' ^s^m Y OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY OF TH LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Rev. Wm. R. Alger's Writings. THE POETRY OF THE ORIENT. A Critical and His- torical Introduction to Sanscrit, Arabic, and Persian Poetry. Illustrated by several hundreds of characteristic specimens. One volume, i6mo. Third edition. Price, $1.50. THE GENIUS OF SOLITUDE. Ninth edition. Price, $1.50. One volume, Part I. — The Solitudes of Nature. Part II. — The Solitudes of Man. Part III. — The Morals of Solitude. Part IV. — Sketches of Lonely Characters. THE FRIENDSHIPS OF WOMEN. One volume, izmo. Ninth edition. Price, $1.50. Have Women no Friendships ? Friendship, inside and outside of the ties of blood. Friendship between Parents and Children, Mothers and Sons, Daughters and Fathers, Sisters and Brothers, Wives and Husbands, Mothers and Daughters, of Sisters, Woman with Woman, Pairs of Female Friends, Platonic Love, or the Marriage of Souls, the Needs and Duties of Woman in this Age. Roberts Brothers, Publishers, Boston. LIFE OF EDWIN FORREST, with numerous Steel-plates and Portraits, Two volumes, 8vo. Cloth, $10.00. J. B. Lippincott & Co., Publishers, Philada. THE DESTINY OF THE SOUL. A CRITICAL HISTORY DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE, WILLIAM ROUNSEYILLE ALGER. TEKTH EDITION, AVITH SIX NEW CHAPTERS. Comjjlctc ^iWiograpIjg of tijc Subjcri COMPRISING 4977 BOOKS RELATING TO THE NATURE, ORIGIN, AND DES- TINY OF THE SOUL. THE TITLES CLASSIFIED, AND ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY, WITH NOTES, AND INDEXES OF AUTHORS AND SUBJECTS. BY EZRA ABBOT, I.IBBABIAM OF HArVaRD COLLEGE. UNivKi;sn'v < CALIFUK> NEW YORK : W. J. WIDDLETON, PUBLISHER. 1878. j3 r lot I £- .4-s- Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860, by WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER, Copyright 1878, W. R. Algek. ELECTKOTXPED BY L. JOHNSON k CO., PREFACE TO THE TEI^TH EDITION. This work has passed through nine editions, and has been out of print now for nearly a year. During the twenty years which have elapsed since it was written, the question of immortality, the faith and opinions of men and the drift of criticism and doubt concerning it, have been a subject of dominant interest to me, and have occupied a large space in my reading and reflection. Accordingly, now that my publisher, moved by the constant demand for the volume, urges the preparation of a new edition introdac- ing such additional materials as my continued researches have gathered or constructed, I gladly comply with his request. The present work is not only historic but it is also polemic; polemic, however, not in the spirit or interest of any party or conventicle, but in the spirit and interest of science and humanity. Orthodoxy insists on doctrines whose irrationality in their current forms is such that they can never be a basis for the union of all men. Therefore, to discredit these, in preparation for more reasonable and auspicous views, is a service to the whole liuman race. This is my justification for the controversial quality which may frequently strike the reader. Looking back over his pages, after nearly a quarter of a century more of investigation and experience, the author is grateful that he finds nothing to retract or expunge. He has but to add such thoughts and illustrations as have occurred to him in the course of his subsequent studies. He hopes that the supplementary chapters now published will be found more sug- gestive and mature than the preceding ones, while the same in aim and tone. For he still believes, as he did in h.is earlier time, that there is much of error and superstition, bigotry and cruelty, to be purged out of the pre- vailing theological creed and sentiment of Christendom. And lie still hopes, as he did then, to contribute something of good influence in this direction. The large circulation of the work, the many letters of thanks for it received by the author from laj'men and clergymen of different de- nominations, the numerous avowed and unavowed quotations from it in recent publications, — all show that it has not been produced in vain, but has borne fruit in missionary service for reason, liberty, and charity. This ventilating and illumining function of fearless and reverential crit- ical thought will need to be fulfilled much longer in many quarters. The doctrine of a future life has been made so frightful by the preponderance PREFACE. in it of the elements of material torture and sectarian narrowness, that a natural revulsion of generous sentiment joins with the impulse of material- istic science to produce a growing disbelief in any life at all beyond the grave. Nothing else will do so much to renew and extend faith in God and immortality as a noble and beautiful doctrine of God and immortality, freed from disfiguring terror, selfishness, and favoritism. The most popular preacher in England has recently asked his fellow-be- lievers, "Can we go to our beds and sleep while China, India, Japan, and other nations are being damned?" The proprietor of a great foundry in Germany, while he talked one day with a workman who was feeding a furnace, accidentally stepped back, and fell headlong into a vat of molten iron. The thought of what happened then horrifies the imagination. Yet it was all over in two or three seconds. Multiply the individual instance by unnumbered millions, stretch the agony to temporal infinity, and we confront the orthodox idea of hell ! Protesting human nature hurls oif such a belief with indignant disdain, except in those instances where the very form and vibration of its nervous pulp have been perverted by the hardening animus of a dogmatic drill transmitted through generations. To trace the origin of such notions, ex- pose their baselessness, obliterate their sway, and replace them with con- ceptions of a more rational and benignant order, is a task which still needs to be done, and to be done in many forms, over and over, again and again. Though each repetition tell but slightly, it tells. Every sound argument is instantly crowned with universal victory in the sight of God, and therefore must at last be so in the sight of mankind. However slowly the logic of events limps after the logic of thoughts, it al- ways follows. Let the mind of one man perceive the true meaning of the doctrine of the general resurrection and judgment and eternal life, as a natural evolution of history from Avithin, and it will spread to the minds of all men; and the misinterpretation of that doctrine so long prevalent, as a preternatural irruption of power from without, will be set aside forever. For there is a providential plan of God, not injected by arbitrary miracle, but inhering in the order of the world, centred in the propulsive heart of humanity, which beats throb by throb along the web of events, removing obstacles and clearing the way for the revelation of the completed pat- tern. When it is done no trumpets may be blown, no rocks rent, no graves opened. But all immortal spirits will be at their goals, and the universe will be full of music. New York, February 22, 1878. PREFACE. "Who follows truth carries his star in his brain. Even so bold a thought is no inappropriate motto for an intellectual workman, if his heart be filled with loyalty to God, the Author of truth and the Maker of stars. In this double spirit of independence and submission it has been my desire to perform the arduous task now finished and offered to the charitable judgment of the reader. -One may be courageous to handle both the traditions and the novelties of men, and yet be modest before the solemn mysteries of fate and nature. He may place no veil before his eyes and no finger on his lips in presence of popular dogmas, and yet shrink from the conceit of esteeming his mind a mirror of the universe. Ideas, like coins, bear the stamp of the age and brain they were struck in. Many a phantom which ought to have vanished at the first cock-crowing of reason still holds its seat on the oppressed heart of faith before the terror-stricken eyes of the multitude. Every thoughtful scholar who loves his fellow-men must feel it an obligation to do what he can to remove painful supei'stitions, and to spread the peace of a cheerful faith and the wholesome light of truth. The theories in theological systems being but philosophy, why should they not be freely subjected to philosophical criticism '{ I have endeavored, without virulence, arrogance, or irreverence towards any thing sacred, to investigate the various doctrines per- taining to the great subject treated in these pages. Many persons, of course, will find statements from which they dissent, — senti- ments disagreeable to them. But, where thought and discussion , are so free and the press so accessible as with us, no one but a . bigot will esteem this a ground of complaint. May all such pass- ages be charitably perused, fairly weighed, and, if unsound, honorably refuted! If the work be not animated with a mean or false spirit, but be catholic and kindly, — if it be not superficial and iy PREFACE. pretentious, but be marked by patience and thoroughness —is it too much to hope that no critic will assail it with wholesale con- demnation simply because in some parts of it there are opinions which he dislikes ? One dispassionate argument is more valuable than a shower of missile names. The most vehement revulsion from a doctrine is not inconsistent, in a Christian mind, with the sweetest kindness of feeling towards the persons who hold that doctrine. Earnest theological debate may be carried on without the slightest touch of ungenerous personality. Who but must feel the pathos and admire the charity of these eloquent words of Henry Giles ? — " Every deep and reflective nature looking intently ' before and after,' looking above, around, beneath, and finding silence and mystery to all his questionings of the Infinite, cannot but conceive of existence as a boundless problem, perhaps an inevitable dark- ness between the limitations of man and the incomprehensibility of God. A nature that so reflects, that carries into this sublime and boundless obscurity ' the large discourse of Reason,' will not narrow its concern in the solution of the problem to its own petty safety, but will brood over it with an anxiety which throbs for the whole of humanity. Such a nature must needs be serious ; but never will it be arrogant : it will regard all men with an embracing pity. Strange it should ever be otherwise in respect to inquiries which belong to infinite relations,— that mean enmities, bitter hatreds, should come into play in these fathomless searchings of the soul ! Bring what solution we may to this problem of measureless alter- natives, whether by Eeason, Scripture, or the Church, faith will never stand for fact, nor the firmest confidence for actual con- sciousness. The man of great and thoughtful nature, therefore, who grapples in real earnest with this problem, however satisfied he may be with his own solution of it, however implicit may be bis trust, however assured his convictions, will yet often bow down before the awful veil that shrouds the endless future, put his finger on his lips, and weep in silence." The present work is, in a sense, an epitome of the thought of mankind on the destiny of man. I have striven to add value to it by comjyrehensiveness of plan —not confining myself, as most of my predecessors have confined themselves, to one province or a few narrow provinces of the subject, but including the entire subject :n one volume; by carefulness of arrangement— not piling the material together or presenting it in a chaos of facts and dreams, but group- PREFACE. V ing it all in its proper relations ; by clearness of explanation, — not leaving the curious problems presented "wholly in the dark with a mere statement of them, but as far as possible tracing the phe- nomena to their origin and unveiling their purport ; by poetic life of treatment, — not handling the different topics dryl}^ and coldly, but infusing warmth and color into them; by copiousness of infor- mation, — not leaving the reader to hunt up every thing for himself, but referring him to the best sources for the facts, reasonings, and hints which he may wish ; and by persevering patience of toil, — not hastilj^ skimming here and there and hurrying the task off, but searching and re-searching in every available direction, examining and re-examining each mooted point, by the devotion of twelve years of anxious labor. How far my efforts in these particulars have been successful is submitted to the public. To avoid the appearance of pedantry in the multiplication of foot-notes, I have inserted many authorities incidentally in the text itself, and have omitted all except such as I thought would be desired by the reader. Every scholar knows how easy it IS to increase the number of references almost indefinitely, and also how deceptive such an ostensible evidence of wide reading may be. When the printing of this volume was nearly completed, and I had in some instances made more references than may now seem needful, the thought occurred to me that a full list of the books published up to the present time on the subject of a future life, arranged according to their definite topics and in chronological order, would greatly enrich the work and could not fail often to be of vast service. Accordingly, upon solicitation, a valued friend — Mr. Ezra Abbot, Jr., a gentleman remarkable for his varied and accurate scholarship — undertook that laborious task for me ; and he has accomplished it in the most admirable manner. No reader, however learned, but may find much important information in the bibliographical appendix which I am thus enabled to add to this volume. Every student who henceforth wishes to investi- gate anj^ branch of the historical or philosophical doctrine of the immortality of the soul, or of a future life in general, may thank Mr. Abbot for an invaluable aid. As I now close this long labor and send forth the result, the oppressive sense of responsibility which fills me is relieved by the consciousness that I have herein written nothing as a bigoted 1 ^* PREFACE. partisan, notliing in a petty spirit of opinionativeness, but have intended every thought for the furtherance of truth, the honor of God, the good of man. The majestic theme of our immortality allures 3'et baffles us. No fleshly implement of logic or cunning tact of brain can reach to the solution. That secret lies in a tissueless realm whereof no nerve can report beforehand. We must wait a little. Soon we shall grope and guess no more, but grasp and know. Meanwhile, shall we not be magnanimous to forgive and help, diligent to study and achieve, trustful and content to abide the invisible issue ? In some happier age, when the human race shall have forgotten, in philanthropic ministries and spiritual worship, the bigotries and dissensions of sentiment and thought, they may recover, in its all-embracing unity, that garment of truth which God made originally " seamless as the firmament," now for so long a time torn in shreds by hating schismatics. Oh, when shall we learn that a loving pity, a filial faith, a patient modesty, best become us and fit our state? The pedantic sciolist, prating of his clear explanations of the mysteries of life, is as far from feeling the truth of the case as an ape, seated on the starry summit of the dome of night, chattering with glee over the awful prospect of infinitude. "What ordinary tongue shall dare to vociferate egotistic dogmatisms where an inspired apostle whispers, with reverential reserve, ""We see through a glass darkly"? There are three things, said an old monkish chi-onicler, which often make me sad. First, that I know I must die; second, that I know not when; third, that I am ignorant where I shall then be. " Est primum durum quod scio me moriturum : Secundum, timeo quia hoc nescio quando : Hinc tertium, flebo quod nescio ubi manebo." Man is the lonely and sublime Columbus of the creation, who, wandering on this cloudy strand of time, sees drifted waifs and strange portents borne far from an unknown somewhere, causing him to believe in another world. Comes not death as a means to bear him thither? Accordingly as hope rests in heaven, fear shudders at hell, or doubt foees the dark transition, the future life is a sweet reliance, a terrible certainty, or a pathetic perhaps. But hving in the present in the humble and loving discharge of its duties, our souls harmonized with its conditions though aspiring beyond them, why should we ever despair or be troubled over- much? Have Ave not eternity in our thought, infinitude in our view, and God for our guide? CONTENTS. |ar*t lirst. HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL INTRODUCTORY VIEWS. CHAPTER I. Theories of the Soul's Origin , 1 CHAPTER II. History of Death 17 CHAPTER IIL Grounds of the Belief in a Future Life , 38 CHAPTER IV. Theories of the Soul's Destination 53 |art Su0nlr. ETHNIC THOUGHTS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE. CHAPTER L Barbarian Notions of a Future Life 68 CHAPTER II. Druidic Doctrine of a Future Life 83 CHAPTER III. Scandinavian Doctrine of a Future Life 87 CHAPTER IV. Etruscan Doctrine of a Future Life 93 viii CONTENTS. CHAPTER V. p^g^ Egyptian Doctrine of a Future Life 97 CHAPTER VI. Brahmanic and Buddhist Doctrine of a Future Life 105 CHAPTER Vn. Persian Doctrine of a Future Life 127 CHAPTER yill. "^ Hebrew Doctrine op a Future Life 144 CHAPTER IX. Rabbinical Doctrine op a Future Life 165 CHAPTER X. -A Greek and Roman Doctrine of a Future Life 175 CHAPTER XI. Mohammedan Doctrine op a Future Life 197 CHAPTER XII. " Explanatory Survey of the Field and its Myths 205 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHINGS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE. CHAPTER I. Peter's Doctrine of a Future Life 218 CHAPTER II. Doctrine of a Future Life in the Epistle to the Hebrews 229 CHAPTER m. Doctrine op a Future Life in the Apocalypse 244 CHAPTER IV. Paul's Doctrine of a Future Life 264 CONTENTS. ix CHAPTER V. John's Doctbine or a Future Life 295 CHAPTER VI. Christ's Teachings concerning the Future Life 315 CHAPTER VII. Resurrection of Christ 346 CHAPTER VIII. Essential Christian Doctrine of Death and Life 373 fart iauxi\. CHRISTIAN THOUGHTS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE. CHAPTER I. Patristic Doctrine op a Future Life 394 CHAPTER IL Medieval Doctrine of a Future Life 407 CHAPTER in. Modern Doctrine of a Future Life 426 iKt iiltl HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL DISSERTATIONS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE. CHAPTER L Doctrine of a Future Life in the Ancient Mysteries 450 CHAPTER n. Metempsychosis; or, Transmigration of Souls 475 CHAPTER III. BEgHRRECTION OF THE FlESH 488 X CONTENTS. CHAPTER IV. PAGE Doctrine of Futcee Punishment; or, Critical History of the Idea OF A Hell 608 CHAPTER V. The Five Theoretic Modes of Salvation 550 CHAPTER VI. Recognition of Friends in a Future Life 567 CHAPTER VII. Local Fate of Man in the Astronomic Universe 579 CHAPTER VIII. Critical History of Disbelief in a Future Life 610 CHAPTER IX. Morality of the Doctrine of a Future Life 646 SUPPLEMENTAEY CHAPTEES. CHAPTER I. The End of the World 663 CHAPTER II. The Day of Judgment 671 CHAPTER III. The Mythological Hell and the True One ; or, The Law of Perdition... 697 CHAPTER IV. The Gates of Heaven ; or, The Law of Salvation in all Worlds 715 CHAPTER V. Resume op the Subject — How the Question op Immortality Now Stands. 725 CHAPTER VI. The Transient and the Permanent in the Destiny of the Soul 753 APPENDIX. LITERATURE OF THE DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE; or, A CATALOGUE OF WORKS RELATING TO THE NATURE, ORIGIN, AND DESTINY OF THE SOUL. By Ezra Abbot. Preface 679 Classification 686 Abbreviations 688 CATALOGUE 689 Additions and Corrections 874 Index of Authors and Anonymous Works 877 Index of Subjects and Passages of Scripture Illustrated 908 1, 1 i> K A >> ^ PART FIRST. HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL INTRODUCTORY VIEWS. CHAPTER I. THEORIES OF THE SOUL's ORIGIN. Pausing, in a thoughtful hour, on that mount of observation whence the whole prospect of life is visible, what a solemn vision greets us ! We see the vast procession of existence flitting across the landscape, from the shrouded ocean of birth, over the illuminated continent of ex- perience, to the shrouded ocean of death. Who can linger there and listen, unmoved, to the Sublime lament of things that die? Although the great exhibition below endures, yet it is made up of clianges, and the spectators shift as often. Each rank of the host, as it advances from the mists of its commencing career, wears a smile caught from the morning light of hope, but, as it draws near to the fatal bourne, takes on a mournful cast from the shadows of the unknown realm. The places we occupy were not vacant before we came, and will not be deserted when we go, but are forever filling and emptying afresh. " still to every draught of vital breath Kenew'd throughout the bounds of earth and ocean. The melancholy gates of death Respond with sympathetic motion." We appear, — there is a short flutter of joys and pains, a bright glimmer of smiles and tears, — and we are gone. But whence did we come? And whither do we go? Can human thought divine the answer? It adds no little solemnity and pathos to these reflections to remember that every considerate person in the unnumbered successions that have preceded us, has, in his turn, confronted the same facts, engaged in the same inquiry, and been swept from his attempts at a theoretic solution of the problem into the real solution itself, while the constant refrain in the song of existence sounded behind him, " One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh ; but the earth abideth forever." 3 THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN. The evanescent phenomena, the tragic plot and scenery of human birth, action, and death, conceived on the scale of reality, clothed in " The sober coloring taken from an eye Tliat hath kept watch o'er man's mortality," and viewed in a susceptible spirit, are, indeed, overwhelmingly impressive. They invoke the intellect to its most piercing thoughts. They swell the heart to its utmost capacity of emotion. They bring us upon the bended knees of wonder and prayer. " Between two worlds life hovers, like a star 'Twixt night and morn upon the horizon's verge. How little do we know that which we arel How less what we may be ! The eternal surge Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar Our bubbles : as the old burst, new emerge, Lash'd from the foam of ages : while the graves Of empires heave but like some passing waves." Widely regarding the history of human life from the beginning, what a visionary spectacle it is ! How miraculously permanent in the whole ! how sorrowfully ephemeral in the parts! What pathetic sentiments it awakens ! Amidst what awful mysteries it hangs ! The subject of the derivation of the soul has been copiously discussed by hundreds of philosophers, physicians, and poets, from Vyasa to Des Cartes, from Galen to Ennemoser, from Orpheus to Henry More, from Aristotle to Frohschammer. German literature during the last hundred years has teemed with works treating of this question from various points of view. The present chapter will present a sketch of these various speculations concerning the commencement and fortunes of man ere his appearance on the stage of this world. The first theory to account for the origin of souls is that of emanation. This is the analogical theory, constructed from the results of sensible observation. There is, it says, one infinite Being, and all finite spirits are portions of his substance, existing a while as separate individuals, and then reassimilated into the general soul. This form of faith, assert- ing the efflux of all subordinate existence out of one Supreme Being, seems sometimes to rest on an intuitive idea. It is spontaneously sug- gested whenever man confronts the phenomena of creation with re- flective observation, and ponders the eternal round of birth and death. Accordingly, we find traces of this belief all over the world ; from the ancient Hindu metaphysics whose fundamental postulate is that the necessary life of God is one constant process of radiation and resorption, "letting out and drawing in," to that modern English poetry which apostrophizes the glad and winsome child as "A silver stream Breaking with laughter from the lake Divine Whence all things flow." The conception that souls are emanations from God is the most obvious way of accounting for the prominent facts that salute our inquiries. It THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN. plausibly answers some natural questions, and boldly eludes others. For instance, to the early student demanding the cause of the mysterious distinctions between mind and body, it says, the one belongs to the system of passive matter, the other comes from the living Fashioner of the Universe. Again: this theory relieves us from the burden that per- plexes the finite mind when it seeks to understand how the course of nature, the succession of lives, can be absolutely eternal without involving an alternating or circular movement. The doctrine of emanation has, moreover, been supported by the supposed analytic similarity of the soul to God. Its freedom, consciousness, intelligence, love, correspond with what we regard as the attributes and essence of Deity. The inference, however unsound, is immediate, that souls are consubstantial with God, dissevered fiagments of Him, sent into bodies. But, in actual eflFect, the chief recommendation of this view has probably been the variety of analogies and images under which it admits of presentation. The annual developments of vegetable life from the bosom of the earth, drops taken from a fountain and retaining its properties in their removal, the separation of the air into distinct breaths, the soil into individual atoms, the utterance of a tone gradually dying away in reverberated echoes, the radiation of beams from a central light, the exhalation of particles of moisture from the ocean, the evolution of numbers out of an original unity, — these are among the illustrations by which an ex- haustless ingenuity has supported the notion of the emanation of souls from God. That "something cannot come out of nothing" is an axiom resting on the ground of our rational instincts. And seeing all things within our comprehension held in the chain of causes and eflects, one thing always evolving from another, we leap to the conclusion that it is precisely the same with things beyond our comprehension, and that God is the aboriginal reservoir of being from which all the rills of finite ex- istence are emitted. Against this doctrine the current objections are these two. First, the analogies adduced are not applicable. The things of spirit and those of matter have two distinct sets of predicates and categories. It is, for example, wholly illogical to argue that because the circuit of the waters is from the sea, through the clouds, over the land, back to the sea again, therefore the derivation and course of souls from God, through life, back to God, must be similar. There are mysteries in connection with the soul that baffle the most lynx-eyed investigation, and on which no known facts of the physical world can throw light. Secondly, the scheme of emanation depends on a vulgar error, belonging to the in- fancy of philosophic thought, and inconsistent with some necessary truths. It implies that God is separable into parts, and therefore both corporeal and finite. Divisible substance is incompatible with the first predicates of Deity, — namely, immateriality and infinity. Before the conception of the illimitable, spiritual unity of God, the doctrine of the emanation of souls from Him fades away, as the mere figment of a 6 THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN. dreaming mind brooding over the suggestions of phenomena and appa- rent correspondences. The, second explanation of the origin of souls is that which says they come from a previous existence. This is the theory of imagination, framed in the free and seductive realm of j^oetic thought. It is evident that this idea does not propose any solution of the absolute origination of the soul, but only offers to account for its appearance on earth. The pre- existence of souls has been most widely affirmed. Nearly the whole world of Oriental thinkers have always taught it. Many of the Greek philosophers held it. No small proportion of the early Church Fathers believed it.' And it is not without able advocates among the scholars and thinkers of our own age. There are