A modern symposium. Subjects: The soul and future life, by Frederic Harrison [and others] and, The influence upon morality of a decline in religious belief, by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen [and others]

GIFT OF

MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

SUBJECTS:

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE.

FREDERIC HARRISON, R. H. BUTTON, PROF. HUXLEY

LORD BLACHFORD, HON. RODEN NOEL, LORD

SELBORNE, CANON BARRY, MR. W. R.

GREG, REV. BALDWIN BROWN,

DR. W. G. WARD ;

THE INFLUENCE UPON MORALITY OF A
DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF.

SIR JAMES FITZ JAMES STEPHEN, LORD SELBORNE, DR

MARTINEAU, MR. FREDERIC HARRISON, THE DEAN

OF ST. PAUL'S, THE DUKE OF ARGYLL, PROF.

CLIFFORD, DR. WARD, PROF. HUXLEY,

MR. R. H. BUTTON.

fetwt:
ROSE-BELFORD PUBLISHING COMPANY,

1878,

CONTENTS.

PAGE

PREFACE ,. 5

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE : —

Mr. Frederic Harrison 17

Mr. R. H. Button 62

Professor Huxley 71

Lord Blachford 84

Hon. Roden Noel 98

Lord Selborne 109

Canon Barry 113

Mr. W. R. Greg 126

Rev. Baldwin Brown 136

Dr. W. G. Ward 147

Mr. Frederic Harrison 155.

THE INFLUENCE UPON MORALITY OF A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS
BELIEF : —

Sir James Stephen .' . 187

Lord Selborne 191

Rev. Dr. Martineau 205

Mr. Frederic Harrison 214

The Dean of St. Paul's 221

The Duke of Argyll 224

Professor Clifford 229

' Dr. Ward 237

Professor Huxley 247

Mr. R. H. Button 253

Sir James Stephen 263

256253

PREFACE TO THIS EDITION.

A PROFOUND change, the signs of which are so legible
that he who runs may read, but the end whereof it is
hard to foresee, is coming over the religious belief of
Christendom. One of the elements of this metamor-
phosis is a growing tendency towards logical consistency.
It is becoming more and more generally seen that in re-
ligion man has but two guides, Reason and Authority ;
that the two are fundamentally antagonistic, but that
either may be adopted without landing us in irrecon-
cilable contradictions: in other words, that a searcher
after religious truth must do one of two things — either
submit himself unreservedly to the control of an Au-
thority claiming to be divine and infallible, or follow
Reason whithersoever it leads, regardless of consequences,
which may be safely left to take care of themselves. The
intellectual leaders of the age — the John Stuart Mills and
the Herbert Spencers — are naturally found on the one
side ; while the submissive flocks who in all times and
countries have rejoiced the hearts of all priesthoods,
whether Brahmin, Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan,
as inevitably gravitate to the other. These two opposite
tendencies are evidenced, on the one hand, by a very no-

V . V : •/• -:J

.;.•;.•,•••. . , « ' •
» - - / ' ' • i < • ••.',' ' * • '
6 ' •••*•• ••«•'• >'•'• PREFACE.

ticeable growth of Roman Catholicism and Ritualism in
England and the United States ; and, on the other, by an
even more remarkable spread of infidelity, and by the in-
creasing influence of rationalistic parties within the
orthodox Churches themselves. People are year by year
becoming more alive to the fact that Reason and Au-
thority are radically opposed, that the conflict between
them is a life and death struggle, that an absolute choice
must be made of one or the other, and that all attempts
at compromise, such as that sought by Evangelical Prot-
estantism, which in one breath proclaims the thoroughly
rationalistic doctrine of the right of private judgment,
and in the next seeks to fetter the free action of the
human mind by confining it within the shackles of iron-
clad creeds and confessions of faith, made three or four
hundred years ago by fallible mortals like ourselves, are
essentially irrational and doomed to inevitable failure.
In the English Church the three parties are represented
by the High Church, with the Ritualists at the extreme
wing ; the Broad Church, or Rationalisers ; and the Low
Church, or Evangelicals : or, as some irreverent wit has
christened them, the Attitudinarians, the Latitudinarians,
and the Platitudinarians.

The Churches of Authority, whether Roman, Ritualist,
or High Anglican, and the Churches of Compromise,
whether Lutheran, Low Anglican, Presbyterian, Metho-
dist, or Baptist, need no more than a passing allusion here.
They are merely seeking to walk in the old paths. Semper
eadem might be chosen as their motto by all, as it has been

PREFACE. 7

by one of them. It is when we come to the other section
of the religious world, — to those who, with a single eye
to TRUTH, choose Reason as their guide, and follow it to
its logical outcome, — that we see how vast is the change
that is coming over the belief of Christendom. It is not
merely that such subjects as the inspiration of the Bible,
the divinity of Christ, the existence of Hell, and the doc-
trines of the Atonement and Eternal Damnation are being
questioned with a vigour and pertinacity to which the
past affords no parallel. These dogmas were questioned
by Voltaire and Paine and the other Deists of the eigh-
teenth century. The change is even more fundamental :
it is, in the extremest sense, radical ; so that a book which
caused so great a ferment when it originally appeared as
" The Age of Reason," would, were it now published for
the first time, create so little remark as almost to fall
still-born from the press. Intellectual Christendom has
travelled a long way since that work was written.
Among the subjects now being discussed with a keenness
and searching rigour unknown in former times are ques-
tions so fundamental as the existence and personality of
God, and the existence and immortality of the human
soul. Reason is doing its work thoroughly ; it is digging
down to the very foundations of religion, with the full
and passionate determination that the faith of the future
—be it Neo-Christianity or any other — shall be founded
on a rock, not on a quicksand. The Reformation of the
nineteenth century is an infinitely more portentous phe-
nomenon than its forerunner of the sixteenth. It is no

8 PREFACE.

mere reform. The question now is, whether Christianity
shall continue to exist, even with such radical changes
as will make it virtually a new thing ; or whether it
shall be replaced by an altogether new edifice built upon
a scientific foundation of positive, verifiable truth.

The leading subject dealt with in this volume is one of
those root questions above referred to, which lie at the
bottom of all religion — the existence and immortality of
the human soul. The present discussion is perhaps the
noblest, as it is certainly the weightiest contribution
towards the solution of the momentous question at issue
that has ever appeared in print, not even excepting the
immortal " Phsedo " of Plato ; and the numerous inci-
dental direct or indirect allusions to it which have been
made on this continent as well as in England, are proofs
of the profound impression which it has created. Nor is
this widespread interest a matter for wonder. To every
human being who can at times lift himself above the
cares and trivialities of this life, the question, " If a man
die, shall he live again ? " must ever be the most solemn
and heart-searching. It would, of course, be absurd to
pretend that "the Great Enigma" is 'at last solved. Prob-
ably it is insoluble ; or, at least, will remain so until the
alleged facts of Spiritualism are proved beyond cavil, of
which there appears to be no immediate prospect; or
until some "traveller" from that" undiscovered country"
of which Hamlet speaks so mournfully, returns and tells
us of his wanderings, and of the glories and joys, and
mayhap also the sorrows, of that unknown land. But if

PREFACE. 9

the problem be insoluble it is well to know even so much ;
it is well to recognise that man is not a god, that his ca-
pacities are not infinite, and that it is mere childish-
ness perversely to war against the established limits of
his intelligence. We shall then concern ourselves with
matters within the scope of our powers, and cease to
waste our energies in vain repinings because we cannot
pierce behind a veil, which, if it be impenetrable, we can
at least believe has been made so for some wise and holy
. purpose. If the discussion which is here reprinted leads
only to this result, it will not have been had in vain.

