered. In 
 fact, they are not the primary standpoints from which to view 
 this subject. In the last analysis the question of immortality is 
 a religious question. As John Fiske has said, "it must ever 
 remain an affair of religion rather than of science." Scien- 
 tifically we may never be able to demonstrate the fact of an after 
 life, assuming that there is such a life. And yet, the rank and 
 file of humanity ever has believed, still does believe, and for 
 aught we now know will continue to believe in a future life, 
 notwithstanding the negative testimony of science. The reason 
 for this is to be found in the fact that the belief is fundamentally 
 motivated by considerations which are essentially religious. And 
 this is legitimate. As has already been stated, religion has its 
 rightful place in the general scheme of human affairs. And 
 when religion is pressed to its ultimate psychological analysis it 
 is found to concern itself chiefly with the emotional aspect of 
 man's mental life. We may not wholly agree with Schleier- 
 macher's definition of religion as a ''feeling of dependence,** 
 and yet Schleiermacher put his finger on the right place when 
 he found in feeling the essence of religion. Other elements 
 enter into it of necessity, but here we are at the center. As 
 one has said, ''Religion is the meeting of spirit with spirit, the 
 flush of happiness, the thrill of satisfaction, the sense of peace, 
 the glad realization that now at last a hunger, keener than 
 physical hunger, has been appeased by the heavenly bread. God 
 and the soul have met, and in the shock of that meeting there 
 
34 JOURNAL OP RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 has come to the soul an emotion of loving fellowship which is 
 the very heart of religion." Of course, it must be understood 
 that religion has to do with cognition as well as with emotion. 
 The preacher struck a wrong note, when, in the course of his 
 sermon, he said: "Few things have done more harm in this 
 world than thought. Don't put me down, my dear friends, as 
 a thinker, put me down as a believer." The audience is said 
 to have remarked afterward that the preacher had placed before 
 them a very unnecessary precaution. Such an attitude is, of 
 course, a travesty on religion. And yet, it serves to show by 
 way of exaggeration where the primary interests in religion 
 lie. They lie not in the rational processes of cognition, but in 
 the affective processes of the emotions. And this being so, we 
 shall find on close investigation that the belief in immortality, 
 which is primarily a religious belief, finds its strongest support, 
 not in the intellect where philosophy and science move and have 
 their being, but in the affections where religion moves and has 
 its being. 
 
 Taking the Christian religion, which is pre-eminently the 
 religion of personal immortality, there are two fundamental 
 motivations to the belief in a future life. One is the attitude 
 of Jesus himself toward the future, and the other is the doc- 
 trine of his resurrection. Which of these two has had the 
 greater influence in the past it would be difficult to say. Pos- 
 sibly the balance has held a fairly horizontal position. But 
 to-day there is a slight inclination on the side of the former. 
 The deeper men's lives become rooted in the conviction of a 
 personal God, to whom they are related in a vital and filial way, 
 the less do they look for objective proofs of immortality, and 
 the more do they come to rest the whole burden of their faith 
 upon that inner sense of assurance which results from a loving 
 and trustful attitude toward God. And this, we are told, is the 
 true Christian ground on which the belief in immortality should 
 ever rest. It was the one ground on which Jesus' belief in 
 immortality rested. While it is true that he did at one time 
 argue for immortality with the unbelieving Sadducees on the 
 ground of the teachings of the old Testament, yet he did so for 
 their sakes and not for his own. His own belief had its roots 
 not in any book but in a great experience, the sense of Sonship. 
 The fact of an eternal and immortal God to whom he was related 
 by an indissoluble tie of filial affection was one of the most real 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 35 
 
 factors in the consciousness of Jesus. His whole life may be 
 looked upon as the unfolding of this conviction, and his whole 
 attitude toward the future was the blossom of this conviction. 
 When he spoke of the future, it was his "Father's house" to 
 which he was going and to which he would ultimately lead his 
 people. He had no long drawn out arguments, based upon 
 logical deductions, to offer in support of his belief. The future 
 life was to him as real as the present life, and all because he 
 was the Son of an immortal Father, whose immortal life he 
 shared. And ultimately, it is said, here is where the Chris- 
 tian 's faith in immortality should ever rest, not so much in the 
 objective evidence of the resurrection of Christ, valuable as 
 that may be, but in the subjective evidence of God's life in the 
 soul. We are to take our stand where Jesus took his stand, not 
 upon logic, but upon the experience of the heart in its relation 
 to God. Am I God's child, have I the divine life in me? If 
 so, I am the immortal child of an immortal Father, and in the 
 sweet consciousness of this fact my heart should rest. 
 