two principal forms of this doctrine; one asserting an ascent of souls from a previous existence below the rank of man, the other a descent of souls from a higher sphere. Generation is the true Jacob's ladder, on which souls are ever ascending or descending. The former statement is virtually that of the modern theory of develojDment, which argues that the souls known to us, ob- taining their first organic being out of the ground-life of nature, have climbed up through a graduated series of births, from the merest element- ary existence, to the plane of human nature. A gifted author. Dr. Hedge, has said concerning pre-existence in these two methods of con- ceiving it, writing in a half-humorous, half-serious, vein, "It is to be considered as exjaressing rather an exceptional than a universal fact. If here and there some pure liver, or noble doer, or prophet-voice, suggests the idea of a revenant who, moved with pity for human kind, and charged with celestial ministries, has condescended to ' Soil his pure ambrosial weeds With the rank vapors of this sin-worn mould,' or if, on the other hand, the 'superfluity of naughtiness' displayed by some abnormal felon seems to warrant the supposition of a visit from the Pit, the greater portion of mankind, we submit, are much too green for any plausible assumption of a foregone training in good or evil. This planet is not their missionary station, nor their Botany Bay, but their native soil. Or, if we suppose they pre-existed at all, we must rather believe they pre-existed as brutes, and have travelled into humanity by the fish-fowl-quadruped road with a good deal of the habitudes and dust of that tramp still sticking to them." The theory of development, deriving human souls by an ascension from the lower stages of rudiment- ary being, considered as a fanciful hypothesis or speculative toy, is in- teresting, and not destitute of plausible aspects. But, when investigated as a severe thesis, it is found devoid of joroof. It is enough here to say that the most authoritative voices in science reject it, declaring that, though there is a development of progress in the plan of nature, from ' Keil, Opuscula; De Pre-cxistentia Animarum. Beausobre, Hist, du Manicheisme, lib. vii. cap. ir. THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN. the more general to the more specific, yet there is no advance from one type or race to another, no hint that the same individual ever crosses the guarded boundaries of genus from one rank and kingdom to another. Whatever progress there may be in the upward process of natural crea- tion or the stages of life, yet to suppose that the life-powers of insects and brutes survive the dissolution of their bodies, and, in successive crossings of the dea,th-gulf, ascend to humanity, is a bare assumption. It befits the delirious lips of Beddoes, who says, — *' Had I been born a four-legg'd child, methinks I might have found the steps from dog to maa And crept into his nature. Are there not Those that fall down out of humanity Into the story where the four-legg'd dwell ?" The doctrine that souls have descended from an anterior life on high may be exhibited in three forms, each animated by a different motive. The first is the view of some of the Manichean teachers, that spirits were embodied by a hostile violence and cunning, the force and fraud of the apostatized Devil. Adam and Eve were angels sent to observe the doings of Lucifer, the rebel king of matter. He seized these heavenly spies and encased them in fleshly prisons. And then, in order to preserve a per- manent union of these celestial natures with matter, he contrived that their race should be propagated by the sexes. Whenever by the pro- creative act the germ-body is prepared, a fiend hies from bale, or an angel stoops from bliss, or a demon darts from his hovering in the air, to inhabit and rule his growing clay-house for a term of earthly life. The spasm of impregnation thrills in fatal summons to hell or heaven, and re- sistlessly drags a spirit into the appointed receptacle. Shakspeare, whose genius seems to have touched every shape of thought with adorn- ing phrase, makes Juliet, distracted with the momentary fancy that Eomeo is a murderous villain, cry, — "' Nature! what hadst thou to do in bell When thou didst bower the spirit of a flend In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh ?" The second method of explaining the descent of souls into this life is by the supposition that the stable bliss, the uncontrasted peace and sameness, of the heavenly experience, at last wearies the people of Para- dise, until they seek relief in a fall. The perfect sweetness of heaven cloys, the utter routine and safety tire, the salient spirits, till they long for the edge and hazard of earthly exposure, and wander down to dwell in fleshly bodies and breast the tempest of sin, strife, and sorrow, so as to give a fresh charm once more to the repose and exempted joys of the celestial realm. In this way, by a series of recurring lives below and above, novelty and change with larger experience and more vivid con- tentment are secured, the tedium and satiety of fixed happiness and protection are modified by the relishing opposition of varied trials of hardship and pain, the insufiFerable monotony of immortality broken THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN. up and interpolated by epochs of surprise and tingling dangers of pro- bation. " Mortals, behold ! the very angels quit Their mansions unsusceptible of change, Amid your dangerous bowers to sit And through your sharp vicissitudes to range!" Thus round and round we run through an eternity of lives and deaths. Surfeited with the unqualified pleasures of heaven, we " straggle down to this terrene nativity." When, amid the sour exposures and cruel storms of the world, we have renewed our appetite for the divine ambrosia of peace and sweetness, we forsake the body and ascend to heaven; this constant recurrence illustrating the great truths, that alternation is the law of destiny, and that variety is the spice of life. But the most common derivation of the present from a previous life is that which explains the descent as a punishment for sin. In that earlier and loftier state, souls abused their freedom, and were doomed to expiate their offences by a banished, imprisoned, and burdensome life on the earth. "The soul," Plutarch writes, "has removed, not from Athens to Sardis, or from Corinth to Lemnos, but from heaven to earth ; and here, ill at ease, and troubled in this new and strange place, she hangs her head like a decaying plant." Hundreds of passages to the same purport might easily be cited from as many ancient writers. Sometimes this fall of souls from their original estate was represented as a simultaneous event: a part of the heavenly army, under an apostate leader, having rebelled, were defeated, and sentenced to a chained bodily life. Our whole race were transported at once from their native shores in the sky to the con- vict-land of this world. Sometimes the descent was attributed to the fresh fault of each individual, and was thought to be constantly happen- ing. A soul tainted with impure desire, drawn downwards by corrupt material gravitation, hovering over the fumes of matter, inhaling the effluvia of vice, grew infected with carnal longings and contagions, became fouled and clogged with gross vapors and steams, and finally fell into a body and pursued the life fitted to it below. A clear human child is a shining seraph from heaven sunk thus low. Men are degraded cherubim. " Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : The soul that rises with us, our life's star. Hath had elsewhere its setting. And Cometh from afar." The theory of the pre-existence of the soul merely removes the mystery one stage further back, and there leaves the problem of our origin as hopelessly obscure as before. It is sufficiently refuted by the open fact that it is absolutely destitute of scientific basis. The explanation of its wide prevalence as a belief is furnished by two considerations. First, there were old authoritative sages and poets who loved to speculate and dream, and who published their speculations and dreams to reign over THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN. 9 the subject fancies of credulous mankind. Secondly, the conception was intrinsically harmonious, and bore a charm to fascinate the imagination and the heart. The fragmentary visions, broken snatches, mystic strains, incongruous thoughts, fading gleams, with which imperfect recollection comes laden from our childish years and our nightly dreams, are referred by self-pleasing fancy to some earlier and nobler existence. We solve the mysteries of experience by calling them the veiled vestiges of a bright life departed, pathetic waifs drifted to these intellectual shores over the surge of feeling from the wrecked orb of an anterior existence. It gratifies our pride to think the soul " a star-travelled stranger," a dis- guised prince, who has passingly alighted on this globe in his eternal wanderings. The gorgeous glimpses of truth and beauty here vouchsafed to genius, the wondrous strains of feeling that haunt the soul in tender hours, are feeble reminiscences of the prerogatives v/e enjoyed in those eons when we trod the planets that sail ai'ound the upper world of the gods. That ennui or plaintive sadness which in all life's deep and lone- some hours seems native to our hearts, what is it but the nostalgia of the soul remembering and pining after its distant home? Vague and forlorn airs come floating into our consciousness, as from an infinitely remote clime, freighted with a luxury of depressing melancholy. " Ah ! not the nectarous poppy lovers use. Not daily labor's dull Lethean spring. Oblivion in lost angels can infuse Of the soil'd glory and the trailing wing." How attractive all this must be to the thoughts of men, how fascinating to their retrospective and aspiring reveries, it should be needless to repeat. How baseless it is as a philosophical theory demanding sober belief, it should be equally superfluous to illustrate further. The third answer to the question concerning the origin of the soul is that it is directly created by the voluntary power of God. This is the theory of faith, instinctively shrinking from the difficulty of the problem on its scientific grounds, and evading it by a wholesale reference to Deity. Some writers have held that all souls were created by the Divine fiat at the beginning of the world, and laid up in a secret repository, whence they are drawn as occasion calls. The Talmudists say, "All souls were made during the six days of creation ; and therefore generation is not by traduction, but by infusion of a soul into body." Others maintain that this production of souls was not confined to any past period, but is con- tinued still, a new soul being freshly created for every birth. Whenever certain conditions meet, — "Then God smites his hands together, And strikes out a soul as a spark, Into the organized glory of things, From the deeps of the dark." This i^ the view asserted by Vincentius Victor in opposition to the dogmatism of Tertullian on the one hand and to the doubts of Augustine 10 THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN. on tYie other.2 It is called the theory of Insufflation, because it affirms that God immediately breathes a soul into each new being : even as in the case of Adam, of whom we read that "God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul." The doctrine drawn from this Mosaic text, that the soul is a divine substance, a breath of God, miraculously breathed by Him into every creature at the com- mencement of its existence, often reappears, and plays a prominent part in the history of psychological opinions. It corresponds with the beauti- ful Greek myth of Prometheus, who is fabled to have made a human image from the dust of the ground, and then, by fire stolen from heaven, to have animated it with a living soul. So man, as to his body, is made of earthly clay; but the Promethean sj^ark that forms his soul is the fresh breath of God. There is no objection to the real ground and essence of this theory, only to its form and accompaniments. It is purely anthropomorphitic ; it conceives God as working, after the manner of a man, intermittently, arbitrarily. It insulates the origination of souls from the fixed course of nature, severs it from all connection with that common process of organic life which weaves its inscrutable web through the universe, that system of laws which expresses the unchanging wili of God, and which constitutes the order by whose solemn logic alone He acts. The objection to this view is, in a word, that it limits the creative action of God to human souls. "We suppose that He creates our bodies as well ; that He is the immediate Author of all life in the same sense in which He is the immediate Author of our souls. The opponents of the creation-theory, who strenuously fought it in the seventeenth century, were accustomed to urge against it the fanciful objection that " it puts God to an invenust employment scarce consistent with his verecundious holiness ; for, if it be true, whenever the lascivious consent to unclean- ness and are pleased to join in unlawful mixture, God is forced to stand a spectator of their vile impurities, stooping from his throne to attend their bestial practices, and raining down showers of souls to animate the emissions of their concupiscence."^ A fourth reply to the inquiry before us is furnished in Tertullian's famous doctrine of Traduction, the essential import of which is that all human souls have been transmitted, or brought over, from the soul of Adam. This is the theological theory: for it arose from an exigency in tlie dogmatic system generally held by the patristic Church. The uni- versal depravity of human nature, the inherited corruption of the whole race, was a fundamental point of belief. But how reconcile this propo- sition with the conception, entertained by many, that each new-born soul is a fresh creation from the "substance," "spirit," or "breath" of God? Augustine writes to Jerome, asking him to solve this question.* Tertullian, whose fervid mind was thoroughly imbued with materialistio a Augustine, De Anima et ejus Origine, lib. iv. » Edward Warren, No Pre-Exi|f ence, p. 74. ♦ Epistola CLXVI. THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN. H notions, unhesitatingly cut this Gordian knot by asserting that our first parent bore witliin him the undeveloped germ of all mankind, so that sinfulness and souls were propagated together.* Thus the perplexing query, " how souls are held in the chain of original sin," was answered. As Neander says, illustrating TertuUian's view, "The soul of the first man was the fountain-head of all human souls: all the varieties of in- d ividual human nature are but modifications of that one sjiiritual sub. stance." In the light of such a thought, we can see how Nature might, when solitary Adam lived, fulfil Lear's wild conjuration, and " All the germens spill At once that make ingrateful man." In the seventh chapter of the Koran it is written, "The Lord drew forth their posterity from the loins of the sons of Adam." The com- mentators say that God passed his hand down Adam's back, and extracted all the generations which should come into the world until the resurrec- tion. Assembled in the presence of the angels, and endued with under- standing, they confessed their dependence on God, and were then caused to return into the loins of their great ancestor. This is one of the most curious doctrines within the whole range of philosophical history. It implies the strict corporeality of the soul ; and yet how infinitely fine must be its attenuation when it has been diffused into countless thou- sands of millions! Der Urkeim theilt sich ins Unendliche. " What ! will the line stretch out to the crack of doom ?" The whole thought is absurd. It was not reached by an induction of facts, a study of phenomena, or any fair process of reasoning, but was arbitrarily created to rescue a dogma from otherwise inevitable rejection. It was the desperate clutch of a heady theologian reeling in a vortex of hostile argument, and ready to seize any fancy, however artificial, to save himself from falling under the ruins of his system. Henry Woolner published in London, in 1655, a book called "Extraction of Soul: a sober and judicious inquiry to prove that souls are propagated; because, if they are created, original sin is impossible." The theological dogma of traduction has been presented in two forms. First, it is declared that all souls are developed out of the one substance of Adam's soul ; a view that logically implies an ultimate attenuating difiusion, ridiculously absurd. Secondly, it is held that " the eating of the forbidden fruit corrupted all the vital fluids of Eve ; and this corruption carried vicious and chaotic consequences into her ova, in which lay the souls of all her posterity, with infinitely little bodies, already existing."^ This form is as incredible as the other ; for it equally implies a limitless distribution of souls from a limited deposit. As Whewell says, "This successive inclusion of germs (Einschachtelungs-Theorie) implies that each soul contains an infinite number of germs."'' It necessarily ex- • De Anima, cap. x. et xix. o Hennings, Geschichte von den Seelen der Men8chen,s. 500. ' Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. I. b. ix. ch. iv. sect. 4. 12 THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN. eludes the formation of new spiritual substance : else original transmitted Bin is excluded. The doctrine finds no parallelism anywhere else in nature. Who, no matter how wedded to the theology of original sin and transmitted death, would venture to stretch the same thesis over the animal races, and affirm that the dynamic principles, or animating souls, of all serpents, eagles, and lions, were once compressed in the first patriarchal serpent, eagle, or lion ? That the whole formative power of all the simultaneous members of our race was concentrated in the first cell-germ of our original progenitor, is a scientific impossibility and in- credibleness. The fatal sophistry in the traducian account of the trans- mission of souls may be illustrated in the following manner. The germs of all the apple-trees now in existence did not lie in the first apple-seed. All the apple-trees now existing were not derived by literal development out of the actual contents of the first apple-seed. No: but the truth is this. There was a power in the first apple-seed to secure certain con- ditions ; that is, to organize a certain status in which the plastic vegetative life of nature would posit new and similar powers and materials. So not all souls were latent in Adam's, but only an organizing power to secure the conditions on which the Divine Will that first began, would, in accordance with His creative plan, forever continue. His spirit-creation. The distinction of this statement from that of traduction is the differ- ence between evolution from one original germ or stock and actual pro- duction of new beings. Its distinction from the third theory — the theory of immediate creation — is the difference between an intermittent inter- position of arbitrary acts and the continuous working of a plan accord- ing to laws scientifically traceable. There is another solution to the question of the soul's origin, which has been propounded by some philosophers and may be called the specu- lative theory. Its statement is that the germs of souls were created simultaneously with the formation of the material universe, and were copiously sown abroad through all nature, waiting there to be successively taken up and furnished with the conditions of development.* These latent seeds of souls, swarming in all places, are drawn in with the first breath or imbibed with the earliest nourishment of the new-born child into the already-constructed body which before has only a vegetative life. The Germans call this representation panspermismus, or the dissemi- nation-theory. Leibnitz, in his celebrated monadologj'^, carries the same view a great deal further. He conceives the whole created universe, visible and invisible, to consist of monads, which are not particles of matter, but metaphysical points of power. These monads are all souls. They are produced by what he calls /ulcruratmis of God. The distinction between fulguration and emanation is this: in the latter case the proces- sion is historically defined and complete; in the former case it is moment- aneous. The monads are radiated from the Divine Will, forth through ■ Ploucquet, De Origine atque Generatione Animse Humanas ex Principiis Monadologicls stability. THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN. 13 the creation, by the constant flashes of His volition. All nature is com- posed of them, and nothing is depopulated and dead. Their naked being is force, and their indestructible predicates are perception, desire, tendency to develop. While they lie dormant, their potential capacities all inwrapped, they constitute what we entitle matter. When, by the rising stir of their inherent longing, they leave their passive state and reach a condition of obscure consciousness, they become animals. Finally, they so far unwind their bonds and evolve their facultative po- tencies as to attain the rank of rational minds in the grade of humanity. Generation is merely the method by which the aspiring monad lays the organic basis for the grouped building of its body. Man is a living union of monads, one regent-monad presiding over the whole organization. That king-monad which has attained to full apperception, the free exer- cise of perfect consciousness, is the immortal human soul.^ Any labored attempt to refute this ingenious doctrine is needless, since the doctrine itself is but the developed structure of a speculative conception with no valid basis of observed fact. It is a sheer hypothesis, spun out of the self-fed bowels of a priori assumption and metaphysic fancy. It solves the problems only by changes of their form, leaving the mysteries as numerous and deej) as before. It is a beautiful and sublime piece of latent poetry, the evolution and architecture of which well display the wonderful genius of Leibnitz. It is a more subtle and powerful process of thought than Aristotle's Organon, a more pure and daring work of imagination than Milton's Paradise Lost. But it spurns the tests of ex- perimental science, and is entitled to rank only among the splendid curiosities of j^hilosophy ; a brilliant and plausible theorem, not a sober and solid induction. One more method of treating the inquiry before us will complete the list. It is what we may properly call the scientijic theory, though in truth it is hardly a theory at all, but rather a careful statement of the observed facts, and a modest confession of inability to explain the cause of them. Those occupying this position, when asked what is the origin of souls, do not pretend to unveil the final secret, but simply say, everywhere in the world of life, fi-om bottom to top, there is an organic growth in accord- ance with conditions. This is what is styled the theory of epigenesis, and is adopted by the chief physiologists of the present day. Swam- merdam, Malebranche, even Cuvier, had defended the doctrine of suc- cessive inclusion ; but Wolf, Blumenbach, and Von Baer established in its place the doctrine of epigenesis.'" Scrupulously confining themselves to the mass of collected facts and the course of scrutinized phenomena, they say there is a natural production of new living beings in conformity to certain laws, and give an exposition of the fixed conditions and sequences of this production. Here they humbly stop, acknowledging » Leibnitz, Monadologie. 1" Eniiemoser, Ilistorisch-psychologisclio Untersuchungen den Urspning der menschliohen Seelen. zweite Auflage. 2 14 THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN. that the causal root of jiower, which produces all these consequences, is an inexplicable mystery. Their attitude is well represented by Swe- denborg when he says, in reference to this very subject, " Any one may form guesses ; but let no son of earth pretend to penetrate the mysteries of creation."" Let us notice now the facts submitted to us. First, at the base of the various departments of nature, we see a mass of apparently lifeless matter. Out of this crude substratum of the outward world Ave observe a vast variety of organized forms produced by a variously-named but unknown Power. They spring in regular methods, in determinate shapes, exist on successive stages of rank, with more or less striking de- marcations of endowment, and finally fall back again, as to their physical constituents, into the inorganic stuff from which they grew. This myste- rious organizing Power, pushing its animate and builded receptacles up to the level of vegetation, creates the world of plants. " Every clod feels a stir of might, An instinct within it that reaches and towers, And, grasping blindlj' above it for light. Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers." On the level of sensation, where the obscure rudiments of will, under- standing, and sentiment commence, this life-giving Power creates the world of animals. And so, on the still higher level of reason and its concomitants, it creates the. world of men. In a word, the great general fact is that an unknown Power — call it Avhat we may. Nature, Vital Force, or God — creates, on the various planes of its exercise, different families of organized beings. Secondly, a more special fact is, that when we have overleaped the mystery of a commencement, every being yields seed ac- cording to its kind, wherefrom, when properly conditioned, its species is perpetuated. How much, now, does this second fact imply? It is by adding to the observed phenomena an indefensible hypothesis that the error of traduction is obtained. We observe that human beings are be- gotten by a deposit of germs through the generative process. To affirm that these germs are transmitted down the generations from the original progenitor of each race, in whom they all existed at first, is an un- warranted assertion and involves absurdities. It is refuted both by Geoffroy St. Hilaire's famous experiments on eggs, and by the crossing of species.'^ In opposition to this theological figment, observation and science require the belief that each being is endowed independently with a germ-forming power. Organic life requires three things: a fruitful germ; a quickening im- pulse; a nourishing medium. Science plainly shows us that this primal nucleus is given, in the human species, by the union of the contents of a sperm-cell with those of a germ-cell; that this dynamic start is imj^arted 11 Tract on the Origin and Propagation of the Soul. chap. i. 12 Flourens, Amouut of Life on the Globe, part ii. ch. iii. sect. ii. THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN. 15 from the life-force of the parents; and that this feeding environment is furnished by the circle of co-ordinated relations. That the formative ■power of the new organism comes from, or at least is wholly conditioned by, the jjarent organism, should be believed, because it is the obvious conclusion, against which there is nothing to militate. That the soul of the child comes in some way from the soul of the parent, or is stamped by it, is also ,implied by the normal resemblance of children to parents, not more in bodily form than in spiritual idiosyncrasies. This fact alone furnishes the proper qualification to the acute and significant lines of the Platonizing jjoet : — " Wherefore who thinks from souls new souls to bring, The same let presse the sunne-beames in his fist And squeeze out drops of light, or strongly wring The rainbow till it die his hands, well prest." "That which is born of the flesh is flesh: that which is born of the spirit is spirit." As the body of the child is the derivative of a germ elaborated in the body of the parent, so the soul of the child is the derivative of a develo2)ing impulse of power imparted from the soul of the parent. And as the body is sustained by absorbing nutrition from matter, so the soul is sustained by assimilating the spiritual substances of the invisible kingdom. The most ethereal elements must combine to nourish that consummate plant whose blossom is man's mind. This repre- sentation is not materialism; for spirit belongs to a different sphere and is the subject of different predicates from matter, though equally under a constitution of laws. Nor does this view pretend to explain what is inherently transcendent: it leaves the creation of the soul within as wide a depth and margin of mystery as ever. Neither is this mode of ex- posing the problem atheistic. It refers the forms of life, all growths, all souls, to the indefinable Power that works everywhere, creates each thing, vivifies, governs, and contains the universe. And, however that Power be named, is it not God ? And thus we still reverently hold that it is God's own hands " That reach through nature, moulding men." The ancient heroes of Greece and India were fond of tracing their genealogy up directl}"^ to their deities, and were proud to deem that in guarding them the gods stooped to watch over a race of kings, a puissant and immortal stock, — " Whose glories stream'd from the same cloud-girt founts Whence their own dawn'd upon the infant world." After all the researches that have been made, we yet find the secret of the beginning of the soul shrouded among the fathomless mysteries of the Almighty Creator, and must ascribe our birth to the Will of God as piously as it was done in the eldest mythical ejiochs of the world. Notwithstanding the careless frivolity of skepticism and the garish light of science abroad in this modern time, there are still 16 THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN. stricken and yearning depths of wonder and sorrow enough, profound and awful shadows of night and fear enough, to make us recognise, in the golden joys that visit us rarely, in the illimitable visions that emanci-' pate us often, in the unearthly thoughts and dreams that ravish our minds, enigmatical intimations of our kinship with God, prophecies of a super-earthly destiny whose splendors already break through the clouds of ignorance, the folds of flesh, and the curtains of time in which our spirits here sit pavilioned. Augustine pointedly observes, " It is no evil that the origin of the soul remains obscure, if only its redemption be made certain. "^^ Non est periculum si origo animce lateat, dum redemptio clareat. No matter how humanity originates, if its object be to produce fruit, and that fruit be immortal souls. When our organism has perfected its intended product, willingly will we let the decaying body return into the ground, if so be we are assured that the ripened spirit is borne into the heavenly garner. Let us, in close, reduce the problem of the soul's origin to its last terms. The amount of force in the universe is imiform.'