The other subject touched upon in this volume — the
influence upon morality of a decline in religious belief — is
one which would inevitably come up for discussion in
a time of religious transition. Such periods have
always been marked by a certain amount of moral
laxity. The age of the Reformation was so, as witness
the excesses of the Anabaptists and other fanatics and
enthusiasts of that day ; and something of the same sort
may be in store for us now. It seems self-evident that a
weakening in the foundation must lead to a weakening
in the superstructure ; and where morality is based upon
religion, as to a large extent it is with Christianity, any-
thing which affects the latter must inevitably react upon
the former. But the evil will be only temporary, and
will be more than compensated by a greater good. Mo-
rality must gain in the end by being placed upon a true
foundation instead of a false one. If the result of the
present yeasty ferment be the evolution of a new religion,

10 PREFACE.

that religion will, we may be sure, be truer and better
than the old one ; and the morality based upon it must
share in the benefit. But the question among scientific
moralists now is, whether morality shall not be altogether
removed from off its old religious foundation, and placed
upon one of its own, to wit, the human conscience, with
the well-being of man and all other sentient creatures for
its aim. To the scientific moralist it seems better that a
man should refrain from doing an evil act because he him-
self knows or feels it to be evil, rather than because some
one else tells him it is evil ; and, on the other hand, that
it will be a gain to get rid of the false idea — if it be a
false one — that the human conscience is, in some peculiar
and special sense, the voice of God and therefore infallible,
and replace it by the true idea — if it be a true one — that
the conscience is a mere human faculty, imperfect like
the rest of man's faculties, In infallibility there are no
degrees, so that, if the former theory be true, the con-
science of a Feejee Island savage or^a Bushman is on a
level with that of a Buddha or a Plato. Both are equally
divine, both equally infallible. . If, however, the rival
theory be true, that the conscience is a human faculty in
precisely the same sense that the intellect and the aesthetic
instinct are human faculties, it follows that the moral
sense — or that power, by whatever name it is called, by
which we judge an act to be right or wrong— is more
developed in the civilized man than in the savage, just as
it is more developed in the man than in the child ; and
that even in the civilized man it is finite, imperfect, fal-

PREFACE. 11

lible, and consequently susceptible of education, improve-
ment, progress, evolution. It is obvious that a searching
enquiry into the relation of morality to religion must be
of the gravest practical importance in a time of such vital
change as that in which we live.

Both questions treated of in these pages are discussed
from widely different standpoints, ranging from Roman
Catholicism at the one extreme to Positivism at the other.
One feature of the controversy might well be imitated
on this side of the Atlantic — that is, the noble tolerance,
gentleness, and courtesy shown towards the most oppo-
site views, however manifestly distasteful. The nearest
approach to warmth of temper occurs, curiously enough,
in the vigorous passage-at-arms between Mr. Harrison and
Professor Huxley, who, on the general question, are almost
at one. The discussions, or " Symposia," originally appeared
in the Nineteenth Century, & monthly review recently start-
ed in London, under the editorship of Mr. James Knowles,
formerly editor of the Contemporary. A brief sketch of
the different contributors or disputants may not be with-
out interest to readers in this country.

Mr. Frederic Harrison is one of the leaders of the Eng-
lish Positivists or Comtists, and one of the ablest review-
writers now living. He has been for years a prominent
contributor to the Fortnightly and other reviews, on poli-
tical, economical, and theological questions. A number
of his essays were recently collected and published in
book form. He has also published a translation of

12 PREFACE.

" Social Statics," being the second volume of Comte's
" Positive Polity."

Mr. Richard Holt Hutton is the editor of the London
Spectator, and the author of a number of literary and
theological essays which were published in 1871 in two
volumes. He is one of the subtlest literary critics of the
day, his masterly essay on Goethe, in particular, having
been pronounced by high authority to be the finest piece
of biographical criticism that exists in any language. In
theology he is Broad-Church, of the school of the late
F. D. Maurice.

Professor Huxley is well-known as one of the greatest
of living biologists and one of the ablest expounders of
popular science. Of his numerous works the best known
are his " Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews," published
in 1870, and his •" Critiques and Addresses," published in
1873. In science he is an uncompromising advocate of
the Darwinian theory, and of Evolution in general ; in
philosophy he is a sensationalist of the school of Locke,
Descartes, Mill, and Spencer ; and in religion apparently
holds the new and growing creed of Agnosticism.

Lord Blachford, better known as Sir Frederick Rogers,
is a lawyer by profession, having been called to the Eng-
lish bar in 1836. He was Permanent Under-Secretary of
State for the Colonies, from 1860 till 1871, when he was
appointed Privy Councillor, and raised to the peerage
under the title of Baron Blachford.

The Hon. Jloden Noel is a son of the first Earl of

PREFACE. 13

Gainsborough, was born in 1834, and educated at Trinity
College, Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1858.
He was groom to the Privy Chamber of Her Majesty
from 1867 to 1871. He is a voluminous writer, and his
poetry is highly spoken of.

Lord Selborne, formerly Sir Roundell Palmer, acquired
his present title when made Lord-Chancellor in 1872.
He was one of the counsel on behalf of the English Gov-
ernment in the arbitration at Geneva, on the Alabama
claims. He edited the well-known " Book of Praise, from
the best English Hymn writers," published in 1862.

Canon Barry is the author of numerous works, includ-
ing an " Introduction to the Old Testament;" "Notes on
the Gospels;" " Life of Sir C. Barry;" " Cheltenham Col-
lege Sermons;" "Notes on the Catechism;" and "Religion
for Every Day : Lectures to Men." He was Head Mas-
ter of Leeds Grammar School for eight years ; in 1862
was appointed Principal of Cheltenham College, in
1868 Principal of Bang's College, London, and in 1871 a
Canon of Worcester. He is a son of Sir Charles Barry, the
eminent architect.

Mr. William Rathbone Greg is one of the best known
and most eloquent theological writers of the day. His
"Creed of Christendom," though written over thirty
years ago, still ranks as the ablest work of its kind in the
language ; so able indeed that no satisfactory reply to it
has ever been forthcoming ; a fact which, as Mr. F. W.
Newman has remarked, goes far to show that it is un-

14- PREFACE.

answerable. His other works are " Enigmas of Life ; "
" Literary and Social Judgments ; " " Political Problems ; "
" Essays on Political and Social Science;" and "Rocks
Ahead." Mr. Greg was a member of the English Civil
Service, having been appointed a Commissioner of Cus-
toms in 1856 ; and Controller of Her Majesty's Sta-
tionery Office, in 1864, an office from which he retired
last year.

The Rev. James Baldwin Brown is a leading Indepen-
dent clergyman, of Brixton, London ; and a voluminous
author. His principal works are "The Home Life in the
.Light of its Divine Idea," which has passed through five
editions ; " The Divine Life in Man ; " " The Soul's Exo-
dus and Pilgrimage;" "The Christian Policy of Life;"
" The Higher Life : its Reality, Experience, and Destiny;"
and " The Doctrine of Annihilation, in the Light of the
Gospel of Love." In theology he belongs to the liberal
or " broad " school.

Dr. W. G. Ward is a leading Roman Catholic writer,
and the editor of the Dublin Review, a quarterly, and the
ablest Roman Catholic periodical published in the English
language.