 IV. Present Status of the Belief. 
 
 Having thus outlined the different forms which the belief 
 in immortality has assumed, the different theories which have 
 been advanced to account for its origin, and the different grounds 
 on which it has rested, we are now ready to consider the present 
 status of the belief as determined by our own empirical study. 
 No sweeping deductions can be made from our limited survey. 
 The results obtained are suggestive rather than exhaustive. 
 In order to ascertain approximately how this subject of an after 
 life is lying to-day in the minds of intelligent, thinking people, 
 the following list of questions was drawn up and distributed 
 over a wide area both in America and Canada. 
 
 1. Do you believe in man's immortality I If not possessed of a belief 
 in immortality, do you hold it as a hope? 
 
 2. What kind of immortality do you believe in, personal or cosmic or 
 merely influential? 
 
 3. Are all men immortal? If not, who are? 
 
 4. What are your reasons for believing in, or not believing in, man's 
 immortality? 
 
 5. What is your conception of the state of the after life? Is it a 
 mere continuation of the present state or is it different? 
 
 6. Did the question of immortality in any way lead to your ''conver- 
 iion" or acceptance of the Christian faith, in case you have accepted it? 
 
36 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 7. Have your views on immortality undergone any radical change with 
 the lapse of years? If so, when, and in what respects? 
 
 8. If given your preference, which would you choose, immortality or 
 annihilation? Why? 
 
 9. What influence has your belief in immortality upon your own con- 
 duct, character, and life? 
 
 10. In your judgment, how did the belief in immortality originate in 
 the race? 
 
 11. In your judgment, has the race been profited or not by its belief in 
 immortality? If profited, how? If not, why? 
 
 12. In your judgment, is the belief in immortality increasing or decreas- 
 ing in the race? If either, why and among what particular class or classes? 
 
 13. In your judgment, has the belief in immortality acted in any way 
 as a cause of or as a preventive against suicide? 
 
 14. In your judgment, what effect would a complete annihilation of 
 the belief in immortality have upon the race, directly and ultimately? 
 
 15. Has the modern pulpit changed its message regarding immortality? 
 If so, how, and with what effect? 
 
 16. What weight do you attach to the general belief in immortality as 
 an evidence for immortality? 
 
 17. What was the attitude of Jesus toward immortality, and what 
 weight do you give to his attitude? 
 
 18. What value do you attach to the doctrine of the resurrection of 
 Christ as an evidence for immortality? 
 
 19. Is science to-day in conflict with a rational belief in personal im- 
 mortality? If so, how? 
 
 20. In your judgment, can the fact of immortality, if it is a fact, ever 
 be established on scientific grounds? If not, why not? 
 
 21. Is a belief in immortality necessitated by the doctrine of evolution? 
 If so, why? If not, why? 
 
 22. Is a belief in immortality necessitated by the doctrine of the conser- 
 vation of energy? Why? 
 
 23. In your judgment, has ''THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL EE- 
 SEARCH^' in England and America made any contribution toward a 
 solution of the problem of immortality? If so, what? 
 
 24. Should children be taught adult views of the after life or be left to 
 frame their own views of it? 
 
 25. Does the desire to be reunited again with loved ones act in any way 
 as a spur to your belief or hope in immortality? 
 
 26. Has the thought of "helP* in any way influenced your life? 
 
 27. What is your age? 
 
 28. Is your sex male or female? 
 
 29. What is your occupation? 
 
 30. Any remarks or suggestions. 
 
 The parties to whom copies of these questions were sent were 
 in most cases the writer's own personal acquaintances from whom 
 he had every reason to expect serious and honest answers. One 
 hundred and seventy such answers were secured. Of these, 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 37 
 
 forty-six belonged to the High School level, twenty to the college 
 level, and one hundred and four to the professional level which 
 included lawyers, physicians, teachers, preachers, etc. 
 
 We shall deal with the professional class first. Of this group 
 seventy-five believed in personal and seven in cosmic immor- 
 tality. Thirteen rejected the idea of a future life altogether. 
 The only immortality for man, they held, is that of influence. 
 Nine were uncertain as to the kind of future life they believed 
 in, but vaguely hoped for a continued existence of some sort. 
 
 Fifty believed that all human beings are immortal. Fifteen 
 affirmed that only a part of humanity will survive death, that 
 part being "the good" and "believers in Christ." Twenty-six 
 were in doubt in regard to the matter, and thirteen affirmed 
 that none are immortal. 
 
