THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES ,^. /A . f CO/WvA c^ / IMMORTALITY MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA • MADRAS MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON . CHICAGO DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA. Ltd. TORONTO IMMORTALITY AN ESSAY IN DISCOVERY CO-ORDINATING SCIENTIFIC, PSYCHICAL, AND BIBLICAL RESEARCH BURNETT H. STREETER A. CLUTTON-BROCK C.W.EMMET J. A. HADFIELD THE AUTHOR OF 'PRO CHRISTO ET ECCLESIA' And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond- Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea. MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1917 COPYRIGHT 133 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. PRESUPPOSITIONS AND PRE- JUDGMENTS PAGE By A. Clutton-Brock, Author of ' Thoughts on the War; ' The Ultimate Belle/;' ' JFilliam Morris : his Work and Influence'' (Home University Library) i II. THE MIND AND THE BRAIN (a DISCUSSION OF IMMORTALITY FROM THE STANDPOINT OF science) By J. A. Hadfield, M.A., M.B., Surgeon^ Royal Navy 17 III. THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD By the Rev. B. H. Streeter, M.A., Canon Residentiary of Hereford^ Fellow and Lecturer of ^leens College^ Oxford. Editor of ^ Foundations^ and ^Concerning Prayer; Author of ^ Restatement and Reunion^ . 75 IV. THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME By B. H. Streeter . . . . .131 i'..-'^..>^jLH-*0 vi IMMORTALITY, V. THE BIBLE AND HELL PACK By the Rev. C. W. Emmet, B.D., Vkar of West Hendrcd^ Berh^ Author of ^ The Eschatologkal Ques- tion in the Gospels^ * The Epistle to the Galatians ' (Readers^ Commentary)^ ' The Third Book of Macca- bees ' ^Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament^ ed. by Charles)^ * The Fourth Book of Maccabees'' [S.P.C.K. translations of early documents), etc. ...... 167 VL A DREAM OF HEAVEN By A. Clutton-Brock . . . .219 VIL THE GOOD AND EVIL IN SPIRITUALISM By the Author of ' Pro Christo et Ecclesia ' (Lily Dougall), Author of ' Christus Futurus^ ' Absente Keo^ * Voluntas Dei^ * The Practice of Christianity^ ' The Christian Doctrine of Health ' ; also of *■ Beggars All; ' The Zeitgeist; ' The Mormon Prophet^ ' Paths of the Righteous; etc. .... 241 VIII. REINCARNATION, KARMA AND THEOSOPHY By the Author of ' Pro Christo et Ecclesia ' . 293 IX. THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY By the Author of ' Pro Christo et Ecclesia ' . 343 Index of Subjects ..... 375 Index of Names . . . . . 379 INTRODUCTION Man's life is like a Sparrow, mighty King ! That — while at banquet with your chiefs you sit Housed near a blazing fire — is seen to fiit Safe from the wintry tempest. Fluttering, Here did it enter ; there, on hasty wing, Flies out, and passes on from cold to cold ; But whence it came we know not, nor behold Whither it goes. Even such, that Transient Thing The Human Soul. . . . This mystery if the Stranger can reveal, His be a welcome cordially bestowed ! Because they believed the Roman Stranger could reveal the mystery of the After-life our Saxon fathers accepted Christianity. May we believe that any teacher, Christian or other, can reveal that mystery to us to-day ? . . . That is a question which tens of thousands are asking now. That there is a life beyond the grave, many, perhaps, the majority, still believe ; but it is a belief resting mainly upon instinct or upon a tradition the trust- worthiness of which they are increasingly aware is being questioned from many sides. The growth alike of knowledge and of moral insight has gradually made more and more untenable the conventional pictures of Heaven and Hell which seem to have satisfied, or at least to have been accepted by, most men well on into the nineteenth viii IMMORTALITY century. Popular confidence in the authority of Scripture has been sapped by scientific discovery and vague rumours of the Higher Criticism. Above all, by demonstrating how intimate is the union of the mind with a brain which is obviously perishable, Science seems to not a few to have given the final coup de grAce to any belief in personal Immortality at all. To such a situation different individuals react in different ways. To the ignoble is open the simple course, " Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die." The nobler sort are moved in divers ways. Some by an act of will turn their backs upon the whole of the achievement of the human intellect and cling, with the desperation of drowning men, to an infallible Bible or an infallible Church. Others seek new light in Spiritualistic seance or in Theosophical revelation. The majority, thinking like the old Rabbi that " God hath given man the present, the future He has kept in His own hand," give themselves over to the task of living cleanly and doing good work in this world, deliberately refusing to let their thoughts dwell over much on a possible Beyond. Of these last perhaps the greater number still " faintly trust the larger hope " ; others with a Stoic renunciation reject it as an out-worn superstition and an enervating dream ; others again have lost all interest in any life beyond the present — and are content. But such contentment, whether the disciplined contentment of the Stoic or the easy acquiescence of the indiflferent, has a way of breaking down. INTRODUCTION ix And ah, to know not, while with friends I sit, And while the purple joy is pass'd about. Whether 'tis ampler day divinelier lit Or homeless night without ; And whether, stepping forth, my soul shall see New prospects, or fall sheer — a blinded thing ! There is, O grave, thy hourly victory. And there, O death, thy sting. And, to-day, most of those who care little on their own account are thinking of brave men about whose present case they would fain know more — if only they believed that possible. But is it really necessary to rest content in such a state of doubt and darkness ? Has Science really proved that Mind is only a pale reflection of material changes in the Brain ? A few years ago it did indeed look as if at no distant date such a conclusion might be reached. It is otherwise to-day. Again, must the Christian outlook on the Future Life be for ever confined within what we now know to be pre-Christian forms of thought which were already, when St. Paul wrote, obsolescent ? Must a grown man always lisp in baby speech .'' Is Theology the one de- partment of human enterprise in which there can never be advance ^ And, while the range of human know- ledge is expanding yearly on every side, is the destiny of man the one and only subject on which we can never hope to learn something new ? Macaulay, in a well-known passage, contrasts the gigantic strides of human science in every other direction with the absolute stagnation in our knowledge of all X IMMORTALHY that lies behind the world of sight and touch. " There are branches of knowledge with respect to which the law of the human mind is progress. . . . But with theology the case is very different. ... A Christian of the fifth century with a Bible is neither better nor worse situated than a Christian of the nineteenth with a Bible, candour and natural acuteness being, of course, supposed equal." But things have changed since Macaulay wrote. Science is every day making new discoveries which bear on the relation of the body and the soul. Psychical Research, if it has added little to our knowledge of another life, has at least thrown startling light on the nature of that mind whose survival is in question ; and Philosophy has not been idle. The application to Theology of the doctrine of Evolution and of the results of Psychology and of the Science of Comparative Religions has given a new meaning to the word Revela- tion ; while, in the light of lately discovered documents and new methods of study, the New Testament speaks with another voice. It is not the lack of new knowledge but the difficulty of co-ordinating it which holds us back; for no one person can have really first-hand knowledge of all the various departments of thought concerned. Discovery comes whenever trains of thought or pieces of information originally separate are seen to illuminate and explain each other. But, when the things requiring to be brought together exist in different minds, this fusion is made harder or easier in exact proportion to the degree of sympathy and the range of contact between those minds Hence, though INTRODUCTION xi much may be accomplished by the reading of books or articles by workers in different departments, conditions become more favourable if this can be supplemented by the living contact of mind with mind. The maximum possibilities of such fusion of different strains is reached where there is personal as well as intellectual under- standing, and where there is an overmastering passion for Truth which makes each willing to put all he has into the common stock, to hold back no half-formed thought as foolish or immature, to secrete no bright idea as private property, and to defend no position once taken up merely from respect to interest or conservatism or from personal amour-propre. Intellectual co-operation only achieves its greatest possibilities where its basis is enthusiasm for a common cause and personal friendship ; and experience shows that the intellectual activity and receptivity of each is raised to the highest pitch when that fellowship is not in work alone and in discussion, but in jest and prayer as well — for humour and common devotion, when both are quite spontaneous, are, though in very different ways, the greatest solvents of egotism and a well-spring of fellowship and mutual understanding. Such fellowship and co-operation is not always an easy thing to compass, but when it exists persons of quite modest gifts and moderate experience can do, relatively to their capacity, great things. The last ten years have seen a widespread recognition of the value of this group method of attacking current problems, practical as well as intellectual. The volumes Foundations and Concerning Prayer were an attempt to xii IMMORTALITY apply it to some urgent questions of Religion ; and, whatever may be thought of these works, such merits as they have are mainly due to this method of approach. The experience gained in the preparation of these books, particularly the latter, suggested the hope that, by the application of the same method, light might be gained on the burning question of the Future Life. Several whose names do not appear on the title-page of this book took part in one or more of the preliminary conferences held at Cumnor, and contributed memoranda on special points. And though none of them are in any way responsible for the opinions expressed in any of the Essays, the authors feel bound to acknowledge the value of their participation in the conferences by the mention of their names : Dr. E. W. Barnes, Master of the Temple ; the Rev. W. S. Bradley, Tutor of Mansfield College ; the Rev. C. H. S. Matthews, Vicar of St. Peter's, Thanet ; Captain W. H. Moberly, D.S.O., Fellow of Lincoln College ; and lastly, Miss M. S. Earp, who, besides being present at all the con- ferences, has given invaluable help in connection with the MSS. and proofs. An acknowledgment is also due to Miss M. E. Campbell for the compilation of the Index. In addition to the discussions, both in this larger group and among themselves, individual contributors have had the advantage of being able to consult other friends who had special knowledge on particular points. By this method it has been possible to focus upon the subjects treated a range of thought, experience, and expert knowledge which no one person could have INTRODUCTION xiii commanded alone. As a result of thorough discussion a degree of unity and unanimity has been arrived at which, in view of the very various tastes, training, and experience of the authors, is remarkable, and which encourages them to believe that the conclusions reached are really sound. Sometimes, of course, an Essay treats of subjects of which its author has himself made a special study, but about which some or all of the other contributors feel that they are not competent to speak with authority ; and things are sometimes said by one writer which would have been put with a different kind of emphasis by another. Subject, however, to these reservations, the book is put forward on the corporate responsibility of all the contributors ; it presents a connected train of thought and a definite and coherent point of view, and, though each Essay is complete in itself, it will gain by being read in the order and context in which it stands. In the first two Essays and the first section of the third the attempt is made to set out in a logical sequence the main arguments for the belief in personal Immortality. The rest of Essay III. and Essays IV. to VI. deal with the nature of the after-life, and discuss the meaning and value for modern thought of concep- tions like Resurrection, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. Essays VII. and VIII. endeavour to estimate judicially the elements of truth and error in Spiritualism and in the doctrineof Reincarnation, more especially in relation to the claims made on its behalf by modern Theosophy. Essay IX. forms, as it were, an Epilogue to the whole collection. xiv IMMORTALITY The effect of the very considerable amount of thought and labour given to the preparation of this book on the minds of its authors has been to convince them of three things : First, they have come to see that the belief in personal Immortality rests on a wider and surer basis in reason than they had originally supposed. Secondly, they feel that though a veil must always hang between this world and the next, it is not entirely impenetrable. If he will only seek it in the right way some real and definite knowledge of the life Beyond can be attained by man. Thirdly, if they believe, as they do, that they have something of value to contribute, it is not from any conceit of their own ability, but because of the method they have used. This has been, in effect, an endeavour to get right away from the old bickerings between Science and Religion, Reason and Revelation ; and to bring together the ascertained results of different branches of Scientific, Philosophical, Critical, and Historical study in such a way as to interpenetrate and illuminate one another in the light of the values derivable from Religion, Ethics, and Art. But what they have done is only to make a beginning, and they are confident that others, improving on their method and commanding wider and deeper ranges of knowledge and experience, will be able to go further forward, and that such light as men can now see is only the twilight which precedes the dawn. -, p ^ B. H. S. CuTTS End, Cumnor, October i, 1917. 7 I PRESUPPOSITIONS & PREJUDGMENTS BY ARTHUR CLUTTON-BROCK AUTHOR or "thoughts on the war," "the ultimate belief," 'WILLIAM morris: HIS WORK AND INFLUENCE" (hOME UNIVERSITY LIURARy) SYNOPSIS Agnosticism, i.e. complete suspense of judgment about a future life is really impossible ...... One main cause of disbelief in it is the passion for disinterestedness. In this case the disbelief is not so complete as it supposes. It is moral rather than intellectual .... Another cause is the reaction against current presentations of the belief. If our beliefs fail to express our values, we reject them. Our effort is to conceive reality in terms of our values. The conflict between beliefs and values is most acute in the matter of a future life ....... There is a disinterested desire to believe in a future life in so far as we wish to prove the justice of the universe. But the conse- quent effort to attain certainty leads us into an unjust concep- tion. So we lose certainty ..... The belief in Hell and its revenge on those who hold it. The natural reaction and the despair of all belief The suspicion of any belief in a future life as tainted with egotism. So agnosticism seems safer and more moral But there is always a counter -reaction. The revolt against mechanical conceptions of life inevitable. The belief in a future life not obsolete but always growing. Only the expres- sion of it becomes obsolete. Men believe more and more in a future state. But they have to earn their belief, and it is always being destroyed by unearned certainties. It can be earned only by the practice of the principles of Christianity TX I PRESUPPOSITIONS AND PREJUDGMENTS In this paper I propose to discuss, not the reasons men give for their beUef or disbelief in a future life, but deeper, unconscious causes, which are peculiarly powerful in this case because there is so little to argue about. The unseen world, if there is one, is unseen ; and we know no facts about it as we know facts about this world. Therefore there are many who say they are agnostics about it ; but it is impossible to be really an agnostic about the question of a future life. ^ If this life is a preparation for another, it cannot be the same for us as if it ended with death ; hence we cannot escape from a working hypothesis that it ■ does or does not end with death, which must, one would suppose, affect our conduct. It may be, of course, that all our working hypotheses, all our thoughts, are merely part of a mechanism and have nothing to do with our conduct, which is another part of the mechanism of life. But we must and do always dismiss that possibility when we think ; for it makes all thinking and all theories futile, including itself It is, however, a strange fact that unbelievers in a future life do not greatly differ in conduct or in values from believers. They do not say, " Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die." They beHeve just as firmly in absolute values, in truth, in righteousness, and in beauty, as the man who 3 Wrt. 4 IMMORTALITY i could draw you a map of heaven ; indeed they often seem to believe more firmly in them, for it is possible to believe in a future life and to have no absolute values at all, to see every good action merely as an investment. But the man who refuses to believe in a future life, if he acts rightly, must do so for the sake of doing so ; righteousness must have an absolute value for him indeed. And here, perhaps, we may find the cause of much avowed disbelief. It is really faith, a faith in absolute values which refuses the support and comfort of any dogma. It maintains that man has his values and that it is his duty to obey them without hope of reward, without even seeking for a proof that they belong to the order of the universe, that they are shared by anything except man ; that man must be good without postulating a God to approve of his goodness, or a universe in which that goodness has any significance or lasting effect. This refusal to believe in a future life is the supreme example of man's passion for disinterestedness. It is the most resolute and defiant of all possible answers to the question — Doth Job fear God for nought ? The answer is — Yes, even though there be no God, and though he who fears is but a quintessence of dust, for a moment become conscious of itself. That is the last asceticism of which man in his passion for absolute values is capable. He proclaims them in the face of a universe which he asserts to be utterly indifferent to them. But this asceticism is never, I think, the complete disbelief it supposes itself to be. Rather it is a kind of self- denial, a discipline which the mind imposes on itself so that it may be sure that its values are absolute. All the beliefs of man have been tainted with his egotism ; they have supplied him with reasons for righteousness other than the right reasons, and have therefore perverted his very conception of righteousness. Tantum religio potuit I PRESUPPOSITIONS & PREJUDGMENTS 5 suadere malorum ; and we are better without it in the form of dogma, for we cannot trust ourselves not to frame dogmas that will pervert our absolute values. As Nietzsche said, there is the will to power in all religion ; and it continually deceives us by pretending to express our absolute values, while it really expresses our desire for rewards for ourselves and punishments for others. All this is not consciously stated ; but it is deep in the minds of many upright men and produces in them a habit of defiant incredulity, which is not so much rational as moral. But there is also another, narrower reason why many excellent men deny a future life. What they really deny is not a future life generally, but the particular kind of future life which they have been taught to believe in, or the particular arguments advanced for it. It is a natural infirmity of the human mind thus to deny the general in the particular. There are, for instance, many people who suppose that the whole question of a future life is bound up with the notion that Heaven is a place above the sky and with the dogma of the physical Resurrection of Christ. It has never occurred to them to consider the two questions separately. Because they do not believe in a local Heaven, or in the physical Resurrection, they assume that they cannot believe in a future life. But it is possible not to be a Christian at all, to believe that Christ never existed, or never to have heard of the name Heaven, and yet to believe in a future life with Plato. Yet another irrelevant cause of disbelief in a future life is the strange assertion, commonly associated with the Christian faith, that animals have no souls. This did not matter so long as men saw no likeness between themselves and animals ; but, now that a thousand discovered facts prove the likeness, the contention is obvious that, since animals have no souls, men can have none either, and must die like 6 IMMORTALITY i dogs. But how if dogs die like men ? How if animals are like men rather than men like animals ? Perhaps the last piece of Christian humility we have to learn, with St. Francis, is that the black beetle is our brother. Perhaps it is the generic snobbery of man, more than anything else, that has deprived him of his highest hopes, just as all our snobberies deprive us of hope by emptying life of absolute values for us. I cannot believe in any real and universal fellowship unless I am ready to strip myself of all status ; 1 cannot believe in a real future life so long as I think of it as a privilege of my own species. In the long run exclusiveness always shuts out those who exclude ; for there is a terrible unconscious sincerity in the human mind by which all lies told for comfort or pride revenge themselves on the liar. If in our beliefs we express our own sense of status, our own hatred, or our own selfish desires, those beliefs gradually empty the universe of values, and so become intolerable to us. Then, whatever truth there may be in them, is also rejected ; hence much of our modern defiant refusal to believe in a future state, in a God, in a universe, which can be valued, is the result of a reaction from beliefs in a future state, a God, a universe, which men find that they cannot value. In his beliefs about these things man is always trying to express his absolute values ; but his beliefs are incessantly tainted with his egotism and so mis-express his values. The values are permanent ; they are the most certain and un- changing fact in the mind of man ; they are always seeking expression and always failing of it because they are so deep and unconscious. There is in man always a desire to love something for its own sake, and not as it helps him to live, either in this life or in another. That passion, that appetite of the soul, persists always through all his changing bodily appetites, and because of it he can never be content with the pleasure he I PRESUPPOSITIONS & PREJUDGMENTS 7 gets from them. It is the most permanent fact of his mind, and to him the most permanent fact of the universe. Therefore he makes an incessant effort to conceive of the universe in terms of it. Since he has this incessant desire to love something for its own sake and values such a love, whether he attains to it or no, above all other experiences of his mind or body, he has also an unceasing desire to find in the very nature of the universe that which is worthy of his love. This desire, because of its very nature, cannot be satisfied by any merely comforting belief. It is indeed the reason why men are suspicious of all comforting beliefs ; for, if I love God, or any one or anything, so that I may be comforted by my love, my love itself is spurious. I might as well try to fall in love with a woman because she is rich. But what man desires above all things is a love which is not spurious ; and yet, because he desires that love so much, his egotism is always tempting him into spurious loves, into spurious certainties. And for a time perhaps he is certain, convinced by miracles or documentary proofs that he has found the true God whom he can love, the creator and ruler of a righteous universe. But gradually, through that terrible unconscious sincerity of his, the very proofs which have given him certainty cause him discomfort. He finds that the God who has been revealed to him so precisely does not satisfy his own values. Will he then give up the God or the values .? The conflict between the God and the values rages through all religious history ; for man clings tenaciously to both and is torn by the logic which would force him to reject the one or the other. But nowhere is this conflict fiercer than in the matter of beliefs about a future life. For man has a disinterested desire to believe in a future life. It is not merely that the individual man wishes to survive, that his egotism cannot endure the thought 8 IMMORTALITY i of a universe in which he himself will not be ; it is that he wishes to find justice, not merely in the mind of man, but also in the order of the universe, and that, without a future life, there seems to him to be no justice, no significance in pain and grief. There are of course those who tell us that our pain and grief will profit posterity. That is not certain ; and, even if it were, there would be no justice in it ; for it is not justice that one man should profit by another's misfortunes ; justice is a matter of the treatment of individuals, not of the race. There it is like love. If I do not love individuals, if I am not just to them, I do not love, I am not just, at all. So, if I believe in the love and the justice of God at all, I believe in His love and justice to individuals. What we really value is persons, not processes ; and we cannot value a mere process of salvation for some abstraction called the race, if persons are utterly sacrificed to it. We cannot value a universe in which this sacrifice occurs, whatever brave efforts we may make to do so. Since, then, there is in man this quite disinterested desire to believe in a future life, since it is an essential part of his desire to believe in a universe which he can value, man is continually tempted to find sure proofs that there is a future life. He is " hot for certainties " ; and these very certainties, when he has attained to them, cause him discomfort. For, since they are spurious certainties, they are always tainted with his own egotism ; and there is some lack of the very justice he desires in the future state of which he is certain. This lack of justice, though it may at first seem to work in his own favour, will afterwards take a terrible revenge upon him ; for it is the injustice of an omnipotent God, in whose hands he is helpless. There is, for instance, the taint of egotism in all our traditional beliefs about rewards and punishments in a future state ; men have always used those beliefs to 1 PRESUPPOSITIONS & PREJUDGMENTS 9 discourage certain kinds of conduct and to encourage others. Churches in particular have used them to suit their own purposes. They conceive of a God who gives to their enemies the kind of future life that they deserve. But if this God of ours is capable of punishing our enemies as we wish, He is capable also of punishing us as He wishes. If He will take vengeance for us He may take vengeance on us. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord ; and vengeance is a terrible weapon in the hands of an omnipotent being into whose nature you have read your own vindictiveness. Hence the belief in Hell, a Hell in which our enemies will suffer ; but we do not know that we ourselves shall not meet them there. Men have been utterly certain about this Hell, and they have not been able to escape from the logic of their own certainty. It is a danger to them as well as to their enemies ; if they use it as a terror to others they cannot escape from the terror of it themselves. They can escape only by denying it altogether ; and this denial comes to them at last, when they see that they cannot value the God whom they have made the instrument of their own vengeance. Hence the fierce reactions against our egotistical conceptions of a future life, of God, of the universe, reactions of man's values against his spurious certainties. In them man tries to destroy all that he has achieved ; he despairs of belief altogether and finds his safety only in denial. In this mood he is peculiarly suspicious of all beliefs in a future state ; for they, more than all other beliefs, have been tainted with egotism and discredited by the frightful revenge they have taken upon it. Certainly belief in a future state has been the cause of more fantastic misery than any other kind of belief, the cause of more fantastic cruelty inflicted by man on man. The struggle for life is a human and kindly thing compared with the struggle for salvation. Egotism in time can be reasoned with and limited ; but egotism projected 10 IMMORTALITY i into eternity goes mad with its own terrors of eternity. Indeed there is an incongruity between egotism and eternity which produces madness in the egotist ; for eternity itself is a conception of the unegotistic, the universal, mind ; and when man projects his egotism into it, fighting for life as in time and space, the result is a nightmare. So the mind of man is at the present day suffering from a nervous shock caused by his past failures to conceive of a future state. A burnt child dreads the fire ; and the mind of man has been burnt by the fires of his own imagined Hell. So he flinches from the peril of any more conceiving. Rather he will keep his values and refuse the attempt to express them in any kind of faith, lest he should lose them in a failure of expression. For there is nothing so demoralising to the nature of man as these failures. They alone have power utterly to pervert his values, to make evil seem to him good. There is no cruelty like religious cruelty ; for nothing but religious fanaticism can utterly remove the natural, kindly inhibitions of man's nature. Therefore men are shy of all faith lest it should lead to fanaticism. There is to them something sane and wholesome in the avowal that they are merely animals, for then at least they can be clean, decent animals and not morbid devils. And yet, as I said to begin with, we cannot thus artificially and wilfully turn away from the question of a future state. For it does, whether we wish it or no, involve our whole view of the nature of the universe. Is the ultimate reality person or process ; is matter the master of that which we call spirit, or spirit the master of that which we call matter ? Is there such a thing as spirit, or merely a complicated mechanical process which becomes conscious of itself through some extra intensity in its working .? There is no getting away from these two alternatives. Either spirit is the supreme fact, supreme over all changes of process and lasting through them all ; or life is to be defined as a mechanical process I PRESUPPOSITIONS & PREJUDGMENTS 1 1 suffering from the illusion that it is not mechanical. In which case nothing distinguishes it from not- life _ except the illusion. If that be so, all.our values are part of that superfluous illusion which is the essence of life. But however much we may seem to be comfortably im- prisoned within the illusion of life, yet the fact that we can call it an illusion proves that we are not perfectly imprisoned. The cold draughts of reality do find their way into our warm prison-house. That consciousness of ours, which we are told is in its very nature a misunder- standing of the reality of ourselves, has by some means begun to be an understanding. The mechanical process is capajble of knowing that it is one ; a remarkable triumph no doubt, but one which necessarily must tempt it to the doubt whether it is a mechanical process after all. Indeed the mechanical explanation of the universe would be quite satisfying, if only it were not we poor machines that had hit upon it. But the mere fact that we are capable of hitting upon it at once arouses a doubt of it in our minds. For, if we can thus triumphantly rid ourselves of our illusions and see that we are only machines, what is that property of the machine which is thus able to triumph over its own nature ? This question the machine cannot but ask itself; and, as soon as it asks it, it ceases to be a machine to itself. Thus there must always be a reaction against all mechanical theories of life just as inevitable as the reaction against all spurious certainties of supernatural belief. The fact that we are capable of conceiving these theories will always in the long run make it impossible for us to believe them. We do finally exist for ourselves because we think ; and that which thinks has for us a reality superior to that which it thinks about, including our own flesh, a reality persisting through all changes of flesh, even the change which we call death. Therefore men will continue to believe in a future life, will indeed believe in it more and more with every increase of consciousness. Such increases of conscious- 12 IMMORTALITY i ness produce doubts of everything, especially doubts of all past beliefs ; for the doubts are themselves part of the increase of consciousness, a necessary part of its conquest of its own subject matter. But consciousness, with every new conquest, becomes more and more sure of its own existence, of its own paramount reality. With all his dethronements of himself, with all his efforts to explain himself, even as a machine, man does become more and more aware of himself as a person. And it is this growing sense of his own reality which makes him cast about so wildly for explanations of him- self. The more this person, which is himself, becomes to him an ultimate reality, the more he tries to explain it in terms of something else, of that which he observes rather than of that which he is. He cannot explain himself in terms of himself ; nor, if he is an ultimate reality, can he learn the nature of that reality from that which is less real ; yet he incessantly tries to do so in the mere process of increasing consciousness. There is this paradox in the whole process of our minds, that we become more aware of ourselves only through our increasing knowledge and experience of that which is not ourselves. And this paradox tempts us continually to believe that what we observe is true also of the observer. We observe certain processes everywhere ; they are truths to us about the external world ; and we believe that they are also true of ourselves. We see the process we call death and we do not see beyond it ; so we think that we are utterly subject to it, that it ends us, because we observe it to end certain formal arrange- ments of matter. But though we may think this, the whole of ourselves is never utterly absorbed into that thought ; for that which thinks remains behind the thought and is capable of a vast unconscious reserve from its own thoughts. Through these very thoughts man achieves the cer- tainty of his own pre-eminent reality ; and it persists I PRESUPPOSITIONS & PREJUDGMENTS 13 through all his doubts and disputations. At certain stages of history it expresses itself in a more and more triumphant faith in a future life, and in other things. But this faith, unfortunately, is apt to be too triumphant ; it goes to man's head and makes him believe that he knows more precisely than he can know. The artist in him, the passionate expresser of faith, is confused with the man of science, and he rushes from passion to logic, as in the Athanasian Creed. He expresses his certainty in dogmas which, because of their very precision, become obsolete, for the precision is temporal though the faith be eternal. He parodies his own certainties in a wrong medium and then falls out of conceit with the parody. It is not enough for him to be sure of his own para- mount reality. He must turn his hymns about it into guide-books of the New Jerusalem ; he must take the Apocalypse for history looking forwards. And the result is that sooner or later he ridicules his own presump- tion and tells himself that these certainties of his are out- worn superstitions because their expression is obsolete. So we are always being told that the belief in a future state is an outworn superstition. But, if by super- stition we mean a mere survival, nothing could be more untrue. For, as a matter of fact, men have attained to a belief in a future state very slowly, and are still in process of attaining to it, a process much hindered by their disgust of past failures to conceive it rationally. Primitive beliefs about it are nearly always beliefs in Ghosts, in appearances of the dead. For to the savage the dead exist only in the shadowy forms in which (as he supposes) they are from time to time seen by the living ; they are not spirits in our sense at all but some kind of material vapour, all that is left of the flesh after the process of death, like the smoke that rises from a funeral pyre. And from this belief in a material phantom there comes a belief in a phantasmic survival of life in beings that — Move among shadows a shadow and wail by impassable streams. 14 IMMORTALITY i This survival is as inferior in reality to the life of a living man as the phantom is inferior to the living body. The whole notion arises from the belief that such ghosts are seen, and from the dreams and visions which are the support of that belief. They do not spring from any sense of the superior reality of person to process, of spirit to matter. This sense grows much later ; and the belief in a future life which is based on it can be sharply distinguished from the belief in ghosts. There is all the difference in the world between the faith of St. Paul and Homer's legends of the underworld. And yet, even now, the faith is constantly confused with the superstition, and while some use the super- stition to explain away the faith, by others it is employed to confirm it. Traditional Christian teaching has in- herited from pre-Christian Judaism notions of a physical resurrection and a local Heaven above the sky, which, though a great advance on early ideas of ghost survival, seem crude and childlike to the modern mind. Hence the very natural tendency to think the faith itself a mere superstition. In all things our faith is constantly weakened by our efforts to attain to a cer- tainty we have not earned. We would have scientific proof where we cannot have it ; and we rely on scientific proof for that faith which can come to us, if at all, only through our whole way of life and thought. Hence the incessant excesses of our belief, and the incessant reactions against them. Hence also the strange fact that men's conscious beliefs are often utterly different from their unconscious. The conscious belief may be merely a reaction against some inadequate expression of belief; the unconscious, all the while, being the slow deposit of faith produced by all that is disinterested in the man's life. This deposit is very slow, slower still for the race than for the individual ; and it is hindered by all perversities both of theory and of conduct. Whenever, for instance, any large body of men, whether a class, or a nation, or a whole civilisation, are filled I PRESUPPOSITIONS & PREJUDGMENTS 1 5 with the idea of their own peculiar status, whenever it seems to them that they are born better than other men, then there is a necessary decHne in their sense of the justice of the universe, in their values, in their faith. Life loses significance for them because they have found a peculiar significance in themselves. It is no accident that the exultation of Christian faith in a future life was combined with the assertion that all men were equal in the sight of God. The Christian faith went with the renunciation of all status. That renunciation, not in words only, but in deeds and in the innermost recesses of the mind, was a necessary antecedent to the Christian happiness. And that happiness was the result of a collective effort made by a whole society, which would no longer believe the proud nonsense of the ancient world. But our modern world is full of a like proud nonsense. Let us get rid of that ; let us once again assert the equality of all men before God, assert it, not only in word, but in thought and in the innermost recesses of the mind ; and then we may leave our faith to grow of itself through our works. II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN (A Discussion of Immortality from the Standpoint of Science) BY JAMES ARTHUR HADFIELD, M.A., M.B. SURGEON, ROYAL NAVY 17 PAGE SYNOPSIS The main problem of Psychology is the relation of Body and Mind. The mind is always found associated with a brain : but shows an increasing tendency to become independent 20 The main thesis of this paper : that the tendency of the mind towards independence and autonomy suggests the possibility of its becoming entirely liberated from the body, and con- tinuing to exist in a disembodied state. I. The main Theories of the Relation of Body and Mind . . 22 The Materialistic : that mind is dependent upon the activity of brain cells. The Idealistic : that the brain is merely an instrument of the mind. The Psychological : that mind and body interact and each has the power of initiation. Psycho- physical interaction. II. Study of the Mind in its present stage of evolution establishing its dominating Influence over the Body. . . 25 (i) Influence of Body on Mind. Mental disturbance from physical causes. Localisation of mental functions in the Brain. (2) Influence of Mind on Brain and Nervous System. Examples of Psychic blindness : deafness : and analgesia. The Nature of Hypnotism and of " Suggestion." A phenomenon of relatively heightened attention. Auto- suggestion and trance. The Power of the Mind to heal bodily disease by mental suggestion. Neurasthenia : Its cause and cure. Rival views of Neurologist and Psychologist. Two illustrations of the cure of Neurasthenia. " Shell Shock " : Illustrations of its cure by mental suggestion. The Psychology of " shell shock." Christian Science : Its claims and its limitations. Telepathy : Communication with spirits of the departed not proved. But the phenomena of "wraiths" too frequent to be neglected ; and other evidence proves existence of mind- transference. 18 II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 19 PAGE III. Study of the Biological development of the Mind, proving its Tendency to Autonomy . . . .56 {a) In the individual. Development of Vision : and of the Emotions. {b) In the race. Low forms of life. The advent of Consciousness — a Psychic fact unexplained by physical terms. The development of Will. Conclusion : ....... 70 Foregoing evidence not a proof that mind will survive, but leads us to expect it. A reasonable hypothesis. Speculation on the purpose of our earthly life. II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN (A Discussion of Immortality from the Standpoint of Science) I propose in this Essay to approach the subject from the scientific and empirical rather than from the philo- sophical and speculative point of view. Psychology presents us with no more difficult and certainly no more fundamental problem than that of the relation of the mind to the brain. Is the mind merely an activity of the brain cells, a product of nerve stimulation ? Or, on the other hand, does the mind dominate the brain and use it as its instrument of expression ? On our answer to this question depends our view as to the possibility of the survival of the mind after the destruction of the brain. Let it be frankly admitted at the outset that we have no scientific proof of the existence of a disembodied mind, a mind entirely free from the limitations of the brain. All the philosophies in the world's history were cradled and nourished in a brain. In its highest flights of fancy or in its wrestling with the problems of life and destiny, the mind yet finds it necessary, like Antaeus, to keep in touch with mother earth from whose breast it draws its sustenance and strength. Science, I repeat, gives us no evidence of the exist- ence of a mind disembodied, naked and stripped of its covering of flesh — but always shows us mind and body associated with one another. Nevertheless, I propose II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 21 to bring forward evidence which will encourage us in the belief that in the course of evolution the mind shows an ever-increasing tendency to free itself from physical control and, breaking loose from its bonds, to assert its independence and live a life undetermined except by the laws of its own nature. The main argument of this essay is that the tendency of the mind towards independence and autonomy suggests the possibility of its becoming entirely liberated from the body, and continuing to live disembodied and free. If we can demonstrate from the point of view of science the relative autonomy of the mind, we may, without doing violence to the facts of science, but rather by interpreting the processes which underlie them, deduce sufficient proof to justify the conclusion that, though the mind is in this life always associated with the brain, it can under suitable conditions survive the destruction of the brain : so that when the body crumbles into dust the mind may " spring triumphant on exulting wing." Modern researches, particularly in the domain of Psychology, normal and abnormal, have opened our eyes to the vast possibilities, as yet unexplored, which lie latent in the mind. In our discussion we shall touch upon some of these discoveries in the sphere of Hypnotism, Telepathy, and Psychotherapy or mental healing, as well as in the more "legitimate" sphere of normal mental biology ; and these studies will supply us with sufficient evidence to establish the claim of the mind to a progressively increasing independence, and to point to the complete liberation of the mind from the body as the probable goal and destiny of natural evolution. It will be convenient to divide our investigation into three main sections : — I. The main theories as to the relation of body and mind. II, Evidence from the study of the mind in its 22 IMMORTALITY II present stage of evolution, pointing to its independence of the body, III. Evidence from the biological evolution of mind in the individual and in the race to show how it originated as a product of physical stimulation, but developed into a psychical force. I. The Main Theories as to the Relation OF Body and Mind A. The Materialistic. — The first and most material- istic view regards the mind as a direct product of the brain. Huxley championed this theory under the name of " Epiphenomenalism." The mind, according to this theory, is " foam " thrown up as a result of the activity of the brain : a " mist " that rises from the surface of the deep, formed of fine particles of its waters. The mind accompanies the brain as a shadow does its sub- stance, and though, like the shadow, it may appear to be more vivacious, it is in reality completely dependent upon the functioning of the brain. Every thought is the result of chemical or mechanical changes in the brain : an " idea " is but an explosion or discharge of a nerve cell : an emotion is an activity of the brain burst- ing into flame : every feeling of love, aspiration, or fear can be explained as due to purely physical changes which produce the vapour of thought or the aroma of virtue. A fuller knowledge of the physiology of the brain would enable us to demonstrate how certain mechanical forces in the mind of Shakespeare produced the character of Hamlet : and how the " Dead March " in ^aul was the result of chemical combustion. Let it be understood that this is at present nothing more than a theory, for these chemical changes have never been demonstrated, and there is at present practically no direct evidence in favour of it. The effect of physical functions on the mind is no doubt important and far-reaching. It is all too obvious to those who are II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 23 compelled to live with sufferers from gout or dyspepsia, and we shall do justice to this aspect of the question later. But the reverse effect of the mind on body is incomparably greater. Meanwhile let us note that to the materialist there is but one answer to our original question : the mind will be abolished as soon as the brain decays : the shadow vanishes when the substance is re- moved: the music must end when the silver cord is loosed: the flame flickers and dies when the wood is burnt to ashes. B. The Idealistic. — The second theory of the relation of mind to body carries us to the other extreme. In the beginning was mind, and mind created the physical world. The material universe is the plastic substance out of which mind may mould her thoughts : the instrument upon which she may play her melody of passion and grief and then cast it off. Without mind the earth would be without form and void : for it is the indwelling soul that gives form to the shell and glad- ness to the summer cloud. Without soul the leaf would wither, the massive crag fall, and the crystal crumble to an amorphous mass. Wordsworth, in his meditations on Tintern Abbey, has described the presence of this all-pervading mind. And I have felt A Presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. Mind is alone real and eternal : the brain is but a deposit thrown out, precipitated, and then formed into a coherent whole, and fashioned as the instrument by which the mind communicates with the material world and with other minds. The destruction of the brain will have no more effect on the existence of the mind than the breaking of a violin on the genius of a musician. The mind, being eternal, is undisturbed by the accidents 24 IMMORTALITY ii which may befall the material and temporary, whose very nature is to decay, I do not propose to discuss in detail either of these two views. There is much to be said for both the materialist and the idealist position, and full justice must be done to both if we are to get at the truth. But we pass them by for the purposes of our investiga- tion, because both views if accepted in toto prejudge the question at issue, and so rule out all further discussion of our main problem. Both the materialist and the idealist have in their philosophy decided beforehand whether the mind can survive the destruction of the brain : it is as impossible for the mind to survive on the one theory as it is necessary in the other : and no amount of argument could alter these conclusions. C. The Psychological. — For the purposes of our dis- cussion we take as our starting-point a third view,^ which is more empirical and open to scientific investi- gation, namely, that of Psycho -physical interaction. On this view every thought which occupies the mind may have some influence on the nervous system : and, on the other hand, every change which takes place in the brain may leave its mark upon mental processes. This theory allows of a certain freedom of action to both the mind and the body, but yet affirms their interdependence. At one time it is the mind that initiates action which results in molecular and vascular changes in the brain : at other times it is the cellular activity of the brain which modifies the thoughts and emotions of the mind. For example : constant mental worry tends to diminish the secretion of bile and so leads to indigestion ; on the other hand, the presence of bile in the blood not only produces jaundice but a depressed spirit and a "jaundiced" view of life. A mighty emotion can sway the body, throwing it into paroxysms now of fear and again of ' Psychology (I employ the word throughout as in modern scientific usage) in so far as it does not profess, like Idealism or Materialism, to be a philosophical theory of Ultimate Reality, is, of course, not exactly a third alternative to them. II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 25 joy. Those of us who have seen men in mortal terror, their eyes thrust out of their orbits, their hair like bristles, realise how the mind in its emotion can affect physical processes. On the other hand, all of us have experienced the depressing effect on the mind of even a slight physical indisposition, producing an irritability which we know to be unworthy of us but which we are unable to control. " The train of representation is determined all along the line from both the neural and the psychical side, with constant psycho-physical inter- action, initiated now from this side, now from that." ^ Nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul ! Taking our start, then, from this theory of " Psycho- physical interaction," and assuming that mind and body are constantly influencing one another, we have yet to study this interaction with a view to determining which of these, the mind or the body, is the dominating factor in our lives, and whether the neural or the physical exercises the more compelling influence over the other. If the mind is dominated by the body, we cannot hope that it can " carry on " after the destruction of the brain : but if the mind proves itself to have gained the mastery over the flesh and can force its commands upon the body, then we may infer that the mind holds its destiny in its own hands. In order to determine this question of dominance let us proceed to our second main subject. II. The Study of the Mind in its present Stage of Evolution, establishing its Dominating Influence over the Body In order to do justice to both sides of the question I shall deal first of all with (i) The influence of the body over mind, and then discuss (2) The influence of the mind over the body. 1 W. McDougall in Mind and Body. 26 IMMORTALITY ii (i) The Influence of the Body over the Mind An impartial study of facts shows that the mind is not that independent, detached, self-determined entity which some would have us believe, but is often con- ditioned by the state of the body and brain. Some of the glandular secretions of the body, the thyroid, for instance, and the ovarian, have a marked effect upon the mind. Most of my readers will be familiar with that form of idiocy in children due to want of the thyroid secretion. This dull, heavy, dribbling child, without inteUigence and without character, is treated with a course of thyroid extract and becomes in a few months as quick-witted and self-respecting as the average child of its age. The discovery of the patho- logy of Cretinism and its consequent cure have no doubt contributed largely to the diminution in the number of " village idiots " which we cannot but have noticed. The mind and intelligence in this case were obviously arrested by the want of this physical secretion, and its artificial supply was followed by the liberation of the mental faculties and the growth of intellect. Some forms of insanity, such as melancholia, also seem to be determined by physical conditions. In many cases such a disease may have followed and been partly caused by mental stress.