Sir James Fitzjames Stephen is one of the ablest jurists
in England, and the author of " The Law of Evidence ; "
" The Indian Evidence Act ; " and other legal works ; also
of a notable work on " Liberty, Equality, and Frater-
nity," intended as an answer to Mill's famous essay on
Liberty.

PKEFACE. 15

The Rev. James Martineau is a leading clergyman of the
Unitarian denomination, and was appointed Principal of
Manchester New College, London, in 1868. He is the
author of numerous works, including, among many others,
" The Rationale of Religiouf Enquiry ; " " Studies of
Christianity;" " Essays, Philosophical and Theological;"
and " Religion as affected by Modern Materialism." He
was one of the founders of the National Review. In
1875 the University of Ley den conferred upon him the
honorary degree of D.D, He is a brother of the late
Harriet Martineau.

The Dean of St. Paul's (the Very Rev. Richard William
Church) was born in 1815, educated at Oxford, and took
his degree in 1836. In 1854 he published a volume of
essays which at once established his reputation as a
scholarly and graceful writer. Two of these essays were
afterwards expanded into a separate volume, and pub-
lished under the title of " The Life of St. Anselm." In
1869 he published a volume of Sermons on the relation
of Christianity to Civilization; and he is also the author
of the "Sacred Poetry of Early Religions." He was
appointed Dean of St. Paul's in 1871.

The Duke of Argyll is a prominent Scottish Liberal
statesman, having been a member of several administra ^
tions, the last office held by him being Secretary of State
for India, in Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet. He is also well
known as the author of an able work on " The Reign of
Law," which ; has passed through many editions ; and a

16 PREFACE.

small work on " Primeval Man." In 1861 he was elected
President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1871 his
eldest son, the Marquis of Lome, married the Princess
Louise.

Prof. Clifford is a mathematician by profession, and
a frequent contributor to the Fortnightly and other
reviews. In theology he may perhaps fairly be classed
with the Positivist school.

F. T. J.

TORONTO, 2nd April, /.CN.

A MODEEN SYMPOSIUM.

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE.

FREDERIC HARRISON.

HOW many men and women continue to give a
mechanical acquiescence to the creeds, long after
they have parted with all definite theology, out of
mere clinging to some hope of a future life, in however dim
and inarticulate a way ! And how many, whose own
faith is too evanescent to be put into words, profess a
sovereign pity for the practical philosophy wherein there
is no place for their particular yearning for a heaven to
come ! They imagine themselves to be, by virtue of this
very yearning, beings of a superior order, and, as if they
inhabited some higher zone amid the clouds, they flout
sober thought as it toils in the plain below ; they counsel
it to drown itself in sheer despair or take to evil living,
they rebuke it with some sonorous household word from
the Bible or the poets — " Eat, drink, for to-morrow ye
die" — "Were it not better not to be?" And they as-
sume the question closed when they have murmured tri-
umphantly, " Behind the veil — begird the veil."

18 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

They are right, and they are wrong : right to cling to a
hope of something that shall endure beyond the grave ;
wrong in their rebukes to men who in a different spirit
cling to this hope as earnestly as they. We too turn our
thoughts to that which is behind the veil. We strive to
pierce its secret with eyes, we trust, as eager and as fearless ;
and even it may be more patient in searching for the
realities beyond the gloom. That which shall come after
is no less solemn to us than to you. We ask you, there-
fore : What do you "know of it ? Tell us ; we will tell
you what we hope. Let us reason together in sober and
precise prose. Why should this great end, staring at all
of us along the vista of each human life, be forever a
matter for dithyrambic hypotheses and evasive tropes ?
What in the language of clear sense does any one of us
hope for after death : what precise kind of life, and on
what grounds ? It is too great a thing to be trusted to
poetic ejaculations, to be made a field for Pharisaic scorn.
At least be it acknowledged that a man may think of the
soul and of death and of future life in ways strictly posi-
tive (that is, without ever quitting the region of evi-
nce), and yet may make the world beyond the grave
the centre to himself of moral life. He will give the
ial life a place as high, and will dwell upon the
proffiises of that which is after death as confidently as
the believers in a celestial resurrection. And he can do
>ut trusting his all to a perhaps so vague that
-m of doubt Qan wreck it, but trusting, rather, to a
of solid knowledge, which no man of any school
denies to be true so fav as it goes.

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 19

THERE ought4 to be no misunderstanding at the" outset
as to what we who trust in positive methods mean by the
word "soul," or by the words " spiritual," "materialist," and
" future life." We certainly would use that ancient and
beautiful word soul, provided there be no misconception
involved in its use. We assert as fully as any theologian
the supreme importance of spiritual life. We agree with
the theologians that there is current a great deal of real
materialism, deadening to our higher feeling. And we
deplore the too common interference to the world beyond
the grave. And yet we find the centre of our religion
and our philosophy in man and man's earth.

To follow out this use of old words, and to see that
there is no paradox in thus using them, we must go back
a little to general principles. The matter turns altogether
upon habits of thought. What seems to you so shocking
will often seem to us so ennobling, and what seems to us
flimsy will often seem to you sublime, simply because our
minds have been trained in different logical methods ;
and hence you will call that a beautiful truth which
strikes us as nothing, but a random guess. It is idle, of
course, to dispute about our respective logical methods,
or to pit this habit of mind in a combat with that. But
we may understand each other better if we can agree to
follow out the moral and religious temper, and learn that
it is quite compatible with this or that mental procedure.

20 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.^

It may teach us again that ancient truth, how much
human nature there is in men ; what fellowship there is
in our common aspirations and moral forces ; how we all
live the same spiritual life ; while the philosophies are
but the ceaseless toil of the intellect seeking again and
again to explain more clearly that spiritual life, and to
furnish it with reasons for the faith that is in it.

This would be no place to expound or to defend the
positive method of thought. The question before us is
simply, if this positive method has a place in the spiritual
world or has anything to say about a future beyond the
grave. Suffice it that we mean by the positive method
of thought (and we will now use the term in a sense not
limited to the social construction of Comte) that method
which would base life and conduct, as well as knowledge,
upon such evidence as can be referred to logical canons
of proof , which would place all that occupies man in a
homogenous system of law. On the other hand, this
method turns aside from hypotheses not to be tested by
any known logical canon familiar to science, whether the
hypothesis claims support from intuition, aspiration or
general plausibility. And, again, this method turns aside
from ideal standards which avow themselves to be lawless,
which profess to transcend the field of law. We say, life
and conduct shall stand for us wholly on a basis of law,
and must rest entirely in that region of science (not
physical but moral and social science) where we are free
to use our intelligence in the methods known to us as
intelligible logic, methods which the intellect can analyze.