 As to the reasons given for the belief in a future life, the 
 teaching of the Bible was named fifty-three times, the general 
 belief in immortality thirty-four times, the incompleteness of 
 this life eleven times, the doctrine of the conservation of energy 
 as applied to personality five times, the doctrine of evolution or 
 of the conservation of values three times, the influence of early 
 training seven times, the influence of the dead twice, the law of 
 the fitness of things twice, boundless aspiration, dread of ex- 
 tinction, and simple faith were each named once. 
 
 Fifty reported themselves as having experienced no impor- 
 tant change of view, while fifty-four reported radical changes 
 of view. The character of the changes indicated were a turn- 
 ing away from a belief in inherent to a belief in conditional 
 immortality; a turning away from a gross material conception 
 of an after life to a more refined spiritual conception of unfet- 
 tered psychical activity; a turning away from a belief in only 
 human survival to a belief in the survival of all animal life ; a 
 turning away from the conception of a heaven of mere song to 
 a heaven of service ; a turning away from a definite belief to a 
 rather vague hope ; and a turning away from all belief and hope 
 to a state of utter disbelief. The particular time in life at 
 which these changes occurred were : 
 
 * ' After reading the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man ; * ' ' * after 
 my second year in College as the result of my philosophical and psycholog- 
 ical studies ; * ' < < after my graduate work in science ; ' ' ' ' after my theolog- 
 ical and psychological studies; '* *' during early adolescence;*' ''at the age 
 of twenty-five;" and ''after a careful study of the Scriptures.'* 
 
38 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 One said the doctrine of immortality had been an important 
 factor in helping to upset his faith in Christianity as a whole. 
 His case is so extraordinary that I feel constrained to note it 
 somewhat in detail. He is an eminent physician, fifty-one 
 years of age. I quote his own words: 
 
 '^I believed in immortality up to the age of fifteen. By twenty-three I 
 had become somewhat doubtful, as my belief in the Bible as the 'Word of 
 God' was fading out, but, as I had never looked closely into the matter, 
 I kept my judgment in suspense. At a later age, I developed consumption 
 of the lungs and became fully persuaded that I had only a few months to 
 live. I then resolved to attempt to settle the matter, and, as I felt that the 
 belief in immortality was bound up with that of the inspiration of the 
 Bible, I began my investigation at the first chapter of Genesis in connec- 
 tion with Adam Clarke's Commentaries. With every chapter my belief in 
 inspiration faded. I did, for a short time, try to persuade myself that 
 Jesus was really divine and was sent by a beneficent Deity to teach the 
 human race, but further study forced me to give up the New Testament 
 also. With the belief in Christianity as a divine system went the doctrine 
 of immortality. Nearly thirty years more of reading science, old theology 
 and new theology, together with such casual thought as I have been able to 
 employ, have only confirmed the conclusions framed then. I would, how- 
 ever, if given my choice prefer immortality to annihilation, provided I could 
 be assured against excessive pain and monotony. My reason is that there 
 Is so much more that I want to know. I would like to spend — not eternity 
 perhaps — but a very, very long time examining into the mysteries of the 
 universe. ' ' 
 
 There were other returns in which the changes in belief indi- 
 cated were just as radical as this, but the case of this man 
 seemed especially significant in view of the fact that the read- 
 justment of his belief took place as a result of a careful inves- 
 tigation of the Scriptures and that at a time when death 
 seemed near at hand. 
 
 Ninety-five preferred immortality. The reasons given were: 
 
 ''For the joy of loving and serving; " "for the sake of the improved con- 
 ditions expected ; " < ' for the sake of a life of harmony with God ; " "be- 
 cause of my repugnance of the idea of annihilation;" "because life is 
 sweet ; " * < from a desire to solve life 's enigmas ; " "in order to complete 
 this incomplete life ; ^ ' ' ' for the opportunity of progress ; ' ' and ' ' for the 
 joy of living and working without tiring." Two preferred annihilation, 
 one giving as his reason the fact that "annihilation is nature's order to 
 which I cordially submit." 
 