^ But the treatment of the mind alone seems to have little effect on this disease, which seems to have a physical as well as a psychic origin, and is probably due to an auto-intoxication, the toxins of which must be purged from the body before the mind can become sane and healthy again. It is probable, indeed, that a good deal of what we call *' temperament " is due to the secretions and toxins which circulate in our system. It is interesting to note that popular language suggests that the origin of these ^ I have been particularly struck in dealing with the insane amongst Naval men, with the fact that even in mental diseases of an undoubted organic origin like General Paralysis of the Insane, the onset of the symptoms appears frequently to have been precipitated by a shock of a mental character. II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 27 states is due to physical causes : we speak, for instance, of a man being " phlegmatic," i.e. charged with a super- abundance of " phlegm " or lymph : of another as "liverish": and use phrases like "vent his spleen," " make his gorge rise," which ascribe mental symptoms to physical causes. We are not, of course, defending the use of such phrases as being accurate (particularly in the case of the liver, that long-suffering organ, which has shared with the kidney most of the abuse of the quack), but to indicate how the popular mind has fastened on the idea that one's temperament is influenced by the effect of physical conditions on the mind. Another indication of the dependence of the mind on the brain is to be found in the phenomena of local- isation in the brain. If the visual centres in the occipital lobe of the brain be removed or injured, we lose our sight : if the area anterior to the occipital lobe be injured, we retain our sight, can see things and copy them, but we fail to understand their meaning. That is to say, a psychical quality is lost with the loss of this piece of brain, clearly indicating that besides the sensory centres there are psychical centres in the brain upon the integrity of which our mental condition to some extent depends. Let us for our third illustration point to facts familiar enough to all. Let the reader try for himself this experiment. When he is feeling gloomy and de- pressed, let him force himself to smile : he will imme- diately find the influence of his action in relieving his gloom. Let a man who is walking with shoulders bent and eyes cast to the ground in thought, raise his head, square his shoulders, and walk upright. He will immediately experience a martial feeling of self- possession. So, clenching the hand, setting the jaw, producing a sneer, and many other physical actions, have a tendency to produce the mental emotion with which they are associated. A very familiar illustration 28 IMMORTALITY II of this same law is that the attitude of prayer helps us to realise a reverent spirit. We shall have reason to refer to this subject again later : for the present we are only concerned to show how physical conditions can modify mental processes. Let us, then, do justice to this side of the question and admit that the brain has its share in influencing the processes of the mind, and realise that the mind cannot afford to spurn the advances of the body, but must for its own health maintain amicable relations with it. The mens sana and the corpus sanum are intimately connected. (2) The Influence of the Mind on the Brain and Nervous System Having acknowledged the service rendered by the brain to the mind, we turn to the facts pointing to the influence of the mind on the brain and nervous system. We shall find that the mind not only influences the body, but that it has an increasing tendency to dominate the body and control its sensations. Let us take a common illustration. A woman receives the news of the sudden death of her husband. This is a " psychic " cause : we call it psychic because it is not the message as spoken that produces the efi^ect on her (she had often before felt the impact of the sound- waves of the word " death "), but its significance for her. We see the flush — an attempt of the heart to drive suffi- cient blood to the brain to stand the shock — the subse- quent pallor, the sickness, the trembling, and ultimately the loss of consciousness, by which means nature delivers her from the agony of mental pain. These phenomena of the circulation and nervous system are produced by a cause that is purely psychical in origin, and prove that the mind is able to use the body to express its feel- ings and emotions, like the evening wind which makes the trees rustle as in merriment or moan as in sadness. II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 29 Again, there is conclusive evidence that the mind can completely dominate sensations, not only by con- trolling but even by abolishing all feeling of them. Those, for instance, who are accustomed to use micro- scopes are able to produce a psychic blindness in one eye. Whilst the right eye, let us say, is kept focussed on the slide, the left eye is kept open, but is yet blind to the rays of light which come to it. The beginner is at first confused with rays coming from the slide and from the surroundings simultaneously, but a little training enables him to cut out the vision of the surroundings in the left eye even though this eye is kept open. The rays of light from the table, stand, and other surround- ings are still striking his retina, but the mind refuses to admit them. The mind thus has the power to refuse the sensations offered to it and to decide which sensations it will reject and which accept. A similar phenomenon is observed in the hypnotic state. A hypnotised subject may be told to observe every picture on a wall except one, and he will no longer see this picture. His sight is not impaired in any way, since he can observe the other pictures, but a psychic blindness has been produced, the mind having the power to refuse the sensations due to the rays of light coming from that one picture. " Having eyes they see not." I have at the present time a patient who, in the hypnotised state, converses with me and obeys my commands. But should any one else command him or speak to him he is completely deaf to the voice and makes no response, telling me that he hears nothing. But as soon as I tell him that he will hear the other voice, he immediately responds, and carries out the commands of the man to whose voice he was previously deaf. The stimuli enter the brain alike in both cases : but in the first case the mind is psychically deaf to them. The extremes of concentration of which the mind is capable are exemplified in the analgesia or loss of the 30 IMMORTALITY ii sensation of pain which can be produced in a hypnotised person. I remember a case (though I was not fortunate enough to see it) in one of the operating theatres of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in which a major abdominal operation (for hernia) was performed on a student with no anaesthetic except that of hypnotic suggestion. The patient was admitted to the hospital the day before the operation, was hypnotised by his own family doctor that night and told under hypnosis that the next day, before the operation, the house surgeon of the wards would tell him to sleep, and that he would pass into a condition in which he would feel no pain. The house surgeon duly carried out his instructions, and though, as far as I remember, he had never had any acquaintance with hypnotism before, his suggestion produced the desired condition in the patient. The patient was operated on painlessly, and recovered with- out discomfort. Indeed, hypnotism is the ideal anaes- thetic if the patient is sufficiently susceptible to its influence, for it is followed by none of those nauseating symptoms of chloroform poisoning so distressing to the patient, and, what is even more important, it is not accompanied by the same degree of shock. Hypnotic anaesthesia differs from that of chloroform in that it is an anaesthetic of the mind, in contrast to that of chloroform, which produces its effect on the brain by melting the myelin fat round the nerve cells, or by some other chemical action which cuts off these cells from external stimuli. These illustrations of the reaction of the mind under hypnosis are extremely important, for they show us the mind so dominating the senses that it can abolish the sensations coming from them, and maintain an attitude of complete indifference to the most urgent calls of physical pain. What more suggestive evidence could we have that the ,mind is well on its way to that state in which it may dispense altogether with the physical, and wing its way to freedom and independence ? II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 31 Hypnotism, however, has discovered for us another truth of great importance, namely, that the mind presides over even those functions of the body which we regard as " vegetative " ; we refer to the secretions of glands, the flow of gastric and other digestive juices, the function of digestion, the peristaltic movements of the bowels, changes in the calibre of the arteries and so forth. Are these functions controlled and regulated by the mind, or by purely mechanical or reflex pro- cesses ? Over these actions we certainly have no 'Voluntary control. Our efibrts to stop ourselves blushing are as futile as our attempts to cure a spasm of colic by force of will or expenditure of thought. AH these effects are normally the result of reflex action, and are regulated by the so-called autonomic or sym- pathetic nervous system. It is usually the presence of food in the stomach that excites the stomach to secrete its hydrochloric acid, and it is the pressure of food, or the irritation of some poison on the bowel wall, that causes it to contract into a colic spasm in order to drive out the irritant : it is the efi^ect of heat upon the skin that dilates the arterioles, thus bringing the blood to the skin surface, and so cooling the blood by contact with the outside air. But it seems to have escaped the observation of some physiologists that the sympa- thetic nervous system, which normally acts reflexly, may itself be controlled and modified by mental processes. It is true that our conscious will has no influence over them, but the " unconscious " part of the mind certainly has the power to initiate or modify these functions of secretion and circulation, as we may prove by experi- menting with a subject under hypnosis. Let us try this simple experiment (which the writer has per- formed) : let a subject be hypnotised, and while he sits calmly and quietly in his chair, suggest to him that his hand is becoming suffused with blood. In the course of half a minute or so this hyperaemia is produced in the hand indicated, whilst the other hand remains 32 IMMORTALITY ii pallid. The secretion of perspiration may be similarly regulated. In some rare but well-authenticated cases blisters have been produced on the skin by mental suggestion under hypnosis.^ Again, the action of the intestines, over which the conscious volition has no direct control, is easily regulated by mental suggestion when the subject is under hypnosis, and thus constipa- tion may be rapidly and easily cured.^ So we might review the other vegetative functions of the body, but the illustrations given will be sufficient to prove that the mind exerts a controlling influence over even the reflex and autonomic functions of the nervous system, and may at any time assert its claim to regulate and direct them. The Nature of Hypnotism and Suggestion Before proceeding to discuss the power of the mind in curing bodily disease, it may not be out of place to refer to the nature of the hypnotic state and of " suggestion." The name " Hypnotism " was origin- ally introduced by Braid to describe this state because it resembled sleep in its mode of induction, its outward appearance of quiescence, and in the loss of memory produced. But Braid abandoned the term because it was found that the mind was really in a state of activity, and in a subsequent hypnosis a person could recall all that occurred in the previous seance. It therefore became the fashion to attribute the phenomena of hypnotism to a " subconscious self." There seems to me, however, to be a much simpler explanation, and one which avoids the necessity of assuming a separate " self." Hypnotism, far from being a condition of sleep, is a condition of heightened attention. In this 1 Since writing this I have performed this experiment ; cf. p. 74, Note A. '^ I have at present a patient with chronic constipation whose condition became so severe that he was invalided from his duties as a Probationary Flight Officer and his commission cancelled. When he came under my care he had for months been treated with the most drastic purgatives. After a fortnight's treatment by Psycho- therapy his disability has disappeared and he is looking a different being. The con- dition in his case had been brought on and perpetuated by worry. II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 33 state the attention is so fixed on some dominating idea, as, for instance, that the subject is in a garden of flowers, that his mind is abstracted from everything else, and there results a dissociation of consciousness. In short, there is produced the same kind of psychic blindness which I have illustrated in the bacteriologist looking through the microscope, and in the patients whose indifference to the sensation of pain I have cited. The state of hypnosis, then, is a state of abstraction from the world produced by devoting the whole attention to one idea, or to a single complex of ideas. The method of inducing hypnotism also suggests this as the true explanation. Whatever the method employed — gazing at a bright light ; listening to the monotonous beat of a metronome ; feeling the sooth- ing sensation of " passes," or picturing some quiet scene suggestive of rest — there is one feature common to all and essential to the success of the hypnosis, namely, that the attention of the subject is arrested by one idea or group of ideas to the exclusion of all others. This is brought about partly by suppressing other sensations, and partly by focussing the attention upon the object selected. The hypnotist having once arrested the attention, and fixed it upon one idea to the exclu- sion of all other ideas, thoughts, and sensations, can then shift it from one point to another, from one idea to another, to each of which the subject gives his undivided attention. The magnet, as it moves from point to point over a sheet of iron filings, concentrates the filings and accumulates them into a little heap, now here, now there. The hypnotist, working on the mind of the subject, first arrests his attention, concentrating it on one fixed point, and then is able to shift his attention from point to point. During the hypnosis the attention is at such a pitch of concentra- tion, and is raised to such high pressure, that if a channel towards motor discharge or sensory feeling D 34 IMMORTALITY ii is opened, the accumulated energy finds an immediate outlet in action. There is no room here for the criticism of the reason or for inhibition : all opposi- tion is swept away, so that the subject forthwith per- forms the action or is swayed by the feelings suggested, however irrational these may be.^ It is interesting to note, however, that this flood of energy is not sufficient to overcome the moral sense although it may override the ordinary barriers of convention and perform actions that are stupid. The hypnotised person will refuse to do anything that is strongly repugnant to him. I have, indeed, had such opposition in a recent case of mine, where the patient consistently refused to carry out an action to which he was opposed, even when he was deeply hypnotised. The case in point was one in which I wished to take out the patient's teeth with hypnosis as an anaesthetic, as he was too weak in health to have gas. For some reason he had a rooted objection to this, which I could not overcome. I could make him do all manner of stupid things, laugh and cry alternately, or dance on one leg, and could stick pins into him without his apparently feeling it, but any attempts to persuade him to have his teeth out invariably aroused his opposition, and he absolutely reflised to have it done. In another case of mine the patient, under deep hypnosis, persisted even in an absolute lie, on which he had staked his reputation, so rooted was his determination to carry out the deception. The hypnotised person is therefore not the automaton some people would have us believe. This theory of hypnosis as a condition of heightened 1 Since writing this account of hypnotism I have read an article by Dr. W. McDougall, of Oxford, on the "State of the Mind during Hypnosis." His view differs from that suggested in this paper, in that he lays emphasis not on the heightened attention of the one idea, so much as the suppression of the remaining ideas and sensations in the brain. Both views, however, agree that hypnosis is the relative predominance of one idea or group of ideas : and both seem to be opposed to the relegating of hypnotic phenomena to a "subconscious self." I have the feeling that the "subconscious self" has had too much imposed upon it by an admiring public. II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 35 attention also explains the tremendous force that lies in suggestion under hypnosis. The suggestions of health and well-being absorb for the time the whole mind and exert a correspondingly powerful effect. If presented to the mind in its ordinary waking state such suggestions are immediately made null and void by the reason, which criticises the ideas suggested and tells the patient that he is, in fact, not well, that his digestion is out of order, and his business is going to the dogs. But under hypnosis the reason is inhibited and the whole attention of the patient is concentrated on the idea that he is becoming vigorous and strong, that he will be determined to tackle his business courageously, that his appetite will improve, and that he will forget his melancholy in a flood of happiness. By " suggestion " we mean the insinuation of an idea into the mind in such a way that it does not clash with the critical and reasoning faculty. This is essen- tially the nature and meaning of " suggestion " in the therapeutic sense. The suggestion exerts its influence on the mind owing to the fact that it is working without the opposition of the critical faculty, which is abolished by hypnotism or the induction of a quiescent state in the subject. Having induced this state we proceed to make these "suggestions" of health and well-being, which we have already described, and which produce so potent an efi^ect on the personality of the patient. We shall proceed later to deal with this power which the mind possesses of modifying physical functions and curing physical disease. Auto-suggestion and Trance The similarity of Hypnotic states to the condition of Trance makes it necessary to say a little on this subject, particularly as it has an important bearing on the subjects discussed later in Essays VII. and VIII,, pp. 261 f., 322 fi^. 36 IMMORTALITY ii First let us enumerate the various stages of Hypnosis. Probably the simplest type of the hypnotic state is "reverie" — that condition in which the mind is absorbed with its own thoughts of some far distant scene, or pleasing recollection of the past, and so becomes oblivious to all its surroundings. Some people are more prone to these moods of abstraction than others, and will walk along the busiest thoroughfares and yet be entirely dissociated from all the sounds and sights of their environment. This is really a very early stage of hypnosis, in this case, self-imposed. When I hypnotise a patient the first state into which he passes is one in which he is completely con- scious of all that is taking place, but is flaccid and unable to produce any voluntary movement. In my own experience of being hypnotised, I have found this stage to be one of extraordinary lucidity. One's mind seems to pass into space in which the atmosphere is rarefied and thought clear and electric. One seems to possess a bird's-eye view of events, to see them in their entirety, and yet to be conscious of their minutest detail. This condition most of us have experienced when lying half- awake in bed. We know perfectly well all that transpires, but we have not the voluntary power to move and get up. It is significant that many poets, philosophers, orators, and even mathematicians receive some of their greatest inspirations in this condi- tion, and solve problems which months of previous labour had failed to elucidate. The clairvoyance of the crystal-gazer appears to belong to this stage, and it is probably whilst in this condition that mystics and seers have their visions. As a rule, they are not aware of having been in a state of mind in any sense abnormal, but feel that they have their wits about them during the whole period. This stage of hypnosis is an excel- lent one for treatment by suggestion, for in it the suggestions made are exceptionally lucid and carry a conviction which ordinary speech could never produce. II . THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 37 As I proceed with my hypnosis the patient passes into a condition in which anaesthesia can be produced. The patient may be perfectly conscious of what the hypnotist is saying and may remember it all afterwards, but yet under suggestion can be made to feel no pain. This stage of hypnosis introduces us to the state of mind of men who have severe wounds inflicted upon them in battle, but are not conscious of their wound, nor of the pain that it should cause, until the excitement of the battle is over and their minds become less abstracted from their condition. It also explains the ecstasy of the martyr whose flesh is torn by wild beasts or who is burnt at the stake but yet feels nothing be- cause of the blessed vision of angels or his glorified Lord. In the next stage of hypnosis the patient passes into a state resembling sleep ; not that he loses conscious- ness of what is taking place around, for he is perfectly aware of what is said to him and of the people about him, but when he is " wakened " he forgets all that has transpired, and feels that he has merely been to sleep. A stage further than this, and the patient may, on the initiative of another or of himself, be made to speak, rise up, walk about the room, and so behave that a casual observer would not realise that there was anything unusual in his behaviour. Yet in his normal waking state the patient has not the faintest recollection of what has happened. A part of his life has been wiped out of his normal memory.^ This is a condition analogous to that of the spiritualistic medium, who, however, produces this condition by auto-suggestion. In it the mind is extremely sensitive to suggestions of the hypnotiser. It is only reasonable to believe that when this condition is produced by auto-suggestion, and the subject passes into the trance with the avowed ' The analogous pathological condition is seen in cases such as that of a patient of mine at the present time who remembers being in hospital in Mesopotamia, and then sudilenly found himself at home in Surrey. He had meanwhile lived for six months, visiting Bombay and returning home by Suez, but all this was completely abolished from his memory. 38 IMMORTALITY ii intention of getting into communication with a certain person, his mind will be particularly sensitive to thoughts about that person, whether these come by direct com- munication with the spirit of the person, as the spiritu- alist holds, or whether from some other mind, as the telepathist considers more probable. We see, then, that in the phenomena of abstraction and trance we may find conditions analogous to those of hypnosis whichever stage of hypnosis we take. In the first stage there is day-dreaming ; in the second the clear mental state so conducive to prayer, and so stimulating to the mind of the thinker, the seer, and the visionary ; instances of the third stage we have in the indifference to pain due to the ecstasy of the martyr or the elation of the soldier on the field of battle ; and finally the somnambulism of the medium. I have some hesitation in thus pointing out the analogy and identity of these states of mind with the stages of hypnosis, lest it should be thought that I am merely *' reducing " them to hypnotism. I would therefore like it to be understood that in my own mind this *' reduction " in no way limits the value of these states of mind. These are all most valuable, each in its own sphere, and the fact that they are shown to be natural states of mind does not make them less valuable as weapons of the spiritual. My purpose is not to show that these states of mind are " only hypnotism," but to show that they can be scientifically induced, and in fact are induced in the various stages of what we call, for want of a better name, " Hypnotism." There are, however, certain deductions of some importance which I may be permitted to point out. First, that the various stages of hypnosis can be induced without the aid of a hypnotist, by auto- suggestion. It is obvious that moods of abstraction and the anaesthesia of the soldier are produced from within and not by suggestions from without. So also is the state of mind of the crystal-gazer, the Hindu, II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 39 and the saint at prayer. The deeper stages of amnesia and somnambulism are not so often self-induced, but may be, as in the medium and the sleep-walker, in the former voluntarily, in the latter involuntarily, but in both without the aid of another person. In the second place, let us understand that a person may be in a condition analogous to the early stages of hypnosis and not be aware of anything abnormal taking place. A patient recently told me that I could not hypnotise him, as others had tried without success. I induced him, however, to let me try. I hypnotised him and stuck a pin through a fold of skin in his hand, and continued my suggestions of healing his " shell- shock." When he was " wakened " he said he had been awake all the time, had his wits about him and heard every word I said. I then pointed to his hand, and to his great surprise he saw the pin sticking through his flesh without causing any pain. I may add that he is now quite cured of his headaches, trembling, sleep- lessness, and general nervousness. But I mention the case to show how in this stage, as in the ecstasy of martyrs and wounded soldiers, as well as in crystal- gazers, it is quite possible to be in such a degree of '* trance " and yet be conscious of nothing abnormal. Lastly, I would emphasise the fact that hypnosis is not an abnormal condition in the sense of being patho- logical. In its early forms it is exemplified in every mood of abstraction in which we indulge. The later and deeper stages are merely an exaggeration of this mental abstraction in various degrees. There is no doubt that hypnotism carries with it its own dangers, which makes it necessary that only duly qualified men should be permitted to use it, but there is no branch of surgery or medicine of which the same cannot be said. Patient work and experience in opera- tions on the mind as well as on the body teach one what are the dangers and how to avoid them. In neither case, in my opinion, is any one justified in using 40 IMMORTALITY ii his skill for public entertainment, and perhaps not even for experiment. Personally, I make a point of rarely using hypnotism except for the cure of disease, not because of its dangers — for I consider there are none to the experienced hypnotist — but because it debases the just uses of a valuable therapeutic agency. The Power of the Mind to heal Bodily Disease by Mental Suggestion In the preceding paragraphs I have put forward the rival claims of the psychologist and the neurologist to explain the functions of the mind : the one claiming that mental processes are the outcome of changes in the brain cells, the other maintaining that the mind is also able to initiate activity and control the functions of the body. We have now to bring forward a further con- tribution to the solution of this problem, and can put the rival claims to the test of successful treatment. If mental suggestion, by itself, can cure diseases of the body we are compelled to conclude one of two things : either that the physical disease had its origin in the mind ; or, if the disease is organic, that the mind has a direct influence in curing organic physical disease. In either case the mind is the dominant factor in causing or curing bodily disease. Neurasthenia Let us take the commonest of all these " borderland " diseases, namely, Neurasthenia. It is a disease in which both mental and physical symptoms are well marked. The physical lassitude, irritability of reflexes, sluggish- ness of bodily functions, constipation, headache, back- ache, dyspepsia, fatigue after the slightest exertion, and a '* tired feeling " even after a long night's rest, find their mental counterpart in irritability of temper, indifi^erence to the joys and sorrows of life, brooding, introspection, II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 41 worry, and loss of the power to concentrate the mind. Most of us can claim relationship to some one who was " born tired " and has been tired ever since. This disease of neurasthenia is claimed both by the neurologist and the psychologist, and is treated by these rival claimants each in his own way. Its Origin The neurologist says that the worry and want of con- centration and other symptoms are caused by physical or chemical changes in the brain structure. " If we could," says he, "but carry our investigations far enough, as some day we shall, we should discover that there are certain chemical changes in the brain cells to account for the worry and lassitude." Huxley, for instance, suggested that every psychosis has its cause in an underlying neurosis. This is at present nothing more than a hypothesis : for no one has yet demonstrated the chemical changes in the brain cells that are supposed to cause the mental symptoms. But it is, of course, a perfectly tenable hypothesis on which to make an investigation. If the absence of thyroid secretion can produce idiocy, it is within the bounds of possibility that some toxin may produce neurasthenia. The thyroid, the suprarenal body, the pituitary body, high blood pressure, low blood pressure, have all been accused by physiologists of being the cause of neura- sthenia. I believe that the neurologist is sometimes correct. There is a type of ''neurasthenia" due to wasting diseases like cancer or an organically dis- organised digestion. I am convinced, however, that the ordinary type of neurasthenia is not produced in this way, and this opinion is backed by the history of its origin in any particular case and by success in treat- ment by mental suggestion alone, as I shall illustrate later. The psychologist (I use the term in its modern 42 IMMORTALITY ii scientific, not in its more familiar philosophical sense) looks at the disease from the other point of view. The condition of the mind, he says, produces the physical symptoms. The worry is primary and the physical lassitude secondary. The psychotherapist, therefore, delves into the mind of the patient, either by question- ing him directly, or by employing the method known as "psycho-analysis," to try to discover the underlying mental cause. He finds that in a very large number of cases the disease originated soon after some violent mental strain, usually associated with a strong emotional element. Disappointment in a love affair is one of the most common : grief at the loss of wife or child : the fear of battle : the shock of being torpedoed : anxiety over business affairs : some wrong committed and the consequent fear of exposure. Every clergyman and doctor is familiar enough with these conditions, which eat out the soul and depress the spirit of the victim, and make life so heavy that he considers it better to die than to live. Thus the origin of the complaint in itself suggests that the psychologist is right in diagnos- ing the disease as mental rather than physical. Its Treatment The correctness of this diagnosis is further con- firmed by success in treatment by mental suggestion. In the treatment of neurasthenia the neurologist, pro- ceeding on the assumption that the symptoms are caused by physical changes in the brain, treats it accordingly. Ascribing it at one time to a toxaemia of the gastro- intestinal tract, one physician treats the patient with intestinal antiseptics, laxatives, and sour milk : another stimulates the nervous system with strychnine or soothes it with bromides : a third puts the patient on a strict milk diet, treats him with massage and electricity. Yet another physician, diagnosing the condition as *' only neurasthenia," sends him off on a sea voyage or II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 43 to a spa. By these means the patient may or may not be cured ; usually he is not. But if he is cured, it has still to be proved by the neurologist that it was not the mental influences, such as the personality of the physician, or the mental relaxation of the spa, even more than the change of air and the sulphur, that produced the cure. The psychotherapist in his treatment approaches the patient from an entirely different point of view. Start- ing from the discovery that in most cases the symptoms of neurasthenia commenced after some mental strain, he examines his patient to find out if he has had any such experience. Having discovered the supposed cause either by questioning or by psycho-analysis,^ he begins to treat the patient with mental suggestion. Let us suppose we have a patient sufi'ering from worry, the disease of the age. The psychologist treats the patient by verbal suggestions alone and cures the worry. The only conclusion we can draw is that the disease was the result of mental causes and not due to a physical defect : or, on the other hand, if the disease is said to be organic, we must conclude that the verbal suggestion * I cannot stay to describe the methods of psycho-analysis in this paper. Freud's method is to diagnose the patient's condition by analysing his dreams, which are said to represent the patient's suppressed wishes expressing themselves in symbolic form. Jung's method is that of word-association tests, the patient being given certain words and asked to reply with the first word that comes to the mind. The principle underlying this method appears to be that emotion checks thought. In this way certain words {e.g. the word "water" to a patient who had contemplated suicide by drowning) arouse emotions. The patient, theref(.re, delays in giving the reaction word. Both by the delay in replying and also by the nature of the patient's reply, the emotional complex in the patient's mind is laid bare to the physician even when the patient is unwilling to divulge it or has even forgotten it. Personally, in my investigations I combine the word-association test with another method suggested and used by the Freudian school, viz. the "free-association" method. Having determined the words, e.g., "water" in the illustration above, to which the patient reacts emotionally, we take these words in rotation and ask the patient to say exactly what comes into his mind when he thinks of the word "water" and the other words reacted to ; what picture he sees before his mind, and so on. One finds that whichever word is taken the thoughts ultimately wander to the one important event — the central emotional complex of the mind — the desire to drown himself. I may add that the fact that Freud attributes practically all cases of hysteria to sexual causes has unfortunately blinded many to the real value both of his psychology and of the methods of psycho-analysis. It is quite possible, however, to employ his methods without accepting his conclusions. 