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 21

When you confront us with hypotheses, however sublime
and however affecting, if they cannot be stated in terras
of the rest of our knowledge, if they are disparate to that
world of sequence and sensation which to us is the ulti-
mate base of all our real knowledge, then we shake our
heads and turn aside. I say, turn aside ; and I do not
say, dispute. We cannot disprove the suggestion that
there are higher channels to knowledge in our aspirations
or our presentiments, as there might be in our dreams
by night as well as by day ; we courteously salute the
hypotheses, as we might love our pleasant dreams ; we
seek to prove no negatives. We do not pretend there are
no mysteries ; we do not frown on the poetic splendours of
the fancy. There is a world of beauty and of pathos in
the vast ether of the Unknown in which this solid ball
hangs like a speck. Let all who list, who have true
imagination and not mere paltering with a loose fancy
—let them indulge their gift, and tell us what their
soaring has unfolded. Only let us not waste life in crude
dreaming, or loosen the knees of action. For life and
conduct, and the great emotions which react on life and
conduct, we can place nowhere but in the same sphere of
knowledge, under the same canons of proof, to which we
intrust all parts of our life. We will ask the same
philosophy which teaches us the lessons of civilization to
guide our lives as responsible men ; and we go again to
the same philosophy which orders our lives to explain to
us the lessons of death. We crave to have the supreme
hours of our existence lighted up by thoughts and motives,

A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

such as we can measure beside the common acts of our
daily existence, so that each hour of our life up to the
grave may be linked to the life beyond the grave as one
continuous whole, " bound each to each by natural piety."
And so, wasting no sighs over the incommensurable
possibilities of the fancy, we will march on with a firm
step till we knock at the gates of death ; bearing always
the same human temper, in the same reasonable beliefs,
and with the same earthly hopes of prolonged activity
among our fellows, with which we set out gayly in the
morning of life.

When we come to the problem of the human soul, we
simply treat man as man, and we study him in accordance
with our human experience. Man is a marvellous and
complex being, we may fairly say of complexity past any
hope of final analysis of ours, fearfully and wonderfully
made to the point of being mysterious. But incredible
progress has been won in reading this complexity, in re-
ducing thi? mystery to order. Who can say that man
shall ever be anything but an object of awe and of un-
fathomable pondering to. himself 1 Yet he would be false
to all that is great in him, if he decried what he already has
achieved toward self-knowledge. Man has probed his own
corporeal and animal life, and is each day arranging it in
more acciirate adjustment with the immense procession
of animal life around him. He has grouped the intel-
lectual powers, he has traced to their relations the func-
tions of mind, and ordered the laws of thought into a
logic of a regular kind. He has analyzed and grouped

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 23

the capacities of action, the moral faculties, the instincts
and emotions. And not only is the analysis of these
tolerably clear, but the associations and correlations of
each with the other are fairly made manifest. At the
lowest, we are all assured that every single faculty of man
is capable of scientific study. Philosophy simply means,
that every part of human nature acts upon a method, and
does not act chaotically, inscrutably, or in mere caprice.

But then we find throughout man's knowledge of him-
self signs of a common type. There is organic unity in
the whole. These laws of the separate functions, of body,
mind, or feeling, have visible relations to each other, are
inextricably woven in with each other, act and react,
depend and interdepend, one on the other. There is no
such thing as an isolated phenomenon, nothing sui
generis, in our entire scrutiny of human nature. What-
ever the complexities of it, there is through the whole a
solidarity of a single unit. Touch the smallest fibre of
the corporeal man, and in some infinitesimal way we may
watch the effect in the moral man, and we may trace this
effect up into the highest pinnacles of the spiritual life.
On the other hand, when we rouse chords of the most
glorious ecstasy of the soul, we may see the vibration of
them, visibly thrilling upon the skin. The very animals
about us can perceive the emotion. Suppose a martyr
nerved to the last sacrifice, or a saint in the act of reliev-
ing a sufferer, the sacred passion within him is stamped
in the eye, or plays about the mouth, with a connection
as visible as when we see a muscle acting on a bone, or

24 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

the brain affected by the supply of blood. Thus from
the summit of spiritual life to the base of corporeal life,
whether we pass up or down the gamut of human forces,
there runs one organic correlation and sympathy of parts.
Man is one, however compound. Fire his conscience and he
blushes. Check his circulation, and he thinks wildly, or
he thinks not at all. Impair his secretions, and moral
sense is dulled, discoloured, or depraved ; his aspirations
flag, his hope, love, faith reel. Impair them still more,
and he becomes a brute. A cup of drink degrades his
moral nature below that of a swine. Again, a violent
emotion of pity or horror makes him vomit. A lancet
will restore him from delirium to clear thought. Excess
of thought will waste his sinews. Excess of muscular
exercise will deaden thought. An emotion will double
the strength of his muscles. And at last the prick of a
needle or a grain of mineral will in an instant lay to rest
forever his body and its unity, and all the spontaneous
activities of intelligence, feeling, and action, with which
that compound organism was charged.

These are the obvious and ancient observations about
the human organism. But modern philosophy and
science have carried these hints into complete explana-
tions. By a vast accumulation of proof positive, thought
at last has established a distinct correspondence between
every process of thought or of feeling and some corporeal
phenomenon. Even when we cannot explain the precise
relation, we can show that definite correlations exist.
To positive methods, every fact of thinking reveals itself

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 25

as having functional relations with molecular change.
Every fact of will or of feeling is in similar relation with
kindred molecular facts. And all these facts, again, have
some relation to each other. Hence we have established
an organic correspondence in alFmanifestations of human
life. To think implies a corresponding adjustment of mo-
lecular activity. To feel emotion implies nervous organs
of feeling. To will implies vital cerebral hemispheres.
Observation, reflection, memory, imagination, judgment
have all been analyzed out, till they .stand forth as func-
tions of living organs in given conditions of the organ-
ism, that is in a particular, environment. The whole
range of man's powers, from the finest spiritual sensibility
down to a mere automatic contraction, falls into one co-
herent scheme ; being all the multiform functions of a
living organism in presence of its encircling conditions.

But, complex as it is, there is no confusion in this
whole when conceived by positive methods. No rational
thinker now pretends that imagination is simply the
vibration of a particular fibre. No man can explain
volition by purely anatomical study. While keeping in
view the due relations between moral and corporeal facts,
we distinguish moral from biologic facts, moral science
from biology. Moral science is based upon biological
science ; but it is not comprised in it ; it has its own
special facts and its own special methods, though always
in the sphere of law. Just so the mechanism of the body
is based upon mechanics, would be unintelligible but for
mechanics, but could not be explained by mechanics alone ,

26 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

or by anything but a complete anatomy and biology. To
explain the activity of the intellect as included in the activ-
ity of the body, is as idle as to explain the activity of the
body as included in the motion of solid bodies. And it is
equally idle to explain the activity of the will, or the
emotions, as included in the theory of the intellect. All
the spheres of human life are logically separable, though
they are organically interdependent. Now the combined
'activity of the human powers organized around the high-
est of them we call the soul. The combination of intel-
lectual and moral energy which is the source of religion,
we call the spiritual life. The explaining the spiritual
side of life by physical instead of moral and spiritual
reasoning, we call materialism.

The consensus of the human faculties, which we call
the soul, comprises all sides of human nature according to
one homogeneous theory. But the intuitional methods
ask us to insert into the midst of this harmonious system
of parts, as an underlying explanation of it, an indes-
cribable entity ; and to this hypothesis, since the days of
Descartes (or possibly of Aquinas), the good old word
soul has been usually restricted. How and when this
entity ever got into the organism, how it abides in it,
what are its relations to it, how it acts on it, why and
when it goes out of it — all is mystery. We ask for some
evidence of the existence of any such entity ; the answer
is, we must imagine it in order to explain the organism.
We ask what are its methods, its laws, its affinities ; we
are told that it simply has none, or none knowable. We

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 27

ask for some description of it, of its course of develop-
ment, for some single fact about it, statable in terms of
the rest of our knowledge; the reply is — mystery,
absence of everything so statable or cognizable, a line of
poetry, or an ejaculation. It has no place, no matter, no
modes, neither evolution nor decay : it is without body,
parts or passions ; a spiritual essence, incommensurable,
incomparable, indescribable. Yet, with all this, it is, we
are told, an entity, the most real and perfect of all en-
tities short of the divine.