 Twelve had no preference, except to prefer such as should 
 be, whether annihilation or immortality. 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 39 
 
 As to the influence which this belief has upon character and 
 life, eighty-two said that it has a beneficial influence. The ex- 
 pressions used were : 
 
 **It inspires me to altruistic service;'* **it makes life worth living;'* 
 * * it makes me desire to grow like God in character ; " * ' it restrains me 
 from evil ;" "it inspires progress in personal holiness ; ' ' * * it holds me to 
 the right ;'* "it gives dignity and range to my life and character ;" "it 
 stimulates fidelity to duty;" and "it gives my life hope and purpose.*' 
 
 Seventeen said the belief had no influence upon their life. 
 Five were unable to tell whether it had or had not an influ- 
 ence upon them. As to its racial influence ninety-three affirmed 
 that the race has been profited by the belief. Nine were in 
 doubt in this respect. One expressed the opinion that the 
 belief has been a positive hindrance to the race in that it has 
 diverted man's attention from the proper business of life, which 
 is the material and moral improvement of this present world, 
 and has focused his attention upon another world which he 
 knows nothing about and will never reach. One said the belief 
 was both a help and a hindrance to humanity. In the case of 
 some it inspired hope and progress, while in the case of others 
 it fostered depression and even insanity by holding up before 
 the mind the gruesome picture of loved ones roasting in a hell 
 of endless torment. 
 
 Twenty-seven held that the belief is decreasing. There was 
 pretty general agreement that this decrease is found principally 
 among the educated classes. One, however, was of the opinion 
 that the decrease is confined chiefly to the religiously liberal 
 classes of Northern Europe who are temperamentally shallow 
 and cynical in their mental characteristics. As to the causes 
 of this decline, it was thought to be brought about : 
 
 "As the result of scientific study, which demands the evidence of the 
 senses as over against that of mere faith ; " "as the result of the doctrine 
 of evolution;" "as the result of the psychological fact of the correlation 
 betwen mind and brain ; " "as a result of the teachings of pagan reli- 
 gions ; ' ' and " as a result of the present-day greed for gold. ' * Thirty, on 
 the other hand, said that the belief is increasing. Some distributed this 
 increase among all classes, others confined it to the educated, others said 
 it is increasing wherever Christianity is being taught, and one made bold to 
 af&rm that "'It is increasing among all classes, except a few college men 
 and a few fool preachers." 
 
 Eleven were of the opinion that the belief is relatively 
 stationary. 
 
40 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 With regard to suicide, fifty-seven held that the belief in 
 immortality has acted as a preventive. As evidence of this, it 
 was cited that there are few suicides among Roman Catholics, 
 who as a body hold firmly to the doctrine of immortality; that 
 the greatest number of suicides are found in non-religious com- 
 munities where the belief in an after life is not held, as is shown 
 by a study of French and German suicides; and that religious 
 workers among persons of suicidal tendencies are at one in 
 their testimony to the great restraining power which this belief 
 has over persons contemplating the act of suicide. One teacher 
 was very emphatic on this point. He said: ''It is indeed a 
 powerful preventive, as I know from personal experience in 
 dealing with persons of suicidal tendencies. '' One called atten- 
 tion to the fact that among primitive peoples this belief has 
 acted as a cause of suicide. Firmly believing in the reality of 
 a future life, these people rushed on by self-inflicted death to 
 enter into that life. Twelve said that the belief acted both 
 as a cause and a preventive, citing examples like those given 
 above. Twelve expressed the opinion that the belief has had 
 no influence either for or against suicide, suicide being the 
 result of a pathological condition of mind with which the belief 
 in a future life has no connection whatever. 
 
 Eighty-five were of the opinion that an annihilation of the 
 belief would work untold harm to the race, both immediately 
 and ultimately. The particular lines of harm indicated were : 
 
 ''It would lower the value now set upon human life and thus cause a 
 reversion to the animal state;" *'it would dull aspiration;" ''it would 
 take away hope and destroy man's peace of mind; " "it would check spirit- 
 ual development;" "it would usher in the reign of unrestrained immor- 
 ality;" "it would increase suicide amazingly;" "it would destroy the 
 moral and religious sanctions that now sustain the race;" and "it would 
 obliterate all altruism and spiritual aspiration." \ 
 
 One replied with the following quotation from the late 
 Senator Hoar: 
 
 "No race or nation will ever be great or will long maintain greatness 
 unless it holds fast to the faith in a living God, in a beneficent Providence, 
 and in a personal immortality. To man as to nation, every gift of noblest 
 origin is breathed upon by this hope's perpetual breath. "Where this faith 
 lives are found courage, manhood, power. Where this faith dies, courage, 
 manhood, and power die with it." 
 
 Two expressed the opinion that an annihilation of the belief 
 in a future life would prove a blessing to humanity in that it 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 41 
 
 would give greater emphasis to the worth of this present life 
 and thus elevate the general moral tone of society. Both, how- 
 ever, were of the opinion that the belief should be destroyed 
 gradually rather than suddenly. Three said that an annihi- 
 lation of this belief would have no important effect, either 
 immediately or ultimately. 
 