44 IMMORTALITY ii of the doctor is able to produce a change in the diseased brain cells. The neurologist is thus placed on the horns of a dilemma, and is compelled to admit the dominating influence of the mind in either case. In order to illustrate the cure of such cases by mental suggestion, I may be permitted to mention some of my own cases. The first case treated was that of a gentle- man in Edinburgh who for six years had been suffer- ing from worry, sleeplessness, and haunting suicidal tendencies. He came to the conclusion, as many such patients do, that he was going mad, and fear of the asylum made him worse. I found that the symptoms first arose when he was lying ill with diphtheria six years previously, and when in this prostrate condition he received news of the death of his little girl. Assum- ing this to have been the cause of neurasthenia I put the patient into a hypnoidal condition (in which, how- ever, he was quite conscious) ^ and treated him with appropriate suggestions, pointing out to him the cause of the ailment, urging him to face it and then bury the dead past : stimulated his faith in immortality and ex- pectation of reunion with his lost child : impressed on him the need of abandoning worry and care : taught him how to be happy though worried, and prevailed on him to abandon his anxieties and to renew his strength by resting his soul in the Everlasting Arms. He was cured after two sittings of about half an hour each, and when I last saw him, some eight years after the treat- ment, he had had no return of the symptoms. I would not have it believed that all cases of neurasthenia are so easily cured, but bring forward the illustration to show what effect purely mental suggestion can have on this class of disease which the neurologist attributes to changes in brain cells, but which the psychologist rightly regards as mentally produced. So rapid a cure ^ I may here repeat in parenthesis that for therapeutic purposes complete un- consciousness in hypnotism is quite unnecessary, the only condition required being the suppression of the critical faculty, so that the mind may be the more powerfully concentrated on the suggestions to a degree impossible in ordinary conversation. II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 45 can only be accounted for on the hypothesis that the cause was mental. In the course of writing the account of this case I have had a visit from an officer recently returned from the front, who was formerly a patient of mine for psychotherapy. A year ago he was a clerk in a shipping office. He came to me with the symptoms of physical exhaustion, anaemia, and sleeplessness. In addition he had delusions that anything he touched, and particularly his pen, was covered with microbes. Bits of paper about the street and about the house filled him with the same fear of contamination. It will be readily understood that such delusions completely in- capacitated him for his work, for nothing could per- suade him to write a letter, and he was compelled to abandon his work suffering from a nervous break- down. Were the mental symptoms in his case due to some toxin affecting the brain ? or, on the other hand, were the physical symptoms caused by mental dis- turbance .? The test of successful treatment will furnish us with an answer. An attempt to discover the cause of the condition by questioning failed to elicit any satisfactory reason for the disease. I there- fore applied the method of " psycho-analysis." By this method I discovered the true cause of his malady ; it turned out, as is so often the case, to be a suppressed anxiety of a strongly emotional character, the nature of which I do not feel justified in making public. In this case the mere realisation by the patient of the latent cause, once it was discovered, was practically sufficient to cure the condition, on the same principle that the best cure for a " tune running in the head " is to sing it aloud, and the only cure for a hidden sin is to confess it. I saw this officer a year ago a candidate for the asylum : I see him now having been through the fighting of the " Devil's Wood " in which one third of his battalion was laid low, but far from being afflicted with the nerve shock one would have expected 46 IMMORTALITY ii he has won for himself a commission, and is one of the few men I have met who genuinely desires to return to the trenches. These two cases are sufficient to prove that the primary lesion was not to be sought for in the brain cells but in the mind, and illustrate the power which the mind is capable of exercising not only over mental but over physical conditions. ''Shell Shock'' The experience of the war has given to medical science another group of interesting examples of " borderland " disease, namely those grouped together as " shell shock." ^ I have at the present time under my care men of the Royal Navy who are suffering from blindness, loss of speech, loss of control over limbs and body which results in a condition of per- petual tremor even during sleep, and other physical nervous disorders, all of which are produced by " shell shock." In these cases the affection of the nervous system is of a functional and not an organic nature, and exhibits no changes such as the microscope or test- tube can discover. Examined by all the known tests the affected nerve is in no sense different from any normal nerve. This may, of course, be due to the imperfection of our laboratory methods, but both the origin and the treatment of these interesting cases encourage us in the belief that " shell shock " is primarily a mental rather than a nervous disease. One or two cases I quote. One patient of mine, J. D., was on board a drifter when it was attacked by a sub- marine. He was at the gun and eagerly gazing across the waves at the submarine. This slight strain on the eyes, coupled with the great emotional strain on the nervous system, produced a blindness by the next morning which was almost complete. Another patient 1 am still treating was occupied one Sunday in dragging 1 I use the term in the very widest sense, as practically equivalent to war stress. II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 47 bodies out of the debris of an explosion. Next morn- ing he woke up to find his arm paralysed. This paralysis, like the blindness of the other patient, is only of a hysterical type. I have obtained some move- ment of his fingers under hypnosis, and still hope to cure him entirely. A young Belgian I saw had a bullet wound in his arm and lost the use of the fore- arm. The surgeon, therefore, cut down to examine the nerves which he supposed to have been injured. He found no evidence of injury, the wound being only a flesh wound. The lad was treated by the physician in charge with suggestion, in this case without hypnosis, and when I saw him he was well on the way to re- covery. I have read of another case, one of many that have appeared in the public press, of a soldier who was struck dumb in battle but was suddenly cured on being kissed by a young lady visiting at his bedside ! Perhaps I may dwell with a little more detail on one or two of my cases. One' of my patients was in H.M.S. when she was blown up by a mine. When I saw him about sixteen months after the event he was in a condition of extreme terror ; day and night he had the sight of the sinking ship with all its horrors in his mind. He had no control over his emotions, was " blubbering " continually, and was shaking all over from head to foot. If a plate fell in the ward, he would literally jump out of bed and hide under it. After the first treatment by mental suggestion his tremors were greatly lessened : after the second he could control his feelings and could discuss the sinking of the ship without emotion ; his headaches had also disappeared : and after further treatment, he was so far cured that he expressed his desire to undergo an operation on his ear and throat, the very thought of which had previously produced in him a spasm of terror. Another patient, J. S., aged 42, was in the Dardanelles, on a mine-sweeper which was frequently shelled. When I saw him his hair had turned white 48 IMMORTALITY ii with the strain of work and constant exposure to danger. He had bad nightmares, and tremors, especi- ally of the limbs, which were in a continual state of spasticity. He proved an excellent subject for hypnosis, becoming a somnambulist. He has now lost his spasticity, and his tremors have disappeared. At the time of writing he no longer dreams, the nightmares have disappeared, and he is well enough to return home to his work. A very interesting case was that of E. C, aged 37, officers' steward, who came com- plaining of neuritis. On examination, however, I found that he was completely anaesthetic from head to foot, so that I could stick pins into him anywhere over the body. He won for himself in the ward the nick- name of the "living pin-cushion." I could not help regretting that he did not require to have his appendix removed, for the operation could have been done painlessly without further anaesthetic ! We have in this man a case of " hysterical " anaesthesia, produced, as I interpret it, as an expression of his protective instinct in order to ward off the " slings of fortune." In his desire to avoid hurt of any kind, he has quite unconsciously become anaesthetic. His case is very interesting as another instance of the power of the mind to cancel the incoming sensations. I have managed to dispel his neuritis and cure his shakiness, by mental suggestion, but, up to the present, even under deep hypnosis, I have not managed to restore his sensation of pain, and the conditions of service prevent my proceeding further with the case. The only conclusion we can draw from these cases is that " shell shock," in spite of all its physical symptoms of paralysis, etc., is primarily a mental rather than a nervous disease. Psychologists are therefore at the present time seeking for the explanation of these lesions. The matter is still under investigation, but the following view seems most in keeping with what is known of such conditions. II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 49 Those acquainted with psychotherapy are familiar with the theory that neuroses and psychoses can be caused by suppressed emotion. When a woman is oppressed with grief even her next-door neighbour knows that it is much better for her to " have a good cry " than to suppress her grief. Suppressed emotions are like suppressed steam, and often lead to disaster in insanity and the asylum. An old lady I know lost her husband by death, and at the time showed no grief at the loss, but two days afterwards began to have delusions that the rest of the family were going to be taken from her, and subsequently she had to be put under restraint. The theologian knows that unless the sin is confessed it produces a depressed and brood- ing disposition like that of Cain in the traditional story, who seems to have started with a melancholia and ended with the aimless, restless wandering of mania. When the sin is confessed the sinner at once feels himself a new man, the sky clears, and the spirit is liberated because the suppressed emotion has been let loose. Most of us have had the uncomfortable feeling of having " something on our mind " which makes us worry and feel restless. As soon, however, as we look for the cause and bring it into consciousness, the rest- lessness disappears. This principle we apply to shell shock. The soldier on the field of battle, the sailor mine-sweeping at sea, are constantly in a state of extreme tension. The natural expression of fear is to turn and run in flight. These men suppress that natural impulse : nothing will induce them to give way to fear : grim determination is written upon their faces. But their very courage is a danger to them. Gun- powder is the more dangerous when it is packed tight and closely confined ; so, too, with the instinctive emotions. The soldier succeeds in suppressing his fear, but that very suppression makes an explosion the more dangerous. A sudden bursting of a high explosive stuns him for a moment, and deprives him of his power E 50 IMMORTALITY ii of control ; and in that moment the pent-up emotion bursts forth. When he comes to himself he finds that he has completely lost the reins, his grip over himself has gone, his self-mastery has given way, and he falls a victim to these symptoms of paralysis, or of general tremors, characteristic of the cases of "shell shock." It is thus often the bravest men, those who have been most successful in mastering and suppressing their fear, that fall victims to this disease. It is not maintained that all cases of " shell shock " can be explained in this way : many cases may be due to a complex of causes. But it seems clear that the above is the cause in many cases of the disease, and a contributory cause in others. I think these cases I have cited will be sufficient to convince the reader of the extraordinary power of the mind over the body, and to compel us to the conclusion that, however much the body and its sensations may modify mental conditions, the mind is the predominant factor in the life of the individual. Christian Science In the popular mind the subject of Mental Healing is so commonly confused with the claims of Christian Science that a few words on this subject will not be out of place. That many of the cures of Christian Scientists are authentic I have no doubt. Convinced as I am of the power of mind over body, I should be surprised if it were not the case. But I am equally con- vinced that the philosophy or "religion" on which it is based is false. I am antecedently inclined to believe the lady who told me that she had suffered from nervousness and was troubled with aches and pains shifting from place to place about her body, and that she was cured by believing in the Christian Science doctrine that " God was All, and that, pain and evil being illusion, she must be healthy and have no pains." II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 51 But when a man tells me that he broke his leg, and after treatment by Christian Science was immediately cured, his statement is so entirely contrary to all that is scientifically known about the body, that it would require overwhelming evidence to convince me that, assuming the person to be telling the truth, this was not a mistake in diagnosis. Even if he tells me that the fracture was diagnosed as such by a medical man I should still be unconvinced, for even the best of surgeons make mistakes on such matters. To take another illustration. If a man's arm is paralysed by " shell shock," in which there is no lesion of the nerve- trunk, but where the function alone is at fault owing to some blockage, I can conceive that a discharge of energy from the mind, whether by the religious emotion fomented by Christian Science, or by Suggestion under Hypnosis, may break down the block, and so suddenly and immediately restore the function. But when a patient comes to me with his nerve-trunk severed by a bullet, I do not believe that any amount of suggestion or of faith will mend the lesion, and I assure him that it will be at least some months before his arm regains its power and sensation. This is the radical distinction between the Christian Scientist and the Psychotherapist : it is based on a fundamental difference between an organic lesion like a ruptured nerve, and a functional lesion such as we find in the cases of patients suffering from " shell shock " to which I have already referred. At the same time, I am quite prepared to admit that Mental Healing may very favourably influence even organic lesions. We have already shown what effect mental suggestion may have on blood supply. But the speedy restoration of bodily tissue is very largely dependent on blood supply. It is quite obvious, there- fore, that the process of healing can be accelerated in a marked degree by increasing the blood supply under mental suggestion. Again, healing is greatly aided by the abolition of pain, so that, if the mind can abolish 52 IMMORTALITY n pain, it will materially aid in curing organic disease. Pain is a very valuable aid in the detection of physical maladies : it waves the red flag to warn us that disease is about to make an onslaught on our bodies, so that we, being forewarned, may also be forearmed. But its proper task is then complete. If it continues to wave its flag and inflict constant and severe suffering, it becomes a positive danger. Following the sugges- tions of other hypnotists I have performed this interest- ing experiment : I inflicted two burns on the arms of a hypnotised subject. In the one case I suggested that the pain should disappear, and it did so ; in the other I allowed the burn to be normally painful. It was found that the painless burn healed with much greater rapidity than the other. This clearly indicates that, after a certain point, pain acts as a deterrent to rapid healing ; and the abolition of pain by suggestion may therefore aid considerably in the cure even of organic diseases. But in both illustrations, whether in the regulation of the blood supply, or in the abolition of pain, the efi^ect that the mind has in healing the body is an indirect one, and has no relation to such a case as the sudden knitting of broken bones which the credulity of the Christian Scientist permits him to believe possible. Now, what is the significance of Mental Healing ? It is that by the influence of the spoken word we have been able to drive away physical pain, control physical movements which have become uncontrolled, bring back power to limbs afllicted with palsy. Physical symptoms have been cured by psychical causes, thus demonstrating the mastery of the mind over the bodv. In other words, we have in the mind an energy which acts not only in its own sphere of mental life, but flows over and floods the arid clods of the physical plains to produce health and gladness. II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 53 Telepathy Having pointed out that we have real evidence that the mind can dominate the body and all its functions, let us now consider certain evidence which suggests that the mind can act without using the ordinary channels of bodily sense. Just as the pursuit of Astrology brought to light facts which laid the foundation of the science of Astronomy, so the pursuit of Spiritualism has brought to light facts of thought-transference or Telepathy, These have already given rise to a certain amount of scientific investigation, and will be more thoroughly investigated in the future. Only the briefest indication of their nature can be given in this place ; but some further illustration will be found in Essay VII. of this volume. Probably the subject first forced itself to the front owing to the frequently recorded cases of " wraiths " appearing at the time of death. Many of us have personal experi- ence of having the thought of some person obtruded on our mind, and have discovered later that this person died at that moment, or passed through some extraordinary experience. The image of the person is flashed across our mind, perhaps visualised. I should hold myself that, if visualised, the appearance is a hallucination, the result of a subjective impression. This states very concisely the difference between the theory of Telepathy and that of Spiritualism. The Spiritualist seems to believe that the spirit of the departed is in the room and manifests himself in some actual form, but a more reasonable theory is that the impression is purely subjective, and due to Telepathy from the dying person. It is to be noted that in several of the best-authenticated of these stories of apparitions of the dying, the death takes place in India or Africa, and the recipient is in England. In 54 IMMORTALITY ii the Proceedings of the S.P.R. many instances of exactly this class are recorded.^ The following account by Dr. Leonard Guthrie, relates the experience of a credible witness, E. W. M., a distinguished scientist and F.R.S. In his own words he writes ^ : — " When I lived in Canada, the following case occurred : an Englishman and an American clubbed together to try to reach the Klondyke goldfield by the overland trail, i.e.^ by going due north from the prairies, instead of following the usual course of cross- ing by the Canadian Pacific Railway to Vancouver, then taking steamer up the coast to Sitka, and crossing back over the mountains via White Horse Pass. After the pair had passed on their journey what the American judged to be the outposts of civilisation, he shot the Englishman while he lay asleep, tried to destroy the body by burning it, rifled his baggage, taking every- thing of value, and returned. When he was questioned as to what had become of his companion, he replied that he (the American) had become discouraged and had given up the expedition, but that the Englishman had pushed on. But there was an encampment of Indians close to the spot where the crime had been committed. The old chief saw two men come north and encamp in the night, he heard a shot and saw one man go south. He went to the camp, saw the body, and informed the nearest post of N.W. Mounted Police. They trailed the murderer, and arrested him before he could escape across the U.S. border. He was brought to Regina. Meanwhile, the brother of the murdered man, in England, had a dream in which he saw his absent brother lying dead and bloody on the ground. He came down next morning very de- pressed, told his dream, and announced his intention 1 For a case that has just come under my own notice, cf. p. 74, Note B. - Extract from " Dreams and their Interpretation," by Sir Robert Armstrong- Jones, M.D., F.R.C.P., F.R.C.S., in The Practitioner. II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN of going straight out to Canada to see if anything had happened to his brother. He arrived out as the trial of the murderer was progressing. He identified several articles in the possession of the murderer as the property of his late brother. The murderer was hanged at Regina." Such instances are comparatively common, and if they do not convince the sceptic they at least afford sufficient ground for scientific investigation. There must be some cause for these phenomena, and if they are not due to telepathy then it is just as necessary to explain in some other way the psychology of such mental aberrations. In a series of seances arranged by the Society for Psychical Research, with Mrs. Piper as medium, the investigators sought to obtain an account of a certain conversation which took place between Mrs. Sidgwick and Mr. F. W. H. Myers, some time before his death. This conversation was known to none except to the two participants. In her trance Mrs. Piper claimed to have access to " Myers," and an attempt was made to induce the spirit of " Myers " to reproduce the conversation through Mrs. Piper, As long as Mrs. Sidgwick was absent and did not come into contact with Mrs. Piper, the medium failed to reproduce the conversation. When, however, Mrs. Sidgwick came into contact with Mrs. Piper, there was a remarkable, though not perfectly accurate, account given of the conversation. That is to say, it was the proximity of Mrs. Sidgwick, who knew the conversation, that made the diflference. Mrs. Sidgwick, therefore, concludes, and rightly so in my opinion, that the medium became possessed of the information, not from the spirit of " Myers," but by mental transference from Mrs. Sidgwick herself. In other words, though it did not prove communication with the spirit world it did afford important evidence of telepathy. The subject needs patient and thorough investiga- tion. Are we to assume that there is a psychic ether 56 IMMORTALITY ri pervading space in the same way as that material ether which the scientist assumes to be omnipresent ; or are we to believe in the theory of " brain waves," by which the activity of one brain is transferred to another brain, as the air conveys waves of sound from one man's voice to the ear of another man ; or, as a third possibility, is the mind altogether free from the limita- tions of time and space, and does it thus possess the power of presenting itself to two persons at once, possibly at remote parts of the earth ? On the one hand, experiments in telepathy, e.g., those conducted at Brighton, and quoted by Podmore in the Encyclopedia Britannica, have shown that more successes are obtained when the person giving and the person receiving the message are in the same room, which suggests that distance does have an influence on the transmission of thought. On the other hand, the fact that messages have been transferred from one hemisphere to another, from Canada to England, sug- gests that the process of transference is independent of space and time and that it is concerned, therefore, with mind itself. It is difficult to conceive how brain waves, the very name of which suggests a material medium, can overcome the obstacle of continents and penetrate a brain in the uttermost parts of the earth, and to do so with sufficient force to rise into consciousness. Whatever the explanation, however, it is safe to say that in telepathy we have an indication that the mind is much less circumscribed by the limitations of the material body than is ordinarily supposed. III. Study of the Biological Development of THE Mind (a) in the Individual and {b) IN the Race, pointing to the Gradual Ascendancy of the Mind over the Body We now pass to another line of argument. In the preceding section we have been examining the mind II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 57 of man as we know it in its present state of evolution. This investigation has shown us the mind dominating the body, having the power to abolish its sensations, to cure its ills and, liberating itself, in a sense, from the brain, to communicate with other minds at a distance from it. We have now to look at the mind biologically, as it passes from its low and humble origin to attain that position of mastery which it now possesses. This study will convince us that in its earlier stages the function of the mind is largely passive in the sense that it has always to await the impact of some external physical stimulus, and has no power of initiation in itself : but in its later stages the mind is found to acquire more and more the power of initiating action, and seems to be on the way to becoming master of itself and of its own destinies. This development I shall trace both in the individual and in the race. In reality the development is analo- gous in both cases, for the individual passes through the stages of evolution that the race has passed through, from the speck of protoplasm from which each of us originated to our present state of growth and intelligence. (^a) In the Individual First, then, I shall trace briefly the evolution of vision and of the emotions in the individual in order to draw attention to that point in evolution where the physical surrenders its rights to the sovereignty of the mind. The development of Vision furnishes us with a» ex- cellent example of this change. The new-born child possesses the whole apparatus of vision — cornea, lens, retina, optic nerve and tracts, and centres of vision in the brain. But the child does not see, and has as yet no sense of vision. For the development of that sense external stimuli are 58 IMMORTALITY ii necessary : the child must open its eyes and let the rays from objects around, from its toys, its mother, or the lamp, fall upon its retina and be conveyed to its brain, where they produce an appropriate sensation. These external stimuli, we repeat, are necessary to sight : without them there would be no sense of vision. In short, the mental representation is dependent upon physical sensations. But this does not remain so always. Look at the child a few years