* Action and reaction being equal, no new creation of force is possible : only its direc- tions, deposits, and receptacles may be altered. No combination of physical joroccsses can produce a previouslj' non-existent subject: it can only initiate the modification, development, assimilation, of realities already in being. Something cannot come out of nothing. The quicken- ing formation of a man, therefore, implies the existence, first, of a material germ, the basis of the body ; secondly, of a power to impart to that germ a dynamic impulse, — in other words, to deposit in it a spirit-atom, or monad of life-force. Now, the fresh body is originally a detached pro- duct of the parent body, as an apple is the detached product of a tree. So the fresh soul is a transmitted force imparted by the parent soul, either directly from itself, or else conditioned by it and drawn from the ground-life of nature, the creative power of God. If filial soul be be- gotten by procession and severance of conscious force from parental soul, the spiritual resemblance of offspring and progenitors is clearly explained. This phenomenon is also equally well explained if the parent soul, so called, be a die striking the creative substance of the universe into indi- vidual form. The latter supposition seems, upon the whole, the more plausible and scientific. Generation is a reflex condition moving the life-basis of the world to produce a soul, as a physical impression moves the soul to produce a perception.'* But, however deep the mystery of the soul's origin, whatever our conclusion in regard to it, let us not forget tliat the inmost essence and verity of the soul is conscious power ; and that all power defies annihilation. It is an old declaration that what begins in time must end in time ; and with the metaphysical shears of that notion more than "Epist. CLVI. "Faraday, Conservation of Force, Phil. M.<»g., April, 1857. Bcliammer, XJrsprung der menschlichen Seelen, sect. 115. HISTORY OF DEATH, once the burning faith in eternal life has been snufTed out. Yet how obvious is its soj^jhistry ! A being beginning in time need not cease in time, if the Power which originated it intends and provides for its per- petuity. And that such is the Creative intention for man appears from the fact that the grand forms of belief in all ages issuing from his mental organization have borne the stami) of an e.xpected immortality. Our ideas may disappear, but they are always recoverable. If the souls of men are ideas of God, must they not be as enduring as his mind ? The naturalist who so immerses his thoughts m the physical phases of nature as to lose hold on indestructible centres of personality, should beware lest he lose the motive which propels man to begin here, by virtue and culture, to climb that ladder of life whose endless sides are affections, but whose discrete rounds are thoughts. CHAPTER II. HISTORY OF DEATH. Dkath is not an entity, but an event ; not a force, but a state. Life is the positive experience, death the negation. Yet in nearly every litera- ture death has been personified, while no kindred prosopopoeia of life is anywhere to be found. With the Greeks, Thanatos was a god ; with the Eomans, Mors was a goddess: but no statue was ever moulded, no altar ever raised, to Zoe or Vita. At first thought, we should anticipate the reverse of this ; but, in truth, the fact is quite naturally as it is. Life is a con- tinuous process ; and any one who makes the effort will find how diflScult it is to conceive of it as an individual being, with distinctive attributes, functions, and will. It is an inward possession which we familiarly ex- perience, and in the quiet routine of custom we feel no shock of surprise at it, no impulse to give it imaginative shape and ornament. On the contrary, death is an impending occurrence, something which we antici- pate and shudder at, something advancing toward us in time to strike or seize us. Its externality to our living experience, its threatening approach, the mystery and alarm enwrapping it, are provocative con- ditions for fanciful treatment, making personifications inevitable. With the old Aryan race of India, death is Yama, — the soul of the first man, departed to be the king of the subterranean realm of the sub- sequent dead, and returning to call after him each of his descendants in turn. To the good he is mild and lovely, but to the impious he is clad in terror and acts with severity. The purely fanciful character of this thought is obvious ; for, according to it, death was before death, since Yama himself died. Yama does not really represent death, but its arbiter and messenger. lie is the ruler over the dead, who himself carries the summons to each mortal to become his subject. 18 HISTORY OF DEATH. In the Hebrew conception, death was a majestic angel, named Sam- mael, standing in the court of heaven, and flying thence over the earth, armed with a sword, to obey the behests of God. The Talmudists developed and dressed up the thought with many details, half sublime, half fantastic. He strides through the world at a step. Fi-om the soles of his feet to his shoulders he is full of eyes. Every person in the moment of dying sees him; and at the sight the soul retreats, running through all the limbs, as if asking permission to depart from them. From his naked sword fall three drops : one pales the counte- nance, one destroys the vitality, one causes the body to decay. Some Eabbins say he bears a cup from which the dying one drinks, or that he lets fall from the point of his sword a single acrid drop upon the suflFerer's tongue : this is what is called " tasting the bitternes.s of death." Here again, we see, it is not strictly death that is personified. The embodiment is not of the mortal act, but of the decree determining that act. The Jewish angel of death is not a picture of death in itself, but of God's decree coming to the fiited individual who is to die. The Greeks sometimes depicted death and sleep as twin boys, one black, one white, borne slumbering in the arms of their mother, night. In this instance the phenomenon of dissolving unconsciousness which falls on mortals, abstractly generalized in the mind, is then concretely symbolized. It is a bold and hapj^y stroke of artistic genius; but it in no way expresses or suggests the scientific facts of actual death. There is also a classic representation of death as a winged boy with a pensive brow and an inverted torch, a butterfly at his feet. This beautiful image, with its affecting accompaniments, conveys to the beholder not the verity, nor an interpretation, of death, but the sentiments of the sur- vivors in view of their bereavement. The sad brow denotes the grief of the mourner, the winged insect the disembodied psyche, the reversed torch the descent of the soul to the under-world; but the reality of death itself is nowhere hinted. The Romans give descriptions of death as a female figure in dark robes, with black wings, with ravenous teeth, hovering everywhere, dart- ing here and there, eager for prey. Such a view is a personification of the mysteriousness, suddenness, inevitableness, and fearfulness, con- nected with the subject of death in men's minds, rather than of death itself. These thoughts are grouped into an imaginary being, whose sum of attributes are then ignorantly both associated with the idea of the unknown cause and confounded with the visible effect. It is, in a word, mere poetry, inspired by fear and unguided by philosophy. Death has been shoAvn in the guise of a fowler spreading his net, setting his snares for men. But this image concerns itself with the accidents of the subject, — the unexpectedness of the fatal blow, the treacherous springing of the trap, — leaving the root of the matter un- touched. The circumstances of the mortal hour are infinitely varied, the heart of the experience is unchangeably the same: there are a HISTORY OF DEATH. 19 thousand modes of dying, but there is only one death. Ever so com- plete an exhibition of the occasions and accompaniments of an event is no explanation of what the inmost reality of the event is. The Norse conception of death as a vast, cloudy presence, darkly- sweeping on its victims, and bearing them away wrap^jed in its sable folds, is evidently a free product of imagination brooding not so much on the distinct phenomena of an individual case as on the melancholy mystery of the disappearance of men from the familiar places that knew them once but miss them now. In a somewhat kindred manner, the startling magnificence of the sketch in the Apocalypse, of death on the pale horse, is a product of pure imagination meditating on the wholesale slaughter which was to deluge the earth when God's avenging judgments fell upon the enemies of the Christians. But to consider this murderous warrior on his white charger as literally death, would be as erroneous as to imagine the bare-armed executioner and the guillotine to be themselves the death which they inflict. No more ai^palling picture of death has been drawn than that by Milton, whose dire image has this stroke of truth in it, that its adumbrate formlessness typifies the disorganizing force which reduces all cunningly-built bodies of life to the elemental wastes of being. The incestuous and miscreated progeny of Sin is thus delineated : — " The shape, — If shape it might be call'd that shape had none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb. Or substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd, For each seem'd either, — black it stood as night, Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell. And shook a dreadful dart : what seem'd his head The likeness of a kingly crown had on." But the most common personification of death is as a skeleton brandish- ing a dart ; and then he is called the grisly king of terrors ; and people tremble at the thovight of him, as children do at the name of a bugbear in the dark. What sophistry this is! It is as if we should identify the trophy with the conqueror, the vestiges left in the track of a traveller with the traveller himself. Death literally makes a skeleton of man ; so man metaphorically makes a skeleton of Death ! All these representations of death, however beautiful, or patlietic, or horrible, are based on superficial appearances, misleading analogies, arbi- trary fancies, perturbed sensibilities, not on a firm hold of realities, in- sight of truth, and philosophical analysis. They are all to be bi'ushed aside as phantoms of nightmare or artificial creations of fiction. Poetry has mostly rested, hitherto, on no veritable foundation of science, but on a visionary foundation of emotion. It has wrought upon flitting, sensible phenomena rather than upon abiding substrata of facts. For example, a tender Greek bard personified the life of a tree as a Hamadryad, the moving trunk and limbs her undulating form and beckoning arms, the drooping boughs her hair, the rustling foliage her voice. A modern poet, 20 HISTORY OF DEATH. endowed with the same strength of sympathy, but acquainted with vege^ table chemistry, might personify sap as a pale, liquid maiden, ascending through the roots and veins to meet air, a blue boy robed in golden warmth, descending through the leaves, with a whisper, to her embrace. So the personifications of death in literature, thus far, give us no pene- trative glance into what it really is, help us to no acute definition of it, but poetically fasten on some feature, or accident, or emotion, associated with it. There are in popular usage various metaphors to express what is meant by death. The principal ones are, extinction of the vital spark, depart- ing, expiring, cutting the thread of life, giving up the ghost, falling asleep. These figurative modes of speech spring from extremely imperfect correspondences. Indeed, the unlikenesses are more important and more numerous than the likenesses. They are simply artifices to in- dicate what is so deeply obscure and intangible. They do not lay the secret bare, nor furnish us any aid in reaching to the true essence of the question. Moreover, several of them, when sharjjly examined, involve a fatal error. For example, upon the admitted supposition that in every case of dying the soul departs from the body, still, this separation of the soul from the body is not what constitutes death. Death is the state of the body when the soul has left it. An act is distinct from its effects. We must, therefore, turn from the literary inquiry to the metaphysical and scientific method, to gain any satisfactory idea and definition of death. A German writer of extraordinary acumen and audacity has said, "Only before death, but not in death, is death death. Death is so unreal a being that he only is when he is not, and is not when he is."' This — paradoxical and puzzling as it may appear — is susceptible of quite lucid iifterpretation and defence. For death is, in its naked significance, the state of not-being. Of course, then, it has no existence save in the con- ceptions of the living. We comjiare a dead person with what he was when living, and instinctively personify the difference as death. Death, strictly analyzed, is only this abstract conceit or metaphysical nonentity. Death, therefore, being but a conception in the mind of a living person, when that person dies death ceases to be at all. And thus the realization of death is the death of death. He annihilates himself, dying with the dart he drives. Having in this manner disposed of the personality or entity of death, it remains as an effect, an event, a state. Accordingly, the question next arises, What is death when considered in this its true aspect? A positive must be understood before its related negative can be intel- ligible. Bicliilt defined life as the sum of functions by which death is resisted. It is an identical proposition in verbal disguise, with the fault that it makes negation affirmation, passiveness action. Death is not a dynamic agency warring against life, but simply an occurrence. Life is the operation of an organizing force producing an organic form accord- ing to an ideal type, and persistently preserving that form amidst the 1 Feuerbach, Gedanken fiber Tod und Unsterbliclikeit, sect. 84. HISTORY OF DEATH. 21 incessant molecular activity and change of its constituent substance. That oi)eration of the organic force which thus constitutes life is a con- tinuous process of waste, casting off the old exhausted matter, and of replacement by assimilation of new material. The close of this process of organific metamorphosis and desquamation is death, whose finality is utter decomposition, restoring all the bodily elements to the original inorganic conditions from which they were taken. The organic force with which life begins constrains chemical affinity to work in special modes for the formation of special products: when it is spent or dis- appears, chemical affinity is at liberty to work in its general modes ; and that is death. " Life is the co-ordination of actions ; the imperfection of the co-ordination is disease, its arrest is death." In other words, " life is the continuous adjustment of relations in an organism with relations in its environment." Disturb that adjustment, and you have malady; de- stroy it, and you have death. Life is the performance of functions by an organism ; death is the abandonment of an organism to the forces of the universe. No function can be performed without a waste of the tissue through which it is performed : that waste is repaired by the assi- milation of fresh nutriment. In the balancing of these two actions life consists. The loss of their equipoise soon terminates them both; and that is death. Upon the whole, then, scientifically speaking, to cause death is to stop " that continuous differentiation and integration of tissues and of states of consciousness" constituting life.^ Death, therefore, is no monster, no force, but the act of completion, the state of cessation ; and all the bugbears named death are but poor phantoms of the fright- ened and childish mind. Life consisting in the constant differentiation of the tissues by the action of oxygen, and their integration from the blastema furnished by the blood, why is not the harmony of these processes preserved for- ever? Why should the relation between the integration and disintegra- tion going on in the human organism ever fall out of correspondence with the relation between the oxygen and food supplied from its environ- ment? That is to say, whence originated the sentence of death upon man? Why do we not live immortally as we are? The current reply is, we die because our first parent sinned. Death is a penalty inflicted upon the human race because Adam disobeyed his Maker's command. We must consider this theory a little. The narrative in Genesis, of the creation of man and of the events in the Garden of Eden, cannot be traced further back than to the time of Solomon, three thousand years after the alleged occurrences it describes. This portion of the book of Genesis, as has long been shown, is a distinct document, marked by many peculiarities, which was inserted in its pre- sent place by the compiler of the elder Hebrew Scriptures somewhere » Spencer, Principles of Psychology, pp. 334-37 22 HISTORY OF DEATH. between seven and ten centuries before Christ.^ Ewaid has fully demon- strated that the book of Genesis consists of many separate fragmentary documents of different ages, arranged together by a comparatively late hand. Among the later of these pieces is the account of the primeval pair in paradise. Grotefend argues, with much force and variety of evi- dence, that this story was dei'ived from a far more ancient legend-book, only fragments of which remained when the final collection was made of this portion of the Old Testament.* Many scholars have thought the account was not of Hebrew origin, but was borrowed from the literary traditions of some earlier Oriental nation. Rosenmuller, Von Bohlen, and others, say it bears unmistakable relationship to the Zendavesta which tells how Ahriman, the old Serpent, beguiled the first pair into sin and misery. These correspondences, and also that between the tree of life and the Zoroastrian plant horn, which gives life and will produce the resurrection, are certainly striking. Buttmann sees in God's declaration to Adam, "Behold, I have given you for food every herb bearing seed, and every tree in which is fruit bearing seed," traces of a prohibition of animal food. This was not the vestige of a Hebrew usage, but the vege- tarian tradition of some sect eschewing meat, a tradition drawn from South Asia, whence the fathers of the Hebrew race came.* Gesenius says, "Many things in this narrative were drawn from older Asiatic tradi- tion."® Knobel also affirms that numerous matters in this relation were derived from traditions of East Asian nations.'' Still, it is not necessary to suppose that the wa-iter of the account in Genesis borrowed any thing from abroad. The Hebrew may as well have originated such ideas as anybody else. The Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Chaldeans, the Per- sians, the Etruscans, have kindred narratives held as most ancient and sacred.* The Chinese, the Sandwich Islanders, the North American Indians, also have their legends of the origin and altered fortunes of the human race. The resemblances between many of these stories are better accounted for by the intrinsic similarities of the subject, of the mind, of nature, and of mental action, than by the supposition of derivation from one another. Eegarding the Hebrew narrative as an indigenous growth, then, how shall we exjjlain its origin, purport, and authority? Of course we cannot receive it as a miraculous revelation conveying infallible truth. The Bible, it is now acknowledged, was not given in the providence of God to teach astronomy, geology, chronology, and the operation of organic forces, but to help educate men in morality and piety. It is a religious, not a scientific, work. Some unknown Hebrew poet, in the early dawn S Tuch, Kommentar iiber Genesis, s. xcviii. * Zur altesten Sageupoesie des Orients. Zeitschrift der deutschen Morgcnlandischen Gesellschaft, band viii. ss. 772-779. B Mythologus, (Schopfung und Sundenfall.) band i. s. 137. « .\rticle "Adam," in Encyclopaedia by Ersch and Giuber. ' Die Genesis erklart, s. 28. 8 Palfrey's Academical Lectures, toI. ii. pp. 21-28. HISTORY OF DEATH. 23 of remembered time, knowing little metaphysics and less science, musing upon the fortunes of man, his wickedness, sorrow, death, and impressed with an instinctive conviction that things could not always have been so casting about for some solution of the dim, jjathetic problem, at last struck out the beautiful and sublime poem recorded in Genesis, which has now for many a century, by Jews, Christians, Mohammedans, been credited as authentic history. With his own hands God moulds from earth an image in his own likeness, breathes life into it, — and new- made man moves, lord of the scene, and lifts his face, illuminated with soul, in submissive love to his Creator. Endowed with free-will, after a while he violated his Maker's command: the divine displeasure was awakened, punishment ensued, and so rushed in the terrible host of ills under which we suffer. The problem must early arise : the solution is, to a certain stage of thought, at once the most obvious and the most satisfactory conceivable. It is the truth. Only it is cast in imaginative, not scientific, form, arrayed in emblematic,- not literal, garb. The Greeks had a lofty poem by some early unknown author, setting forth how Prometheus formed man of clay and animated him with fire from heaven, and how from Pandora's box the horrid crew of human vexa- tions were let into the world. The two narratives, though most unequal in depth and dignitj^ belong in the same literary and philosophical cate- gory. Neither was intended as a plain record of veritable history, each word a naked fact, but as a symbol of its author's thoughts, each phrase the metajahorical dress of a speculative idea. Eichhorn maintains, with no slight plausibility, that the whole account of the Garden of Eden was derived from a series of allegorical pictures which the author had seen, and which he translated from the language of painting into the language of words. At all events, we must take the account as symbolic, a succession of figvirative expressions. Many of the best minds have always so considered it, from Josephus to Origen, from Ambrose to Kant. What, then, are the real thoughts which the author of this Hebrew poem on the primal condition of man meant to convey beneath his legendary forms of imagery ? These four are the essential ones. First, that God created man ; secondly, that he created him in a state of freedom and happiness surrounded by blessings ; third, that the favored subject violated his Sovereign's order; fourth, that in con- sequence of this offence he was degraded from his blessed condition, beneath a load of retributive ills. The composition shows the charactei-- istics of a philosopheme or a myth, a scheme of conceptions deliberately wrought out to answer an inquiry, a story devised to account for an exist- ing fact or custom. The picture of God jDerforming his creative work in six days and resting on the seventh, may have been drawn after the sep- tenary division of time and the religious separation of the Sabbath, to explain and justify that observance. The creation of Eve out of the side of Adam was either meant by the author as an allegoric illustration that the love of husband and wife is the most powerful of social bonds, or as 24 HISTORY OF DEATH. a pure myth seeking to explain the incomparable cleaving together of husband and wife by the entirely poetic supposition that the fii-st woman was taken out of the first man, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. All early literatures teem with exemplifications of this process, — a sponta- neous secretion by the imagination to account for some presented phe- nomenon. Or perhaps this part of the relation — "and he called her woman [manness], because she was taken out of man" — may be an in- stance of those etymological myths with which ancient literature abounds. Woman is named Isha because she was taken out of man, whose name is Ish. The barbarous treatment the record under considera- tion has received, the utter baselessness of it in the light of truth as foundation for literal belief, find perhaps no fitter exposure than in the fact that for many centuries it was the prevalent faith of Christendom that every woman has one rib more than man, a permanent memorial of the Divine theft from his side. Unquestionably, there are many good persons now who, if Richard Owen should tell them that man has the same number of ribs as woman, would think of the second chapter of Genesis and doubt his word ! There is no reason for supposing the serpent in this recital to be in- tended as a representative of Satan. The earliest trace of such an inter- pretation is in the Wisdom of Solomon, an anonymous and apocryphal book composed probably a thousand years later. What is said of the snake is the most plainly mythical of all the portions. What caused the snake to crawl on his belly in the dust, while other creatures walk on feet or fly with wings ? Why, the sly, winding creature, more subtle, more detestable, than any beast of the field, deceived the first woman; and this is his punishment! Such was probably the mental process in the writer. To seek a profound and true theological dogma in such a state- ment is as absurd as to seek it in the classic myth that the lapwing with 11 his sharp beak chases the swallow because he is the descendant of the enraged Tereus who pursued jioor Progne with a drawn sword. Or, to cite a more apposite case, as well might we seek a reliable historical narrative in the following Greek myth. Zeus once gave man a remedy H against old age. He put it on the back of an ass and followed on foot. |< It being a hot day, the ass grew thirsty, and would drink at a fount which h a snake guarded. The cunning snake knew what precious burden the hi ass bore, and would not, except at the price of it, let him drink. He lii obtained the prize ; but with it, as a punishment for his trick, he inces- p santly suffers the ass's thirst. Thus the snake, casting his skin, annually fflj renews his youth, while man is borne down by old age.