 The relation of the modern pulpit to the belief in an after 
 life was variously estimated. Sixty-two were agreed that the 
 pulpit has changed its message concerning the future. The 
 lines of change indicated were varied. Some held that the 
 present-day pulpit has turned very generally from a belief in 
 personal to a belief in cosmic immortality. Others, that it 
 has turned from personal to influential immortality. And still 
 others held that it is rapidly moving toward an acceptance of 
 the doctrine of reincarnation. There was pretty general agree- 
 ment, however, that the pulpit of today is saying less about an 
 after life than the pulpit of earlier days had to say about it, 
 and that, when it is spoken of, the idea of hell is almost, if not 
 quite, ignored. Most of this class of respondents were of the 
 impression that this change is for the better in that it leads to 
 the acceptance and formation of a good life from higher motives 
 than that of fear. A few, however, said that this change is for 
 the worse in that the pulpit is failing to use the motive of fear 
 which, they said, has been the great moral educator of the race. 
 One of this class expressed the belief that the reason why the 
 pulpit of to-day is either silent altogether or else exceedingly 
 cautious in its utterances about the future is because both 
 preacher and people alike are at the present time utterly at 
 sea on the whole subject. Twelve were of the opinion that the 
 modern pulpit has not changed. 
 
 Seventy-seven said that Jesus assumed the fact of immor- 
 tality, and that his attitude carries with it the greatest weight 
 possible as an evidence for the reality of an after life in view 
 of the fact that he was the most spiritually minded teacher 
 that the world has ever known. Fifteen, however, took the 
 opposite view and said that the attitude of Jesus carried no 
 more weight than that of any other good man. Two, in fact, 
 said that his attitude carried less weight than that of an intel- 
 ligent scholar of to-day. To quote their own words: 
 
 "The testimony of Jesus to an after life is of no more value than that 
 of any other man of his day, and is not to be compared with that of a 
 
42 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 modern scientist of good standing •'' ^' Jesus imbibed the belief in immor- 
 tality from his environment and was not in as good a position as we are 
 today to judge of its truth.'' 
 
 Twelve said they had no idea whatever what Jesus' attitude 
 was toward the belief in an after life. 
 
 In regard to the doctrine of Christ's resurrection, seventy- 
 six held it to be the crowning evidence of a future life. A few 
 others were inclined to attach less evidential value to the story 
 of the resurrection, regarding it merely as a co-ordinate factor 
 in the general group of evidences for an after life. All of 
 these seventy-six respondents, however, were at one in their 
 belief that the resurrection of Christ is a well authenticated 
 fact of history. Fifteen, on the other hand, said that the story 
 of the resurrection is not an established fact of history, and, 
 therefore, carries no weight as an evidence for immortality. 
 Two physicians replied in substantially the same terms, the 
 exact words of one being, ''The teaching concerning the resur- 
 rection of Christ is by no means an established fact. It is 
 utterly lacking in historical confirmation." One man said, 
 ''Even if a physical resurrection did take place, it would by 
 no means prove immortality." One scientist of wide repute 
 said, "While I believe in personal immortality yet I do not 
 base my belief upon the doctrine of the resurrection of Christ. 
 I regard Hume's argument as never having been answered." 
 Hume's argument, as we all know, was that "Nothing that is 
 of less frequent occurrence than the falsity of human testi- 
 mony can be proved by testimony." Thirteen said that they 
 had never given the story of the resurrection any thought, and 
 were not in a position, therefore, to say what bearing it had 
 upon the belief in an after life. 
 
 Fifty-five were of the opinion that science is not in conflict 
 with a rational belief in personal immortality. Fifteen took 
 the opposite view. One psychologist, of international reputa- 
 tion, said, "It is, I believe, impossible to disprove personal 
 immortality by scientific reasoning, because of the lack of data 
 one way or the other. I think, however, that science makes it 
 extremely improbable." An eminent physician says: 
 
 "Science, so far as I am aware, finds no evidence upon which to found 
 a rational belief in personal immortality. Since the scientific spirit teaches 
 us to believe only those things which are proved, to disbelieve those which 
 
SPiDLE: IMMORTALITY 43 
 
 are disproved, and to hold our judgment in suspense in regard to other 
 matters, we must be content to leave, at least, the doctrine of personal 
 immortality in doubt." 
 
 Thirty-four had no idea how science stands related to the 
 belief in personal immortality. 
 