later. The sensations have meanwhile been stored as memories, combined to acquire meanings, associated for the building up of visions that "eye hath not seen." This power of calling up new visions we call " imagination " : it is quite independent of external stimulus. Indeed imagination is more vivid when these stimuli are cut off. Consequently we shut our eyes when we wish to image anything, and seers receive their visions in the dark watches of the night. In the highest examples we have the genius of the artist, poet, and philosopher, each of whom expresses in his own plastic material of words or of pigment the creations of his imagination. The balance has now turned : mental representation is altogether independent of physical stimuli, and the mind can initiate its own objects of imagination. Indeed we may go a step further and we find that imagination can become so vivid that it deceives the senses into believing that the imaged objects are actually present. This we term hallucination. The functions have been reversed and the mind is now creating the sensations. The develop- ment of vision, then, shows us the transference of initia^ve from the periphery, namely the bodily sensa- tion, to the mind at the centre. The Emotions. — The second illustration we take is that of the emotions. Readers of James's Psychology are familiar with the theory there enunciated, that the emotions are the result of bodily movement. " The bodily changes follow directly the perception II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 59 of the exciting fact, and our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion. Common sense says we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep : we meet a bear, are frightened and run : we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike." In contrast to that James holds that " we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble." In this account of the emotions we have the direct assertion that the mental states of emotion are dependent on physical movements, and therefore subordinated to them. We need have no hesitation in accepting this theory, provided that it is intended to account only for the origin and early development of the emotions. Darwin, in his fascinating book on the Expression of the Emotions^ has shown the physiological purpose of emotional expressions, which seems to prove their physiological origin. The scowl expressive of anger is the vestige of the setting of the brow assumed by an animal before charging a hostile animal. The sneer which exhibits the canine teeth is all that remains of the fierce threat of the wolf to devour. I have myself often seen South Sea Islanders express disgust of others by turning their back on them and lifting one leg in the manner of the dog. We are therefore quite justified in admitting the truth of this evidence, and in accepting the theory that the emotions originated in physical movements which serve a physiological purpose, so long as it relates to the origin and development, and not to the present state, of our emotions. These move- ments, originally expressing physiological functions, have now assumed a new meaning, having attained a mental significance which has obliterated the traces of their physiological origin. In the development of the emotions there comes the time, corresponding to that we have noted in the case of vision, when the move- ment no longer creates the emotion, though it may suggest it, but is itself produced by the emotion. The balance of power has changed from the physical to the 6o IMMORTALITY ii mental, so that the physical actions which originally produced the emotions (as James has told us) are now merely the expressions of those emotions. This con- clusion is in keeping with the judgment of common sense and of introspection. It is embodied in ordinary language ; the word e-motion suggests a motion from within outward, a movement originated in the mind and expressing itself in physical activity. Thus we now knit our brow because we are angry ; we- show our teeth in order to express a threat ; smile because we feel pleasure ; and run away because we are frightened. In short, while mental emotion originated in physical movements, the balance has now turned and the mind now initiates these movements and uses them as modes of expression. The process which we have illustrated in the indi- vidual, by which vision and emotion have liberated themselves from the domination of the body, is also found to be at work in the biological evolution of the race. Here, too, we can trace the process by which the mind grows from being a puny parasite of the body to become its master and lord. (^b) In the Race In tracing the biological development of the mind in the race I cannot, in the space at my disposal, even mention all the varied stages through which it passes. It is possible only to touch on the more important ones, but these will suffice for our argument. My purpose in outlining these stages is to trace the gradually increasing ascendancy of the mind from its humble origin, a weakling, dependent for its every movement on the body, until it attains the full vigour of mindhood which subdues the parent from which it sprang, and makes the body its slave. In the earliest forms of animal life, and even in some forms of plant life, we find what appears to be II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 6i evidence of mental activity, in that their actions seem to exhibit an intelligent purpose. When the sensitive plant is touched, its leaves curl up and droop, as though to withdraw themselves from danger. The Venus Fly- trap, which closes its petals over the fly and traps it, appears to possess more wit and cunning than its hapless victim. I'he single-celled amoeba, the earliest form of animal life, puts forth its pseudopodia or prolongations and, encircling a morsel of food, seizes and absorbs it. AJl these organisms, although devoid of any nervous system, perform movements which so simulate purposive actions that the casual observer is apt to jump to the conclusion that they are endowed with mental power. But are we justified in concluding that these early forms of life exhibit mental power : can we say that they possess intelligence ? From the philosophical point of view it is maintained that the fact that their actions are directed towards useful ends, suggests that a mind must be at work. The philosopher will argue that these actions cannot be explained except by postulating a guiding and directing force which is essentially intelligent and purposive. This, however, does not mean that these creatures have minds in the individual sense, nor that they possess the power of initiation with themselves as centre. I, per- sonally, agree with the views of the philosopher, and believe in the existence of the " cosmic mind " which dwells in all living things and works out its purposes in them ; but, as scientists, it is better that we should not accept this as a postulate and argue from it as fact, until we find some scientific and empirical evidence of the presence of mind in these low forms of life. Looked at from the scientific point of view there are several facts which make us hesitate to affirm that these primi- tive forms of life have minds. In the first place, their actions are of a mechanical nature whereby we can predict with certainty what their movements will be. If you touch the Venus Fly-trap it will close its petals, 62 IMMORTALITY ii quite irrespective of whether the stimulus is a fly which it can eat or a bit of wood. In other words, it acts without discrimination : its action is purely mechanical. Similarly, in an animal like the mollusc, action is purely reflex, so that when you apply any irritant you can always predict with certainty that it will respond in a particular way. In the case of the amoeba, the mechanical nature of its movements have been demon- strated in an experiment devised by Professor Schafer, which reproduces these movements in a globule of olive- oil under conditions which exclude the possibility of mental interference.^ We cannot, therefore, claim that as yet we have conclusive proof of a mind in these early forms of life, except perhaps in the vague sense of a mind general and diffuse, pervading all living things, and expressing its power and purpose through them. We often hear it said that a musician " makes his violin speak," his piano " live." They are not living, but they are the vehicle of a mind behind. In this sense we can perhaps say that these primitive creatures possess a mind. But they possess a mind only in a passive sense ; they contain it rather than possess it.^ Let us pass to a higher stage in the development ot mind, in which we find a store of nerve energy. If we destroy the brain of a frog and then touch its belly with acid, it will lift its leg and make movements to scratch off the acid. This is a purely reflex action, and acts with that mechanical certainty which seems to exclude the working of an intelligence. But further, ^ " Take on a glass rod a drop of ordinary olive-oil which has been coloured with Scharlach R., and place it gently on the surface of a i per cent solution of sodium bicarbonate." The result observed is that the olive-oil sends out prolonga- tions, and performs movements almost identical with those of the amoeba. This, however, is purely a phenomenon of surface tension. - It is only right to state that, whereas I have maintained the generally accepted view of scientific men on this question, there is a growing opinion among scientists, that even in these very early forms of life there are the manifestations of mental activity and intelligence. Were such a view to become accepted I need hardly point out that the general conclusion I am arguing for would be further strengthened, but I prefer not to assume more than the evidence would be generally admitted to prove. II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 63 let the leg be restrained from movement, and the brain- less creature will lift the other leg to perform the same service. This looks, at first sight, as if the animal, realising that one action was frustrated, devised another action to perform the same service, and, in doing so, showed purposive intelligence. This, however, would be going beyond our premisses. He would be a bold man who would affirm that a brainless frog has a mind. This experiment, however, does take us one stage higher. In order to perform this action, reflex as it is, we must assume that the creature has a store of nerve energy. When this source of energy finds the normal channel of outflow closed, it expends itself by passing down another : denied access to one leg, it discharges its force down the motor nerve of the other leg which moves towards the irritated point on the belly. We have here, then, a new factor which distinguishes this " reflex " frog from the amoeba and lower forms of life, namely, its power to store up nerve energy. It has not, however, the power possessed by the normal frog and all higher animals of determining at will into which channel that store of nerve force shall be directed. The next stage is the all-important one, from our point of view, since it introduces the psychic element, and presents us with phenomena which can be explained only in terms of mental life. The organism now develops along two paths which are associated together. . (i) On the sensory side, the organism now possesses the power of recognising the sensations which come to it — in other words, it develops Cotisciousness. (2) On the motor side, the organism has the power of directing its reserve store of nerve energy in any direction in accordance with its own desires towards carrying out its purposes and fulfilling its aims — in other words, it develops a fVill. In both Consciousness and Will we have phenomena which the laws of Physiology entirely fail to explain, 64 IMMORTALITY ii and which Psychology alone can even attempt to elucidate. (i) Consciousness is the sensation of psychic states. When we speak of being *' conscious " of any sensation we mean that by some means we become " aware " of it. Let us realise that there are millions of sensations which never rise to consciousness ; impressions that do not impress our mind sufficiently to make us " aware " of them. Such, for instance, are the " sensations " of normal digestion, breathing, or the secretion of glands. These functions are always sending impressions up to the higher centres, but, under normal conditions, they do not produce consciousness of their movements. They become conscious only when these organs are disturbed and their functions upset, in which case we may be very painfully " aware " of them. But let us pause for a moment. What do we mean when we say that we are " aware " ? What is it to be " aware " ^ Who is it that is conscious } We have, in using these terms, taken a great stride : we have, in fact, passed from physiological to psychical terms. In using such words as *' aware " we are using terms for which we can find no physiological substitute. We have, in fact, entered the realm of *' mind," a sphere into which physiology can- not enter and in which it cannot live. Like the fish which cannot breathe in the open air, physiology pants and expires in its efforts to follow the mind into the psychic region ; the atmosphere is too rarefied : thought is too ethereal to be grasped by it. In short, physiology has to abandon this field to psychology. In the earlier stages physiology may, with some reason, claim to explain the phenomena presented. It can trace the stimulus as it passes round the reflex arc, up the sensory nerve, across the synapse or junction, and down the motor nerve. This acts with the same mechanical certainty as the touching of an electric button at one end of a wire produces the ringing of a bell at the other end. But when we come to consciousness. II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 65 physiology fails to satisfy us, because we are dealing with something that is different in kind from nerve energy. We may make use of our last illustration (remembering that it is only an analogy, and at best only explains the mechanism of consciousness) to make clear this difference. An ordinary current of electricity produces heat in a wire — such is the normal mechanism of nerve energy as illustrated in reflex action. But let this current pass through a filament of exceptional refinement, and be raised to a greater intensity, and the heat will be transformed into light. Consciousness is thus a phenomena of intensification : it is produced when our sensations are raised to a sufficiently high pitch of tension. It is due to mental friction : to the effort to cut a new channel through the brain. Heat and light may both be produced by the transmission of a current of electricity along an electric wire : they may, from the physical point of view, differ only in the length of their waves and in velocity. But the essential feature of our analogy, imperfect as it is, is that in its resultant expression light is a different form of energy from heat^ and therefore stimulates an entirely different system of nerve-endings in our bodies. Consciousness is thus a different form of energy from nerve energy, though it may have arisen out of it ; it is, in fact, psychic energy, which it is impossible to describe in terms of the physical. This dramatic leap from the physiological to the psychical is the most important factor in the evolution of mind. It is the decisive factor which once and for all turns the balance and establishes the supremacy of the mind over the body. This is that reversal of power which we have already illustrated in the faculty of vision and in the emotions, both of which were born of sensory impulses but grew to become psychic powers by throwing off the yoke of the flesh. Henceforward the mind begins to live a life inde- pendent of the body. The tulip springs from a bulb, F 66 IMMORTALITY ii and in its early stages derives all its sustenance from the store of food in the bulb. But when its leaves are well established, and it has exhausted its store of nourish- ment, it begins to breathe in strength and force from the sunlight and air around, without which it would fade and wither and fail to produce the perfect flower. So mind can come to perfection only by turning to the light, and freely exercising its intellectual and aesthetic functions. The mind arises from the body and its sensations, but only in the sense that the dragon-fly springs from the grub which lives in the mud of a stagnant pool ; its origin is humble but its life in the sunlight is a whirl of coloured brilliance and wanton liberty. This new form of energy which we call con- sciousness has a similar freedom and autonomy ; it originated in physical sensations of the body, but has taken wing, breathes the airs of the ethical blue, and is nourished by spiritual food. Thus the mind has now as little in common with the sensations of the body from which it sprang, as this fiery, dazzling creature has with the slime-covered grub. Let us, then, note the significance of this change. The mind has now the power to choose its own food, because it knows what it is getting. This truth we have illustrated in the individual by the power possessed by the mind to refuse sensations ofi^ered to it and to produce a psychic blindness and psychic deafness. The results of this are very far-reaching from the point of view of our mental and spiritual development. "Take heed what (or how) ye hear," said the Master, realising that it is in the power of man to respond or not to the appeals of sense made to him. There are other ways of resisting the voices of the sirens than the crude method of stuffing the ears with wax ; the mind may refuse to listen. St. Paul follows up the injunc- tion of the Master by encouraging us to think only of " whatsoever things are beautiful and of good report," realising that the mind is capable of seeking the best II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 67 things, by which alone it can develop and fulfil its highest life. (2) The Development of the Will. — Hitherto we have dealt with the new stage in the biology of the mind in so far as it affects the sensory side in the development of consciousness. We have now to study it on the motor side, and to discuss the power of the mind to react as it wills to sensations in order either to annul or to reinforce any tendencies to action. Let us compare this stage with the foregoing. In the case of reflex action, as in the occipitated frog, we could always predict that the animal would perform certain movements in response to certain irritation. With the advent of will we cannot so predict action. The normal frog, for instance, if touched with acid may scratch itself, may shrink into itself, or may jump away, and we can never say which it will choose to do. Again, in the " reflex " animal the greater the stimulus the greater is the reaction : the stronger the acid the more violently will the frog scratch : the more a child is annoyed the more vigorously does it cry. But the adult man or woman in whom the mind is fully developed can either inhibit or reinforce the tendency to any particular action. A man may be beaten with many stripes, and not raise a finger in protest ; for he is exercising another power than that of reflex action, the power of mental inhibition or self-restraint. On the other hand, incoming sensations may be greatly reinforced hy the mind, produc- ing a more violent motor reaction. No casual observer, for instance, would have understood why, in a certain episode, the dangling of a bit of string by a 'bus con- ductor should have produced such wild fury in the driver of the 'bus behind. The grim humour of the situation was, however, revealed and the tury accounted for, when the conductor explained his little joke — the driver's father was being hanged that morning. The stimulus of a bit of string was quite insufficient in itself 68 IMMORTALITY ii to produce the reaction ; but it was reinforced by the mind which grasped the sinister meaning, and let loose stores of energy which turned the driver's face purple and the air blue. These illustrations will convince us that the adult mind does not react mechanically nor proportionately to any incoming sensation, but has the power either to react vigorously or to exert an inhibitory action in response to it. This implies that there must be a store of energy, a reservoir of nerve force, accumulated some- where in the brain, which the mind can draw upon and can either withhold or expend in response to any given stimulus. This power we call the tVill. The will is the power the mind possesses of directing as it desires the store of nerve energy to the accomplishment of its own ends. Contrast this with the lower forms of animal life already illustrated, which have a store of nerve energy, but which have not the power to direct that energy into any channel they will, but must necessarily discharge it down the most open or frequently used channel. For will two things are essential, both of which we have in the developed mind — a store of nerve energy and the capacity to direct that energy into any desired channel. There may, however, be those who are still sceptical of the existence of a definite power we call the will, and who consider that the discharge of nerve energy to which we give that name can be accounted for by the purely mechanical workings of the law of association. In order to illustrate the difference between the law of association and the working of will, I would recommend such to try the simple experiment devised by Dr. McDougall of Oxford. Take a series of nonsense syllables, read them over a number of times in a casual, indifferent manner, and record how many repetitions are required to memorise accurately the whole series. In this case the memorising is brought about purely by the associa- tion of one syllable with another, the one mechanically calling up the other. Now repeat the experiment with ir THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 69 another series of nonsense syllables, but this time, instead of reading them indifferently, " set your mind " to it, directing your energies towards your object. It may surprise you to find that it now requires only some ten or twelve repetitions. Obviously, in this latter case, some new force has been added which is something diff^erent, and far more potent than mere association, and produces a very different result. This additional force is the will. We may now summarise the stages of the evolution of the mind. There are, of course, countless other intermediate stages, but it is sufficient for us to have mentioned the most important : — ( 1 ) In the first stage, that illustrated in the amoeba, we have as yet no conclusive proof of the presence of a mind, except perhaps in the sense of a pervading mind, passive and impersonal, a part of the cosmic mind working in and through the primitive creature. (2) In the second stage, we have the animals which possess a nervous system, whose actions are controlled by the flow of nerve energy or neurokyme. (3) In the third stage, we have those animals in which incoming sensations have developed a centre for sensations, the central nervous system, where nerve energy is stored, and from which it is discharged by regularly constituted channels, and in response to specially strong stimuli. (4) In the final stage, sensations are raised to a high pitch of intensity, and in some unknown way produce a psychic form of energy we call consciousness. In this stage, also, the organism not only has a store of nerve energy, but possesses the power of directing that energy at will into any channel which leads to the fulfilment of its conscious purposes. In the will, as in consciousness, we have a new element in the evolution of the life, the development of a force which can dominate brain processes. It is an autonomy, controlling the nervous system, and 70 IMMORTALITY ii regulating the functions of the mind. It is a psychic force which from its place of authority can direct the stores of nerve force, now into this channel, and now into that, by a power of choice which no physiological law, and, indeed, no psychological law, can explain or predict. The body thus appears to have produced what it can no longer control, nor even understand ; and evolution has brought forth the flower and glory of its age-long development. Beyond this stage of mental evolution it is not neces- sary to go, because we have now crossed the great gulf between the physiological and the psychical, and have set our feet firmly on that shore where the higher faculties of the mind, reason and abstract thought, are subsequently developed. These higher powers serve only to point us still further along the road that delivers us from bondage to the flesh, and leads us to anticipate the complete emancipation of the mind from the body. The mind may henceforth become indifferent to the disasters which in the course of nature are bound to overtake the body, and may hope to survive its destruction and decay — and perhaps thereafter to find or create for itself a " spiritual body " adapted to a difi^erent sphere of existence and to other modes of life.^ This brings to an end our examination, from the scientific point of view, of the relation of body and mind with special reference to the possibility of the mind surviving the destruction of the body. The survey is necessarily incomplete. We have, for instance, omitted altogether the question as to the nature of matter. An increasing number of scientists are devoting themselves to this problem, and they tell us that matter is not that solid, indestructible thing we take it to be, but consists of ions vibrating at an extraordinary velocity. It will 1 Cf. Essay III. pp. 103 ff. II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 71 be extremely dramatic if science proves that matter is after all only a function of some invisible force. This and other similar subjects I have been compelled to omit from this short study. I do not pretend that the evidence I have brought forward amounts to proof that the mind survives the destruction of the body. I have merely attempted to show, in the first place, that it is credible, and not con- tradictory to the teaching of science as we know it at the present day ; and, secondly, that it is not only not contradictory to science, but that science points to this supremacy and Hberation of the mind as the goal towards which nature is working. It is only reasonable to assume that the process which has been at work during the whole of biological history will be continued to its logical conclusion. For the present, therefore, so far as science is con- cerned, life after the grave is not a proved fact, but the evidence is sufficient to justify faith in it. Such "faith" is often looked upon as a specifically religious function, and suggests to the casual observer a process of "swallowing" what is incredible. Far from that being the case, faith is a function which the scientist employs constantly and without which he could not conduct his investigations, x " Faith " is merely the re- ligious counterpart of the "hypothesis" of the scientist. He is bound to assume as a hypothesis the law of gravity, and other mighty assumptions which he has not proved ; but, having assumed any such hypo- thesis, he finds that the facts of the universe as he knows them fit so perfectly into it that he is con- firmed in his belief in the legitimacy of his hypothesis. Precisely the same process is employed by the religious man who assumes the truth of belief in God and in immortal life. Having accepted these hypotheses, he finds that they explain so many of the deep problems of the world that his faith in them is confirmed. Since, therefore, the facts of science, which we have been 72 IMMORTALITY ii studying, seem rather to confirm than to contradict the hypothesis of a hfe beyond death, the religious man is acting only reasonably when he accepts the belief as an article of his faith. I have, in the preceding discussion, tried to keep within the bounds of scientific fact. It remains with other contributors to this book to discuss these problems from the religious and philosophical point of view. I may be permitted, however, to trespass on their domain to the extent of suggesting the broad conclusions to which I feel myself drawn. We have looked upon the emancipation of the soul from the body as a process of evolution. This emancipation we may therefore assume to be the purpose of our existence on this earth. Before our birth we were undifferentiated " soul " ; we were parts of the '* cosmic mind," we were as water drawn in a pitcher from the " mind pool." Our destiny is to grow personalities out of the raw material with which we began life. In every stage of evolution it is only the few who progress, the many remain unevolved. So it may be in the passage from the physical to the spiritual. Readers of Ibsen's Peer Gynt will remember that when the prodigal returned from his wanderings he encountered the " Voice in the Darkness." The Voice informed him in reply to his enquiries that he had never developed an individuality, his life had been too pithless to entitle him to any reward, for he was neither good enough for Heaven, nor bad enough for Hell. His fate would therefore be to be boiled down again in the same melting-pot as Tom, Dick, and Hal, and so form raw material again. Such may be the destiny of those who never pass upwards. They have never grown per- sonalities ; they have not even become individuals in the highest sense ; they have, therefore, failed in the main purpose of their lives. They were intended to gain the mastery over their senses and develop minds capable of dominating the body. Instead, even to the II THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 73 end, they