If we ask why we are to assume the existence of some-
thing of which we have certainly no direct evidence, and
which is so wrapped in mystery that for practical pur-
poses it becomes a nonentity, we are told that we need to
conceive it, because a mere organism cannot act as we see
the human organism act. Why not ? They say there
must be a principle within as the cause of this life. But
what do we gain by supposing a " principle ? " The " prin-
ciple " only adds a fresh difficulty. Why should a " prin-
ciple," or an entity, be more capable of possessing these
marvelous human powers than the human organism?
Besides we shall have to imagine a " principle " to ex-
plain not only why a man can feel affection, but also why
a dog can feel affection. If a mother cannot love her
child — merely qua human organism — unless her love be a
manifestation of an eternal soul, how can a* cat love her
kittens — merely qua feline organism — without an imma-
terial principle or soul ? Nay, we shall have to go on to
invent a principle to account for a vtree growing, or a

28 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

thunder-storm roaring, and for every force of Nature.
Now this very supposition was made in a way by the
Greeks, and to some extent by Aquinas, the author of
the vast substructure of anima underlying all Nature,
of which our human soul is the fragment that alone sur-
vives. One by one the steps in this series of hypothesis
have faded away. Greek and mediaeval philosophy im-
agined that every activity resulted not from the body
which exhibited the activity, but from some mysterious
entity inside it. If marble was hard, it had a " form "
in forming its hardness ; if a blade of grass sprang up, it
had a vegetative spirit mysteriously impelling it ; if a dog
obeyed his master, it had an animal spirit mysteriously
controlling its organs. The mediaeval physicists, as
Moliere reminds us, thought that opium induced sleep
quia est in eo virtus dormitiva. Nothing was allowed
to act as it did by its own force or vitality. In every
explanation of science we were told to postulate an inter-
calary hypothesis. Of this huge mountain of figment,
the notion of man's immaterial soul is the one feeble
residuum.

Orthodoxy has so long been accustomed to take itself
for granted, that we are apt to forget how very short a
period of human history this sublimated essence has been
current. From Plato to Hegel the idea has been continu-
ally taking fresh shapes. There is not a trace of it in the
Bible in its present sense, and nothing in the least akin
to it in the Old Testament. Till the time of Aquinas
theories of a material soul, as a sort of gas, were

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 29

never eliminated ; and until the time of Descartes, our
present ideas of the antithesis of soul and body were
never clearly defined. Thus the Bible, the Fathers, and
the mediaeval Church, as was natural when philosophy
was in a state of flux, all represented the soul in very
different ways ; and none of these ways were those of a
modern divine. It is a curious instance of the power of
words that the practical weight of the popular religion is
now hung on a metaphysical hypothesis, which itself
has been in vogue for only a few centuries in the history
of speculation, and which is now become to those trained
in positive habits of thought a mere juggle of ideas.

We have in all this sought only to state what we mean
by man's soul, and what we do not mean. But we make
no attempt to prove a negative, or to demonstrate the non-
existence of the supposed entity. Our purpose now is a very
different one. We start out from this — that this positive
mode of treating man is in this, as in other things, morally
sufficient ; that it leaves no voids and chasms in human
life ; that the moral and religious sequelae which are
sometimes assigned to its teaching have no foundation in
fact. We say that, on this basis, not only have we an en
trance into the spiritual realm, but that we have a firmer
hold on the spiritual life than on the basis of hypotheses.
On this theory, the world beyond the grave is in closer
and truer relation to conduct than on the spiritualist the-
ory. We look on man as man, not as man plus a hetero-
geneous entity. And we think that we lose nothing, but
gain much thereby, in the religious as well as in the moral

30 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

world. We do not deny the conceivable existence of the
heterogeneous entity. But we believe that human nature
is adequately equipped on human and natural grounds
without this disparate nondescript.

Let us be careful to describe the method we employ as
that which looks on man as man, and repudiate the vari-
ous labels, such as materialists, physical, imspiritual
methods, and the like, which are used as equivalent for
the rational or positive method of treating man. The meth-
od of treating man as man insists, at least as much as any
other method, that man has a moral, emotional, religious
life, different in kind from his material and practical life,
but perfectly coordinate with that physical life, and to be
studied on similar scientific methods. The spiritual sym-
pathies of man are undoubtedly the highest part of human
nature ; and our method condemns as loudly as any system
physical explanations of spiritual life. We claim the right
to use the term " soul," " spiritual," and the like, in their
natural meaning. In the same way, we think that there
are theories which are justly called " materialist," that
there are physical conceptions of human nature which are
truly dangerous to morality, to goodness, and religion. It
is sometimes thought to be a sufficient proof of the reality
of this heterogeneous entity of the soul, that otherwise we
must assume the most spiritual emotions of man to be a
secretion of cerebral matter, and that, whatever the diffi-
culties of conceiving the union of soul and body, it is
something less difficult than the conceiving that the
nerves think, or the tissues love. We repudiate such

THE SOCJL AND FUTURE LIFE. 31

language as much as any one can, but there is
another alternative. It is possible to invest with
the highest dignity the spiritual life of mankind by
treating it as an ultimate fact, without trying to find
an explanation for it either in a perfectly unthinkable
hypothesis or in an irrational and debasing physicism.

We certainly do reject, as earnestly as any school can,
that which is most fairly called materialism, and we will
second every word of those who cry out that civilization is.
in danger if the workings of the human spirit are to become"
questions of physiology, and if death is the end of a man,
as it is the, end of a sparrow. We not only assent to such
protests, but we see very pressing need for making them.
It is a corrupting doctrine to open a brain, and to tell us that
devotion is a definite molecular change in this and that
convolution of gray pulp, and that if man is the first of
living animals, he passes away after a short space like the
beasts that perish. And all doctrines, more or less, do tend
to this, which offer physical theories as explaining moral
phenomena, which deny man a spiritual in addition to a
moral nature, which limit his moral life to the span of his
bodily organism, and which have no place for " religion "
in the proper sense of the word.

It is true that in this age, or rather in this country, we
seldom hear the stupid and brutal materialism which pre-
tends that subtilties of thought and emotion are simply
this or that agitation in some gray matter, to be ulti-
mately expounded by the professors of gray matter. But
this is hardly the danger which besets our time. The true

32 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

materialism to fear is the prevailing tendency of anatomical
habits of mind or specialist habits of mind to intrude into
the regions of religion and philosophy. A man whose
whole thoughts are absorbed in cutting up dead monkeys
and live frogs has no more business to dogmatize about
religion than a mere chemist to improvise a zoology. Bio-
logical reasoning about spiritual things is as presumptuous
as the theories of an electrician about the organic facts of
nervous life. We live amid a constant and growing usur-
pation of science in the province of philosophy ; of biology
in the province of sociology ; of physics in that of religion.
Nothing is more common than the use of the term science,
when what is meant is merely physical and physiological
science, not social and moral science. The arrogant attempt
to dispose of the deepest moral truths of human nature on
a bare physical or physiological basis is almost enough to
justify the insurrection of some impatient theologians
against science itself. It is impossible not to sympathize
with men who at least are defending the paramount claim
of the moral laws and the religious sentiment. The solu-
tion of the dispute is, of course, that physicists and theo-
logians have each hold of a partial truth. As the latter
insist, the grand problem of man's life must be ever re-
ferred to moral and social argument ; but then, as the
physicist insists, this moral and social argument can only
be built up on a physical and physiological foundation.
The physical part of science is, indeed, merely the vestibule
to social, and thence to moral science ; and of science in
all its forms the philosophy of religion alone holds the key.