^ In all theseljti cases the mental action is of the same kind in motive, method, and result, jfci The author of the poem contained in the third chapter of Genesisjij does not say that man was made immortal. The implication plainly isjl^ • ^lian, De Nat. Animal., lib. vi. cap. 51. 1 HISTORY OF DEATH. 25 that he was created mortal, taken from the dust and naturally to return again to the dust. But by the power of God a tree was provided whose fruit would immortalize its partakers. The penalty of Adam's sin was directly, not physical death, but being forced in the sweat of his brow to wring his subsistence from the sterile ground cursed for his sake; it was indirectly literal death, in that he was prevented from eating the fruit of the tree of life. "God sent him out of the garden, lest he eat and live forever." He was therefore, according to the narrative, made originally subject to death ; but an immortalizing antidote was j^repared for him, which he forfeited by his transgression. That the writer made use of the trees of life and knowledge as embellishing alle- gories is most probable. But, if not, he was not the only devout poet who, in the early times, with sacred reverence believed the wonders the inspiring muse gave him as from God. It is not clear from the Biblical record that Adam was imagined the first man. On the contrary, the statement that Cain was afraid that those who met him would kill him, also that he went to the land of Nod and took a wife and builded a city, implies that there was another and older race. Father Peyrere wrote a book, called " Prseadamitse," more than two hundred years ago, pointing out this fact and arguing that there really were men before Adam. If science should thoroughly establish the truth of this view, religion need not suffer; but the common theology, inextricably built upon and intertangled with the dogma of "original sin," would be hope- lessly ruined. But the leaders in the scientific world will not on that account shut their eyes nor refuse to reason. Christians should follow their example of truth-seeking, with a deeper faith in God, fearless of results, but resolved upon reaching reality. It is a very singular and important fact that, from the appearance in Genesis of the account of the creation and sin and punishment of the first pair, not the faintest explicit allusion to it is subsequently found anywhere in literature until about the time of Christ. Had it been all along credited in its literal sense, as a divine revelation, could this be so ? Philo Judseus gives it a thoroughly figurative meaning. He says, "Adam was created mortal in body, immortal in mind. Paradise is the soul, piety the tree of life, discriminative wisdom the tree of knowledge ; the serpent is pleasure, the flaming sword turning every way is the sun revolving round the world."'" Jesus himself never once alludes to Adam or to any part of the story of Eden. In the whole New Testament there are but two import- ant references to the tradition, both of which are by Paul. He says, in effect, "As through the sin of Adam all are condemned unto death, so by the righteousness of Christ all shall be justified unto life." It is not a guarded doctrinal statement, but an unstudied, rlietorical illustration of the affiliation of the sinful and unhappy generations of the past with their offending progenitor, Adam, of the believing and blessed family of W De Mundi Opificio, liv-lvi. De Cherub, viii. 26 HISTORY OF DEATH. the chosen vrith their redeeming head, Christ. He does not use the word death in the Epistle to the Romans prevailingly in the narrow sense of physical dissolution, but in a broad, spiritual sense, as appears, for example, in these instances: — "To be carnally-minded is death ;" "The law of the spirit of life in Christ hath made me free from the law of sin and death." For the spiritually-minded were not exempt from bodily death. Paul himself died the bodily death. His idea of the relations of Adam and Christ to humanity is more clearly expressed in the other passage already alluded to. It is in the Epistle to the Corinthians, and appears to be this. The first man, Adam, was of the earth, earthy, the head and repi-esentative of a corruptible race whose flesh and blood were never meant to inherit the kingdom of God. The second man, Christ the Lord, soon to return from heaven, was a quickening spirit, head and representative of a risen spiritual race for whom is prepared the eternal inheritance of the saints in light. As by the first man came death, whose germ is transmitted with the flesh, so by the second man comes the resur- rection of the dead, whose type is seen in his glorified ascension from Hades to heaven. "As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." Upon all the line of Adam sin has entailed, what other- wise Avould not have been known, moral death and a disembodied descent to the under-world. But the gospel of Christ, and his resurrection as the first-fruits of them that slept, proclaim to all those that are his, at his speedy coming, a kindred deliverance from the lower gloom, an inves- titure with spiritual bodies, and an admission into the kingdom of God. According to Paul, then, physical death is not the retributive conse- quence of Adam's sin, but is the will of the Creator in the law of nature, the sowing of terrestrial bodies for the gathering of celestial bodies, the putting off of the image of the earthy for the putting on of the image of the heavenly. The specialty of the marring and punitive inter- ference of sin in the economy is, in addition to the penalties in moral experience, the interpolation, between the fleshly " unclothing" and the spiritual "clothing upon," of the long, disembodied, subterranean resi- dence, from the descent of Abel into its palpable solitude to the ascent of Christ out of its multitudinous world. From Adam, in the flesh, humanity sinks into the grave-realm ; from Christ, in the spirit, it shall rise into heaven. Had man remained innocent, death, considered as change of body and transition to heaven, would still have been his por- tion ; but all the suffering and evil now actually associated with death would not have been. Leaving the Scriptures, the first man appears in literature, in the history of human thought on the beginning of our race, in three forms. There is the IMythical Adam, the embodiment of poetical musings, fanci- ful conceits, and speculative dreams ; there is the Theological Adam, the central postulate of a groujD of dogmas, the support of a fabric of con- troversial thought, the lay-figure to fill out and wear the hypothetical dresses of a doctrinal system ; and there is the Scientific Adam, the first HISTORY OP DEATH. 27 specimen of the genus man, the supposititious personage who, as the earliest product, on this grade, of the Creative organic force or Divine energy, commenced the series of human generations. The first is a hypostatized legend, the second a metaphysical personification, the third a philosophical hypothesis. The first is an attractive heap of imagina- tions, the next a dialectic mass of dogmatisms, the last a modest set of theories. Philo says God made Adam not from any chance earth, but from a carefully-selected portion of the finest and most sifted clay, and that, as being directly created by God, he Avas superior to all others generated by men, the generations of whom deteriorate in each remove from him, as the attraction of a magnet weakens from the iron ring it touches along a chain of connected rings. The Rabbins say Adam was so large that when he lay down he reached across the earth, and when standing his head touched the firmament : after his fall he waded through the ocean, Orion-like. Even a French Academician, Nicolas Fleurion, held that Adam was one hundred and twenty-three feet and nine inches in height. All creatures except the angel Eblis, as the Koran teaches, made obeis- ance to him. Eblis, full of envy and pride, refused, and was thrust into hell by God, where he began to plot the ruin of the new race. One effect of the forbidden fruit he ate was to cause rotten teeth in his descendants. He remained in Paradise but one day. After he had eaten from the prohibited tree. Eve gave of the fruit to the other creatures in Eden, and they all ate of it, and so became mortal, with the sole exception of the phoenix, who refused to taste it, and consequently remained immortal. The Talmud teaches that Adam would never have died had he not sinned. The majority of the Christian fathers and doctors, from Tertul- lian and Augustine to Luther and Calvin, have maintained the same opinion. It has been the orthodox — that is, the prevailing — doctrine of the Church, affirmed by the Synod at Carthage in the year four hundred and eighteen, and by the Council of Trent in the year fifteen hundred and forty-five. All the evils which afflict the world, both moral and material, are direct results of Adam's sin. He contained all the souls of men in himself; and they all sinned in him, their federal head and legal representative. When the fatal fruit was plucked, — "Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat, Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe That all was lost." Earthquakes, tempests, pestilences, poverty, war, the endless brood of distress, ensued. For then were " Turn'd askance The poles of earth twice ten degrees and more From the sun's axle, and with labor push'd Oblique the centric globe." Adam's transcendent faculties and gifts were darkened and diminished 28 HISTOrtY OF DEATH. in his depraved posterity, and all base propensities let loose to torment, confuse, and degrade them. We can scarcely form a conception of the genius, the beauty, the blessedness, of the first man, say the theologians in chorus." Augustine declares, " The most gifted of our time must be con- sidered, when compared with Adam in genius, as tortoises to birds in speed." Adam, writes Dante, " was made from clay, accomplished with every gift that life can teem with." Thomas Aquinas teaches that " he was immortal by grace though not by nature, had universal knowledge, fellowshippcd with angels, and saw God." . South, in his famous sermon on "Man the Image of God," after an elaborate panegyric of the wondrous majesty, wisdom, peacefulness, and bliss of man before the fall, exclaims, "Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens the rudiments of Paradise!" Jean Paul has amusingly burlesqued these conceits. "Adam, in his state of innocence, possessed a knowledge of all the arts and sciences, universal and scholastic history, the several penal and other codes of law, and all the old dead languages, as well as the living. He was, as it were, a living Pegasus and Pindus, a movable lodge of sublime light, a royal literary society, a pocket-seat of the Muses, and a short golden age of Louis the Fourteenth !" Adam has been called the Man without a Navel, because, not being born of woman, there could be no umbilical cord to cut. The thought goes deep. In addition to the mythico-theological pictures of the mecha- nical creation and superlative condition of the first man, two forms of statement have been advanced by thoughtful students of nature. One is the theory of chronological progressive development ; the other is the theory of the simultaneous creation of organic families of different spe- cies or typical forms. The advocate of the former goes back along the interminable vistas of geologic time, tracing his ancestral line through the sinking forms of animal life, until, with the aid of a microscope, he sees a closed vesicle of structureless membrane ; and this he recognises as the scientific Adam. This theory has been brought into fresh dis- cussion by Mr. Darwin in his rich and striking work on the Origin of Species.'^ The other view contrasts widely with this, and is not essentially different from the account in Genesis. It shows God himself creating by regular methods, in natural materials, not by a vicegerent law, not with the anthropomorphitic hands of an external potter. Every organized fabric, however complex, originates in a single physiological cell. Every individual organism — from the simple plant known as red snow to the oak, from the zoophyte to man — is developed from such a cell. This is unquestionable scientific knowledge. The phenomenal process of organic advancement is through growth of the cell by selective appropriation of 11 Strauss gives a multitude of apposite quotations in his Christliche Glaubenskhre, band i. s. 691, sect. 51, ff. 12 Tlie most forcible defence of this hypothesis is that made by Herbert Spencer. See, in his volume of Essays, No. 2 of the Haythorne Papers. Also see Oken, Entstehung des ersten Menschen, Isis, 1819, 88. 1117-1123. HISTORY OF DEATH. 29 material, self-multiplication of the cell, chemical transformations of the pabulum of the cell, endowment of the muscular and nervous tissues l^roduced by those transformations with vital and psychical properties. But the essence of the problem lies in the question. Why does one of these simple cells become a cabbage, another a rat, another a whale, another a man ? Within the limits of known observation during historic time, every organism yields seed or bears progeny after its own kind, Between all neighboring species there are impassable, discrete chasms. The direct reason, therefore, why one cell stops in completion at any given vegetable stage, another at a certain animal stage, is that its pro- ducing parent was that vegetable or that animal. Now, going back to the tirst individual of each kind, which had no determining parent like itself, the theory of the gradually ameliorating development of one species out of the next below it is one mode of solving the problem. Another mode — more satisfactory at least to theologians and their allies — is to conclude that God, the Divine Force, by whom the life of the universe is given, made the world after an ideal plan, including a systematic arrangement of all the possible modifica- tions. This plan was in his thought, in the unity of all its parts, from the beginning ; and the animate creation is the execution of its diagrams in organic life. Instead of the lineal exti'action of the complicated scheme out of one cell, there has been, from epoch to epoch, the simultaneous production of all included in one of its sections. The Creator, at his chosen times, calling into existence a multitude of cells, gave each one the amount and type of organic force which would carry it to the destined grade and form. In this manner may have originated, at the same time, the first sparrow, the first horse, the first man, — in short, a whole circle of congeners. " The grassy clods now calved ; now half appear'd The tawny lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds, And rampant shakes his brinded mane." Each creature, therefore, would be distinct from others from the first. " Man, though rising from not-man, came forth sharply defined." The races thus originated in their initiative representatives by the creative power of God, thenceforth possess in themselves the power, each one, in the generative act, to put its typical dynamic stamp upon the primordial cells of its immediate descendants. Adam, then, was a wild man, cast in favoring conditions of climate, endowed with the same faculties as now, only not in so high a degree. For, by his peculiar power of form- ing habits, accumulating experience, transmitting acquirements and tendencies, he has slowly risen to his present state with all its wealth of wisdom, arts, and comforts. By either of these theories, that of Darwin, or that of Agassiz, man, the head of the great organic family of the earth, — and it matters not at all whether there were only one Adam and Eve, or whether each so HISTORY OF DEATH. separate race had its own Adams and Eves," not merely a solitary pair, but simultaneous hundreds, — man, physically considered, is indistinguish- ably included in the creative plan under the same laws and forces, and A'isibly subject to the same destination, as the lower animals. He starts with a cell as they do, grows to maturity by assimilative organization and endowing transformation of foreign nutriment as they do, his life is a continuous i:)rocess of waste and repair of tissues as theirs is, and there is, from the scientific point of view, no conceivable reason why he should not be subject to physical death as they are. They have always been subject to death, — which, therefore, is an aboriginal constituent of the Creative j^lan. It has been estimated, upon data furnished by scientific observation, that since the appearance of organic life on earth, millions of years ago, animals enough have died to cover all the lands of the globe with their bones to the height of three miles. Consequently, the historic commencement of death is not to be found in the sin of man, AVe shall discover it as a necessity in the first organic cell that was ever formed. The spherule of force which is the primitive basis of a cell spends itself in the discharge of its work. In other words, " the amount of vital action which can be performed by each living cell has a definite limit." "When that limit is reached, the exhausted cell is dead. To state the fact difierently : no function can be performed without " the disintegration of a certain amount of tissue, whose components are then removed as efiete by the excretory processes." This final expenditure on the part of a cell of its modification of force is the act of molecular death, the germinal essence of all decay. That this organic law should rule in every living structure is a necessity inherent in the actual con- ditions of the creation. And wherever we look in the realm of physical man, even "from the red outline of beginning Adam" to the amorphous adipocere of the last corpse when fate's black curtain falls on our ra<;e, we shall discern death. For death is the other side of life. Life and death are the two hands with which the organic power works. The threescore simple elements known to chemists die, — that is, sur- render their peculiar powers and properties, and enter into new com- binations to produce and support higher forms of life. Otherwise these inorganic elemental wastes would be all that the material universe could show. The simple plant consists of single cells, which, in its develop- i ment, give up their independent life for the production of a more exalted jf vegetable form. The formation of a perfectly organized plant is made M possible only through the continuous dying and replacement of its cells. | Similarly, in the development of an animal, the constituent cells die for '?! the good of the whole creature; and the more perfect the animal the, greater the subordination of the jDarts. The cells of the human body 13 The Diversity of Origin of the Human Eaccs, by Louis Agassiz, Christian Examiner, July. 1850. HISTORY OF DEATH. 31 .are incessantly dying, being borne off and replaced. The epidermis or scarf-skin is made of millions of insensible scales, consisting of former cells which have died in order with their dead bodies to build this guardian wall around the tender inner parts. Thus, death, operating within the individual, seen in the light of natural science, is a necessity, is purely a form of self-surrendering beneficence, is, indeed, but a hidden and indirect process and completion of life.'* And is not the death of the total organism just as needful, just as benignant, as the death of the component atoms ? Is it not the same law, still expressing the same meaning? The chemical elements wherein individuality is wanting, as Wagner says, die that vegetable bodies may live. Individual vegetable bodies die that new individuals of the species may live, and that they may supply the conditions for animals to live. The individual beast dies that other individuals of his species may live, and also for the good of man. The plant lives by the elements and by other jilants: the animal lives by the elements, by the plants, and by other animals : man lives and reigns by the service of the elements, of the plants, and of the animals. The individual man dies — if we may trust the law of analogy — for the good of his species, and that he may furnish the conditions for the development of a higher life elsewhere. It is quite obvious that, if individuals did not die, new individuals could not live, because there would not be room. It is also equally evident that, if individuals did not die, they could never have any other life than the present. The foregoing considerations, fathomed and appreciated, trans- form the institution of death from caprice and punishment into necessity and benignity. In the timid sentimentalist's view, death is horrible. Nature unrolls the chart of organic existence, a convulsed and lurid list of murderers, from the spider in the window to the tiger in the jungle, from the shark at the bottom of the sea to the eagle against the floor of the sky. As the jierfumed fop, in an interval of reflection, gazes at the spectacle through his dainty eyeglass, the jjrospect swims in blood and glares with the ghastly phosphorus of corruption, and lie shudders with sickness. In the philosophical naturalist's view, the dying jianorama is wholly different. Carnivorous violence prevents more pain than it in- flicts ; the wedded laws of life and death wear the solemn beauty and wield the merciful functions of God; all is balanced and ameliorating; above the slaughterous struggle safely soar the dove and the rainbow ; out of the charnel blooms the rose to which the nightingale sings love ; nor is there poison which helj^s not health, nor destruction which supplies not creation with nutriment for greater good and joy. By painting such pictures as that of a woman with "Sin" written on her forehead in great glaring letters, giving to Death a globe entwined by a serpent, — or that of Death as a skeleton, waving a black banner over the world and sounding through a trumpet, " Woe, woe to the inhabit- 1* Hermann Wagner, Der Tod, beleuchtet vom Standpunkte diT Xaturwissenschaften. g2 HISTORY OF DEATH. ants of the earth!" by interpreting the great event as punishment in- stead of fulfilment, extermination instead of transition,-men have ela- borated in the faith of their imaginations, a melodramatic death which nature never made, l^ruly, to the capable observer, death bears the double aspect of necessity and benignity: necessity, because it is an ultimate fact, as the material world is made, that, since organic action implies expenditure of force, the modicum of force given to any physical or.^anization must finally be spent; benignity, because a bodily immor- tality on earth would both prevent all the happiness of perpetually-rismg millions and be an unspeakable curse upon its possessors. The benevolence of death appears from this fact,-that it boundlessly multipUes the numbers who can enjoy the prerogatives of life. It calls up ever fresh generations, with wondering eyes and eager appetites, to the perennial banquet of existence. Had Adam not sinned and been ex- pelled from Paradise, some of the Christian Fathers thought, the fixed number of saints foreseen by God would have been reached and then no more would have been born.'* Such would have been the necessity, there being no death. But, by the removal of one company as they grow tired and sated, room is made for a new company to approach and enjoy the ever-renewing spectacle and feast of the world. Thus all the delight- ful boons life has, instead of being cooped within a little stale circle, are ceaselessly diffused and increased. Vivacious claimants advance, see what is to be seen, partake of what is furnished, are satisfied, and retire; and their places are immediately taken by hungry successors. Thus the torch of life is passed briskly, with picturesque and stimulating effect, aloncr the manifold race of running ages, instead of smouldering stag- nantly forever in the moveless grasp of one. The amount of enjoyment, the quantity of conscious experience, gained from any given exhibition by a million persons to. each of whom it is successively shown for one hour, is, beyond all question, immensely greater and keener than one person could have from it in a million hours. The generations of men seem like fire-flies glittering down tlie dark lane of History; but each swarm had its happy turn, fulfilled its hour, and rightfully gave way to its followers. The disinterested beneficence of the Creator ordains that the same plants, insects, men, shall not unsurrenderingly monopolize and stop the bliss of breath. Death is the echo of the voice of love rever- berated from the limit of life. , The cumulative fund of human experience, the sensitive affiliatmg line of history, like a cerebral cord of personal identity traversing the centuries, renders a continual succession of generations equivalent to the endless existence of one generation ; but with this mighty difference -- that it preserves all the edge and spice of novelty. For consider what would be the result if death were abolished and men endowed with an; earthly immortality. At first they might rejoice, and think their last,: 15 Augustine, Op. Imp. iii. HISTORY OF DEATH. 33 dreadest enemy destroyed. But what a mistake ! In the first jilace, since none are to be removed from the earth, of course none must come into it. The space and material are all wanted by those now in pos- session. All are soon mature men and women, — not anotlier infant ever to hang upon a mother's breast or be lifted in a father's arms. All the prattling music, fond cares, yearning love, and gushing joys and hopes associated with the rearing of children, gone ! What a stupendous fragment is stricken from the fabric of those enriching satisfactions which give life its truest value and its purest charm ! Ages roll on. They see the same everlasting faces, confront the same returning phenomena, engage in the same worn-out exercises, or lounge idly in the unchange- able conditions which bear no stimulant which they have not exhausted. Thousands of years pass. They have drunk every attainable spring of knowledge dry. Not a prize stirs a pulse. All pleasures, permutated till ingenuity is baffled, disgust them. No terror startles them. No possible experiment remains untried; nor is there any unsounded fortune left. No dim marvels and boundless hopes beckon them with resistless lures into the future. They have no future. One everlasting now is their all. At last the incessant repetition of identical phenomena, the unmitigated sameness of things, the eternal monotony of affairs, become unutterably burdensome and horrible. Full of loathing and immeasurable fatigue, a weariness like the weight of a univei-se oppresses them ; and what would they not give for a change ! any thing to break the nightmare-spell of ennui, — to fling off the dateless flesh, — to die, — to pass into some un- guessed realm, — to lie down and sleep forever : it would be the infinite boon ! Take away from man all that is dependent on, or interlinked with, the appointment of death, and it would make such fundamental alterations of his constitution and relations that he would no longer be man. It would leave us an almost wholly different race. If it is a divine boon that men should be, then death is a good to us ; for it enables us to be men. Without it there would neither be husband and wife, nor parent and child, nor family hearth and altar ; nor, indeed, would hardly any thing be as it is now. The existent phenomena of nature and the soul would comprise all. And when the jaded individual, having mastered and exhausted this finite sum, looked in vain for any thing new or further, the world would be a hateful dungeon to him, and life an awful doom ; and how gladly he would give all that lies beneath the sun's golden round and top of sovereignty to migrate into some untried region and state of being, or even to renounce existence altogether and lie down forever in the attractive slumber of the grave ! Without death, man- kind would undergo the fate of Sisyphus, — no future, and in the present the oj^pression of an intolei-able task with an aching vacuum of motive. The certainty and the mystery of death create the stimulus and the romance of life. Give the human race an earthly immortality, and you exclude them from every thing greater and diviner than the earth 34 HISTORY OF DEATH. affords. Who could consent to that? Take away death, and a brazen wall girds in our narrow life, against which, if we remained men, we should dash and chafe in the climax of our miserable longing, as the caged lion or eagle beats against his bars. The gift of an earthly immortality conferred on a single person — a boon which thoughtless myriads would clasp with frantic triumph — would prove, perhaps, a still more fearful curse than if distributed over the whole species. Retaining his human affections, how excruciating and remediless his grief must be, to be so cut off" from all equal community of experience and destiny with mankind, — to see all whom he loves, generation after generation, fading away, leaving him alone, to form new ties again to be dissolved, — to watch his beloved ones growing old and infirm, while he stands without a change! His love would be left, in agony of melan- choly grandeur, "a solitary angel hovering over a universe of tombs" on the tremulous wings of memory and grief, those wings incapacitated, by his madly-coveted prerogative of deathlessness, ever to move from above the sad rows of funereal urns. Zanoni, in Bulwer's magnificent conception, says to Viola, "The flower gives perfume to the rock on whose breast it grows. A little while, and the flower is dead ; but the rock still endures, the snow at its breast, the sunshine on its summit." A deathless individual in a world of the dying, joined with them by ever- bereaved affections, would be the wretchedest creature conceivable. As no man ever yet prayed for any thing he would pray to be released, to embrace dear objects in his arms and float away with them to heaven, or even to lie down with them in the kind embrace of mother earth. And if he had no affections, but lived a stoic existence, exempt from eveiy sympathy, in impassive solitude, he could not be happy, he would not be man : he must be an intellectual marble of thought or a monumental mystery of woe. Death, therefore, is benignity. "When men wish there Avere no such appointed event, they are deceived, and know not what they wish. Literature furnishes a strange and profound, though wholly uninten- tional, confirmation of this view. Every form in which literary genius has set forth the conception of a^n earthly immortality represents it as an evil. This is true even down to Swift's painful account of the Struldbrugs in the island of Laputa. The legend of the Wandering Jew,'® one of the most marvellous products of the human mind in ima- ginative literature, is terrific with its blazoned revelation of the contents of an endless life on earth. This story has been embodied, with great variety of form and motive, in more tlian a hundred works. Every one is, without the writer's intention, a disguised sermon of gigantic force on the benignity of death. As in classic fable poor Tithon became im- mortal in the dawning arms of Eos only to lead a shrivelled, joyless, ic Bibliographical notice of the legend of tho Wandering Jew, by Paul Lacroix ; trans, into English by G. W. Thornbury. Grasse, Der ewige Jude. HISTORY OF DEATH. 