 As to the possibility of science proving the reality of an 
 after life, granted that there is such a life, fifteen believed 
 such a thing possible. One scientist of note said, *'No man 
 can foretell what science will be able to do." Another scien- 
 tist said, "Science has already so far outstripped in its dis- 
 coveries the expectations of a generation ago that it would not 
 be at all surprising if in this matter of an after life it should 
 also outstrip our present expectations and lay bare to us facts 
 which now seem utterly beyond the limit of its apparent sphere. ' ' 
 Sixty, on the other hand, were of the opinion that science can 
 never establish the fact of an after life, granting the reality of 
 such a life. The grounds upon which their convictions were 
 based can all be summed up in one sentence, namely, science 
 can never prove the existence of a future life because it has 
 no data upon which to work and can obtain no data, for the 
 reason that science deals only with the experiential facts of 
 man's present life while immortality lies entirely outside the 
 sphere of such experience. 
 
 Forty-one regarded the doctrine of evolution as lending no 
 support whatever to the belief in an after life. To quote the 
 words of one, ''The doctrine of evolution argues more for mor- 
 tality than it does for immortality, for if the lower species are 
 mortal, as we know they are, why not the higher species, includ- 
 ing man himself." A prominent physician says: 
 
 **The doctrine of evolution appears to me to oppose a belief in personal 
 immortality. Individual plants and animals, species, races, nations, planets, 
 stars, systems, and now it seems perhaps even the chemical elements, arise, 
 grow old, and die. The elements of which they are composed live on and 
 are reincarnated in other forms, but that which distinguished them — their 
 individuality — disappears. Why should we expect an exception to be made 
 in favor of one, even the highest, species of animals?" 
 
 With minor variations, this was the line of reasoning followed 
 by all of those indicated above. Opposed to them stood twenty- 
 eight who regarded the doctrine of evolution as furnishing 
 rather strong presumptive evidence in favor of personal immor- 
 tality. The gist of their position has already been given under 
 
44 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 the head of 'Hhe conservatism of values" in discussing the 
 scientific grounds of the belief. 
 
 In like manner did opinions differ as to the evidential value 
 of the doctrine of the conservation of energy. Thirty affirmed 
 that it has no value as an evidence for personal immortality 
 but that it does favor the idea of cosmic survival. Says one, 
 **Is my mind 'energy' or some manifestation of it? If so, I 
 would expect it to live on after death but not in the form of my 
 personality. As a matter of fact I believe that mind is as inde- 
 structible as energy or matter." Another says, "Only the 
 imagination of a protagonist could detect any analogy here." 
 Another says, "If the doctrine of the conservation of energy 
 furnished any support to the idea of personal immortality then 
 every living creature from time immemorial to time immemorial 
 must be immortal." Another says, "Life and energy are not 
 in the same category, so that the conservation of the one by no 
 means argues for the conservation of the other." Twenty-nine 
 took the opposite view and said that the doctrine of the con- 
 servation of energy does support a belief in personal immor- 
 tality. In fact, one prominent scientist gave this as the only 
 ground of her belief in personal immortality, "the doctrine of 
 the conservation of energy as applied to personality." 
 
 Forty-eight were of the opinion that "The Society for Psy- 
 chical Research" has made no contribution whatever toward a 
 solution of the problem of immortality. Two believed that it 
 has done something for the belief by calling general attention 
 to the subject. Eight took the opposite ground and said that 
 this Society has made a most invaluable contribution in that it 
 has established beyond all reasonable doubt the validity of 
 spirit-communication. 
 
 Sixty-one favored the idea of children being taught adult 
 views of immortality. Thirty-one objected to this. The rea- 
 sons given were that: 
 
 * ' Children are shrewd enough to frame their own views, which they do ; * ' 
 '*it is wrong to inculcate views into a child's mind which may later have 
 to be repudiated. Teach only those things to a child which are known to 
 be true and which the child will never have occasion to repudiate, and let 
 all debatable matters like that of a future life take care of themselves ; ' ' 
 *^ children should not have adult views of religious matters thrust upon 
 them but should be given the Bible and allowed to frame their own views 
 therefrom ;" ' ' it is better for the child not to force into its mind adult 
 views upon any subject but rather to guide its processes in the framing of 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 45 
 
 its own views ; ' ' and "it is of much greater importance to teach the child 
 how to obtain immortality than to attempt to teach it about immortality. ' ' 
 
 Twelve were in doubt as to whether children should or should 
 not be taught adult views of an after life. 
 