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 33

The true materialism lies in the habit of scientific specialists
to neglect all philosophical and religious synthesis. It is
marked by the ignoring of religion, the passing by on the
other side, and shutting the eyes to the spiritual history
of mankind. The spiritual traditions of mankind, a su-
preme philosophy of life and thought, religion in the proper
sense of the word, all these have to play a larger and ever
larger part in human knowledge ; not as we are so often
told, and so commonly is assumed, a waning and vanishing
part. And it is in this field, the field which has so long
been abandoned to theology, that Positivism is prepared
to meet the theologians. We at any rate do not ask them
to submit religion to the test of the scalpel or the electric
battery. It is true that we base our theory of society and
our theory of morals, and hence our religion itself, on a
curriculum of physical and especially of biological science.
It is true that our moral and social science is but a pro-
longation of these other sciences. But, then, we insist
that it is not science in the narrow sense which can order
our beliefs, but philosophy ; not science which can solve
our problems of life, but religion. And religion demands
for its understanding the religious mind and the spiritual
experience. *

Does it seem to any one a paradox to hold such language,
and yet to have nothing to say about the immaterial en-
tity which may assume to be the cause behind this spirit-
ual life ? The answer is, that we occupy ourselves with
this spiritual life as an ultimate fact ; and, consistently
with the whole of our philosophy, we decline to assign a
3

34 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

cause at all. We argue, with the theologians, that it is
ridiculous to go to the scalpel for an adequate account of
a mother's love ; but we do not think it is explained (any
more than it is by the scalpel) by an hypothesis for which
not only is there no shadow of evidence, but which cannot
even be stated in philosophic language. We find the same
absurdity in the notion that maternal love is a branch of
the anatomy of the raaramce, and in the notion that the
phenomena of lactation are produced by an immaterial
entity. Both are forms of the same fallacy, that of trying
to reach ultimate causes instead of studying laws. We
certainly do find that maternal love and lactation have
close correspondences, and that both are phenomena of
certain female organisms. And we say that to talk of
maternal love being exhibited by an entity which not only
is not a female organism, but is not an organism at all, is
to use language which to us, at least, is unintelligible.

The philosophy which treats man as man simply affirms
that man loves, thinks, acts, not that the ganglia, or the
sinuses, or any organ of man, loves and thinks and acts.
The thoughts, aspirations, and impulses, are not secretions,
and the science which teaches us about secretions will not
teach us much about them ; our thoughts, aspirations, and
impulses, are faculties of a man. Now, as a man implies
a body, so we say these also imply a body. And to talk
to us about a bodiless being thinking and loving is simply
to talk about the thoughts and feelings of nothing.

This fundamental position each one determines accord-
ing to the whole bias of his intellectual and moral nature-

THE SOUL AND FUTUKE LIFE. 35

But on the positive, as on the theological, method there is
ample scope for the spiritual life, for moral responsibility,
for the world beyond the grave, its hopes and its duties ;
which remain to us perfectly real without the unintelligible
hypothesis. However much men cling to the hypothesis
from old association, if they reflect, they will find that
they do not use it to give them any actual knowledge
about man's spiritual life ; that all their methodical reas-
oning about the moral world is exclusively based on the
phenomena of this world, and not on the phenomena of any
other world. And thus the absence of the hypothesis alto-
gether does not make the serious difference which theolo-
logians suppose.

To follow out this into particulars : Analysis of human
nature shows us man with a great variety of faculties ;
his moral powers are just as distinguishable as his intel-
lectual powers ; and both are mentally separable from his
physical powers. Moral and mental laws are reduced
to something like system by moral and mental science,
with or without the theological hypothesis. The most
extreme form of materialism does not dispute that
moral and mental science is for logical purposes some,
thing more than physical science. So the most extreme
form of spiritualism gets its mental and moral science by
observation and argument from phenomena ; it does not,
or it does not any longer, build such science by abstract de-
duction from any proposition as to an immaterial entity.
There have been, in ages past, attempts to do this. Plato,
for instance, attempted to found, not only his mental and

36 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

moral philosophy, but his general philosophy of the uni-
verse, by deduction from a mere hypothesis. He imagined
immaterial entities, the ideas of things inorganic, as much
as organic. But then Plato was consistent and had the
courage of his opinions. If he imagined an idea, or soul,
of a man, he imagined one also for a dog, for a tree, for a
statue, for a chair. He thought that a statue and a chair
were what they are, by virtue of an immaterial entity
which gave them form. The hypothesis did not add much
to the art of statuary, or to that of the carpenter ; nor to
do him justice, did Plato look for much practical result
in these spheres. One form of the doctrine alone survives
— that man is what he is by virtue of an immaterial en-
tity temporally indwelling in his body. But, though the
hypothesis survives, it is in no sense any longer the basis
of the science of human nature with any school. No
school is now content to sit in its study and evolve its
knowledge of the moral qualities of man out of abstract
deductions from the conception of an immaterial entity.
All, without exception, profess to get their knowledge of
the moral qualities by observing the qualities which men
actually do exhibit, or have exhibited. And those who
are persuaded that man has, over and above his man's na-
ture, an immaterial entity, find themselves discussing the
laws of thought and of character on a common ground with
those who regard man as man — i. e., who regard man's
nature as capable of being referred to an homogeneous
system of law. Spiritualists and materialists, however
much they may ^differ in their explanations of moral phe-

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 37

nomena, describe their relations in the same language, the
language of law, not of illuminism.

Those, therefore, who dispense with a transcendental
explanation are just as free as those who maintain it, to
handle the spiritual and religious phenomena of human
nature, treating them simply as phenomena. No one has
ever suggested that the former philosophy is not quite as
well entitled to analyze the intellectual faculties of man,
as the stoutest believer in the immaterial entity. It
would raise a smile now-a-days to hear it said that such
a one must be incompetent to treat of the canons of in-
ductive reasoning, because he was unorthodox as to the
immortality of the soul. A.nd if,' notwithstanding this
unorthodoxy, he is thought competent to investigate the
laws of thought, why not the moral laws, the sentiments T
and the emotions ? As a fact, every moral faculty of man
is recognized by him just as much as by any transcenden-
talist. He does not limit himself, any more than the
theologian does, to mere morality. He is fully alive to
the spiritual emotions in all their depth, purity, and
beauty. He recognizes in man the yearning for a power
outside his individual self, which he may venerate, a love
for the author of <his chief good, the need for sympathy
with something greater than himself. All these are posi-
tive facts which rest on observation, quite apart from any
explanation of the hypothetical cause of these tendencies
in man. There, at any rate, the scientific observer finds
them ; and he is at liberty to give them quite as high a
place in his scheme of human nature as the most complete

A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

theologian. He may possibly give them a far higher
place, and bind them far more truly into the entire tissue
of his whole view of life, because they are built up for
him on precisely the same ground of experience as all the
rest of his knowledge, and have no element at all hetero-
geneous from the rest of life. With the language of
spiritual emotion he is perfectly in unison. The spirit of
devotion, of spiritual communion with an ever-present
power, of sympathy and fellowship with the living world,
of awe and submission toward the material world, the
sense of adoration, love, resignation, mystery, are at least
as potent with the one system as with the other. He can
share the religious emotion of every age, and can enter
into the language of every truly religious heart. For
myself, I believe that this is only done on a complete as
well as a real basis in the religion of humanity, but we
need not confine the present argument to that ground. I
venture to believe that this spirit is truly shared by all,
whatever their hypothesis about the human soul, who
treat these highest emotions of man's nature as facts of
primary value, and who have any intelligible theory
whereby these emotions can be aroused.