35 repulsive existence ; and the fair young witch of CumjB had ample cause to regret that ever Apollo granted her request for as many years as she held grains of dust in her hand ; and as all tales of successful alchemists or Rosicrucians concur in depicting the result to be utter disappoint- ment and revulsion from the accursed prize ; we may take it as evidence of a spontaneous conviction in the depths of human nature — a conviction sure to be brought out whenever the attempt is made to describe in life an opposite thought — that death is benign for man as he is constituted and related on earth. The voice of human nature speaks truth through the lips of Cicero, saying, at the close of his essay on Old Age, " Quodsi nnn minus immortales futuri, iame>i exstinyid hoinini suo tempore optuhile est" In a conversation at the house of. Sappho, a discussion once arose ui^on the question whether death was a blessing or an evil. Some maintained the former alternative; but Sappho victoriously closed the debate by saying. If it were a blessing to die, the immortal gods would experience it. The gods live forever: therefore, death is an evil." The reasoning was plausible and brilliant. Yet its sophistry is complete. To men, conditioned as they are in this world, death may be the greatest blessing ; while to the gods, conditioned so differently, it may have no similar application. Because an earthly eternity in the flesh would be a fright- ful calamity, is no reason why a heavenly eternity in the spirit would be other than a blissful inheritance. Thus the remonstrance which may be fallaciously based on some of the foregoing considerations — namely, that they would equally make it appear that the immortality of man in any condition would be undesirable — is met. A conclusion drawn from the iacts of the present scene of things, of course, will not apply to a scene inconceivably difl'erent. Those whose only bodies are their minds may be fetterless, hapijy, leading a wondi-ous life, beyond our deepest dream and farthest fancy, and eternally free from trouble or satiety. Death is to us, while we live, what we think it to be. If we confront it with analytic and defiant eye, it is that nothing which ever ceases in beginning to be. If, letting the superstitious senses tyrannize over us and cow our better part of man, we crouch before the imagination of it, it assumes the shape of the skeleton-monarch who takes the world for his empire, the electric fluid for his chariot, and time for his sceptre. In the contemplation of death, hitherto, fancy inspired by fear has been by far too much the prominent faculty and impulse. The literature of the subject is usually ghastly, appalling, and absurd, with i>oint of view varying from that of the credulous Hindu, ji^rsonifying death as a monster with a million mouths devouring all creatures and licking them in his flaming lips as a fire devours the moths or as the sea swallows the torrents,'* to that of the atheistic German dreamer, who converts nature into an immeasurable corpse worked by galvanic forces, and that of the 'T Fragment X. Quoted in Slure'a Hist. Lit. Greece, book iii. chap. v. sect. 18. 18 Tliomson's trans, of Bhagavad Gita, p. 77. 36 HISTORY OF DEATH. bold French philosopher, Carnot, whose speculations have led to the theory that the sun will finally expend all its heat, and constellated life cease, as the solar system hangs, like a dead orrery, ashy and spectral, the ghost of what it was. So the extravagant author of Festus says, — " God tore tlie glory from tlie sun's broad brow And flung the flaming scalp away." The subject should be viewed by the unclouded intellect, guided by serene faith, in the light of scientific knowledge. Then death i.s re- vealed, first, as an organic necessity in the primordial life-cell ; secondly, as the cessation of a given form of life in its completion; thirdly, as a benignant law, an expression of the Creator's love; fourthly, as the inaugu- rating condition of another form of Jife. What we are to refer to sin is all the seeming lawlessness and untimeliness of death. Had not men sinned, all would reach a good age and j^ass away without suffering. Death is benignant necessity ; the irregularity and pain associated with it are an inherited punishment. Finally, it is a condition of improve- ment in life. Death is the incessant touch with which the artist, Nature, is bringing her works to perfection. Physical death is exjoerienced by man in common with the brute. Upon grounds of physiology there is no greater evidence for man's spiritual survival through that overshadowed crisis than there is for the brute's. And on grounds of sentiment man ought not to shrink from sharing his open future with these mute comrades. Des Cartes and Malebranche taught that animals are mere machines, without souls, worked by God's arbitrary power. Swedenborg held that "the souls of brutes are extinguished with their bodies."'^ Leibnitz, by his doctrine of eternal monads, sustains the immortality of all creatures. Coleridge defended the same idea. Agassiz, with much jjower and beauty, advocates the thouglit that animals as well as men have a future life.^ Tlie old traditions affirm that at least four beasts have been translated to heaven; namely, the ass that spoke to Balaam, the white foal that Christ rode into Jerusalem, the steed Borak that bore Mohammed on his famous night-journey, and the dog that wakened the Seven Sleepers. To recognise, as Goethe did, brothers in the green-wood and in the teeming air, — to sympathize with all lower forms of life, and hope for them an open range of limitless iwssibilities in the hospitable home of God, — is surely more becoming to a philosopher, a poet, or a Christian, than that careless scorn which commonly excludes them from regard and contemptu- ously leaves them to annihilation. This subject has been genially treated by Richard Dean in his " Essay on the Future Life of Brutes." But on moral and psychological grounds the distinction is vast between the dying man and the dying brute. Bretschneider, in a beautiful ser- mon on this point, specifies four particulars. Man foresees and provides 19 Outlines of the Infinite, chap. ii. sect. iv. 13. so Contributions to the Natural History of the United States, vol. i. pp. 64-C6. HISTORY OF DEATH. 37 for his death : the brute does not. Man dies with unrecompensed merit and guilt : the brute does not. Man dies with faculties and powers fitted for a more perfect state of existence: the brute does not. Man dies with the expectation of another life: the brute does not. Three con- trasts may be added to these. Fii'st, man desires to die amidst his fel- lows : the brute creeps away by himself, to die in solitude. Secondly, man inters his dead with burial-rites, rears a memorial over them, che- rishes recollections of them which often change his subsequent character : but who ever heard of a deer watching over an expiring comrade, a deer- funeral winding along the green glades of the forest ? The barrows of Norway, the mounds of Yucatan, the mummy-pits of Memphis, the rural cemeteries of our own day, speak the human thoughts of sympathetic reverence and jjosthumous survival, typical of something superior to dust. Thirdly, man often makes death an active instead of a passive experience, his will as it is his fate, a victory instead of a defeat.-^ As Mirabeau sank towards his end, he ordered them to pour perfumes and roses on him, and to bring music ; and so, with the air of a haughty conqueror, amidst the volcanic smoke and thunder of reeling France, his giant spirit went forth. The patriot is proud to lay his body a sacrifice on the altar of his country's weal. The philanthropist rejoices to spend himself without pay in a noble cause, — to offer up his life in the service of his fellow-men. Thousands of generous students have given their lives to science and clasped death amidst their trophied achievements. Who can count the confessors who have thought it bliss and glory to be martyrs for truth and God ? Creatures capable of such deeds must in- herit eternity. Their transcendent souls step from their rejected man- sions through t"he blue gateway of the air to the lucid palace of the stars. Any meaner allotment would be discordant and unbecoming their rank. Contemplations like these exorcise the spectre-host of the brain and quell the horrid brood of fear. The noble purpose of self-sacrifice enables us to smile upon the grave, " as some sweet clarion's breath stirs the soldier's scorn of danger." Death parts with its false frightfulness, puts on its true beauty, and becomes at once the evening star of memory and the morning star of hope, the Hesper of the sinking flesh, the Phos- phor of the rising soul. Let the night come, then : it shall be welcome. And, as we gird our loins to enter the ancient mystery, we will exclaim, with vanishing voice, to those we leave behind, — " Though I stoop Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud. It is but fur i ti J13 ] press 3oiVs lamp Close to my breast : its splendor, soon or late, Will pierce the glooin : I shall emerge somewhere." ^ Umbreit, liber das Sterben als einen Akt menschlicU-personlicher Selbststandigkeit. Studien nnd Kritiken, 1837. UN IV K lis IT V ol' 38 GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE. CHAPTER III. GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE. It Is the j^urpose of the following chapter to describe the originating supports of the common belief in a future life ; not to probe the depth and test the value of the various grounds out of which the doctrine grows, but only to give a descriptive sketch of what they are, and a view of the process of growth. The objections urged by unbelievers belong to an open discussion of the question of immortality, not to an illustra- tive statement of the suggesting grounds on which the popular belief rests. When, after sufficient investigation, we ask ourselves from what causes the almost univei'sal expectation of another life sjarings, and by what influences it is nourished, we shall not find adequate answer in less than four words: feeling, imagination, faith, and reflection. The doc- trine of a future life for man has been created by the combined force of instinctive desire, analogical observation, prescriptive authority, and philosophical speculation. These are the four pillars on which the soul builds the temple of its hopes; or the four glasses through which it looks to see its eternal heritage. First, it is obvious that man is endowed at once with foreknowledge of death and with a powerful love of life. It is not a love of being here ; for he often loathes the scene around him. It is a love of self-possessed existence ; a love of his own soul in its central consciousness and bounded royalty. This is an inseparable element of his very entity. Crowned Avith free will, walking on the crest of the world, enfeoffed with individual faculties, served by vassal nature with tributes of various joy, he cannot bear the thought of losing himself, of sliding into the general abyss of matter. His interior consciousness is permeated with a self-pre- serving instinct, and shudders at every glimpse of danger or hint of death. The soul, pervaded with a guardian instinct of life, and seeing death's steady approach to destroy the body, necessitates the conception of an escape into another state of existence. Fancy and reason, thus set at work, speedily construct a thousand theories filled with details. Desire first fathers thought^ and then thought woos belief. Secondly, man, holding his conscious being precious beyond all things, and shrinking with pervasive anxieties from the moment of destined dissolution, looks around through the realms of nature, with thoughtful eye, in search of parallel phenomena further developed, significant : sequels in other creatures' fates, whose evolution and fulfilment may GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE. 39 hajjly throw light on his own. With eager vision and heart-prompted imagination he scrutinizes whatever ajjpears related to his object. See- ing the snake cast its old slough and glide forth renewed, he conceives, so in death man but sheds his fleshly exuvife, while the spirit emerges, regenerate. He beholds the beetle break from its filthy sepulchre and commence its summer work ; and straightway he hangs a golden scara- bseus in his temples as an emblem of a future life. After vegetation's wintry deaths, hailing the returning spring that brings resurrection and life to the graves of the sod, he dreams of some far-off" spring of Humanity, yet to come, when the frosts of man's untoward doom shall relent, and all the costly seeds sown through ages in the great earth- tomb shall shoot up in celestial shapes. On the moaning sea-shore, weeping some dear friend, he perceives, now ascending in the dawn, the planet which he lately saw declining in the dusk; and he is cheex'ed by the thought that "As sinks the day-star in the ocean-bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky, So Lycidas, sunk low, shall mount on high." Some traveller or poet tells him fabulous tales of a bird which, grown aged, fills its nest with spices, and, spontaneously burning, soai's frona the aromatic fire, rejuvenescent for a thousand years; and he cannot but take the phoenix for a miraculous type of his own soul springing, free and eternal, from the ashes of his corpse. Having watched the silkworm, as it wove its cocoon and lay down in its oblong grave apparently dead, until at length it struggles forth, glittering with rainbow colors, a winged moth, endowed with new faculties and living a new life in a new sphere, he conceives that so the human soul may, in the fulness of time, dis- entangle itself from the imprisoning meshes of this world of larvae, a thing of sjiirit-beauty, to sail through heavenly airs ; and henceforth he engraves a butterfly on the tombstone in vivid prophecy of immortality. Thus a moralizing observation of natural similitudes teaches man to hope for an existence beyond death. Thirdly, the prevailing belief in a future life is spread and upheld by the influence of authority. The doctrine of the soul's survival and transference to another world, where its experience depends on conditions observed or violated here, conditions somewhat within the control of a select class of men here, — such a doctrine is the very hiding-place of the power of priestcraft, a vast engine of interest and sway which the shrewd insight of priesthoods has often devised and the cunning policy of states subsidized. In most cases of this kind the asserted doctrine is placed on the basir; of a divine revelation, and must be implicitly received. God proclaims it through his anointed ministers: therefore, to doubt it or logically criticize it is a crime. History bears witness to such a pro- cedure wherever an organized priesthood has flourished, from primeval 40 GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE. pagan India to modern papal Rome. It is traceable from the dark Osirian shrines of Egypt and the initiating temple at Eleusis to the funeral fires of Gaul and the Druidic conclave in the oak-groves of Mona; from the reeking altars of Mexico in the time of Montezuma to the masses for souls in Purgatory said this day in half the churches of Christendom. Much of the popular faith in immortality which has pre- vailed in all ages has been owing to the authority of its promulgators, a deep and honest trust on the part of the people in the authoritative dicta of their religious teachers. In all the leading nations of the earth, the doctrine of a future life is a tradition handed down from immemorial antiquity, embalmed in sacred books which are regarded as infallible revelations from God. Of course the thoughtless never think of questioning it; the reverent piously em- brace it ; all are educated to receive it. In addition to the i^roclamation of a future life by the sacred books and bj' the priestly hierarchies, it has also been affirmed by countless individual saints, philosophers, and prophets. Most persons readily accejit it on trust from them as a de- monstrated theory or an inspired knowledge of theirs. It is natural for modest unspeculative minds, busied with worldlj' cares, to say, These learned sages, these theosophic seers, so much more gifted, educated, and intimate with the divine counsels and plan than we are, with so much deeper experience and purer insight than we have, must know the truth: we cannot in any other way do so well as to follow their guidance and confide in their assertions. Accordingly, nmltitudes receive the belief in a life to come on the authority of the world's intellectual and religious leaders. Fourthly, the belief in a future life results from philosophical medita- tion, and is sustained by rational proofs.' For the completion of the present outline, it now remains to give a brief exposition of these argu- ments. For the sake of convenience and clearness, we must arrange these reasonings in five classes ; namely, the physiological, the analogical, the psychological, the theological, and the moral. There is a group of considerations drawn from the phenomena of our bodily organization, life and death, which compose the ■physiological argu- ment for the sejiarate existence of the soul. In the first place, it is con- tended that the human organization, so wondrously vitalized, developed, and ruled, could not have grown up out of mere matter, but implies a pre-existent mental entity, a spiritual force or idea, which constituted the primeval impulse, grouj^ed around itself the organic conditions of our existence, and constrained the material elements to the subsequent processes and results, according to a prearranged plan.^ This dynamic agent, this ontologieal cause, may naturally survive when the fleshly iWohlfarth, Triumph des Glaubens an Unsterblichkeit nnd Wiedcrsehen tiber jeden ZweifeL Oporinus, Ilistoria Critica Doctrinae de Tniinortalitate Mortalium. * Mliller, Elements of Physiologj-, book vi. sect. i. cb. 1. GROUNDS OP THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE. 41 organization which it has built around itself dissolves. Its independence before the body began involves its indejjendence after the body is ended. Stahl has especially illustrated in physiology this idea of an independent soul-monad. Secondly, as some potential being must have preceded our birth, to assimilate and construct the physical system, so the great phenomena attending our conscious life necessitate, both to our instinctive apprehen- sion and in our philosophical conviction, the distinctive division of man into body and soul, tabernacle and tenant. The illustrious Boerhaave wrote a valuable dissertation on the distinction of the mind from the body, which is to be found among his works. Every man knows that he dwells in the flesh but is not flesh. He is a free, j^ersonal mind, occupy- ing and using a material body, but not identified with it. Ideas and passions of purely immaterial origin pervade every nerve with terrific in- tensity, and shake his encasing corporeity like an earthquake. A thought, a sentiment, a fancy, may prostrate him as effectually as a blow on his brain fi'om a hammer. He wills to move a palsied limb: the soul is vni- affected by the paralysis, but the muscles refuse to obey his volition: the distinction between the person willing and the instrument to be wielded is unavoidable. Thirdly, the fact of death itself irresistibly suggests the duality of flesh and spirit. It is the removal of the energizing mind that leaves the frame so empty and meaningless. Think of the undreaming sleep of a corpse which dissolution is winding in its chemical embrace. A moment ago that hand was uplifted to clasp yours, intelligent accents were vocal on those lips, the light of love beamed in that eye. One shuddering sigh, — and how cold, vacant, forceless, dead, lies the heap of clay! It is imi^ossible to prevent the conviction that an invisible power has been liberated; that the flight of an animating principle has pro- duced this awful change. Why may not that untraceable something which has gone still exist ? Its vanishing from our sensible cognizance is no proof of its perishing. Not a shadow of genuine evidence has ever been afforded that the real life-powers of any creature are destroyed.' In the absence of that proof, a multitude of considerations urge us to infer the contrary. Surely there is room enough for the contrary to be true ; for, as Jacobi profoundly observes, "life is not a form of body; but body is one form of life." Therefore the soul which now exists in this form, not appearing to be destroyed on its departure hence, must be supposed to live hereafter in some other form.'* A second series of observations and reflections, gathered from partial similarities elsewhere in the world, are combined to make the analogical argument for a future life. For many centuries, in the literature of many ■nations, a standard illustration of the thought that the soul survives the decay of its earthy investiture has been drawn from the metamorphosis ' Sir Humphry Davy, Proteus or Immortality. ^ Bakcwell, Natural Evidence of a Future State. 42 GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE. of the caterpillar into the hutterily.* This world is the scene of our grub-state. The body is but a chrysalis of soul. When the preliminary experience and stages are finished and the transformation is complete, the spirit emerges from its cast-off cocoon and broken cell into the more ethereal air and sunnier light of a higher world's eternal day. The emblematic correspondence is striking, and the inference is obvious and beautiful. Nor is the change, the gain in endowments and privileges, greater in the supposed case of man than it is from the slow and loath- some worm on the leaf to the swift and glittering insect in the air. Secondly, in the material world, so far as we can judge, nothing is ever absolutely destroyed. There is no such thing as annihilation. Things are changed, transformations abound; but essences do not cease to be. Take a given quantity of any kind of matter ; divide and subdivide it in ten thousand ways, by mechanical violence, by chemical solvents. Still it exists, as the same quantity of matter, Avith unchanged qualities as to its essence, and will exist when Nature has manipulated it in all her labo- ratories for a billion ages. Now, as a solitary exception to this, are minds absolutely destroyed? are will, conscience, thought, and love annihilated? Personal intelligence, affection, identity, are inseparable components of the idea of a soul. And what method is there of crushing or evaporating these out of being? What force is there to compel them into nothing? Death is not a substantive cause working effects. It is itself merely an effect. It is simply a change in the mode of existence. That this change puts an end to existence is an assertion against analogy, and wholly unsupported. Thirdly, following the analogy of science and the visible order of being, we are led to the conception of an ascending series of existences rising in regular gradation from coarse to fine, from brutal to inental, from earthly composite to simply spiritual, and thus pointing up the rounds of life's ladder, through all nature, to the angelic ranks of heaven. Then, feeling his kinship and common vocation Avith supernal beings, man is assured of a loftier condition of existence reserved for him. There are no such immense, vacantly yawning chasms, as that would be, between our fleshly estate and the Godhead. Nature takes no such enormous jumps. Her scaling advance is by staid and normal steps, " There's lifeless matter. Add the power of shaping, And you've the crystal : add again the organs Wherewith to subdue sustenance to the form And manner of one's self, and you've the plant : Add power of motion, senses, and so forth. And you've all kinds of beasts : suppose a pig. To pig add reason, foresight, and such stuff, Then you have man. What shall we add to man To bring him higher?" Freedom from the load of clay, emancipation of the spirit into the full range and masterdom of a spirit's powers ! 6 Butler, Analogy, part i. ch. 1. GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE. 43 Fourthly, many strong similarities between our entrance into this world and our departure out of it would make us believe that death is but another and higher birth.® Any one acquainted with the state of an unborn infant — deriving its sole nutriment, its very existence, from its vascular connection with its mother — could hardly imagine that its separation from its mother would introduce it to a new and independent life. He would rather conclude that it would perish, like al\vi£_wrer from its parent limb. So it may be in the separation of the soul from the body. Further, as our latent or dimly-groping senses were useless while we were developing in embryo, and then implied this life, so we now have, in rudimentary condition, certain powers of reason, imagination, and heart, which prophesy heaven and eternity ; and mys- terious intimations ever and anon reach us from a diviner sphere, — " Like hints and echoes of the world To spirits folded in the womb." The Persian jjoet, Buzurgi, says on this theme, — " What is tlie soul ? The seminal principle from the loins of destiny. This world is the womb : the body, its enveloping membrane : The bitterness of dissolution, dame Fortune's pangs of childbirth. What is death ? To be born again, an angel of eternity." Fifthly, many cultivated thinkers have firmly believed that the soul is not so j'oung as is usually thought, but is an old stager on this globe, having lived through many a previous existence, here or else- where.'' They sustain this conclusion by various considerations, either drawn from premises presupposing the necessary eternity of spirits, or resting on dusky reminiscences, " shadowy recollections," of visions and events vanished long ago. Now, if the idea of foregone conscious lives, personal careers oft repeated with unlost being, be admitted, — as it fre- quently has been by such men as Plato and Wordsworth, — all the con- nected analogies of the case carry us to the belief that immortality awaits us. We shall live through the next transition, as we have lived through the past ones. Sixthly, rejecting the hypothesis of an anterior life, and entertaining the supposition that there is no creating and overruling God, but that all things have arisen by spontaneous development or by chance, still, we are not consistently obliged to expect annihilation as the fate of the soul. Fairly reasoning from the analogy of the past, across the facts of the present, to the impending contingencies of the future, we may say that the next stage in the unfolding processes of nature is not the destruction of our consciousness, but issues in a purer life, elevates us to a spiritual rank. It is just to argue that if mindless law or boundless fortuity made this world and brought us here, it may as well make, or have made, another world, and bear us there. Law or chance — excluding God from « Bretschneider, Predigten liber Tod, Unsterblichkeit, und Auferstehung. ' James Parker, Account of the Divine Goodness concerning the Pre-existence of Souls. 