are completely under the mastery of their senses, in which they find their only joy. These pro- fane persons, like Esau, sell their birthright for a mess of pottage. What will happen to them ? Since they have chosen not to develop that " soul " with which they were endowed into personalities in touch with the eternal, their end may be to pass back again into the melting-pot to be boiled down with the rest (for the Master of the Universe wastes nothing) : they merely return to that nonentity from which they came : from them may be taken away even that individuality which they have. But there are those, too, who fulfil their destiny. They, too, were drawn out of the " mind pool " before their individual life began, and were thrown into this material world to turn the soul substance into a living personality realising and fulfilling the purpose of their Maker. This is nature's way always : to transform the simple and undifferentiated into the complex and highly developed. What are the essential conditions by which the personality passes from the terrestrial to the immortal life .? These will be differently stated according to the philosophy, creed, or Church to which we adhere. In all true religions and philosophies there is the turning away from evil and wrong to all that is right and good in the belief that it is only truth and beauty and love that are real and eternal. Herein the intuition of the seer goes beyond the con- clusions of empirical science, but it in no wise con- tradicts them, for it is only travelling a little further along the same road. We may conclude, then, that before our lives began we were each parts of the " world soul " without separate consciousness, and without distinct individu- ality, that our lives were offspring of the universal life and that by interaction with other lives, with material things, and with God, we are capable of developing souls free and undetermined, and capable of immortal 74 IMMORTALITY ii life. Our destiny is, that from the undeveloped soul with which we started we shall become ever more differentiated and more spiritual, in touch with the Infinite, knowing and loving God. The world soul from which we are derived came from God, and we go to God who is our Eternal Home, Meanwhile it is our business on earth so to live that we shall prepare ourselves for the time when body and brain decay but When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home. ADDITIONAL NOTES A (cf. p. 32). Since this Essay has been in type I have myself succeeded in producing blisters by suggestion alone on three diiFerent occasions — the first time unexpectedly, the other times under strictly scientific conditions, the experiment being witnessed by another medical man, besides the hypnotist, and the patient being closely watched to avoid any possibility of fraud. B (cf. p. 54). On the morning of August 14 a patient of mine announced to his ward doctor that he was very troubled by a dream that his brother was killed in France. On Tuesday, August 21, he told me he had again dreamed this and was very troubled. On August 24 I received word from the patient's father asking me to break the news to the son that his brother had died as the result of wounds received in action on August 14. His last letter home, written when he was quite well, was dated August 13. I may add that when the patient told me of his dream on the 21st another surgeon was present, and I said to this surgeon, as well as to another who was not present, that we would take note of it and see if it corresponded with fact. The doctor of the ward also confirms the story of the dream a week previously, so that the whole account rests on very firm evidence. I have the signatures of these surgeons as witnesses. in THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD BY BURNETT HILLMAN STREETER CANON RESIDENTIARY OF HEREFORD FELLOW OF QJLTEEN's COLLEGE, OXFORD EDITOR OF "foundations" AND "CONCERNING PRAYER " AUTHOR OF "restatement AND REUNION " 75 SYNOPSIS PAGE The Proof of Immortality . . . . .78 The intuitions of great men. The argument used by our Lord amplified and discussed. Christ and His Contemporaries .89 Considerations bearing on the question of the sense in which He accepted the current conceptions of His age. The Resurrection of the Body . . . .91 The origin of the belief in Jewish Apocalyptic. Its accept- ance by our Lord and by St. Paul qualified by their rejection of a "flesh and blood" resurrection. Positive values which their acceptance of it was intended to assert. Time and Space in the Next Life . . . .96 The question whether the "spiritual body" is to be understood in a purely symbolic or in a more or less realistic sense is bound up with the question whether or no Space is a con- dition of the next life. Arguments to show that Space (and Time) is such a condition, and that therefore some kind of local centre and organ of expression of the personality — which may be called a " body " — must be postulated. Bodies Celestial and Bodies Terrestrial . . . 103 Further considerations on the nature of the "spiritual body." How will recognition be possible ? The Hour of Death . . . . . .110 The idea that the future fate of the soul depends entirely on the state of mind at the actual moment of death to be rejected as immoral. Nevertheless, the way a man reacts to the circumstances of death may profoundly modify his character and therefore his future fate. The Resurrection — its Time and Manner . . .113 The relation between the body of the present and of the future life in no way one of material identity. 76 Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 77 CAGE The Resurrection of our Lord. The transition from the "natural" to the "spiritual body." No interval between Death and Resurrection. The day of death for the individual also the Day of Judgment. The Day of Judgment . .121 The traditional picture of the Dies irae is derived rather from Jewish Apocalyptic, than from authentic teaching of Christ. In the Fourth Gospel Judgment is regarded as an internal automatic process of which the results will be revealed on "the last day." At death we leave behind external posses- sions and disguises ; supposing that we also assume a spiritual body which completely expresses our real character we shall be " found out " for what we really are. This will be our condemnation or reward. Is repentance and amendment possible after death .? Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD The Proof of Immortality Great men are greater than the arguments they use. Their insight into the reality of things often transcends what they can justify by logic. Plato, Zoroaster, the philosophers of India, the Taoist sages of China, to say nothing of outstanding thinkers of more recent date — men divided from one another by race, temperament, epoch, and civilisation — have all agreed, though on very diverse grounds, in looking for some kind of life beyond the grave. Their arguments may often fail to convince, but the fact of their broad general agreement is an impressive one. It is not to the pigmies of our race that we owe the persistence of the belief in immor- tality ; nor is it the mark of a moral weakling to value or desire it. Not the least impressive feature in this list is the fact that there can be included in it the name of Jesus Christ. A life beyond and better than the present was one of the things which He most valued and about which He was most sure. The precise degree of authority to be attributed to His views is a matter on which at the present day opinions vary immensely ; but the absolute conviction on a point of this fundamental importance of one whom few will estimate as less than the world's supreme religious genius is a fact which cannot lightly be dismissed. 78 Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 79 But however we may estimate the precise weight to be attached to the mere intuition of supreme genius, we have also, in the case of our Lord, to consider a clear summary statement of what he regarded as the main, if not the only, reason for His belief. " As touching the dead, that they are raised ; have ye not read in the book of Moses, in the place concerning the Bush, how God spake unto him, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob ? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living" (Mk. xii. 26-27). An appeal to a text of the Pentateuch does not at first seem at all convincing. The actual form, however, in which the argument is cast is due to its being addressed to a body of men who acknowledged no other authority ; but a very little consideration shows that it is much more than a mere argumentum ad hominem. To say that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is to say that He is a God who sets a supreme value on individual persons ; and it is argued that the fact that God so values them is a guarantee that He cannot allow them to perish. It is essentially an argu- ment from the character of God ; and its point and cogency lies in the assertion that belief in immortality is a necessary deduction and consequence of a right belief in God. The argument will repay a close examination. What is a right belief in God } What are its impHcations } Man cannot conceive of the Infinite in His totality, but we feel that we must speak of God as personal. But when we ascribe personality to God we do not mean to imply that He has the limitations of personality as we know it but merely that personality — with its free self-determined life of thought and love and the delight in beauty — just because it is the highest thing we know, is that something from the analogy of which we can derive the least inadequate conception that is possible of the Divine. If we say that God is personal 8o IMMORTALITY iii we at least say something which is positive, something which, though short of being the whole truth, we know to be really true. To say that He is not personal is to imply that He is less than personal, and that we know to be untrue. Within the conception of personality the Apostles' Creed singles out for emphasis two outstanding aspects of the Divine activity by styHng Him Father and Creator. Father and Creator, when applied to God, must, like Person, be understood as instances of the highest activities known to our experience, taken as types of a higher and richer activity of the Divine to which these are the nearest and least misleading analogies we can find. To what, then, do they point ? Let us for Father say Parent, for in God must be combined all and more than all we find in human Fatherhood and Motherhood in one. And for Creator may we not say Artist, to include all and more than all we mean by constructor, inventor, thinker, poet .'' God — Parent and Artist — what does this mean ? Both analogies alike suggest one who brings into existence what otherwise would not have been. And in the case of God this bringing into existence cannot be thought of as a single act, but as a continual activity of giving, guiding, sus- taining, and perfecting. But this is only half and not the most important half of what is meant. Artist and Parent are not mere workers or mere producers, how- ever diligent, however able ; they are above all things those who supremely value, though for different qualities and in a different way, that on which their care is lavished. In different ways they are two types of absolutely disinterested love — in the case of the artist of the vision he vainly endeavours to embody in his work, in the case of the parent of the living person whom he or she has been permitted to bring into being and to rear. The human artist again and again destroys his work ; but only when he feels it completely fails to embody Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 8i the vision. In the rare cases where he knows he has reached such relative success as is permitted to man- kind, he would wish his work to last for ever — exegi monumentum aere perennius. Still more rarely can the human parent acquiesce in the extinction of a child — to those who really know and love it any human per- sonality, however imperfect, has a value other and greater than that of the greatest work of art. Hence, if the personality of a human parent or of a human artist are dim reflections of elements in the character of the Divine (that is, unless we are prepared to say that the Infinite is in the last resort something less noble than ourselves) He must be above all things interested in the continual production of that which has supreme value — of value in ever new and ever higher forms, and no value which He has created can He lightly or willingly suffer to perish. Not merely the Conservation of Energy but the Conservation of Value, to use Hoffding's famous phrase, nay, rather the Augmentation ^ of Value must be a principle of the Universe. But, we must ask, would not this principle of the Conservation of Value, or even of the Augmentation of Value, be satisfied without assuming the immortality of the individual, so long as new and possibly ever better and richer forms of life were being continually created .'' Would not the assumption to the contrary prove too much .^ Would it not mean that the lily and the butterfly have immortal souls } If God were thought of merely as the Artist, the con- tinuance of the species with its continual rebirth of fresh lives to take the place of those who have deceased might perhaps suffice. But not if we think of Him as also Parent and Friend. The question resolves itself into this, at what point does individuality as such become a thing of absolute value .'' No two lilies, no two butterflies, are exactly the same, but, despite this fact, judged purely by aesthetic values, there is no ' Cf. Concerning Prayer, p. 6. G 82 IMMORTALITY iii. great loss when the lilies or the butterflies of one year have replaced those of the year before. Whether their individuality has a value other than aesthetic must depend in the last resort upon whether they have anything which we can reasonably call a conscious personality, or, in other words, a soul. So far as we can see they have not. In the teaching of our Lord we seem to detect the suggestion of a hierarchy of values in the scale of life. There is the grass of the field which " God has so clothed " — it has supreme aesthetic value — but which to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the baker's furnace. There are the sparrows " not one of which falleth to the 'ground without your Father " — a phrase which suggests something more of individual care. And there is man, of whom it is said " ye are of more value than many sparrows," and " the very hairs of your head are numbered." We need not dogmatise as to the exact point in the scale of being at which there first appears a consciousness sufficiently individual to have a per- manent value as such. There are some, for instance, who hold that phenomena like " race memory " and the instincts which compel the individual insect to sacrifice its own interests to those of the species, point either to the existence of an individual soul greater than can find expression in the physical constitution of the individual creature, or possibly to the existence of a corporate soul of the species to which the individual is related much as one's hand would be to one's self, if one could conceive of the attachment of the hand to the self as being of a purely psychic and not also of a physical nature. I hesitate to accept such speculations myself, but had they any foundation it would be conceivable that even vegetable life might be the expression of a hidden soul. If so, it is so effectively hidden that we can make no positive use of the hypothesis. But when we come to the higher animals the case is different. If love, loyalty, and capacity for unselfish devotion rather than Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 83 intellect be the test of " soul," few lovers of the dog would be disposed to deny that at least in some indi- viduals, if not in whole species of the lower animals, there is latent and can be awakened something to which we cannot refuse the name " soul " — a rudimentary soul if you like, but, then, even among men are all souls equally advanced? Souls are not, like sixpences, material objects all of the same size. Whatever is sentient partakes of the nature of spirit, and the standard by which we measure spirit is not magnitude but quality. Dogs, at any rate some dogs, have at least an ele- mentary sense of right and wrong. They know when they have done wrong, and are capable of shame. They may not understand the meaning of their offence, but they know they have offended against the will of a person higher than themselves whom they both love and fear. The attitude of a dogr towards its master is very like that of the ancient Hebrew to his God. Perhaps the analogy may be pressed still further. It is often pointed out that this apparent " sense of sin " in animals appears to be confined to domestic animals, and it is argued that it is merely a result of their inter- course with man. Possibly — but is it therefore an illusion ^ Nothing stimulates the growth of conscience in man so much as willing service of and conscious fellowship with a Being infinitely higher than himself. Why should not relations with a master, made in the image of God, do for the dog what relation with God can do for the master ^ Indeed, it may possibly — I would not say more than "possibly" — be the case that animals have what is known as a " conditional " immortality, that is to say, that they survive as individuals only if they have, through contact with human beings, actually de- veloped what would otherwise have been only a latent possibility and achieved something which we may call a soul or personality of a rudimentary kind. Hut if they have once achieved personality we may suppose it will still further develop, and that they might come to 84 IMMORTALITY iii play in the next life a part in the fellowship of souls analogous to that which little children play in this life. But I should be unwilling to lay too much stress on the arguments which bear on the difficult and highly debatable question of animal survival. After all, to approach the problem of the quality and indi- vidual worth of life by first considering the vegetable, insect, or animal world, is to begin at the end about which we know least. The important thing to recognise is that at the other end of the scale of life, in the fully developed human being, we certainly have an individu- ality which is a thing of intrinsic value as individual. No two leaves of a tree are exactly alike, but no two brothers of a family are even approximately identical even though they may be twins physically almost indis- tinguishable. What constitutes the individuality of human beings is character — character possibly to some extent a thing innate but ever developing through con- scious reaction towards circumstances, experiences, and especially through the infinitely subtle influences of personal relationships ; and to any two individuals these must be infinitely diverse. If there are men of whom it must be said that it were " better had they not been born," it is probable that, unless in some way their characters can be revolutionised either in this world or the next, they will ultimately cease to have any real value to man or God and become extinct. But these, we believe, are exceptional cases. No one who has really loved another but feels that he has loved some- thing which is unique and uniquely valuable. There are many nowadays who urge that what we love is only that element in our friends which is divine and eternal, and that therefore it will suffice if we think of this element as destined to survive only as part of the Infinite Divine Life to be manifested again in higher achievements of personal existence. " Whether," writes Mr. Wells, " we live for ever or die to-morrow does not affect righteousness. Many people seem to find the Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 85 prospect of a final personal death unendurable. This impresses me as egotism. 1 have no such appetite for a separate immortality ; what, of me, is identified with God, is God ; what is not is of no more permanent value than the snows of yester-year." ^ There is a note of idealism here ; but it simply is not true to say that " it does not affect righteousness " whether we live for ever or die to-morrow. For if the Divine righteousness may lightly " scrap " the individual, human righteousness may do the same. The most conspicuous mark of the moral level of any community is the value it sets on human personality. The moral achievement of the individual may be measured largely by his readiness to sacrifice his own life for others, but the moral height of a society is shown by its reluctance to sacrifice even its least worthy members. The dis- interestedness which is content with a Universe in which his own ego will soon cease to be is much to the credit of Mr. Wells ; it would not be to God's credit were He equally content. Weary and disillusioned with ourselves and with the world, there are times when most of us cease to desire a future life and when we think that the one individual about whom we have most knowledge is perhaps not worth preserving. But Christ looked at it not from our end but from God's. He did not consider the question from the point of view of what we think about ourselves or what we hope for for ourselves, but of what God thinks and what God hopes. We are the children of God, and therefore God wants us, and is not content to cut down His plans and expectations for us to the level either of our desert, our weariness, or our despair. We are thus brought back again to the point that, in the last resort, belief in individual immortality depends on our conception of the character of God. If God is at all like what Christ supposed Him to be, personal immortality is completely proved. 1 H. G. Wells in God the In-visible King. 86 IMMORTALITY III But what if Christ be mistaken about God ? Why should we trust His insight into reality rather than that of some who have thought otherwise than He ? My answer would be that, in regard to every question, that man gets the right solution who most clearly sees how to state the problem rightly, that man finds the law which explains phenomena who realises which are the really significant facts to be explained. And in this matter of the essential character of the Power behind the Universe, of all the facts Christ noted those which are the most significant, and of all the questions that can be asked He asked the most fundamental first. The conceptions we entertain about God depend very much on the moral and intellectual interests on which our own lives are concentrated. If, like the early Semite, we are preoccupied in internecine tribal wars, our God will be the great avenger — on His enemies and on ours. If, like the Buddha, we despair of life and seek only respite from the "wheel of Things," God will evaporate into the eternal calm of the ocean of unruffled Being. If, like the pure metaphysician, we are seeking merely the intellectual postulates of an intelligible world, we may chance to light upon an Absolute " beyond good and evil " or on some featureless Eternal which under- lies the temporal. If, like the Scientific Materialist, we focus all our attention on the stupendous revelationswhich Chemistry and Physics have given as to the nature of the material creation, we may see nothing in or behind the Universe but matter and primal energy. But if, following the lead of Christ, we take a broader survey and look also into the heart of nature's last product, man, we shall see that the most fundamental thing to be explained is not the material Universe but the presence of life, and that the most significant thing about life itself is not its quantity but its quality. The real problem of the philosopher is to explain this — to tell us, not why we eat and drink, but why we can rever- ence or admire, not why we need our fellows, but why Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 87 we can also disinterestedly love. Any tenable hypo- thesis of the ultimate nature of Reality must, of course, explain the material creation, it must explain biological evolution, but it must explain in addition something much more difficult. The world and the struggle for life must indeed be accounted for, but in the last resort what most requires to be explained is not the struggle for life but the fact that men can rise above it and will cheerfully sacrifice life itself for a cause or an ideal. If the highest life we know is a life which is capable of supreme devotion to ideals, we must surely attribute to the Source of all life a sense of value deeper, not shallower, than ours. That is what Christ taught — God is love. And it is the quality of His love, not of our achievement, which is the guarantee for our survival. God is the Creator, the great Artist, and must value what He has made just in proportion to the extent in which He has expressed Himself in it — of all the creatures, therefore, that we know on this earth, He must value most the being who, in however imperfect degree, is made in His own image. He is the great Artist, but He is much more than this. He is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob — a God to whom the individual is personally dear. He is the all-Parent who cannot regard His children merely as details in a picture however glorious, or as notes in a tune however wonderful. " What man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone ; or if he shall ask for a fish, will give him a serpent ? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him." No one of us, could we help it, would consent to the extinction of a child or friend of ours. Can God then allow one of His children or His friends to cease to be ? If so. He were either as impotent as we, or, not being impotent, more callous than ourselves. I'his cannot be. 88 IMMORTALITY in If human goodness has in it anything of real and eternal value, if it is something grounded in ultimate reality, if it is an imperfect reflection of a characteristic of the Divine — then that Eternal and Divine Reality which is the ground and source of our poor goodness must be better, not worse, than ourselves. It must be more just, more tender, not less so than ourselves. To It even the falling to the ground of a single sparrow cannot but be a matter of concern. In the eyes of the Infinite Living Reality we are of more value than many sparrows — therefore Death is not the end. More than this, it follows that Death, so far from being the end can only be a fresh beginning. If God really cares for the things which we see to be supremely valuable in life, why is it that their perfection is so rarely, or rather never, actually attained ? Why is it that achievement is so often missed, character so often marred ? Why are lives so obviously of value, so clearly moving on the upward path, in one case cut short by early death, in another strangely ruined or frustrated ; why are so many others checked and stunted at the very start .'' Look where we will, poet and artist just miss the perfection of their art, the work of the clearest thinker is marred by some element of crankiness or error, the highest and noblest character shows strange inconsistencies and unexpected flaws. There is but one possible answer. Life in this world is but a stage on the road to something farther on and better. It is a school whose curriculum is inexplicable, except as leading to a life's career beyond. It is the first act of a drama in which the characters are introduced, the action set in motion, but the whole plot is not yet seen. We see enough of life to feel sure that it is (or rather that to those who make it so it can be) an education ; we see enough of the play to catch an inkling of a plot — but that is all. There is enough evidence of purpose and design to justify us in asserting that there must be more. And if so there must be a life Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 89 beyond the present in which that more will be worked out. If man is potentially the noblest of all the Creator's works of art, he is also the most unfinished ; if he is the child of God he is only in the nursery stage. A God that was content to leave it so would be morally of lower status than ourselves. Christ and His Contemporaries The Resurrection of the Body and the Day of Judg- ment are the most striking features of the form under which the nature and inauguration of the future life are conceived of in the New Testament. If we are to estimate the value of these conceptions for modern thought we must first ask exactly what the phrases meant on the lips of Christ Himself and of St. Paul. This cannot be done without a momentary glance at the history of the ideas. But the history of ideas alone may be actually misleading, unless certain principles of interpretation are already borne in mind. To express in words thoughts even about simple and obvious matters, completely, adequately, and without possibility of misunderstanding, is always hard ; to do so in deep matters about which we feel strongly is well- nigh impossible. Poets and prophets often, less fre- quently philosophers, have possessed to a supreme degree the gift of expressing thought in words, but in exact proportion to the originality of what they had to say they too have found complete and adequate ex- pression elude their efforts. Prophet, philosopher, or poet can only express himself by means of the words, ideas, and conceptions which are familiar to his con- temporaries ; and some thoughts can only be conveyed indirectly by association or allusion. Hence, to in- terpret correctly the message of any great one of the past it is necessary first to study the world of thought and idea in which he lived ; we must know something 90 IMMORTALITY ni of the background of historic memories, social usage, literary tradition and education of the contemporaries whom he was addressing. To seek his meaning we must ask, not what such and such words, if literally translated into English, would mean to us, but what associations the words would have in the minds of those who first heard or read them ; and this often means a careful study of the history of the phrase he uses. On the other hand, having once recognised this principle, and having once thoroughly studied the environment of the great man and the history and meaning to con- temporaries of the words and conceptions with which he deals, we must beware of the error of supposing that by these words and ideas he means no more than an average contemporary would have understood by them. No great man is ever really understood by his contemporaries simply because the mere fact that what he says is so largely original makes' it impossible for its full meaning to be brought home to the majority. Only after his influence has penetrated and has actually modified the thought-milieu of future generations does it become possible for any but the selected few to understand him. No great man of the past can be interpreted aright if these two to some extent opposing considerations are lost sight of, but they are of more than ordinary im- portance for the interpretation of our Lord's views of the mode and circumstances of the future life. The thought-world of the Palestine in which He lived was so remote from our own that without some study of the background of contemporary thought we are bound to misconceive much of what He says. On the other hand, the depth and originality of His thought is such that it is not sufficient to study the meaning that the terms which He uses would have borne to an average contemporary. We must also remember that supremely in His case interpretation must beware of losing the spirit behind the letter, and we must recognise that the Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 91 key to the real meaning of His words must be sought in the clear apprehension of His outlook upon life and religion as a whole. And this is a key of which we can only possess ourselves in virtue of the fact that sub- stantial elements at least of His general religious attitude have by this time percolated into and become a part of the substance of European thought. The Resurrection of the Body The oldest Hebrew literature, like the oldest Greek, reveals a belief in a dim, shadowy Underworld to which go the spirits of the departed — Sheol, the Hebrew equivalent of Hades, a world of ghosts and sapless shades leading a faint and feeble existence in which the same fate is shared by good and evil alike. " A land of thick darkness, as darkness itself ; a land of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness" (Job x. 22). "Cast off among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more ; and they are cut off from thy hand" (Ps. Ixxxviii. 