 It was acknowledged by fifty-nine that the desire to be 
 reunited to loved ones acted as a spur to their belief in a future 
 life. Two couched their sentiments in the following phrases: 
 
 ' ' I long for the touch of a vanished hand ; " * ' I would like to 
 see my mother, God grant that I may go to her." Here I 
 should add the case of a young lawyer from whom I obtained 
 the following statement. I had given him a copy of our ques- 
 tionnaire some months before this, with a promise on his part to 
 fill it out and return it to me. Months passed by and the 
 syllabus was not returned. One day he came to me with this 
 statement : 
 
 "1 am sorry to say I have never been able to fill out your syllabus. I 
 took it home, laid it on the shelf in the dining room, and every day took it 
 down and looked over the questions and talked them over with my wife 
 while engaged in the noon meal. Honestly, I have worn out that sheet of 
 paper handling it over and looking at the questions, but I have not an- 
 swered one of them and I cannot answer them. When I try to reason this 
 matter out on the basis of logic I say to myself, of course there is no 
 future life. But, on the other hand, my father died a few years ago and 
 I cannot but believe that I shall see him again. That is how I think and 
 feel, and, if you can reconcile that contradiction you know what my belief 
 in immortality is.'* 
 
 With regard to the belief in "Hell," fifty-five said that it 
 never had any influence over their life. Forty affirmed that 
 it had. A few specified as to the exact nature- of this influence. 
 One said, "the thought of hell has had an influence for good 
 over my life ever since I can remember." Another said, "the 
 thought of hell hindered me from joining the church for a 
 year or two." A third said, "for a time the thought of hell 
 upset my faith in everything and caused me much misery." 
 And another said, "only as a child did the thought of hell have 
 any influence over my life, and then it introduced into my 
 experience an element of tragedy which was entirely needless 
 and which interfered for a time with both my mental and 
 moral development." 
 
 Some of the "Remarks" appended to our returns were of 
 considerable significance. One psychologist of wide repute says : 
 
46 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 ''If I should try to sum up my views in general, I should say that the 
 whole question is one that has become a side issue in my life, — one on which 
 I do not hold any very vital opinions, such as I do have being rather in the 
 negative. I hold them lightly and in a way to be somewhat easily changed, 
 I suppose, by scientific evidence if any were forthcoming, or by those funda- 
 mental emotional determinants (which I think are at the root of the belief 
 in those that hold it strongly) if any should rise in my own life. ' ' 
 
 Another says: 
 
 ''My impression is that all these questions refer to reason, omitting the 
 great field of feeling, which may be just as meaningful as that which our 
 poor intellects can comprehend. The only incontestable argument for im- 
 mortality, incontestable because unanswerable, is the argument of the heart. 
 When I see injustice, suffering, sorrows of parting, and incompleteness in 
 this life, my heart longs to give those who desire it another life where all 
 may be righted. This is best expressed in Browning's Saul. But, as I said 
 above, my reason works otherwise, and to it the immortality of influence, 
 as set forth in George Eliot's Choir Invisible, seems most desirable." 
 
 Another says: 
 
 ' ' I regret to say that in my present state of mind I cannot give a very 
 satisfactory response to the questions set. If I were to reply now, it would 
 be from the standpoint of a pretty rank agnostic, and you know very well 
 what the character of such a reply would be. It may be that this is only 
 a temporary state with me. I hope it is, for I am getting very little com- 
 fort out of it." 
 
 The Mayor of a large city writes : 
 
 "Your circular was duly received and I have read it over several times. 
 I did not realize before how limited my knowledge was along the lines you 
 suggest. There are so few items in the list of questions that I could 
 answer with satisfaction to myself that I do not feel justified in answering 
 even the more simple questions. Candidly, if I could satisfactorily answer 
 those questions, I ought to be able to write after my name all the letters 
 that Clark University gives for degrees." 
 
 Turning now to our College and High School returns, we find 
 only one in each of these two groups expressing doubt in the 
 reality of an after life. All the rest believed in immortality, 
 and all, except one, in personal immortality. With the excep- 
 tion of one other thing which will be noted below, this was the 
 only feature of special importance to be observed in these two 
 groups. 
 
 From all the above returns, it will be seen that the belief in 
 personal immortality far outstrips that of any other form of 
 survival. Seventy-two per cent, of all our respondents hold 
 to a belief in the preservation of personality in a future life. 
 The idea of an impersonal survival does not seem to fascinate 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 
 
 the imagination of most people. If they are to survive, imy 
 want to know it and to consciously participate in whatever the 
 future may have for them. 
 