44 GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE. "hjK the question — may as easily make us immortal as mortal. Reasoning by analogy, we may affirm that, as life has been given us, so it will be given us again and forever. Seventhly, faith in immortality is fed by another analogy, not based on reflection, but instinctively felt. Every change of material in our organ- ism, every change of consciousness, is a kind of death. We partially die as often as we leave behind forgotten experiences and lost states of being. We die successively to infancy, childhood, youth, manhood. The past is the dead : but our course is still on, forever on. Having survived so many deaths, we expect to survive all others and to be ourselves eter- nally. /There is a third cluster of reasonings, deduced from the distinctive J^-l^'^'nature of spirit, constituting ihe psychological argument for the existence of the soul independent of the body. In the outset, obviously, if the soul be an immaterial entity, its natural immortality follows ; because death and decay can only be sujjposed to take efiect in dissoluble com- binations. Several ingenious reasons have been advanced in proof of the soul's immateriality, — reasons cogent enough to have convinced a large class of philosophers.* It is sufficient here to notice the following one. All motion implies a dynamic mover. Matter is dormant. Power is a reality entirely distinct from matter in its nature. But man is essentially an active power, a free will. Consequently there is in him an immaterial principle, since all power is immaterial. That principle is immortal, because subsisting in a sphere of being whose categories exclude the possibility of dissolution.^ Secondly, should we admit the hviman soul to be material, yet if it be an ultimate monad, an indivisible atom of mind, it is immortal still, defying all the forces of destruction. And that it actually is an uncom- r Jr- pounded unit may be thus proved. Consciousness is simple, not collective. Ja^ A Lilence the power of consciousness, the central soul, is an absolute integer. U(M^^'^^^/Fov a living perceptive whole cannot be made of dead imperceptive parts. ( "^^^^^^/^f^ yf the soul were composite, each component part would be an individual, a distinguishable consciousness. Such not being the fact, the conclusion results that the soul is one, a simple substance.^" Of course it is not liable to death, but is naturally eternal. Thirdly, the indestructibleness of the soul is a direct inference from its ontological characteristics. Reason, contemplating the elements of the soul, cannot but embrace the conviction of its perpetuity and its essential independence of the fleshly organization. Our life in its inner- most substantive essence is best defined as a conscious force. Our present existence is the organic correlation of that personal force with the phy- 8 Astnic. Dissertation siir rimmaterialite et I'Tmmortalite de I'Ame. Broiighton, Dcfenco of tlie Doctrine of ttie Human .''nul ms an Immaterial and Naturally Immortal Principle. Marstaller, Von der Unsterblichkeit dor Menselilichen Seele. 9 Andrew Baxter. Inquiry into the Nature of the Soul. '0 Herbart, Lehrbuch znr Psychologle, sect. 150. GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE. 45 sical materials of the body, and with other forces. The cessation of that correlation at death by no means involves, so far as we can see, the destruc- tion or the disindividualization of the primal personal force. It is a fact of strikmg significance, often noticed by i^sychologists, that we are unable to conceive ourselves as dead. The negation of itself is impossible to consciousness. The reason we have such a dread of death is that we conceive ourselves as still alive, only in the grave, or wandering through horrors and shut out from wonted pleasures. It belongs to material growths to ripen, loosen, decay ; but what is there in sensation, reflection, memory, volition, to crumble in pieces and rot away ? Why should the 230wer of hope, and joy, and faith, change into inanity and oblivion? What crucible shall burn up the ultimate of force? What material processes shall ever disintegrate the simplicity of spirit? Earth and plant, muscle, nerve, and brain, belong to one sphere, and are subject to the temjioral fates that rule there ; but reason, imagination, love, will, belong to another, and, immortally fortressed there, laugh to scorn the fretful sieges of decay. Fourthly, the surviving superiority of the soul, inferred from its con- trast of qualities to those of its earthy environment, is further shown by another fact, — the mind's dream-power, and the ideal realm it freely soars or walks at large in when it pleases." This view has often been enlarged upon, especially by Bonnet and Sir Henry Wotton. The unhappy Achilles, exhausted with weeping for his friend, lay, heavily moaning, on the shore of the far-sounding sea, in a clear spot where the waves washed in upon the beach, when sleep took possession of him. The ghost of miserable Patroclus came to him and said, " Sleepest thou anil art forgetful of me, Achilles?" And the son of Peleus cried, "Come nearer: let us em- brace each other, though but for a little while." Then he stretched out his friendly hands, but caught him not ; for the spirit, shrieking, vanished beneath the earth like smoke. Astounded, Achilles started up, clasped his hands, and said, dolefully, "Alas! there is then indeed in the subter- ranean abodes a spirit and image, but there is no body in it.'"'' The realm of dreams is a world of mystic realities, intangible, yet existent, and all-prophetic, through which the soul nightly floats while the gross body slumbers. It is everlasting, because there is nothing in it for cor- ruption to take hold of. The appearances and sounds of that soft inner sphere, veiled so remote from sense, are reflections and echoes from the spirit-world. Or are they a direct vision and audience of it? The soul really is native resident in a world of truth, goodness, and beauty, fel- low-citizen with divine ideas and affections. Through the senses it has knowledge and communionwith the hard outer-world of matter. When the senses fall away, it is left, imperishable denizen of its own appro- priate world of idealities. " Schubert, Die Symbolik des Traumes. 12 Iliad, lib. xxUi. 11. 60-105. 4 46 GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE. Another assemblage of views, based on the character of God, form the theological argument for the future existence of man." Starting with the idea of a God of infinite perfections, the immortality of his children is an immediate deduction from the eternity of his purposes. For what- ever purpose God originally gave man being, — for the disinterested dis- tribution of happiness, for the increase of his own glory, or whatever else, — will he not for that same purpose continue him in being forever? In the absence of any reason to the contrary, we must so conclude. In view of the unlimited perfections of God, the fact of conscious responsible creatures being created is sufficient warrant of their perpetuity. Other- wise God would be fickle. Or, as one has said, he would be a mere drapery-painter, nothing within the dress. Secondly, leaving out of sight this illustration of an eternal purpose in eternal fulfilment, and confining our attention to the analogy of the divine works and the dignity of the divine Worker, we shall be freshly led to the same conclusion. Has God moulded the dead clay of the material universe into gleaming globes and ordered them to fly through the halls of space forever, and has he created, out of his own omnipo- tence, mental personalities reflecting his own attributes, and doomed them to go out in endless night after basking, poor ephemera, in the sun- shine of a momentary life? It is not to be imagined that God ever works in vain. Yet if a single consciousness be extinguished in everlasting nonentity, so far as the production of that consciousness is concerned he has wrought for nothing. His action was in vain, because all is now, to that being, exactly the same as if it had never been. God does nothing in sport or unmeaningly : least of all would he create filial spirits, dig- nified with the solemn endowments of humanity, without a high and serious end." To make men, gifted with such a transcendent largess of powers, wholly moi-tal, to rot forever in the grave after life's swift day, were work far more unworthy of God than the task was to Michael Angelo — set him in mockery by Pietro, the tyrant who succeeded Lorenzo the Magnificent in the dukedom of Florence, — that he should scoop up the snow in the Via Larga, and with his highest art mould a statue from it, to dissolve ere night in the glow of the Italian sun. Thirdly, it is an attribute of Infinite Wisdom to proportion powers to results, to adapt instruments to ends with exact fitness. But if we are utterly to die with the ceasing breath, then there is an amazing want of symmetry between our endowments and our opportunity ; our attain- ments are most superfluously superior to our destiny. Can it be that an earth house of i5ix feet is to imprison forever the intellect of a La Place, whose telescopic eye, piercing the unfenced fields of immensity, systema- tized more worlds than there are grains of dust in this globe ? — the heart 13 ArWi. Unsterliliclikoit rier mensclilichcn Peole, spchster Brief. " Ulrici, Unstciblichkoit dor mcnschliclien Seele aus dcm Wesen Gottes erwiesen. GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE. 47 of a Borromeo, whose seraphic love expanded to the limits of symi^a- thetic being? — the soul of a Wycliffe, whose undaunted will, in faithful consecration to duty, faced the fires of martyrdom and never blenched? — the genius of a Shakspeare, whose imagination exhausted worlds and then invented new? There is vast incongruity between our faculties and the scope given them here. On all it sees below the soul reads "Inade- quate," and rises dissatisfied from every feast, craving, with divine hunger and thirst, the ambrosia and nectar of a fetterless and immortal world. "Were we fated to perish at the goal of threescore, God would have har- monized our 230vvers with our lot. He would never have set such mag- nificent conceptions over-against such poor possibilities, nor have kindled so insatiable an ambition for so trivial a prize of — dust to dust. Fourthly, one of the weightiest supports of the belief in a future life is that yielded by the benevolence of God. Annihilation is totally irrecon- cilable with this. That He whose love for his creatures is infinite will absolutely destroy them after their little span of life, when they have just tasted the sweets of existence and begun to know the noble delights of spiritual progress, and while illimitable heights of glory and blessed- ness are beckoning them, is incredible. We are unable to believe that while his children turn to him with yearning faith and gratitude, with fer- vent prayer and expectation, he will spurn them into unmitigated night, blotting out those capacities of happiness which he gave them with a virtual promise of endless increase. Will the affectionate God permit humanity, ensconced in the field of being, like a nest of ground- sparrows, to be trodden in by the hoof of annihilation? Love watches to preserve life. It were Moloch, not the universal Father, that could crush into death these multitudes of loving souls supplicating him for life, dash into silent fragments these miraculous personal harps of a thousand strings, each capable of vibrating a celestial melody of praise and bliss. Fifthly, the apparent claims of justice afford presumptive proof, hard ^ r- JL to be resisted, of a future state wherein there are compensations for the '''Vv^f unmerited ills, a complement for the fragmentary experiences, and rectifi- ^J)^ cation for the wrongs, of the present life.'^ God is just; but he works -•x>tXc.OUi without impulse or caprice, by laws whose progressive evolution requires ^^^ -tt'-'-ai ' time to show their perfect results. Through the brief space of this exist- ence, where the encountering of millions of free intelligences within the fixed conditions of nature causes a seeming medley of good and evil, of discord and harmony, wickedness often triumphs, villany often out- reaches and tramples ingenuous nobility and helpless innocence. Some saintly spirits, victims of disease and penury, drag out their years in agony, neglect, and tears. Some bold minions of selfishness, with seared consciences and nerves of iron, pluck the coveted fruits of pleasure, wear the diadems of society, and sweep through the world in jjomp. 15 M. Jules Simon, La Religion Naturelle, liv. iii. : L'lmmortalitS. 48 GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE. The virtuous suffer undeservedly from the guilty. The idle thrive on the industrious. All these things sometimes happen. In spite of the compensating tendencies which ride on all spiritual laws, in spite of the mysterious Nemesis which is throned in every bosom and saturates the moral atmosphere with influence, the world is full of wrongs, sufferings, and unfinished justice.'^ There must be another world, where the remu- nerating processes interiorly begun here shall be openly consummated. Can it be that Christ and Herod, Paul and Nero, Timour and Fenelon, drop through the blind trap of death into precisely the same condition of unwaking sleep? Not if there be a God! There is a final assemblage of thoughts pertaining to the likelihood of another life, which, arranged together, may be styled the 7noral argument in behalf of that belief." These considerations are drawn from the seeming fitness of things, claims of parts beseeching completion, vatici- nations of experience. They form a cumulative array of probabilities whose guiding forefingers all indicate one truth, whose consonant voices swell into a powerful strain of promise. First, consider the shrinking from annihilation naturally felt in every breast. If man be not destined for perennial life, why is this dread of non-existence woven into the soul's inmost fibres? Attractions are co-ordinate with destinies, and every normal desire foretells its own fulfilment. Man fades unwillingly from his natal haunts, still longing for a life of eternal remembrance and love, and confiding in it. All over the world grows this pathetic race of forget-me-nots. Shall not Heaven pluck and wear them on her bosom ? Secondly, an emphatic presumption in favor of a second life arises from the premature mortality prevalent to such a fearful extent in the human family. Nearly one-half of our race perish before reaching the age of ten years. In that period they cannot have fulfilled the total purposes of their creation. It is but a part we see, and not the whole. The destinies here seen segmentary will appear full circle be- yond the grave. The argument is hardly met by asserting that this un- timely mortality is the punishment for non-observance of law ; for, deny- ing any further life, would a scheme of existence have been admitted establishing so awful a proportion of violations and penalties ? If there be no balancing sphere beyond, then all should pass through the ex- perience of a ripe and rounded life. But there is the most perplexing inequality. At one fell swoop, infant, sage, hero, reveller, martyr, are snatched into the invisible state. There is, as a noble thinker has said, an apparent "caprice in the dispensation of death strongly indicative of a hidden sequel." Immortality unravels the otherwige inscrutable mystery. 1» Dr. Chalmers, Bridgewater Treatise, chap. 10. "Crombie, Natural Theology, Essay IV.: The Arguments for Immortality. Bretschneider, I)io Religiose Gluiibcnsrelire, sect. 20-21. GROUNDS OP THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE. 49 Thirdly, the function of conscience furnishes another attestation to the continued existence of man. This vicegerent of God in the breast, t''-^i^ M ^~ oblivion, like snow-flakes in the ocean. " The super-earthly desires of y man are then created in him only, like swallowed diamonds, to cut Blowly through his material shell" and destroy him. «i Lewis, Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion. THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION. The denial of a future life introduces discord, grief, and despair in "h^^ every direction, and, by making each step of advanced culture the .J/) jf^ ascent to a wider survey of tantalizing glory and experienced sorrow, as well as the preparation for a greater fall and a sadder loss, turns faithful affection and heroic thought into " blind furies slinging flame." Unless immortality be true, man appears a dark riddle, not made for that of which he is made capable and desirous : every thing is begun, nothing ended; the facts of the present scene are unintelligible; the plainest analogies are violated ; the delicately-rising scale of existence is broken off abrupt; our best reasonings concerning the character and designs of God, also concerning the implications of our own being and experience, are futile ; and the soul's proud faculties tell glorious lies as thick as stars. Such, at least, is the usual way of thinking. However formidable a front may be presented by the spectral array of doubts and difficulties, seeming impediments to faith in immortality, the faithful servant of God, equipped with philosophical culture and a saintly life, will fearlessly advance upon them, scatter them right and left, and win victorious access to the prize. So the mariner sometimes, off Sicilian shores, sees a wondrous island ahead, apparently stopping his way with its cypress and cedar groves, glittering towers, vine-wreathed balconies, and marble stairs sloping to the water's edge. He sails straight forward, and, severing the jjillared porticos and green gardens of Fata Morgana, glides far on over a glassy sea smiling in the undeceptive sun. CHAPTER IV. THEORIES OF THE SOUL's DESTINATION. Before examining, in their multifarious detail, the special thoughts and fancies respecting a future life prevalent in different nations and times, it may be well to take a sort of bird's-eye view of those general theories of the destination of the soul under which all the individual varieties of opinion may be classified. Vast and incongruous as is the heterogeneous mass of notions brought forth by the history of this province of the world's belief, the whole may be systematized, discriminated, and reduced to a few comprehensive heads. Such an architectural grouping or outlining of the chief schemes of thought on this subject will yield several advantages. Showing how the different views arose from natural speculations on the correlated phenomena of the outward world and facts of human experience, it affords an indispensable help towards a philosophical analysis and explanation of the popular faith as to the destiny of man 54 THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION. after death, in all the immense diversity of its contents. An orderly arrangement and exposition of these cardinal theories also form an ei^itome holding a bewildering multitude of particulars in its lucid and separating grasp, changing the fruits of learned investigation from a cmnbersome burden on the memory to a small number of connected formularies in the reason. These theories serve as a row of mirrors hung in a line of historic perspective, retlecting every relevant shape and hue of meditation and faith humanity has known, from the ideal visions of the Athenian sage to the instinctive superstitions of the Fejee savage. When we have adequately defined these theories, — of which there are seven, — traced their origin, comprehended their significance and bearings, and dissected their supjwrting pretensions, then the whole field of our theme lies in light before us ; and, however grotesque or mysterious, simple or subtle, may be the modes of thinking and feeling in relation to the life beyond death revealed in our subsequent researches, we shall know at once where to refer them and how to explain them. The precise object, therefore, of the pi-esent chapter is to set forth the comprehensive theories devised to solve the problem. What becomes of man when he dies ? But a little while man flourishes here in the bosom of visible nature. Soon he disappears from our scrutiny, missed in all the places that knew him. Whither has he gone ? What fate has befallen him ? It is an awful question. In comparison with its concentrated interest, all other affairs are childish and momentary. Whenever that solemn question is asked, earth, time, and the heart, natural transformations, stars, fancy, and the brooding intellect, are full of vague oracles. Let us see what intelligible answers can be constructed from their responses. The first theory which we shall consider propounds itself in one terrible word, annihilation. Logically this is the earliest, historically the latest, view. The healthy consciousness, the eager fancy, the controlling sentiment, the crude thought, — all the uncurbed instinctive conclusions of primitive human nature, — jjoint forcibly to a continued existence for the soul, in some way, when the body shall have perished. And so history shows us in all the savage nations a vivid belief in a future life. But to the philosophical observer, who has by dint of speculation freed himself from the constraining tendencies of desire, faith, imagination, and authority, the thought that man totally ceases with the destruction of his visible organism must occur as the first and simplest settlement of the question.^ The totality of manifested life has absolutely disap- peared : why not conclude that the totality of real life has actually lost its existence and is no more? That is the natural inference, unless by some means the contrary can be proved. Accordingly, among all civilized people, every age has had its skeptics, metaphysical disputants who have mournfully or scoffingly denied the separate survival of the soul. This 1 LalanJo, I/ictionii;i;ii; Jl-s Atliet-s Aiiciens ot Modt-rues. THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION. 55 is a necessity in the inevitable sequences of observation and theory; because, when the skeptic, suppressing or escaping his biassed wishes, the trammels of traditional opinion, and the spontaneous convi«tion3 prophetic of his own uninterrupted being, first looks over the wide scene of human life and death, and reflectingly asks, What is the sequel of this strange, eventful history ? obviously the conclusion suggested by the immediate phenomena is that of entire dissolution and blank oblivion. This result is avoided by calling in the aid of deeper philosophical con- siderations and of inspiring moral truths. But some will not call in that aid ; and the whole superficial appearance of the case — regarding that alone, as they then will — is fatal to our imperial hopes. The primordial clay claims its own from the disanimated frame; and the vanished life, like the flame of an outburnt taper, has ceased to be. Men are like bubbles or foam-flakes on the world's streaming surface: glittering in a momentary ray, they break and are gone, and only the dark flood re- mains still flowing forward. They are like tones of music, commencing and ending with the unpurposed breath that makes them. Nature is a vast congeries of mechanical substances pervaded by mindless forces of vitality. Consciousness is a production which results from the fer- mentation and elaboration of unconscious materials ; and after a time it deceases, its conditions crumbling into their inorganic grounds again. From the abyss of silence and dust intelligent creatures break forth, shine, and sink back, like meteor-flashes in a cloud. The generations of sen- tient being, like the annual growths of vegetation, by spontaneity of dynamic development, spring from dead matter, flourish through their destined cycle, and relapse into dead matter. The bosom of nature is, therefore, at once the wondrous womb and the magnificent mausoleum of man. Fate, like an iron skeleton seated at the summit of the world on a throne of fresh-growing grass and mouldering skulls, presides over all, and annihilation is the universal doom of individual life. Such is the atheistic naturalist's creed. However indefensible or shocking it is, it repeatedly appears in the annals of speculation ; and any synopsis of the possible conclusions in which the inquiry into man's destiny may rest that should omit this, would be grossly imperfect. This scheme of disbelief is met by insuperable objections. It excludes some essential elements of the case, confines itself to a wholly empirical view ; and consequently the relentless solution it announces applies only to a mutilated problem. To assert the cessation of the soul because its physical manifestations through the body have ceased, is certainly to affirm without just warrant. It would appear impossible for volition and intelligence to originate save from a free parent mind. Numerous cogent evidences of design seem to prove the existence of a God by whose will all things are ordered according to a plan. Many powerful impressions and arguments, instinctive, critical, or moral, combine to teach that ni the wreck of matter the spirit emerges, deathless, from the closing waves of decay. The confirmation of that truth becomes irresistible when 56 THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION. we see how reason and conscience, with delighted avidity, seize upon its adaptedness alike to the brightest features and the darkest defects of the present life, whose imperfect symmetries and segments are harmo- niously filled out by the adjusting complement of a future state. ^ The next representation of the fate of the soul disposes of it by re- ahsorption into the essence from which it emanated. There is an eternal fountain of unmade life, from which all individual, transient lives flow, and into which they return. This conception arose in the outset from a superficial analogy which must have obtruded itself upon primitive notice and speculation ; for man is led to his first metaphysical inquiries by a feeling contemplation of outward j^henomena. Now, in the mate- rial world, when individual forms perish, each sensible component re- lapses into its original element and becomes an undistinguishable portion of it. Our exhaled breath goes into the general air and is united with it : the dust of our decaying frames becomes part of the ground and vegetation. So, it is strongly suggested, the lives of things, the souls of men, when they disappear from us, are remerged in the native spirit whence they came. The essential longing of every part for union with its whole is revealed and vocal throughout all nature. Water is sullen in stillness, murmurs in motion, and never ceases its gloom or its com- plaining until it sleeps in the sea. Like spray on the rock, the stranding generations strike the sepulchre and are dissipated ipto universal vapor. As lightnings slink back into the charged bosom of the thunder-cloud, as eager waves, spent, subside in the deep, as furious gusts die away in the great atmosphere, so the gleaming ranks of genius, the struggling masses of toil, the pompous hosts of war, fade and dissolve away into the peaceful bosom of the all-engulfing Soul. This simplest, earliest philo- sophy of mankind has had most extensive and permanent prevalence.' For immemorial centuries it has possessed the mind of the countless millions of India. Baur thinks the Egyptian identification of each deceased person with Osiris and the burial of him under that name, were meant to