All positive methods of treating man of a comprehen-
sive kind, adopt to the full all that has ever been said
about the dignity of man's moral and spiritual life, and
treat these phenomena as distinct from the intellectual
and the physical life. These methods also recognize the
unity of consciousness, the facts of conscience, the sense
of identity, and the longing for perpetuation of that iden-

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 39

tity. They decline to explain these phenomena by the
popular hypotheses ; but they neither deny their existence
nor lessen their importance. Man, they argue, has a
complex existence, made up of the phenomena of his phy-
sical organs, of his intellectual powers, of his moral
faculties, crowned and harmonized ultimately by his re-
ligious sympathies — love, gratitude, veneration, submis-
sion, toward the dominant force by which he finds himself
surrounded. I use words which are not limited to a
particular philosophy or religion — I do not now confine
my language to the philosophy or religion of Comte — for
this same conception of man is common to many philoso-
phies and many religions. It characterizes such systems
as those of Spinoza or Shelley or Fichte as much as those
of Confucius or Buddha. In a word, the reality and the
supremacy of the spiritual life have never been carried
further than by men who have departed most widely from
the popular hypotheses of the immaterial entity.

Many of these men, no doubt, have indulged in hypo-
theses of their own, quite as arbitrary as those of theology.
It is characteristic of the positive thought of our age that
it stands upon a firmer basis. Though not confounding
the moral facts with the physical, it will never lose sight
of the correspondence and consensus between all sides of
human life. Led by an enormous and complete array of
evidence, it associates every fact of thought or of emotion
with a fact of physiology, with molecular change in the
body. Without pretending to explain the first by the
second, it denies that the first can be explained without

40 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

the second. But with this solid basis of reality to work
on, it gives their place of supremacy to the highest sensi-
bilities of man, through the heights and depths of the
spiritual life.

Nothing is more idle than a discussion about words.
But when some deny the use of the word " soul " to those
who mean by it this consensus, and not any immaterial
entity, we may remind them that our use of the word
agrees with its etymology and its history. It is the mode
in which it is used in the Bible, the well-spring of our
true English speech. It may, indeed, be contended that
there is no instance in the Bible in which soul does
mean an immaterial entity, the idea not having been
familiar to any of the writers, with the doubtful exception
of St. Paul. But without entering upon Biblical philology,
it may be said that for one passage in the Bible in which
the word " soul " can be forced to bear the meaning of
immaterial entity, there are ten texts in which it cannot
possibly refer to anything but breath, life, moral sense, or
spiritual emotion. When the Psalmist says, " Deliver my
soul from death," "Heal my soul,. for I have sinned," "My
soul is cast down within me," "Return unto my rest, O my
soul," he means by " soul " what we mean — the conscious
unity of our being culminating in its religious emotions ;
and until we find some English word that better expresses
this idea, we shall continue to use the phraseology of
David.

It is not merely that we are denied the language of
religion, but we sometimes find attempts to exclude us

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 41

from the thing. There are some who say that worship,
spiritual life, and that exaltation of the sentiments which
we call devotion, have no possible meaning unless applied
to the special theology of the particular speaker. A little
attention to history, a single reflection on religion as a
whole, suffice to show the hollowness of this assumption.
If devotion mean the surrender of self to an adored
Power, there has been devotion in creeds with many gods>
with one God, with no gods ; if spiritual life mean the cul-
tivation of this temper toward moral purification, there
was spiritual life long before the notion of an immaterial
entity inside the human being was excogitated ; and as
to worship, men have worshipped, with intense and over-
whelming passion, all kinds of objects, — organic and inor-
ganic, material and spiritual, abstract ideas as well as
visible forces. Is it implied that Confucius, and the
countless millions who have followed him, had no idea of
religion, as it is certain that they had none of theology ;
that Buddha and the Buddhists were incapable of spiritual
emotion; that the Fire-worshippers and the Sun- wor-
shippers never practised worship; that the pantheists
and the humanists, from Marcus Aurelius to Fichte, had
the springs of spiritual life dried up in them for want of
an Old or New Testament ? If this is intended, one can
only wonder at the power of a self-complacent conformity
to close men's eyes to the native dignity of man. Religion,
and its elements in emotion — attachment, veneration,
love, — are as old exactly as human nature. They moved
the first men and the first women ; they have found a

42 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

hundred objects to inspire them, and have bowed to a
great variety of powers. They were in full force long
U'toro theology was. and before the rise of Christi-
anity ; and it would be strange indeed if it should cease
with the decline of either. It is not the emotional ele-
ments of religion which fail us; for these, with the
growing goodness of mankind, are gaining in purity and
st ivn- th. Rather it is the intellectual elements of religion
which an- conspicuously at fault. We need to-day, not
the faculty of worship (that is ever fresh in the heart),
but a clearer vision of the power we should worship.
Nay, it is not we who are borrowing the privileges of
theology : rather it is theology which seeks to appropri-
ate to itself the most universal privilege of man.

II.

THE rational view of the soul (we insisted in a previous
paper) would remove us as far from cynical materialism
as from a fantastic spiritualism. It restores to their true
supremacy in human life those religious emotions which
materialism forgets; while it frees us from the idle
figment which spiritualism would foist upon human nature.
We entirely agree with the theologians that our age
is beset with a grievous danger of materialism. There is
a school of teachers abroad, and they have found an echo
here, who dream that victorious vivisection will ultimately
win them anatomical solutions of man's moral and
spiritual mysteries. Such unholy nightmares, it is true,

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 43

are not likely to beguile many minds in a country like
this, where social and moral problems are still in their
natural ascendant. But there is a subtiler kind of
materialism, of which the dangers are real. It does not,
indeed, put forth the bestial sophism that the apex of
philosophy is to be won by improved microscopes and
new batteries. But, then, it has nothing to say about the
spiritual life of man ; it has no particular religion ; it
ignores the soul. It fills the air with paeans to science ;
it is never weary of vaunting the scientific methods, the
scientific triumphs. But it always means physical, not
moral science; intellectual, not religious conquests. It
shirks the question of questions— to what human end is
this knowledge ? — how shall man thereby order his life
as a whole ? — where is he to find the object of his yearn-
ings of spirit ? Of the spiritual history of mankind it
knows as little, and thinks as little, as of any other sort
of Asiatic devil-worship. At the spiritual aspirations of
the men and women around us, ill at ease for want of
some answer, it stares blankly, as it does at some spirit-
rapping epidemic. " What is that to us ? — see thou to
that " — is all that it can answer when men ask it for a
religion. It is of the religion of all sensible men, the
religion which all sensible men never tell. With a smile
or a shrug of the shoulders it passes by into the whirring
workshops of science (that is, the physical prelude of
science) ; and it leaves the spiritual life of the soul to the
spiritualists, theological or nonsensical as the case may
be, wishing them both in heaven. This is the materialism
to fear.