 Another disclosure of importance is that relating to the time 
 and cause of changes in belief. Fifty-two per cent, of our 
 respondents reported themselves as having passed through a 
 period of radical change regarding their belief in a future life. 
 The time at which these changes took place were almost invari- 
 ably that of later adolescence. This, as we know, is the college 
 period, and the causes assigned for these changes indicated were 
 said to be, in almost every case, the effect of the study of 
 science and philosophy during the college course. An inter- 
 esting side-light upon this aspect of the subject is furnished by 
 our college and High School returns. Out of the forty-six 
 copies of our syllabus which were distributed among High 
 School pupils, forty-six copies were returned, all answered. 
 Out of the one hundred copies which were distributed among 
 college students, only twenty were returned. The distribution 
 of these latter copies was placed in the hands of four college 
 professors, one in each of four different colleges. One of these 
 colleges returned fourteen copies, another six, and the other two 
 none. Of the forty-six respondents from the High School level, 
 only four reported changes of view regarding the future. Of 
 the twenty respondents from the college level, on the other 
 hand, fourteen reported changes of belief. It would seem from 
 all this, then, that the time of radical readjustment of belief in 
 immortality is during the college period or the time of later 
 adolescence. And the intensity of this process of readjustment 
 seems to be pretty accurately measured by the small number of 
 those who are willing to commit their views to paper, and also 
 by the large percentage of changes in belief found among those 
 who are willing thus to commit themselves. All this, of course, 
 comports with what we have long since known, namely, that 
 the age of adolescence is the age of psychical upheaval and of 
 radical readjustment of beliefs, a fact which carries with it a 
 tremendous pedagogical significance, as all must admit. 
 
 One other important fact should not be overlooked. While 
 it is true that, for various reasons, many are now questioning 
 the validity of the belief in a future life, yet the almost unani- 
 mous verdict of our returns is that an annihilation of this belief 
 would work untold harm, both immediately and ultimately. 
 
48 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 Only seven venture a contrary judgment. And the reason for 
 this solicitude is placed wholly on the ground of its practical 
 moral value. It is held that this belief has been one of the most 
 potent incentives to a good life that has motivated human con- 
 duct. In Pragmatic phraseology it has "worked," and, hence, 
 according to Pragmatic logic, it is " true. ' ' But does it ' ' work ? ' ' 
 Does the belief in a future life put man in more helpful and 
 healthful relations with his environment? I am inclined to 
 think that it does. No doubt life would still have worth even 
 though the belief in immortality were destroyed. But with 
 the destruction of this belief, life would certainly lose a large 
 percentage of its worth for most people. It is by no means a 
 cheap belief. Its power to enrich life is great. It is at once 
 both humanizing and expanding. Nothing can more effectively 
 kill out the brute in man and spur him on to the attainment of 
 high moral manhood than the thought of immortality. What 
 else can strip a human soul so utterly bare naked of everything 
 but itself as this thought of the future? And, surely, if any- 
 thing should induce a man to be good, it is the contemplation 
 of one day having nothing to fall back upon but himself. 
 "What a hell such an experience is for some people. They dread 
 to be alone. They are such poor company to themselves that 
 unless they have a book or a friend or some exciting pleasure 
 to divert their attention from themselves they are utterly 
 wretched. There is a Book that asks this question: "Where- 
 withal shall a young man cleanse his way ? ' ' and the same Book 
 answers, "By taking heed thereto according to thy Word." 
 For a man to take heed to his way in the light of his immortal 
 destiny is a most powerful cleanser from all brutal defilement. 
 And not only that. The belief in a future life is not only 
 humanizing but it is also expanding in its effects upon char- 
 acter. It gives to human endeavor its most enhancing orienta- 
 tion. It says to every laborer, do your best, you are not carv- 
 ing a statue of ice to be melted down by the hot rays of anni- 
 hilation, you are carving a figure out of materials that are inde- 
 structible, do your best therefore. Such has ever been the 
 appeal of the belief in immortality to the human heart. And 
 wherever this appeal has been responded to, there do we find 
 our noblest character and our highest service. A belief, there- 
 fore, that has blessed the race with such results as these we can 
 ill-afford to abandon. And we are pleased to say that as 
 
SPIDLE: IMMORTALITY 49 
 
 rational beings we are not obliged to abandon it. So far as 
 the writer is aware, no field of human research has as yet demon- 
 strated the denial of immortality. The burden of proof is not 
 with the man who affirms, but with the man who denies, a future 
 life. He has the instincts of the whole race against him. Are 
 these instincts false ? They may be, but it remains to be shown. 
 In my inner heart of hearts I have the conviction, however I 
 may have received it, that my life is destined to unfold into a 
 higher order than the present. This conviction rules and mo- 
 tivates all the activities of my life. Who will say that it is a 
 delusion? It may be, but I await a positive demonstration of 
 it. Till otherwise proved, I shall cling to my belief in a per- 
 sonal immortality as one of the most precious boons, not only 
 of my own life, but of the life of the race. 
 
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