denote the reception of the individual human life into the universal nature-life. The doctrine has been implicitly held wherever pantheism has found a votary, from Anaximander, to whom finite crea- tures were "disintegrations or decompositions from the Infinite," to Alexander Pope, affirming that " All are but parts of one stupendous whole, AVhose body nature is, and God the soul." The first reasoners, who gave such an ineradicable direction and tinge to the thinking of after-ages, were furthermore driven to the supposition of a final absorption, from the impossibility, in that initiatory stage of thought, of grasping any other theory which would apparently meet the 2 Drossbach, Die Ilarmonie der Ergebuisse der Xaturforsclning luit den Forderungcn dcs Mensch- lichen Gemilthes. s riouut, Anima Mundi; or, The Opinions of the Ancients concerning Man's Soul after this Life. THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION. 57 case so well or be more satisfactory. They, of course, had not yet arrived at the idea that God is a joersonal Spirit whose nature is revealed in the constitutive characteristics of the human soul, and who carries on his works from eternity to eternity without monotonous repetition or weari- some stagnancy, but with perpetual variety in never-ceasing motion. Whatever commences must also terminate, they said, — forgetting that number begins with one but has no end. They did not conceive of the universe of being as an eternal line, making immortality desirable for its endless novelty, but imaged it to themselves as a circle, making an ever- lasting individual consciousness dreadful for its intolerable sameness, — an immense round of existence, phenomena, and experience, going forth and returning into itself, over and over, forever and ever. To escape so repulsive a contemplation, they made death break the fencing integu- ment of consciousness and empty all weary personalities into the abso- lute abyss of being. Again: the extreme difficulty of apprehending the truth of a Creator literally infinite, and of a limitless creation, would lead to the same result in another way. Without doubt, it seemed to the naive thinkers of antiquity, that if hosts of new beings were continually coming into life and increasing the number of the inhabitants of the future state, the fountain from which they proceeded would some time be exhausted, or the universe grow plethoric with population. There would be no more substance below or no more room above. The easiest method of sur- mounting this problem would be by the hypothesis that all spirits come out of a great World-Spirit, and, having run their mortal careers, are absorbed into it again. Many — especially the deepest Oriental dreamers — have also been brought to solace themselves with this conclusion by a course of reasoning based on the exposures, and assumed inevitable sufferings, of all finite being. They argue that every existence below the absolute God, because it is set around with limitations, is necessarily obnoxious to all sorts of miseries. Its pleasures are only " honey-drops scarce tasted in a sea of gall." This conviction, with its accompanying sentiment, runs through the sacred books of the East, is the root and heart of their theology, the dogma that makes the crudest penances pleasant if a renewed existence may thus be avoided. The sentiment is not alien to human longing and surmise, as witnesses the night-thought of the English poet who, world-sated, and sadly yearning, cries through the starry gloom to God, — "When shall my soul her incarnation quit. And, readopted to thy blest embrace, Obtain her apotheosis in thee ?" Having stated and traced the doctrine of absorption, it remains to in- vestigate the justice of its grounds. The doctrine starts from a premise partly true and ends in a conclusion partly false. We emanate from the creative power of God, and are sustained by the in-flowing presence 58 THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION. of his life, but are not discerptions from his own being, any more than beams of light are distinct substances shot out and shorn off from the sun to be afterwards drawn back and assimilated into the parent orb. We are destined to a harmonious life in his unifying love, but not to be fused and lost as insentient parts of his total consciousness. We are products of God's will, not component atoms of his soul. Souls are to be in God as stai-s are in the firmament, not as lumps of salt are in a solvent. This view is confirmed by various arguments. In the first place, it is supported by the philosophical distinction be- tween emanation and creation. The conception of creation gives us a personal God who wills to certain ends ; that of emanation reduces the Supreme Being to a ghastly array of laws, revolving abysses, galvanic forces, nebular star-dust, dead ideas, and vital fluids. According to the latter supposition, finite existences flow from the Infinite as conse- quences from a principle, or streams from a fountain ; according to the former, they proceed as effects from a cause, or thoughts from a mind. That is pantheistic, fatal, and involves absorption by a logical necessity ; this is creative, free, and does not presupjiose any circling return. Material things are thoughts which God transiently contemplates and dismisses ; spiritual creatures are thoughts which he permanently ex- presses in concrete immortality. The soul is a thought; the body is the word in which it is clothed. Secondly, the analogy which first leads to belief in absorption is falsely interpreted. Taken on its own ground, rightly appreciated, it legitimates a different conclusion. A grain of sand thrown into the bosom of Sahara does not lose its individual existence. Distinct drops are not annihilated as to their simple atoms of water, though sunk in the midst of the sea. The final particles or monads of air or granite are not dis- solvingly blended into contiimity of unindividualized atmosphere or rock when united with their elemental masses, but are thrust unap- proachably apart by molecular repulsion. Now, a mind, being, as we conceive, no composite, but an ultimate unity, cannot be crushed or melted from its integral pereistence of personality. Though plunged into the centre of a surrounding wilderness or ocean of minds, it must still retain itself unlost in the multitude. Therefore, if we admit the existence of an inclusive mundane Soul, it by no means follows that lesser sotils received into it are deprived of their individuality. It is "one not otherwise than as the sea is one, by a similarity and contiguity of parts, being composed of an innumerable host of distinct spirits, as that is of aqueous particles ; and as the rivers continually discharge into the sea, so the vehicular people, upon the disruption of their vehicles, discharge and incorporate into that ocean of spirits making the mundane Soul."* * Tucker, Light of Nature, Part 11. chap. xxii. THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION. 59 r Thirdly, every consideration furnished by the doctrine of final causes as api^lied to existing creatures makes us ask, What use is there in call- ing forth souls merely that they may be taken back again ? To justify their creation, the fulfilment of some educative aim, and then the lasting fruition of it, appear necessary. Why else should a soul be drawn from out the unformed vastness, and have its being struck into bounds, and be forced to pass through such appalling ordeals of good and evil, pleasure and agony ? An individual of any kind is as important as its race ; for it contains in possibility all that its tyi^e does. And the purposes of things, so far as we can discern them, — the nature of our spiritual constitution, the meaning of our circumstances and probation, the resulting tendencies of our experience, — all seem to prophesy, not the destruction, but the perfection and jDerpetuation, of individual being. Fourthly, the same inference is yielded by applying a similar considera- tion to the Creator. Allowing him consciousness and intentions, as we must, what object could he have either in exerting his creative j^ower or in sending out portions of himself in new individuals, save the pro- duction of so many immortal personalities of will, knowledge, and love, to advance towards the perfection of holiness, wisdom, and blessedness, — filling his mansions with his children ? By thus multijjlying his own image he adds to the number of happy creatures who are to be bound together in bands of glory, mutually receiving and returning his affec- tion, and swells the tide of conscious bliss which fills and rolls forever through his eternal universe. Nor, finally, is it necessary to expect personal oblivion in God in order to escape from evil and win exuberant happiness. Those ends are as well secured by the fruition of God's love in us as by the drowning of our consciousness in his plenitude of delight. Precisely herein consists the fundamental distinction of the Christian from the Brahmanic doc- trine of human destiny. The Christian hopes to dwell in blissful union with God's will, not to be annihilatingly sunk in his essence. To borrow an illustration from Scotus Erigena,^ as the air when thoroughly illumined by sunshine still keeps its aerial nature and does not become sunshine, or as iron all red in the flame still keeps its metallic substance and does not turn to fire itself, so a soul fully possessed and moved by God does not in consequence lose its own sentient and intelligent being. It is still a bounded entity, though recipient of boundless divinity. Thus evil ceases, each personality is preserved and intensely glorified, and, at the same time, God is all in all. The totality of perfected, enraptured, immortalized humanity in heaven may be described in this manner, adopting the masterly expression of Coleridge:— " And as one body seems the aggregate Of atoms numberless, each organized. * Philosophy and Doctrines of Erigena, Universali^t Quarterly Review, vol. vii. p. 100. 60 THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION. So, by a strange and dim similitude, Infinite myriads of self-conscious minds In one containing Spirit live, who fills With absolute ubiquity of thought All his involved monads, that yet seem Each to pursue its own self-centring end." A third mode of answering the question of human destiny is by the conceiition of a general resurrection. Souls, as fast as they leave the body, are gathered in some intermediate state, a starless grave-world, a ghostly limbo. When the present cycle of things is completed, when the clock of time runs down and its lifeless weight falls in the socket, and " Death's empty helmet yawns grimly over the funeral hatchment of the world," the gates of this long-barred receptacle of the deceased will be struck open, and its pale prisoners, in accumulated hosts, issue forth, and enter on the immortal inheritance reserved for them. In the sable land of Hades all departed generations are bivouacking in one vast army. On the resur- rection-morning, striking their shadowy tents, they will scale the walls of the abyss, and, reinvested with their bodies, either plant their banners on the summits of the earth in permanent encampment, or storm the battlements of the sky and colonize heaven with flesh and blood. All advocates of the doctrine of psychopannychism, or the sleep of souls from death till the last day, in addition to the general body of orthodox Christians, have been supporters of this conclusion.® Three explanations are possible of the origination of this belief. First, a man musing over the affecting jjanorama of the seasons as it rolls through the year, — budding life alternating with deadly desolation, spring still bringing back the freshness of leaves, flowers, and carolling birds, as if raising them from an annual interment in winter's cold grave, — and then thinking of the destiny of his own race, — how many generations have ripened and decayed, how many human crops have been harvested from the cradle and planted in the tomb, might naturally — especially if he had any thing of the poet's associating and creative mind — say to himself. Are we altogether perishable dust, or are we seed sown for higher fields, — seed lying dormant now, but at last to sprout into swift immortality when God shall make a new sunshine and dew omnipotently penetrate the dry mould where we tarry ? No matter how partial the analogy, how forced the process, how false the result, such imagery would sooner or later occur ; and, having occurred, it is no more strange that it should get literal acceptance than it is that many other popular figments should have secured the firm establishment they have. Secondly, a mourner just bereaved of one in whom his whole love was garnered, distracted with grief, his faculties unbalanced, his soul a chaos, is of sorrow and fantasy all compact; and he solaces himself with * Baumgarten, Beantwortung des Sendschrcibcns Ileyns vom Schlafe der abgeschiedcnen Peelen. Chalmers, Astronomical Discourses, iv. THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION. 61 the ideal embodiment of his dreams, half seeing what he thinks, half believing what he wishes. Ilis desires pass through unconscious volition into supposed facts. Before the miraculous power of his grief-wielded imagination the world is fluent, and fate runs in the moulds he conceives. The adored form on which corruj^tion now banquets, he sees again, ani- mated, beaming, clasped in his arms. He cries. It cannot be that those lioly days are forever ended, that I shall never more realize the blissful dream in which we trod the sunny world together! Oh, it must be that some time God will give me back again that beloved one ! the sej^ulchre closed so fast shall be unsealed, the dead be restored, and all be as it was before ! The conception thus once born out of the delirium of busy thought, anguished love, and regnant imagination, may in various ways win a fixed footing in faith. Thirdly, the notion which we are now contemplating is one link in a chain of thought which, in the course of time and tlie range of specula- tion, the theorizing mind could not fail to. forge. The concatenation of reflections is this. Death, is the separation of soul and body. That separation is repulsive, an. evil. Therefore it was not intended by the Infinite Goodness, but was introduced by a foe, and is a foreign, marring element. Finally God will vanquish his antagonist, and banish from the creation all his thwarting interferences with the primitive perfection of harmony and hapi^iness. Accordingly, the souls which Satan has caused to be separated from their bodies are reserved apart until the fulness of time, when there shall be a universal resurrection and restora- tion. So far as reason is competent to pronounce on this view considered as a sequel to the disembodying doom of man, it is an arbitrary piece of fancy. Philosophy ignores it. Science gives no hint of it. It sprang from unwarranted metaphors, perverted, exaggerated, based on analogies not parallel. So far as it assumes to rest on revelation it will be examined in another place. Fourthly, after the notion of a great, epochal resurrection, as a reply to the inquiry. What is to become of the soul ? a dogma is next encountered which we shall style that of a local and irrevocable conveyance. The dis- embodied spirit is conveyed to some fixed region,' a penal or a blissful abode, where it is to tarry unalterably. This idea of the banishment or admission of souls, according to their deserts, or according to an elective grace, into an anchored location called hell or heaven, a retributive or rewarding residence for eternity, we shall pass by, with. few words, because it recurs for fuller examination in other chapters. In the first place, the whole picture is a gross simile drawn, from; occurrences of this outward world and unjustifiably applied to the fortunes of the mind in the invi- sible sphere of the future. The figment of a judicial transportation of the soul from one place or planet to another, as if by a Charon's boat, is a clattering and- repulsive conceit,. inadmissible by one who apprehends ' Lange, Daa Laud der Herrlicbkeit. 5 THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION. the noiseless continuity of God's self-executing laws. It is a jarring mechanical clash thrust amidst the smooth evolution of spiritual des- tinies. It compares with the facts as the supposition that the planets are swung around the sun bj"- material chains compares with the law of gravitation. Moral compensation is no better secured by imprison- ment or freedom in separate localities than it is, in a common envi- ronment, by the fatal working of their interior forces of character, nnd their relations with all things else. Moreover, these antagonist kingdoms, Tartarean and Elysian, defined as the everlasting habitations of dej^arted souls, have been successively driven, as dissipated visions, from their assumed latitudes and longitudes, one after another, by progressive dis- covery, until now the intelligent mind knows of no assignable spot for them. Since we are not acquainted with any fixed locations to which the soul is to be carried, to abide there forever in appointed joy or woe, and since there is no scientific necessity nor moral use for the supposi- tion of such places and of the transferrence of the departed to them, we cannot hesitate to reject the associated belief as a deluding mistake. The truth, as we conceive it, is not that different souls are borne by con- stabulary apparitions to two immured dwellings, manacled and hurried into Tophet or saluted and ushered into Paradise, but that all souls spontaneously pass into one immense empii'e, drawn therein by their appropriate attractions, to assimilate a strictly discriminative experience. But, as to this, let each thinker form his own conclusion. The fifth view of the destination of the soul may be called the theory of recurrence.^ When man dies, his surviving spirit is immediately born again in a new body. Thus the souls, assigned in a limited number to each world, continually return, each one still forgetful of his previous lives. This seems to be the specific creed of the Druses, who affirm that all souls were created at once, and that the number is unchanged, while they are born over and over. A Druse boy, dreadfully alarmed by the discharge of a gun, on being asked by a Christian the cause of his fear, replied, " I was born murdered ;" that is, the soul of a man who had been shot passed into his body at the moment of his birth.' The young mountaineer would seem, from the sudden violence with which he was snatched out of his old house, to have dragged a trail of connecting con- sciousness over into his new one. As a general rule, in distinction from such an exception, memory is like one of those passes which the con- ductors of railroad-trains give their passengers, " good for this trip only." The notion of an endless succession of lives on the familiar stage of this dear old world, commencing each with clean-wiped tablets, possesses for some minds a fathomless allurement; but others wish for no return- pass on their ticket to futurity, preferring an adventurous abandon- ment " to fresh fields and pastures new," in unknown immensity, to a 8 Pohmidiiis, Piss, fie Multiplici Aninianim Reditu in Corpora. « CInirtliill. Mount Lebanon, vol. ii. ill. 12. THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION. 63 renewed excursion through landscapes already traversed and experiences drained before. Fourier's doctrine of immortality belongs here. According to his idea, the Great Soul of this globe is a composite being, comprising about ten billions of individual souls. Their connection with this planet will be for nearly eighty thousand years. Then the whole sum of them will swarm to some higher jilanet, — Fourier himself, jjerhaps, being the old gray gander that will head the flock, pilot-king of their flight. Each man is to enjoy about four hundred births on earth, poetic justice leading him successively through all the grades and phases of fortune, from cripplehood and beggary to paragonshij) and the throne. The invisible residence of spirits and the visible are both on this globe, the former in the Great Soul, the latter in bodies. In the other life the soul becomes a sharer in the woes of the Great Soul, which is as unhappy as seven- eighths of the incarnated souls ; for its fate is a compound of the fates of the human souls taken collectively. Coming into this outward scene at birth, we lose anew all memory of past existence, but wake up again in the Great Soul with a perfect recollection of all our previous lives both in the invisible and in the visible world. These alternating passages between the two states will continue until the final swooping of total humanity from this exhausted planet in search of a better abode.'" The idea of the recurrence of souls is the simplest means of meeting a difficulty stated thus by the ingenious Abraham Tucker in his "Light of Nature Pursued." "The numbers of souls daily pouring in from hence upon the next world seem to require a proportionable drain from it somewhere or other ; for else the country might be overstocked." The objection urged against such a belief from the fact that we do not re- member having lived before is rebutted by the assertion that " Some draught of Lethe doth await. As old mythologies relate, The slipping through from state to state." The theory associated with this Lethean draught is confirmed by its responsive correspondence with many unutterable experiences, vividly felt or darkly recognised, in our deepest bosom. It seems as if occa- sionally the poppied drug or other oblivious antidote administered by nature had been so much diluted that reason, only half baffled, struggles to decipher the dim runes and vestiges of a foregone state ; — " A nd ever something is or seems That touches lis with mystic gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams." In those excursive reveries, fed by hope and winged with dream, which scour the glens and scale the peaks of the land of thought, this nook of hypothesis must some time be discovered. And, brought to light, it has 1' Fourier, Passions of the Human Soul, (Morell's translation,) Introduction, vol. i. pp. 14-18; also pp. 233-23& 64 THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION. much to interest and to please ; but it is too destitute of tangible proof to be successfully maintained against assault.^^ There is another faith as to the fate of souls, best stated, perhaps, in the phrase perpetual migration. The soul, by successive deaths and births, tra- verses the universe, an everlasting traveller through the rounds of being and the worlds of sjaace, a transient sojourner briefly inhabiting each.^^ All reality is finding its way up towards the attracting, retreating Godhead. Minerals tend to vegetables, these to animals, these to men. Blind but yearning matter aspires to spirit, intelligent spirits to divinity. In every grain of dust sleep an army of future generations. As every thing below man gropes upward towards his conscious estate, " the trees being imi^er- fect men, that seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground," so man himself shall climb the illimitable ascent of creation, every step a star. The animal organism is a higher kind of vegetable, whose develop- ment begins -with those substances with the production of which the lif« of an ordinary vegetable ends.^^ The fact, too, that embryonic man passes through ascending stages undistinguishable from those of lower crea- tures, is full of meaning. Does it not betoken a preserved epitome of the long history of slowly-rising existence? What unplummeted abysses of time and distance intervene from the primary rock to the Victoria Regia ! and again from the first crawling spine to the fetterless mind of a Schelling I But, snail-pace by snail-pace, those immeasurable separations have been bridged over; and so everj'' thing that now lies at the dark basis of dust shall finally reach the transplendent apex of intellect. The objection of theological prejudice to this developing succession of ascents — that it is degrading — is an unhealthy mistake. Whether we have risen or fallen to our present rank, the actual rank itself is not altered. And in one respect it is better for man to be an ad- vanced oyster than a degraded god ; for in the former case the path is upwards, in the latter it is downwards. " We wake," observes a profound thinker, "and find ourselves on a stair: there are other stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended ; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight." Such was plainly the trust of the author of the following exhortation : — " Be worthy of death ; and so learn to live That every incarnation of thy soul In other realms, and worlds, and firmaments Shall be more pure and high." Bulwer likewise has said, "Eternity may be but an endless series of those emigrations which men call deaths, abandonments of home after home, ever to fairer scenes and loftier heights. Age after age, the spirit — that glorious nomad — may shift its tent, fated not to rest in the dull n Bertram, Priifung der Meinung von der PrSexistenz der menschlichen Seele. K NUmberger, Still-Leben. odcr Ubcr die Unsterblichkeit der Seele. 1* Licbig, Animal Chemistry, cli. ix. THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION. 65 Elysium of the heathen, but carrying with it evermore its twin elements, activity and desire." But there is something unsatisfactory, even sad and dreary, in this prospect of incessant migration. Must not the pilgrim pine and tire for a goal of rest? Exhausted with wanderings, sated with experiments, will he not pray for the exempted lot of a contented fruition in repose ? One must weary at last of being even so sublime a vagabond as he whose nightly hostelries are stars. And, besides, how will sundered friends and lovers, between whom, on the road, races and worlds interpose, ever over- take each other, and be conjoined to journey hand in hand again or build a bower together by the way ? A poet of finest mould, in happiest mood, once saw a leaf drop from a tree which overhung a mirroring stream. The reflection of the leaf in the watery sky-hollow far below seemed to rise from beneath as swiftly as the object fell from above ; and the two, encountering at the surface, became one. Then he sang, — touching with his strain the very marrow of deepest human desire, — " How speeds, from in the river's thought. The spirit of the leaf that falls, Its heaven in that calm bosom wrought, As mine among yon crimson walls 1 From the dry bough it spins, to greet Its shadow on the placid river : So might I my companions meet, Nor roam the countless worlds forever !" Moreover, some elements of this theory are too grotesque, are the too rash inferences from a too crude induction, to win sober credit to any extent. It is easy to devise and carry out in consistent descriptive details the hypothesis that the soul has risen, through ten thousand transitions, from the condition of red earth or a tadpole to its present rank, and that,— " As it once crawl'J upon the sod, It yet shall grow to be a god ;" but what scientific evidence is there to confirm and establish the sup- position as a truth ? Why, if it be so, — to borrow the humorous satire of good old Henry More, — " Then it will follow that cold-stopping curd And harden'd moldy cheese, when they have rid Due circuits through the heart, at last Shall speed Of life and sense, look thorough our thin eyes And view the close wherein the cow did feed Whence they were milk'd : grosse pie-crust will grow wise, And pickled cucumbers sans doubt philosophize!" The form of this general outline stalks totteringly on stilts of fancy, and sprawls headlong with a logical crash at the first critical probe. The final theory of the destination of souls, now left to be set forth, may be designated by the word transition}^ It affirms that at death they W Taylor, Physical Theory of Another Life, ch. xii. 60 THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION. pass from the separate material worlds, which are their initiating nur- series, into the common spiritual world, which is everywhere present. Thus the visible peoples the invisible, each person in his turn consciously rising from this world's rudimentary darkness to that world's universal light. Dwelling here, free souls, housed in frames of dissoluble clay, — " We hold a middle rank 'twixt heaven and earth, On the last verge of mortal being stand. Close to the realm where angels have their birth, Just on the boundaries of the spirit-land." Why has God " broken up the solid material of the universe into innume- rable little globes, and swung each of them in the centre of an impassable solitude of space," unless it be to train up in the various spheres separate households for final union as a single diversified family in the boundless spiritual world ?