5). "The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence " (Ps. cxv. 17). It was not until some time after the return from the Babylonian Exile that the hope began to dawn that the righteous might have something better to look forward to than this land of darkness and of unsub- stantial dreams. This dawning hope took the form of the belief that the body would be miraculously restored, its scattered elements recombined, and the soul brought back from Sheol to animate it. But this hope and expectation, it is important to remember, did not stand in isolation. It grew up and it only existed in integral connection with a particular development and extension of the expectation of a "Day of the Lord" and aMessianic Kingdom, very different in character from that looked forward to by the older Prophets, which was elaborated by a series of so-called Apocalyptic writers, beginning 92 IMMORTALITY m with the second century b.c. The Book of Daniel and the Revelation of St. John are the only two works of the kind which have gained a place in the Canon, and most of the intervening members of the series were lost sight of quite early in the history of the Church.^ Their rediscovery, mainly during the last half-century, has shed an entirely new light upon the origin and inter- pretation of that whole cycle of New Testament teach- ing which is connected with the Resurrection and the Day of Judgment, and on the meaning in detail of the ideas associated with these two central conceptions. A review of the various stages in the development of the idea of the Resurrection, and a careful discrimina- tion of the minor differences in which the conception is worked out by different Apocalyptic writers, is not here necessary. To students of theology it is familiar, for others it would be tedious. Two points only require to be emphasised : — (i) The belief in the resurrection of the body was in a sense a protest against the older idea — which still survived among the powerful sect of Sadducees — of an empty and meaningless ghost existence. Compared and contrasted with life in Sheol, the belief in the Resurrec- tion meant an immortality worth the having. In Sheol, again, good and evil fared alike. The association of the resurrection with a judgment on each individual accord- ing to his works was an emphatic affirmation that the consequences of right or wrong choice extend into the next life. So far, therefore, the belief in the resurrec- tion of the body was an immense moral and religious advance. (2) Without a return to life in the body it was felt that the righteous dead could have no share in the glorious Messianic Kingdom on earth, participation in which was their obvious due. A common view of these writers was that the old body of flesh and blood would be raised up with all its wounds and weakness, but would ' For a brief account of this literature cf. p. 176, note. Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 93 shortly be transformed into something more glorious than the body of this life/ The amount of transforma- tion thought to be required, and the conception of the life to be lived in the transformed body, vary with the degree of spiritual insight in different writers ; but some extremely crude and materialistic ideas are found, and it is probable that these appealed most widely to the popular mind. The real meaning of our Lord's answer to the problem propounded by the Sadducees as to the woman who had seven husbands (Mk. xii. 18 ff.) cannot be properly understood unless it is considered in relation to these elements in contemporary thought. Thus, as against the belief in nothing better than a ghost existence in the world below, to which the majority of the Sadducees still adhered. He is emphatic that the dead are raised — that is to say, that the life of the future is something more glorious and more satisfying, not something less so, than this present life. On the other hand, He is equally opposed to any materialistic con- ception of a future life which is merely a glorified replica of the present, with marrying and giving in marriage, and with all the physical and social limitations which this inevitably involves in this world. The cruder elements in popular Apocalyptic He rejects with no less emphasis than He had rejected the empty, joyless future of the Sadducees. The future life will be no mere repetition of this ; it will be something transcending all earthly experience — they will be " as the angels in heaven." The discussion of the subject by St. Paul in writing to the Corinthians is conditioned by a somewhat different background of thought. The via media laid down by our Lord was defined in relation to opposing elements in Palestinian thought. On the one hand, to the cruder popular Apocalyptic expectation of a flesh and blood resurrection ; on the other, to the ^ Cf. z Baruch 50-51. 94 IMMORTALITY iii Sadducean belief in an unsubstantial life in Sheol. St, Paul's solution is equally a via media ^ but not between the same extremes. The difficulty felt by the Corinthians depended upon their supposing that they must make a choice between one of two alternatives. On the one side there was the same popular Apocalyptic belief in a flesh and blood resurrection still continuing in much of early Christian thought, but, on the other, there was, not, as in the case of our Lord's answer to the Sadducees, a conception of a shadowy Hades, but rather a belief in the immortality of the soul conceived along the lines of later Greek philosophy. Like our Lord, St. Paul is emphatic in repudiating the notion that " flesh and blood " can inherit eternal life, but, as against a section of his Greek converts, he still argues that a body will be given by God — a spiritual body, indeed, but still a body. What was the point of this insistence } Greek thought valued the intellect above all. The afl'ections were associated in that philosophy with the life of the body, they belonged to the temporal not to the eternal element in man's nature. To Greek thought airadela^ incapacity to feel, was a characteristic of the divine, and the life of God consisted in Oeoopva, in pure intellectual activity apart from feeling. vov<; only, the intellectual element in man which was held to be most akin to the divine, would certainly be immortal. But to the Christian God is love, and the highest capacity in man is love. Hence feeling, effort, experi- ence — things which come to us in and through the life of the body — are the things we value most, not least, and supreme values would be lost unless something corresponding to them exists in the life of the world to come. Again, " pure reason" is the same for all men, and an immortality of the Reason only would tend to obliterate all individuality and idiosyncrasy. If the " body " stands for the medium of individuality, for the means Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 95 by which in the next world persons will be recognisable or still distinct — then the body must survive. Eternal form will still divide The Eternal soul from all beside And I shall know him when we meet. To our Lord, then, and to St. Paul, the real meaning and value of the idea of the resurrection of the body does not consist in an affirmation of a material and flesh and blood existence in the future — that they both repudiate. It stands mainly for two things, that the life of the future will be richer not poorer than this life, and that individuality, personal distinctions, and the results of the moral and emotional as well as of the intellectual activities of this life will be preserved in the next. More than that, it means that the capacity for such activity will still endure. " Love never faileth." The future will be no Nirvana of passion- less contemplation, but a full activity of the whole personality in conscious harmony with other souls. It is probable, though less certain, that St. Paul had another reason for insisting on the importance of the body. His Epistles show that the tendencies of thought which appeared a little later as Gnosticism were already beginning to affect the Church. A fundamental tenet of this type of thought was the doctrine that matter, and therefore the body, is intrinsically evil and that spirit alone is good. In practice two contrary deductions could be and were made from this theory — either that the body must be crushed by an extreme asceticism or that the lusts of the flesh might be indulged in at will, since the further pollution of an already evil body cannot afl^ect the spirit which is a prisoner within. The teaching that the body is an integral part of the complete nature and life of a being who is destined in his whole nature to inherit Eternal Life proved to be one of the strongest guarantees against the invasion of ideas which, though 96 IMMORTALITY iii sounding to modern ears as unscientific as immoral, had a strong appeal to serious thinkers in that age. The foregoing summary makes it clear that the belief in the resurrection of the body arose, was developed, and was chiefly valued as being the most natural and obvious way in which to express in regard to the future life that belief in the Conservation and in the Augmentation of Value which, as has been previously argued, is of the essence of the Christian belief in God. It is the genius of Christianity to put the inward before the outward, the spiritual before the material ; hence it is on the resurrection of the body as an expression of belief in the preservation of spiritual values that I would lay most stress. In so far as it is this, I would urge that it rests on the firm and inexpugnable ground of being a necessary deduction from our belief in God. But a further question must be raised. Does an in- terpretation in terms of moral and spiritual values really exhaust the meaning of the conception of a " spiritual body " in the life to come ? Ought we to affirm that the term " body " is no more than a mere symbol of our belief that, in some way at present inconceivable, spiritual values such as individuality, capacity for action or affection, and the possibility of mutual recognition are conserved .'' Or ought we to affirm that in the next life there will still exist an organ of expression of the activity of the spirit which, though not the same as the flesh and blood body of this life, has some recognisable analogy to it, and possibly even some direct connection with it .'' Time and Space in the next Life The answer to the foregoing question must mainly depend upon whether we think of the future life as being an existence in space, or whether we believe it to be a state of being in which our consciousness will. Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 97 in some way at present wholly inconceivable, be independent of spatial relations. There is a widespread notion among philosophers and theologians that the Hfe of the world to come must necessarily be one which transcends the conditions of time and space, and in which pure spirit can exist and function apart from all contact with or relation to matter. Granted such presuppositions, it is clear that the resurrection of the body is a meaningless phrase unless the word body is understood to be used in a purely symbolic sense. For a body in any ordinary sense can only exist in space. I must frankly confess that until lately I have felt bound to accept this view. But more recent reflection inclines me to question, not the validity of the deduction but the premisses from which it starts, and to ask, Are we really bound to assume that the life of the world to come is a lite that is outside time and space ? At first sight it might seem that the question I am asking could not be answered without first obtaining a satisfactory solution of that most diflicult philosophical problem, what is the real nature of space and time? If so, our question would have to wait long for an answer and nothing less than a treatise would suffice even to attempt it. But this is not required. The widespread notion that the life of the next world is one transcending time and space seems to me to be partly the result of an acute reaction against the crude con- ceptions of popular theology, and partly a confused deduction from four propositions. The propositions are of a very different character from one another, but no one of them, even if we admit it to be true, will really support the conclusion so often drawn from them. These propositions are : — (i) God exists outside time and space. To His consciousness all time is simultaneously present as an Eternal Now, and He is present in His entirety io/us ubique at every point of space. H 98 IMMORTALITY m (2) Space and Time, according to Kant's famous contention, are not things having an independent objective existence, but are " forms of perception." They belong to the subjective constitution of our own mind, which is so made that it can only experience things as happening successively in time, and cannot think of them except as existing externally to the self and to one another in space. (3) Thought is independent of space. It is no more difficult to think about the Dog Star millions of miles away than about a lamp in the room upstairs. A third-class railway compartment occupied by ten philosophers is not more crowded if they begin to discuss the Absolute, or less crowded if they all fall asleep. (4) In this life, especially with the progress of years and infirmity, we are acutely conscious of material " limitations " to the spirit. Human aspiration would throw off all limitations in the life to come — and space seems to be one of these. The sum total effect of these four sets of considera- tions is to produce a general feeling that somehow or other Time and Space are slightly discreditable and troublesome limitations belonging to the lower life of flesh and blood which we shall transcend in the world to come. I submit, however, that a closer analysis of these arguments does not bear this out. (i) The proposition that the Divine consciousness transcends Time and Space would be assented to by most, though not by all, philosophers ; but assuming it to be true it is irrelevant to the question of the nature of our consciousness in the life to come — unless, indeed, we assume that what happens after death is a complete merging of the individual in the universal consciousness. The arguments in support of the view that the con- sciousness of God transcends Time and Space are far Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 99 too complex to be summarised in this place. But so far as I apprehend them they (or at any rate the most important of them) are based on considerations which apply to the Infinite Consciousness as such and are not applicable to any finite consciousness. It is argued, for instance, that there must be an ultimate Unity which transcends all difference, an Absolute as the condition of the existence of the Relative, an Unchange- able as a background of change, a Perfection as the presupposition of the possibility of Progress. But these arguments (if valid at all) apply to God only because He is assumed to be Infinite ; and for precisely the same reason they do mi apply to any finite spirit. The chief argument for the contrary view seems to me to be this. In the world to come the righteous may look forward to an ever closer union with the Divine, and in so far as this is consummated they may expect to share more and more of the Divine Life, and so ultimately to share the Divine consciousness in every way. Moreover, such a view seems at first sight to be borne out by that indescribable experience of the Poet, the Artist, or the Mystic which is commonly spoken of as " an experience of the Eternal in the temporal." This appeal to artistic and mystic experience cannot be lightly dismissed, but I believe on further analysis that the content of the consciousness in question will be found to consist in a sense of abidingness and contact with ultimate reality rather than in that complete elimination of the experience of succession which would be involved in perception outside time. Union with the Divine means primarily complete harmony of will and taste ; it implies an identical sense of values in regard to what- ever the individual experiences ; it has nothing to do with the capacity to understand and experience all things whatsoever simultaneously in one coup d\vil. It may indeed be ultimately possible for the individual to become so closely identified with the Divine will as to be able to apprehend reality with something even of lOO IMMORTALITY iii the metaphysical transcendence of the Divine mind, but even so this could only be in a partial and, as it were, derivative way.^ Otherwise the individual would be simply merged in the Universal consciousness, he would become just a part of God — a view which is inconsistent with that belief in individual immortality which on other grounds I have urged we should accept, and which in the last resort seems inconsistent with the possibility of either the love of God to man or of man to God, since an undifferentiated unit cannot love itself. (2) We can accept, if we will, the argument of Kant that Time and Space are merely " forms of per- ception " without committing ourselves to the view that we shall be independent of them in the next life. For his argument in no way depends on the fact that we are beings encased in flesh and blood but on an analysis of the nature of perception applicable to any finite being. This point he himself makes quite clear in the additions to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. " It is not necessary that we should limit this intuition in space and time to the sensibility of man. It is quite possible that all finite thinking beings must necessarily agree with us on this point." "Such an intuition {i.e. an intuition which is not limited to space and time), so far as we can understand, can belong to the First Being only." ^ Many philosophers accept Kant's view of Space and Time in a modified form. They hold that these are, indeed, as he maintains, merely subjective " forms of perception," but go beyond him in supposing that they are the forms under which the Universal mind perceives things. God thinks the universe — that is what con- stitutes creation — and He thinks it under the forms of ^ This appears to be substantially the view of St. Thomas Aquinas — himself a mystic and the friend of the notable mystic S. Bonaventura. Cf. Summa i. 10. 5, creaturae spirituales quantum ad affcctiones et intclligentias, in quthus est successio, mensurantur tempore . . . sed quantum ad -visionem gloriae participant aeternitatem. 2 Cf. Max Miiller's translation, p. 735. Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD loi time and space. Hence space and time, though ideal and subjective in relation to mind as such, are real and objective in relation to finite minds. This is a con- siderable departure from the teaching of Kant, since it ignores his distinction between " forms of perception " and " categories of the understanding." But on this view it is even more clear that we can never transcend the limitations of Time and Space. For if the thought of God is what creates, and if things are what they are because God so thinks them, then, if God thinks them under the forms of Time and Space, we could only think of them otherwise by thinking of them as being something different from what they really are — a privilege to which few would aspire. (3) The fact that thought does not itself occupy space and that distance is no impediment to thought, though true, is irrelevant. My thought about an elephant takes up no more room than my thought about the fly on its ear, but I can only think of either as occupying space and as being external to each other and to myself. And again, though I can think of Sirius as easily as of the house opposite, I can only think of it as being something which is outside myself, in the sense that I take for granted that the self which thinks is situated at or somehow centred in a particular spot in space which I call " here," and that the object I think of is situated at a certain distance, whether fai or near, from that spot. Of course there is a sense in which anything which is embraced by my thought is not " outside " myself, and it is impossible to think of my personality as strictly confined within the limits of my outermost skin. But the difiiculty — a great one — of seeing how personality can be attached to a local centre, or of defining exactly where or what that centre is, does not alter the fact that the very possibility of perceiving objects in space implies that the percipient is " here " and the thing perceived is " there," i.e. that the percipient I02 IMMORTALITY iii has, somehow or other, a centre of consciousness at a particular point in space. (4) The notion that space is a cramping limitation, which we may aspire to transcend in another world, is due to a confusion between space as a philosophical concept and distance as a practical impediment to attain- ing our desires. " O that I had wings like a dove " is a common enough desire, but what we really wish for is, not to escape from space altogether, but to be wafted rapidly and easily to some other point in space — to join some absent dear one or enjoy a fairer scene. In the life to come, for all we know, we may be able like Ariel " to put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes," to take a week-end trip to Mars or a six months' tour round the Milky Way. But an exist- ence in which that was possible would be no more an existence which transcended the limits of space than is the life of a squirrel in a cage. It would seem, then, that unless we suppose that after death the individual consciousness becomes part of the Universal Consciousness and *' the dewdrop slips into the silent sea," that is, if there is such a thing as a separate individual immortality at all, the presumption is strongly in favour of the view that we shall continue to imagine and to perceive in terms of time and space. But an ego that thinks in terms of space must necessarily have some centre of consciousness localised at any given moment in a particular spot ; for other- wise it cannot think of objects as outside itself, or have any standpoint from which to survey them. Hence, a state of existence in which we can perceive things other than ourselves as existing in space is only possible if our consciousness has some localised centre such as in this world is provided by our body. This centre may be capable of moving from one place to another with incredible rapidity, but it must be something which exists in space and is at a particular point in space at any given time. Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 103 But a consciousness with a centre which exists in space at all must be conceived of as associated with or attached to some entity which is at any rate on the way to having a claim to the title " body " in more than a merely symbolic sense. The considerations which follow may seem to strengthen the claim. Bodies Celestial and Bodies Terrestrial It has been shown above that, once we dismiss from our minds the idea that the next life is one that tran- scends the conditions of time and space, and once we clearly recognise that if we must expect still to look out upon a Universe that exists in space, we are com- pelled to assume that the ego must have some kind of local centre. But if the ego is to survive at all it is incredible that it will survive merely as a " looker on." It must live and move and act. But this means that, related to the local centre which we are bound to postulate in order to make even " looking on " a possi- bility, there must also be an organ or instrument of the activity of the personality having something like the same kind of relation to it that the physical body has to mind and will in this life. At once we seem to be driven to postulate something which may be called a " body " in something like the ordinary sense of that term. But if so, of what nature is this local centre, this instrument, this organ of the spirit, this *' body " if we may so call it. Is it material.? Certainly not, if by " material " is meant something which you can kick with your boot. But that is not the proper meaning of the word. A cubic foot of hydrogen, invisible and lighter than the air, is precisely no more and no less *' material " than a cubic foot of lead. And the ultimate atom of which any kind of matter is composed has lately been shown to be no undifferentiated " solid " mass but a vortex, a kind of infinitesimal solar system, of electrons ; which electrons I04 IMMORTALITY m themselves seem, so far as can at present be determined, to be units of electric force without any measurable solid substratum. Matter is not necessarily something gross ; indeed, if scientific speculation as to the ether are correct, it is not necessarily even ponderable. We need not even raise, much less attempt to settle, that most difficult of all philosophical questions, what is matter and what is its relation to mind ? By matter is meant that which can be thought of as other than mind or spirit. Whether mind or matter are in the last resort disparate, or whether they are each an aspect of some ultimate substance which is neither, or whether one is a product of the other are ques- tions on which the doctors largely differ. We need not stay to discuss these questions ; for whatever views are held about them, it would be admitted that what exists in and occupies space must be called matter, whatever its mobility, its tenuity, or its capacity for rapidly assuming different forms. Hence we cannot deny the attribute " material " in its strictly philosophic sense to the " body " of the future life ; though in the popular sense of the word "material" we assuredly must do so — and that with emphasis, since we must suppose it to be normally invisible and impalpable to earthly senses, though probably both visible and palpable to the acuter perceptions of the next life. We may proceed to ask whether we can suppose there to be any further analogies between the *' body " of this life and this material instrument of the spirit in the next, which would perhaps even more fully justify the use of the term " body " to describe it ? The time is past when a point of this kind could be considered as settled by a discussion of the exact exegesis of a text of Scripture, but it can never be wholly irrele- vant to examine the underlying principle of the inspired intuitions of such an original thinker and profound religious genius as St. Paul. What, then, is the fundamental idea at the back of Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 105 St. Paul's mind when he draws his famous distinction between the natural body of flesh and blood (a-cofia ■>^v^(,k6v) and the spiritual body {o-co/jia TrvevfiarLKov) of the life to come ? It is often supposed that by " spiritual " he means *' made of spirit," i.e. " imma- terial," This is a possible meaning ; St. Paul certainly did not regard the future body as material in the crude popular sense, for he expressly denies that flesh and blood can inherit eternal life ; but the context makes another interpretation more probable. Since " natural " (-v/ru^t/coi/) in the context does not mean a body made of ^v)(i]^ but a body adapted to the life of the '^jrv^Vi it is probable that by " spiritual " (TrvevfiartKov) body is meant, not a body made of Trvevfia^ but a body adapted to the life of the irvevixa. When in Greek the words ■^vxf} and TTvev/iia are used in contrast to one another, the word -^vxv always stands for the life which man shares with the animals, while Trveufia stands for those higher capacities in which he transcends them. Thus the " natural " body is one adapted to a life in which eating, drinking, and the continuance of the species are neces- sary ; the " spiritual " body is one adapted to a life in which these things are left behind, but in which the higher activities of life are to be pursued in an enhanced and intensified degree. In fact, in each case he is thinking not of the material of which the body is composed, but, to use a modern phrase, of the environ- ment to which it is adapted. If this interpretation is correct, the idea that lies behind St, Paul's mind, put into modern language, is something like this. The body is essentially the means of expression of the life of the spirit, and the organ of its activity. As such it is adapted to its environment, and it draws its substance and nourishment from that environment. Change the environment, and the spirit must find a new expression for its life, a new organ of its activity, a new ** body." But the new " body " will be as perfectly (indeed, we hope more perfectly) adapted io6 IMMORTALITY iii to the new environment as the old body was to the old environment ; it must, therefore, be of an entirely different character. "It is sown in corruption ; it is raised in incorruption : it is sown in dishonour ; it is raised in glory : it is sown in weakness ; it is raised in power : it is sown a natural, it is raised a spiritual body " (i Cor. XV. 42-44). And its substance (whatever that may be) is derived from the new environment ; it is " a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens" (2 Cor. v. i). "Thou sowest not the body that shall be . . . but God giveth it a body" (i Cor. XV. 37-38)- The idea is one which it will be worth while to follow out a little further. In this world mind is the highest form of life, and life only appears in connection with organisms made up of material constituents. It is, however, important to observe the relation which exists in any living animal between the life principle and the material organism. Whether we regard the life principle as a separate entity, having much the same relation to the material organism as a bird to its cage or a tenant to his house, or whether we regard the organism as a single entity of which the life principle and the body which is its material con- comitant are merely two aspects, it is clear that the life principle is, so to speak, the predominant partner. A contrast must be made between what in popular language is known as " living matter " and " dead matter." " Dead matter," so-called, can only grow as a result of accretion from without, and can only move as a result of impact from some external force. Living matter grows by absorbing into itself, by means of its own spontaneous activity, matter originally outside it, and it transforms the character of that which it takes in, so that it becomes assimilated to itself. In the case of animal organisms there is in addition a conscious selection and rejection of the outside material according as it is suitable or otherwise to assimilation ; and this purposive Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 107 selection is still further facilitated by a power of spon- taneous movement in space. The human body has its origin in a minute cell, or rather in the conjunction of two minute cells, and from this small beginning, first within and afterwards outside the womb, it gradually increases in size and in differen- tiation of function in regard to its parts till the age of maturity. But the important point to notice is that it is only by virtue of the continued activity of the life principle within it that this process of growth is accom- plished, and that the continued nourishment and repair of the body when grown is maintained. There is, of course, no point at which we can say that the life exists apart from its material substratum, but it is equally true to say that the developed body has been built up by and is the result of the initiative, activity, and dominance of the principle of life within it. The most highly evolved expression of this principle of life is that complex of will, thought, and feeling which we call mind or con- sciousness. It would seem, therefore, that, up to a point, it is literally true to say that the body is made by the soul within it, using the term soul to include the unconscious and subconscious as well as the conscious manifestations of the principle of life. Now, if we believe that the soul is a thing which has such an intrinsic value that, if the universe is a reason- able and tolerable universe, it must somehow or other be preserved, it is surely reasonable to suppose that it will not lose this capacity of building up for itself out of its environment a body which can be an organ of expression and activity adapted to its new environment. " When they shall rise from the dead," said our Lord, " they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels in Heaven." A body adapted to the environment of the life to come will be one which will not be adapted to eating, drinking, and the continuance of the species. Our present bodies have been developed during a long course of evolution throughout which the io8 IMMORTALITY iii environment has been such that the chief form of adap- tation demanded has been in regard to activities of this kind. Hence they are less perfectly adapted than we could v^ish to those higher activities of the soul whose possibilities and value have come into view comparatively late in the physical history of the race. Our bodies are the only means we have for the expression of our aspira- tions, our creative, our ethical and our aesthetic activi- ties, nevertheless they are felt to be clumsy and inefficient mediums of such expression just in proportion to the mental, moral, and aesthetic development of the indi- vidual. What ardent soul would not wish to construct for itself an organ of expression more subtly responsive to its needs and aspirations than the body of this life ? " Here in the body pent, absent from Thee I roam " expresses a feeling which in one form or another few have not experienced. A body, but one immune from the weaknesses and limitations and grosser wants of this world, is what we all should wish for. And, after all, is there really any solid reason why we should not do so .'' Matter, let me repeat, exists in subtler forms than flesh and blood. Bodies, as St. Paul says, may be of many different kinds. Speculations as to bodies made of ether or some such substance are too often nowa- days pursued into the realms of the fanciful and the absurd, nevertheless it is, I would submit, both un- philosophic and unscientific to reject entirely every such hypothesis as unworthy of serious consideration. Such speculations, no doubt, are to be found most frequently in books which portray the future life with a childish elaboration of grotesque and material details vouched for by fancied revelations, the greater part of which clearly rest either on misunderstanding of the true nature of phenomena like automatic writing ^ or medium- istic vision, or on conscious fraud, or on a mixture of the two. But is not the widespread popularity of such literature the natural and inevitable result of the fact that 1 Cf. pp. 257-262, 322 ff. Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 109 more sober teachers have been content, either to go on merely repeating a traditional Apocalyptic symbolism that has lost all meaning and attraction to the modern mind ; or, by insisting that the life of the next world must transcend the conditions of Time and Space, have offered mankind a conception which to the intellect is a puzzle and to the imagination an empty blank ? The attempt to reach too precise and detailed a conception of the nature of the *' spiritual " body is to be deprecated. Speculations on the subject may easily become so fanciful and uncertain that they tend to throw discredit on the very idea of a " spiritual " body at all. There is, however, one question which cannot be altogether avoided. If I ask " With what body do they come ? " I raise a question wider than that of the constituency, material or otherwise, of the future in- tegument of the soul. The body of youth is very different from the body of old age. Shall we be raised up young or old .'' In the resurrection of the dead, will a man meet his mother as he remembers her when he laid her grey-headed in the grave, or will it be as his father saw her in the prime of life at the marriage altar, or will it be as her grandmother knew her a baby in the cradle .'' In this life we recognise our friends by sight and touch and by the sound of the voice. Will recognition of persons in the next life also depend on something corresponding to sense impressions .'' I think a distinction should be drawn. We cannot imagine that in the life to come the Heavens will cease to declare the glory of God ; or that the " music of the spheres " (if such there be) should sound, and we be deaf. In the immensity of the universe there must be sights and sounds strange and beautiful yet to be revealed. And why may not the mountains, the sunsets, and the flowers of this earth still be open to our gaze — but seen as still more glorious by the undimmed eye and heightened perceptions of the body that shall be ? no IMMORTALITY iii The beauty and the glory may no longer come to us through five separate avenues of sense ; perhaps it may be through more than five, perhaps through less, but obviously in a life under conditions of Time and Space the capacity of aesthetic appreciation depends on there being something corresponding to sense perception. On the other hand, it is probable that the communica- tion between soul and soul on which recognition, mutual understanding, and fellowship depend will be far less dependent there than here on sense perception. Phenomena like Telepathy and thought-transference and the richer though more familiar experience of sympathy and fellowship in love and friendship, point already in the direction of a possibility of recognition and inter- communion without the need of sight or hearing. But if this be so, then in the next life, though we may expect to see and hear our loved ones, we shall not be dependent on seeing and hearing for knowledge of and communion with them. No changes in outward form will prevent immediate recog- nition of our friends ; and not only of them, but of those also whom we have never known in this life. Elijah and St. Paul will not look at all like the portraits of them in stained-glass windows ; but we shall be able to recognise them none the less. The Hour of Death Now might I do it pat, now he is praying ; And now I'll do 't. And so he goes to heaven ; And so am I revenged. Thus Hamlet declines to kill the king at prayer, he will rather wait till he can find him about some act That has no relish of salvation in 't ; Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven, And that his soul may be as damn'd and black As hell, whereto it goes. Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 1 1 1 The Idea of the supreme importance of the last few moments of life on earth appears conspicuously in the Prayer Book — in the Service for the Burial of the Dead, " Suffer us not at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee," in the petition in the Litany against " sudden death," and in that for deliverance " in the hour of death and in the day of judgment." In Roman Catholic theology, again, it is held that one who has committed any mortal sin must, if he dies unabsolved, inevitably go to Hell, This widespread and deeply rooted conviction as to the critical nature of the Hour of Death contains an element which, I would submit, is both true and important, and also an element which, I venture to think, is superstitious and immoral. AH is but lost, that living we bestow, If not well ended at our dying day. Oh man, have mind of that last bitter throe, For as the tree does fall, so lies it ever low.^ The haunting fear that at the last moment some little slip may cause a noble soul to trip and fall from Heaven to Hell has been the cause of untold misery and super- stition. While the idea that there will be a chance to make it all right on one's death-bed has helped many another to stifle the warnings of his conscience. It is time that Christian teaching repudiated far more openly and with far more emphasis than heretofore, all relics of the notion that a man's life will be judged not as a whole but solely by the thought or act of its last moment. Such a view revolts our sense of justice ; it is really inconsistent with a thoroughgoing belief in the goodness of God. And, if God is not just and not good — and that in a sense in which we can understand those words — what becomes of the hope of Immortality at all ? On the other hand, it is important to remember that the circumstances of death vary immensely. Very often, so far as we can see, death has in it no element '■ Spenser, Faerie ^lueenc, i. lo. 41. 112 IMMORTALITY III of crisis ; it is a mere passing away from this life which is hardly likely to modify the character at all. In other cases it occurs as the climax of a great moral, mental, or physical struggle. Now, the way in which we react to any great crisis in life, profoundly and permanently modifies our character — either for better or for worse. The circumstances of a man's last moments may be such that the very fact of facing death may be the expression of an act of choice of the highest moral value. The sailor who goes down with his ship after standing aside to let the women and children be saved, the soldier who dies heroically for the sake of what he believes to be the cause of right, are doing something else than merely dying. They are performing acts of supreme moral value ; and no one can perform any act having any degree of moral excellence at all without being permanently the better for it, whether he goes on living in this world or the next. And what applies to the sailor and the soldier applies also to many cases where death follows an accident or an illness — the way in which the soul reacts to the whole set of circum- stances, be they prolonged or be they short and sudden, which culminate in death, cannot but affect for better or for worse the state in which he makes a new begin- ning in the life to come. Again, the possibility of a death-bed repentance is not a thing to be ignored. Those who postpone repentance to their death-bed, commonly find it impossible to repent then ; for repentance means a real change of heart and not merely the conventional reaction of a frivolous nature terrified at the thought of Hell. But cases of real and genuine change of heart on the death- bed do occur ; and when they occur they constitute a real change of character which cannot but affect the moral level at which a man enters into the life of the world to come, and this, as will appear from what follows, is really a matter of no small moment. Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 113 The Resurrection — its Time and Manner " And the sea gave up the dead which were in it." Christian art has delighted in the picture of waves dividing, tombs bursting, and the dead coming forth, naked or in grave-clothes, just as they were when last seen by human eye, to stand before the Throne. Theology has added that if any had been consumed with fire, devoured by beasts or scattered to the winds, the bodies of these also will be restored " bone to his bone " as in Ezekiel's vision.^ This crude, but vividly dramatic, conception of the resurrection, ultimately derived from pre-Christian Apocalyptic, was held by many, though by no means all, of the early Fathers of the Church. But, as has been already shown, it is directly opposed not only to the clear implications of our Lord's teaching, but to the actual letter of St. Paul's — " that which thou sowest, thou sowest not the body that shall be" ; "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God." At the present day there is not, so far as I am aware, any theologian of repute by whom it would be maintained ; but it is still sufficiently prevalent, especially among the less educated, to be the cause of a widespread mis- understanding, and consequently of a complete rejection, of the real teaching of the New Testament, and too often, along with that, of any definite and effective belief in Immortality at all. The notion of a material identity between the present and the future bodies is one which ought to be far more emphatically repudiated by the Church than has hitherto been done ; but that does not mean that there is no connection or continuity between them. That connection, however, clearly cannot consist in identity of material particles ; for even in this life, so we are told, the material particles which constitute our 1 Ezek. xxxvii. In Ezekiel the original reference of the vision was not to the resurrection of the individual but to the restoration of the scattered remnants of Israel. I 114 IMMORTALITY iii bodies are completely replaced about once In every seven years. The principle of continuity and connec- tion between my body of to-day and my body of twenty years ago is to be found, not in its material particles, but in the form-giving, body -building principle of life within, i.e. in the soul. The soul is not, as the Gnostics thought, a mere prisoner in a body of alien nature. Body affects soul and soul affects body, and neither is complete without the other ; but, as argued above, the soul is the *' predominant partner." But if the principle of bodily continuity even in this world is found, not in any identity of material particles, but in the soul, it is obvious that the principle of con- tinuity between the terrestrial and the celestial body also must be looked for in the same direction. And if we ask how the connection we seek can be adequately supplied by the soul, the reply would be that it is in virtue of that power inherent in the life principle of determining form and of building up by assimilation from its environment a new body suited to that environ- ment — whether that environment be in this world or in the world beyond our sight. It may be asked whether some light on the relation of the present and the future body cannot be derived from the accounts in the Gospels of the Resurrection of our Lord. This would undoubtedly be the case if only we might assume that every detail in these stories was to be relied upon as authentic. That assumption, however, is one v/hich I personally am unable to make. The belief that our Lord showed Himself alive after His passion rests upon a stronger historical basis than is often supposed. Quite apart from the literary evidence, of which the most remarkable is the first- hand and detailed account of the various appearances by St. Paul (i Cor. xv. 3-8), the broad fact of the rise of Christianity has somehow to be explained. It is impossible to account for the fact that a body of peasants — crushed and disillusioned by the crucifixion of Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 115 the leader they had regarded as the destined Master of the world — started forthwith, in the face of incredulity, opposition, and bitter persecution, to preach with passion and conviction the Gospel that He was the Son of God soon to return in glory as Judge of all mankind, except on the hypothesis that some startling event or events had occurred which put it for them absolutely beyond doubt that He was still alive. But the historical value of the accounts given in the Gospels of these events is a very different matter. No doubt the bulk of the material in the first three Gospels has a high degree of historical value — of that a prolonged study of the subject has convinced me — but there are special reasons why I feel that too much confidence cannot be put in the details of the accounts they give of the Resurrection. Of these one of the most weighty is the unfortunate disappearance of the original conclusion of St. Mark, which is the earliest and (for purposes of narrative as distinct from discourse) the most reliable of the three. Another is the fact that, in spite of the clear teaching of our Lord and of St. Paul, the early Church continued to be largely dominated by the pre-Christian idea of a flesh and blood resurrection ; and there are clear indications that the influence of this preconceived idea has modified the tradition of what actually happened in this case. The most conspicuous, but not the only, instance of this would be the statement (Lk. xxiv. 39-43) that the Risen Master partook in the presence of the disciples of a piece of broiled fish, and invited them to handle a body of " flesh and bones." In view of this unreliability of the tradition in points of detail, it seems to me impossible to make use of it to elucidate our conception of the nature of the con- tinuity between our bodies in this and in the next life. On the contrary, my own inclination is to reverse the process and to approach the particular question of the relation between the crucified and the risen body of our ii6 IMMORTALITY m Lord Himself in the light of the conclusions arrived at above as to the general question of the continuity and connection between the " natural " and the " spiritual " body. I am far from wishing to dogmatise on the difficult subject of the manner of our Lord's Resurrec- tion, but in trying to frame a conception of it for myself, I am disposed to look first to His own teaching and that of St. Paul on the nature of the Resurrection- body. I cannot build upon the details of a tradition which there is reason to think has been influenced by the a priori conceptions of a generation which, in this as in other things, only partially understood either the Master or His greatest follower. There remains to ask how we may conceive the transition from the " natural " to the "spiritual " body to be effected. Three main answers to this question have been suggested. We may suppose that during our life on earth we are, although we know it not, building up an unseen celestial body which is a sort of counterpart of our earthly body but more exactly adapted to the expres- sion of the character which our thoughts and conduct are all the while developing. Or, again, we may hold that the death of this body is the very act of birth of a new body which will grow, possibly with immense rapidity, to be a perfect expression of the character to which we shall have by that time attained. In either case we may expect the body to reflect the nature of the self far more clearly than it does in this world. It will be fair and vigorous when the character is good, mean and weak when the character is bad. And in either case, if there is any growth or change of our character in the next life, it would be reflected and accompanied by a corresponding growth in the " spiritual " body. As between these two alternatives there seems little to choose, and little evidence on which to base a decision. The third possibility is one which, person- ally, I am disinclined to accept, but, as the weight of Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 117 tradition can be pleaded in its favour, it demands a serious consideration. Christian theology inherited from Jewish Apocalyptic the idea that after death there is an interval during which the soul waits in a disembodied state until the time is ripe for a general resurrection of all men for the Day of Judgment, and that its assumption of the risen body will be postponed till that date. The validity or otherwise of this view cannot be considered without a brief summary of its origin and history. As has already been pointed out, the Jews, until long after the return from Babylon, believed that the soul at death left the body and departed to a joyless existence in Sheol. The Apocalyptic writers started with the conception of Sheol as an accepted belief. Their own contribution to a more worthy conception of immor- tality was twofold. They moralised the conception of Sheol itself by making a considerable difference in the degree of happiness and the quality of life enjoyed there — a difference which depended on the degree of goodness or wickedness in the life that had been led on earth. In addition to this they taught that ultimately ail the spirits of the righteous would be recalled from Sheol altogether and would again assume their bodies to enjoy a fuller and more glorious life. This bodily resurrection was connected either with the establish- ment or with the end and final sublimation into Heaven of the Messianic Kingdom on earth. Thus the idea that there must be a long interval between death and resurrection in the case of any individual who dies before the General Resurrection of all men was partly due to the survival of an originally non-ethical concep- tion of life in Sheol as the next stage after death, and was partly due to the historical fact that beUef in the resurrection (i.e. in a full and worthy immortality for the individual) was to the mind of the average Jew inextricably bound up with the conception of the Messianic Kingdom upon earth. ii8 IMMORTALITY iii This idea, along with others, the early Church took, over more or less uncriticised from Jewish Apocalyptic. But there are two points worth noting. (i) The belief in a long interval between death and resurrection cannot claim to have behind it the authority of our Lord's own teaching. True, there are sayings of His which might appear to suggest it, but there are others which imply something much more like the view advocated above. A crucial saying is that to the Penitent Thief, " To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." Paradise in Jewish Apocalyptic (wherever the word does not refer to the earthly Garden of Eden) is one of the divisions of Heaven ; it does not mean a department of Sheol. Our Lord therefore, it would seem, expected that both He and the Thief would go straight to Heaven without any interval in Hades. The Parable of Dives and Lazarus, if we accept the current view that *' Abraham's bosom " is a synonym for Paradise, has precisely the same implication. Again, His argument to the Sadducees, that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the God of the dead but of the living, would lose half its force if we suppose He thought of them as being in a " disem- bodied state," i.e.^ as enjoying a less full and real life than they had done on earth. ^ No doubt the idea that our Lord Himself spent the interval between Good Friday and Easter morning in Hades is found in the primitive Church ; but that is easily explained as being the natural, indeed the inevitable, inference which minds trained in Jewish Apocalyptic would draw from the fact that the series of events which convinced the Apostles of His Resurrection began on the third day. The inference was a natural one ; it does not follow that it was correct.^ ' The idea that the new life of the transformed ^I'XV follows immediately after death, which appears in 4 Mace. ix. 22, xvii. 18, xviii. 23, may have been already current in some circles in Palestine. ^ The clause "descended into Hell" first appears in a local version of the Apostles' Creed about the year 400 a.d. Its probable reference is to the " raking of Hell," i.e. to the belief that during tlie interval between His Death and Resurrection Ill THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 119 (2) The question Is one on which St. Paul's views appear to have undergone a change. When he wrote the Epistles to the Thessalonians and the first Epistle to the Corinthians he expected to be alive at a visible Second Coming of Christ, and he taught that the dead would first be raised (evidently from Sheol) to meet the Lord. Later in life he writes to the Philippians of his desire "to depart and be with Christ." Whether or not he had faced the full implications of this remark we cannot be certain. But we know that he habitually thought of Christ and His celestial body as in Heaven, not in Sheol ; and the expectation that after death he will at once depart to be with Christ logically involves the complete abandonment of the old belief in any interval of waiting in Sheol at all before the entry into the resurrection life. Possibly, in another of its aspects, the idea of " the end of all things " is one which should still be retained. The realisation of the Kingdom of God on earth is as much an integral part of the Christian hope as is the entry of the individual into immortal life — and this can only be realised after a long process, which may possibly culminate in a final consummation before this planet becomes uninhabitable, if, as is generally supposed, this will sooner or later be the case. Again, if the dead still take an interest in this earth — and at the very least they cannot but be affected by the moral quality of those who keep leaving this world to enter the society of which they are members — there is a sense in which " they without us should not be made perfect," since the full achievement of the glory of Heaven must wait for the complete regeneration of Earth. But the corporate regeneration of society on earth and the entry by the individual into that state where our Lord preached to, converted and baptizc