^* The surmise is not unreasonable, but recommends itself strongly, that, — " If yonder stars be fill'd with forms of breathing clay like ours. Perchance Vie space which spreads between is for a spirit's powers." The soul encased in flesh is thereby confined to one home, its natal nest; but, liberated at death, it wanders at will, unobstructed, through every Avorld and cerulean deep; and wheresoever it is, there, in pro- portion to its own capacity and fitness, is heaven and is God.^^ All those world-spots so thickly scattered through tlie Yggdrasill of universal space are but the brief sheltering-places where embryo intelligences clip their shells, and whence, as soon as fledged through the discipline of earthly teaching and essays, the broodlet souls take wing into the mighty airs of immensity, and thus enter on their eternal emanciijation. This conjecture is, of all which have been offered yet, perhaps the completest, least perplexed, best recommended by its harmony witli our knowledge and our hope. And so one might wish to rest in it with humble trust. The final destiny of an immortal soul, after its transition into the other world, must be either unending progress towards infinite perfection, or the reaching of its perihelion at last and then revolving in uninterrupted fruition. In the former case, pursuing an infinite aim, with each degree of its attainment the flying goal still recedes. In the latter case, it will in due season touch its bound and there be satisfied, — " 'When weak Time shall be pour'd out Into Eternity, and circular joys Dance in an endless round." This result seems the more probable of the two; for the assertion of countless decillions of personalities all progressing beyond every conceiv- able limit, on, still on, forever, is incredible. If endless linear progress were the destiny of each being, the whole universe would at last become 15 Taylor, Saturday Evening, pp. 95-111. w Taylor, Physical Theory of Another Life, ch. xvii. THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION. G7 a line ! And though it is true that the idea of an ever-novel chase attracts and refreshes the imagination, while the idea of a monotonous revolution repels and wearies it, this is simijly because we judge after our poor earthly experience and its flagging analogies. It will not be so if that revolution is the vivid realization of all our being's possibilities. Annihilation, absorption, resurrection, conveyance, recurrence, migra- tion, transition, — these seven answers to the question of our fate, and of its relation to the course of natui-e, are thinkable in words. We may choose from among them, but can construct no real eighth. First, there is a constant succession of growth and decay. Second, there is a per- petual flow and ebb of personal emanation and impersonal resumption. Third, there is a continual return of the same persistent entities. Fourth, all matter may be sublimated to spirit, and souls alone remain to occupy boundless space. Fifth, the power of death may cease, all the astronomic orbs be populated and enjoyed, each by one generation of everlasting inhabitants, — the present order continuing in each earth until enough have lived to fill it, then all of them, physically restored, dwelling on it, with no more births or deaths. Sixth, if matter be not transmutable to soul, when that peculiar reality from which souls are developed is exhausted, and the last generation of incarnated beings, have risen from the flesh, the material creation may, in addition to the inter-stellar region, be eternally appropriated by the spirit- races to their own free range and use, through adaptations of faculty unknown to us now ; else it may vanish as a phantasmal spectacle. Or, finally, souls may be absolutely created out of nothing by the omnipotence of God, and the universe may be infinite : then the process may proceed forever. But men's beliefs are formed rather by the modes of thought they have learned to adopt than by any proofs they have tested; not by argumen- tation about a subject, but by the way of looking at it. The moralist re- gards all creation as the work of a personal God, a theatre of moral ends, — a just Providence watching over the parts, and the conscious immortal- ity of the actors an inevitable accompaniment. The physicist contem- plates the universe as constituted of atoms of attraction and repulsion, which subsist in perfect mobility through space, but are concreted in the molecular masses of the planets. The suns are vast engines for the dis- tribution of heat or motion, the equivalent of all kinds of force. This, in. its diffusion, causes innumerable circulations and combinations of the ori- ginal atoms. Organic growth, life, is the fruition of a force derived from the sun. Decay, death, is the rendering up of that force in its equiva- lents. Thus, the universe is a composite unity of force, a solidarity of ul- timate unities which are indestructible, though in constant circulation of new groupings and journeys. To the religious faith of the moralist, man is an eternal person, reaping what he has sowed. To the speculative intellect of the physicist, man is an atomic force, to be liberated into the ethereal medium until again harnessed in some organism. In both cases he is immortal : but in that, as a free citizen of the ideal world ; in this, as a flying particle of the dynamic immensity. PART SECOND. ETHNIC THOUGHTS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE. CHAPTER I. BARBARIAN NOTIONS OF A FUTURE LIFE. Proceeding now to give an account of the fancies and opinions in re- gard to a future life which have been prevalent, in different ages, in various nations of the earth, it will be best to begin by presenting, in a rapid series, some sketches of the conceits of those uncivilized tribes who did not^ — so far as our knowledge reaches — possess a doctrine sufficiently distinctive and full, or important enough in its historical relations, to warrant a detailed treatment in sej^arate chapters. We will glance first at the negroes. According to all accounts, while there are, among the numerous tribes, diversities and degrees of supersti- tion, there is yet, throughout the native pagan population of Africa, a marked general agreement of belief in the survival of the soul, in spectres, divination, and witchcraft ; and there is a general similarity of fimeral usages. Early travellers tell us that the Bushmen conceived the soul to be immortal, and as impalpable as a shadow, and that they were much afraid of the return of deceased sjiirits to haunt them. They were accustomed to pray to their departed countrymen not to molest them, but to stay away in quiet. They also employed exorcisers to lay these ill- omened ghosts. Meiners relates of some inhabitants of the Guinea coast that their fear of ghosts and their childish credulity reached such a pitch that they threw their dead into the ocean, in the expectation of thus drowning soul and body together. Superstitions as gross and lawless still have full sway. Wilson, whose travels and residence there for twenty years have enabled him to furnish the most reliable information, says, in his recent work,i "A native African would as soon doubt his present as his future state of being." Every dream, every stray suggestion of the mind, is interpreted, with un- 1 Western Africa, ch. xU. BARBARIAN NOTIONS OF A FUTURE LIFE. 69 questioning credence, as a visit from the dead, a whisper from a departed soul. If a man wakes up with pains in his bones or muscles, it is because his spirit has wandered abroad in the night and been flogged by some other spirit. On certain occasions the whole community start up at midnight, with clubs, torches, and hideous yells, to drive the evil spirits out of the village. They seem to believe that the souls of dead men take rank with good or bad spirits, as they have themselves been good or bad in this life. They bury with the deceased clothing, orna- ments, utensils, and statedly convey food to the grave for the use of the revisiting spirit. With the body of king Weir of the Cavalla towns, who was buried in December of 1854, in presence of several missionaries, was interred a quantity of rice, palm-oil, beef, and rum : it was supposed the ghost of the sable monarch would come back and consume these articles. The African tribes, where their notions have not been modified by Christian or by Mohammedan teachings, appear to have no definite idea of a heaven or of a hell ; but future reward or punishment is considered under the general conception of an association, in the disembodied state, with the benignant or with the demoniacal powers. The New Zealanders imagine that the souls of the dead go to a place beneath the earth, called Reinga. The path to this region is a precipice qlose to the sea-shore at the North Cape. It is said that the natives who live in the neighborhood can at night hear sounds caused by the passing of spirits thither through the air. After a great battle they are thus warned of the event long before the news can arrive by natural means.^ It is a common superstition with them that the left eye of every chief, after his death, becomes a star. The Pleiades are seven New Zealand chiefs, brothers, who were slain together in battle and are now fixed in the sky, one eye of each, in the shape of a star, being the only part of them that is visible. It has been observed that the mythological doc- trine of the glittering host of heaven being an assemblage of the departed heroes of earth never received a more ingenious version.^ Certainly it is a magnificent piece of insular egotism. It is noticeable here that, in the Norse mythology, Thor, having slain Thiasse, the giant genius of winter, throws his eyes up to heaven, and they become stars. Shungie, a cele- brated New Zealand king, said he had on one occasion eaten the left eye of a great chief whom he had killed in battle, for the purpose of thus increasing the glory of his own eye when it should be transferred to the firmament. Sometimes, apparently, it was thought that there was a separate immortality for each of the eyes of the dead, — the left ascending to heaven as a star, the right, in the form of a spirit, taking flight for Reinga. The custom, common in Africa and in New Zealand, of slaying the slaves or the wives of an important person at his death and burying * Shortland, Traditions of the New Zealanders, cli. vii. s Library of Ent. Knowl. : The New Zealahders, pp. 22 70 BARBARIAN NOTIONS OF A FUTURE LIFE. them with him, prevails also among the inhabitants of the Feejee Islands. A chief's wives are sometimes strangled on these occasions, sometimes buried alive. One cried to her brother, "I wish to die, that I may accom- pany my husband to the land where he has gone. Love me, and make haste to strangle me, that I may overtake him."* Departing souls go to the tribunal of Ndengei, who either receives them into bliss, or sends them back, as ghosts, to haunt the scenes of their former existence, or distributes them as food to devils, or imprisons them for a period and then dooms them to annihilation. The Feejees are also very much afraid of Samiulo, ruler of a subterranean world, who sits at the brink of a huge fiery cavern, into which he hurls the souls he dislikes. In the road to Ndengei stands an enormous giant, armed with an axe, who tries to maim and murder the passing souls. A powerful chief, whose gun was interred with him, loaded it, and, when he came near the giant, shot at him, and ran by while the monster was dodging the bullet. The people of the Sandwich Islands held a confused medley of notions as to another life. In different persons among them were found, in re- gard to this subject, superstitious terror, blank indifference, positive un- belief. The current fancy was that the souls of the chiefs were led, by a god whose name denotes the "eyeball of the sun," to a life in the heavens, while plebeian souls went down to Akea, a lugubrious under- ground abode. Some thought spirits were destroyed in this realm of darkness ; others, that they were eaten by a stronger race of spirits there; others still, that they survived there, subsisting upon lizards and butter- flies.* What a piteous life they must have led here whose imaginations could only soar to a future so unattractive as this ! The Kamtschadales send all the dead alike to a subterranean ely- sium, where they shall find again their wives, clothes, tools, huts, and where they shall fish and hunt. All is there as here, except that there are no fire-spouting mountains, no bogs, streams, inundations, and im- passable snows ; and neither hunting nor fishing is ever pursued in vain there. This lower paradise is but a beautified Kamtschatka, freed from discommoding hardships and cleansed of tormenting Cossacks and Russians. They have no hell for the rectification of the present wrong relations of virtue and misery, vice and happiness. The only distinction they appear to make is that all who in Kamtschatka are poor, and have few small and weak dogs, shall there be rich and be furnished with strong and fat dogs. The power of imagination is very remarkable in this raw people, bringing the future life so near, and awakening such an impatient longing for it and for their former companions that they often, the sooner to secure a habitation there, anticipate the natural time of their death by suicide.® * Wilkes, Narrative of the U. S. Exploring Expedition, yo\. iii. cli. 6 .Tarvea, Hist, of the Sandwich Islands, p. 42. •Chrjstopb Meiners, Vermischto Schriften, thl. i. sects. 169-173. BARBARIAN NOTIONS OF A FUTURE LIFE. 71 The Esquimaux betray the influence of their clime and habits, in the formation of their ideas of the life to come, as plainly as the Kamtscha- dales do. The employments and enjoyments of their future state are rude and earthy. They say the soul descends through successive places of habitation, the first of n-hich is full of pains and horrors. The good, — that is, the courageous and skilful, those who have endured severe hardships and mastered many seals, — passing through this first residence, find that the other mansions regularly improve. They finally reach an abode of perfect satisfaction, far beneath the storms of the sea, where the sun is never obscured by night, and where reindeer wander in great droves beside waters that never congeal, and wherein the whale, the walrus, and the best sea-fowls always abound.'' Hell is deep, but heaven deeper still. Hell, they think, is among the roots, rocks, monsters, and cold of the frozen or vexed and suffering waters ; but '^Beneath tempestuous seas and fields of ice Their creed has placed a lowlier paradise." The Greenlanders, too, located their elysium beneath the abysses of the ocean, where the good Spirit Torngarsuk held his reign in a happy and eternal summer. The wizards, who pretended to visit this region at will, described the disembodied souls as pallid, and, if one sought to seize them, unsubstantial.^ Some of these people, however, fixed the site of pai-adise in the sky, and regarded the aurora borealis as the play- ing of happy souls. So Coleridge pictures the Laplander " Marking the streamy banners of the North, And thinking he those spirits soon should join Who there, in floating robes of rosy light, Dance sportively." But others believed this state of restlessness in the clouds was the fate only of the worthless, who were there pinched with hunger and plied with torments. All agreed in looking for another state of existence, where, under diverse circumstances, happiness and misery should be awarded, in some degree at least, according to desert.^ The Peruvians taught that the reprobate were sentenced to a hell situated in the centre of the earth, where they must endure centuries of toil and anguish. Their paradise was away in the blue dome of heaven. There the spirits of the worthy would lead a life of tranquil luxury. At tiie death of a Peruvian noble his wives and servants frequently were slain, to go with him and wait on him in that happy region.^" Many authors, including Prescott, yielding too easy credence to the very questionable assertions of the S2->anish chroniclers, have attributed to the Peruvians a belief in the resurrection of the body. Various travellers and writers have also predicated this belief of savage nations in Central Africa, of T Prichard, Physical Hist, of Mankind, vol. i. ch. 2. 8 Egede, Greenland, ch. 18. •Dr. Karl Andree, Grunland. w Prescott, Conquest of Peru, vol. i. ch. 3. 72 BARBARIAN NOTIONS OF A FUTURE LIFE. certain South Sea islanders, and of several native tribes in North America. In all these cases the supposition is probably erroneous, as we think for the following reasons. In the iirst place, the idea of a resurrection of the body is either a late conception of the associative imagination, or else a doctrine connected with a speculative theory of recurring epochs in the destiny of the world ; and it is in both instances too subtle and elaborate for an uncultivated people. Secondly, in none of the cases re- ferred to has any reliable evidence been given of the actual existence of the belief in question. It has merely been inferred, by persons to whose minds the doctrine was previously familiar, from phenomena by no means necessarily implying it. For example, a recent author ascribes to the Feejees the belief that there will be a resurrection of the body just as it was at the time of death. The only datum on which he founds this astounding assertion is that they often seem to prefer to die in the full vigor of manhood rather than in decrepit old age !" Thirdly, we know that the observation and statements of the Spanish monks and historians, in regard to the religion of the pagans of South America, were of the most imperfect and reckless character. They perpetrated gross frauds, such as planting in the face of high precipices white stones in the shape of the cross, and then pointing to them in proof of their assertion that, before the Christians came, the Devil had here parodied the rites and doctrines of the gospel.^^ They said the Mexican goddess, wife of the sun, was Eve, or the Virgin Mary, and QuetzalcoatI was St. Thomas P^ Such afRrmers are to be cautiously followed. Finally, it is a quite signifi- cant fact that while some point to the pains which the Peruvians took in embalming their dead as a proof that they looked for a resurrection of the body, Acosta expressly says that they did not believe in the rei^urrec- tion, and that this unbelief was the cause of their embalming.'* Garci- laso de la Vega, in his "Royal Commentaries of the Peruvian Incas," says that when he asked some Peruvians why, they took so great care to pre- serve in the cemeteries of the dead the nails and hair which had been cut off, they replied that in . the day of resurrection the dead would come forth with whatever of their bodies was left, and there would be too great a press of business in that day for them to afford time to go hunting round after their hair and nails !^* The fancy of a Christian is too plain here. If the answer were really made by the natives, they were playing a joke on their credulous questioner, or seeking to please him with distorted echoes of his own faith. The conceits as to a future life entertained by the Mexicans varied considerably from those of their neighbors of Peru. Souls neither good nor bad, or whose virtues and vices balanced each other, were to enter a 11 Erskine, Islands of the Western Pacific, p. 248. 12 Schoolcraft, History, &c. of the Indian Tribes, part v. p. 93. 13 Squier, Serpent-Symbol in America, p. 13. 1* Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, book v. ch. 7. 1' Book ii. ch. 7. BARBARIAN NOTIONS OF A FUTURE LIFE. 73 medium state of idleness and empty content. The wicked, or those dj'ing in any of certain enumerated modes of death, went to Mictlan, a dismal hell within the earth. The souls of those struck by light- ning, or drowned, or dying by any of a given list of diseases, — also tlie souls of children, — were transferred to a remote elysium, Tlalocan. There was a place in the chief temple where, it was supposed, once a year the spirits of all the children who had been sacrificed to Tlaloc invisibly came and assisted in the ceremonies. The ultimate heaven was reserved /or warriors who bravely fell in battle, for women who died in labor, for those offered up in the temples of the gods, and for a few others. These passed immediately to the house of the sun, their chief god, whom they accompanied for a term of years, with songs, dances, and revelry, in his circuit around the sky. Then, animating the forms of birds of gay plumage, they lived as beautiful songsters among the flowers, now on earth, now in heaven, at their pleasure.^® It was the Mexican custom to dress the dead man in the garb appropriated to the guardian deity of his craft or condition in life. They gave him a jug of water. They placed with him slips of paper to serve as passports through guarded gates and perilous defiles in the other world. They made a fire of his clothes and utensils, to warm the shivering soul while traversing a region of cold winds beyond the grave.'^ The following sentence occurs in a poem composed by one of the old Aztec monarchs: — "Illustrious nobles, loyal subjects, let us aspire to that heaven where all is eternal and corruption cannot come. The horrors of the tomb are but the cradle of the sun, and the shadows of death are brilliant lights for the stars."^* Amidst the mass of whimsical conceptions entering into the faith of the widely-spread tribes of North America, we find a ruling agreement in the cardinal features of their thought concerning a future state of exist- ence. In common with nearly all barbarous nations, they felt great fear of apparitions. The Sioux were in the habit of addressing the deceased at his burial, and imploring him to stay in his own place and not come to distress them. Their funeral customs, too, from one extremity of the continent to the other, were very much alike. Those who have reported their opinions to us, from the earliest Jesuit missionaries to the latest investigators of their mental characteristics, concur in ascribing to them a deep trust in a life to come, a cheerful view of its conditions, and a re- markable freedom from the dread of dying. Charlevoix says, "The best- established opinion among the natives is the immortality of the soul." On the basis of an account written by William Penn, Pope composed the famous passage in his " Essay on Man :" — " Lo ! the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind Sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind. WCIavigero, History of Mexico, book vi. sect. 1. " Ibid. sect. 39. M Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, toI. i. ch. 6. 74 BARBARIAN NOTIONS OF A FUTURE LIFE. His soul proud Science never taught to stray- Far as the solar walk or milky way : Yet simple nature to his faith hath given, Behind the cloud-topp'd hill, an humbler heaven, Some safer world in depth of woods embraced, Or happier island in the watery waste. To be, contents his natural desire : He asks no angel's wiug, no seraph's fire. But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company." Their rude instinctive belief in the soul's survival, and surmises as to its destiny, are implied in their funeral rites, which, as already stated, wei-e, with some exceptions, strikingly similar even in the remotest tribes.^' In the bark coffin, with a dead Indian the Onondagas buried a kettle of provisions, a pair of moccasins, a piece of deer-skin and sinews of the deer to sew patches on the moccasins, which it was supposed the deceased would wear out on his journey. They also furnished him with a bow and arrows, a tomahawk and knife, to procure game with to live on while pursuing his way to the land of spirits, the blissful regions of lia-wah-ne-u.™ Several Indian nations, instead of burying the food, sus- pended it above the grave, and renewed it from time to time. Some writers have explained this custom by the hypothesis of an Indian belief in two souls, one of which departed to the realm of the dead, while the other tarried by the mound until the body was decayed, or until it had itself found a chance to be born in a new body.^^ The supposition seems forced and extremely doubtful. The truth probably lies in a simpler explana- tion, which will be offered further on. The Winnebagoes located paradise above, and called the milky way the " Road of the Dead."^'^ It was so white with the crowds of journey- ing ghosts ! But almost all, like the Ojibways, imagined their elysium to lie far in the West. The soul, freed from the body, follows a wide beaten path westward, and enters a country abounding with all that an Indian covets. On the borders of this blessed land, in a long glade, he finds his relatives, for many generations back, gathered to welcome him.^^ The Chippewas, and several other important tribes, always kindled fires on the fresh graves of their dead, and kept them burning four successive nights, to light the wandering souls on their way."* An Indian myth represents the ghosts coming back from Ponemah, the land of the Here- after, and singing this song to the miraculous Hiawatha : — "Do not lay such heavy burdens On the graves of those you bury, Not such weight of furs and wampum, '9 Baumgarten, Geschichte der Volker von America, xiii. haupts. : vom Tod, Vergrttbniss, und Traucr. 20 Clarke, Onondaga, vol. i. p. 51. *i Miiller, Geschichte der Amerihanischen Urreligionen, sect. 66. M Schoolcraft, History, Ac. of tho Indian Tribes, part iv. p. 240. M Ibid, part ii. p. 135. «< Ibid.' part v. p. 64 ; part iv. p. 55. BARBARIAN NOTIONS OF A FUTURE LIFE. 75 Not such weight of pots and kettles ; For the spirits faint beneath them. , Only give them food to carry, Only give them fire to light them. Four days is the spirit's journey To the land of ghosts and shadows, Four its lonely night-encampments. Therefore, when the dead are buried, Let a fire, as night approaches, Four times on the grave be kindled, That the soul upon its journey May not grope about in darkness."25 The subject of a future state seems to have been by far the most pro- minent one in the Indian imagination. They relate many traditions of persons who have entered it, and returned, and given descriptions of it. A young brave, having lost his betrothed, determined to follow her to the land of souls. Far South, beyond the region of ice and snows, he came to a lodge standing before the entrance to wide blue plains. Leaving his body there, he embarked in a white stone canoe to cross a lake. He saw the souls of wicked Indians sinking in the lake ; but the good gained an elysian shore, where all was warmth, beauty, ease, and eternal youth, and where the air was food. The Master of Breath sent him back, but promised that he might at death return and stay.'^* The Wyandots tell of a dwarf, Tcha-ka-bech, who climbed a tree which grew higher as often as he blew on it. At last he reached heaven, and discovered it to be an excellent place. He descended the tree, building wigwams at inter- vals in the branches. He then returned with his sister and nephew, resting each night in one of the wigwams. He set his traps up there to catch animals. Rising in the night to go and examine his traps, he saw one all on fire, and, upon approaching it, found that he had caught the sun ! Where the Indian is found believing in a Devil and a hell, it is the re- sult of his intercourse with Europeans. These elements of horror were foreign to his original religion." There are in some quarters faint traces of a single purgatorial or retributive conception. It is a representation of paradise as an island, the ordeal consisting in the passage of the dark river or lake which surrounds it. The worthy cross with entire facility, the unworthy only after tedious struggles. Some say the latter are drowned ; others, that they sink up to their chins in the water, where they pass eternity in vain desires to attain the alluring land on which they gaze.^^ Even this notion may be a modification consequent upon European influence. At all events, it is subordinate in force and only occasional in occurrence. For the most part, in the Indian faith mercy swallows up the other attributes of the Great Spirit. The Indian dies «5 Longfellow, Song of Hiawatha, xix. : The Ghosts. 2* Schoolcraft, Indian in his Wigwam, p 79. 27 Loskiel, Hist. Mission of United Brethren to N. A. Indians, part i. ch. 3. S8 Schoolcraft, Indian iu his Wigwam, p. 202. History,