44 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

The theologians and the vast sober mass of serious
men and women, who want simply to live rightly, are
quite right when they shun and fear a school that is
so eager about cosmology and biology, while it leaves
morality and religion to take care of themselves. And
yet they know all the while that before the advancing
line of positive thought they are fighting a forlorn hope ;
and they see their own line daily more and more demor-
alized by the consciousness that they have no rational plan
of campaign. They know that their own account of the
soul, of the spiritual life, of Providence, of heaven, is
daily shifting— is growing more vague, more inconsistent,
more various. They hurry wildly from one untenable
position to another, like a routed and disorganized army.
In a religious discussion years ago we once asked one of
the Broad Church, • a disciple of one of its eminent
founders, what he understood by the Third Person of the
Trinity ; and he said, doubtfully, that " he fancied there
was a sort of a something." Since those days the process
of disintegration and vaporization of belief has gone on
rapidly ; and now very religious minds, and men who
think themselves to be religious, are ready to apply this
" sort of a something" to all the verities in turn. They
half hope that there is " a sort of something " fluttering
about, or inside, their human frames, that there may turn
out to be a " something" somewhere after death, and that
there must be a sort of a somebody or (as the theology of
culture will have it) a sort of a something controlling and
and comprehending human life. But the more thought-

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 45

ful spirits, not being professionally engaged in a doctrine,
mostly limit themselves to a pious hope that there may
be something in it, and that we shall know some day

what it is.

•

Now, theologians and religious people unattached must
know that this will never serve — that this is paltering
with the greatest of all things. What, then, is the only
solution which can ultimately satisfy both the devotees of
science and the believers in religion ? Surely but
this, to make religion scientific by placing religion under
the methods of science. Let science come to see that
religion, morality, life, are within its field, or, rather, are
the main part of its field. Let religion come to see that
it can be nothing but a prolongation of science, a rational
and homogeneous result of cosmology and biology, not a
matter of fantastic guessing. Then there will be no true
science which does not aim at, and is not guided by, sys-
tematic religion. And there will be no religion which
pretends to any other basis but positive knowledge and
scientific logic. But for this science must consent to add
spiritual phenomena to its curriculum, and religion must
consent to give up its vapid figments.

Positivism in dealing with the soul discards the
exploded errors of the materialists and spiritualists alike.
On the one hand, it not only admits into its studies the
spiritual life of men, but it raises this life to be the
essential business of all human knowledge. All the
spiritual sentiments of man, the aspirations of the consci-
ous soul in all their purity and pathos, the vast religious

46 A MODEKN SYMPOSIUM.

experience and potentialities of the human heart seen in
the history of our spiritual life as a race — this is, we say,
the principal subject of science and of philosophy. No
philosophy, no morality, no polity, can rest on stable
foundations if this be not its grand aim ; if it have not a
systematic creed, a rational object of worship, and a
definite discipline of life. But, then, we treat these
spiritual functions of the soul, not as mystical enigmas,
but as positive phenomena, and we satisfy them by philo-
sophic and historic answers and not by naked figments. And
we think that the teaching of history and a true synthesis
of science bring us far closer to the heart of this spiritual
life than do any spiritualist guesses, and do better equip
us to read aright the higher secrets of the soul : meaning
always by soul the consensus of the faculties which
observation discovers in the human organism.

On the other hand, without entering into an idle dis-
pute with the spiritualist orthodoxy, we insist on regard-
ing this organism as a perfectly homogeneous unit, to be
studied from one end of it to the other by rational scien-
tific methods. We pretend to give no sort of cause as
lying'behind the manifold powers of the organism. We
say the immaterial entity is something which we cannot
grasp, which explains nothing, for which we cannot have
a shadow of evidence. We are determined to treat man
as a human organism, just as we treat a dog as a canine
organism ; and we know no ground for saying, and no
good to be got by pretending, that man is a human
organism plus an indescribable entity. We say the human

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 47

organism is a marvellous thing, sublime if you will, of
subtilest faculty and sensibility ; but we, at any rate, can
find nothing in man which is not an organic part of this
organism ; we find the faculties of mind, feeling, and will,
directly dependent on physical organs ; and to talk to us
of mind, feeling, and will, continuing their functions in
the absence of physical organs and visible organisms, is to
use language which, to us at least, is pure nonsense.

And now to turn to the grand phenomenon of material
organisms which we call Death. The human organism,
like every other organism, ultimately loses that unstable
equilibrium of its correlated forces which we name Life,
and ceases to be an organism or system of organs, adjust-
ing its internal relations to its external conditions. There-
upon the existence of the complex independent entity to
which w<P attribute consciousness undoubtedly — i. e., for
aught we know to the contrary — comes to an end. But the
activities of this organism do not come to an end, except
so far as these activities need fresh sensations and
material organs. And a great part of these activities, and
far the noblest part, only need fresh sensations and
material organs in other similar organisms. While there
is an abundance of these in due relation, the activities go
on ad infinitum, with increasing energy. We have not
the slightest reason to suppose that the consciousness
of the organism continues, for we mean by consciousness
the sum of sensations of a particular organism, and the
particular organism being dissolved, we have nothing
left whereto to attribute consciousness, and the proposal

48 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

strikes us like a proposal to regard infinity as conscious.
So, of course, with the sensations separately, and with
them the power of accumulating knowledge, of feeling,
thinking, or of modifying the existence in correspondence
with the outward environment. Life, in the technical
sense of the word, is at an end, but the activities of which
that life is the soui^e were never so potent. Our age is
familiar enough with the truth of the persistence of energy,
and no one supposes that with the dissolution of the body
the forces of its material elements are lost. They only
pass into new combinations and continue to work else-
where. Far less is the energy of the activities lost. The
earth, and every country, every farmstead, and every city
on it, are standing witnesses that the physical activities
are not lost. As century rolls after century, we see in
every age more potent fruits of the labour whict raised the
pyramids, or won Holland from the sea, or carved the
Theseus out of marble. The bodily organisms which
wrought them have passed into gases and earths, but the
activity they displayed is producing the precise results
designed on a far grander scale in each generation. Much
more do the intellectual and moral energies work
unceasingly. Not a single manifestation of thought or
feeling is without some result so soon as it is communi-
cated to a similar organism. It passes into the sum of
his mental and moral being.

But there is about the persistence of the moral energies
this special phenomenon. It marks the vast interval be-
tween physical and moral science. The energies of ma-

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 49

terial elements, so far as we see, disperse, or for the most
part disperse. The energies of an intellectual and moral
kind are very largely continued in their organic unities.
The consensus of the mental, of the moral, of the emo-
tional powers may go on, working as a whole, producing
precisely the same results, with the same individuality,
whether the material organism, the source and original
base of these. powers, be in physical function or not. The
mental and moral powers do not, it is true, increase and
grow, develop or vary, within themselves. Nor do they
in their special individuality produce visible results, for
they are no longer in direct relations with their special
material organisms. But the mental and moral powers
are. not dispersed like gases. They retain their unity,
they retain their organic character, and they retain the
whole of their power of passing into and stimulating the
brains of living men ; and in these they carry on their
activity precisely as they did, while the bodies in which
they were formed absorbed and exhaled material sub-
stance.

Nay, more : the individuality and true activity of these
mental and moral forces is often not manifest, and some-
times is not complete, so long as the organism continues
its physical functions. Newton, we may suppose, has ac-
complished his great researches. They are destined to
transform half the philosophy of mankind. But he is
old, and incapable of fresh achievements. We will say
he is feeble, secluded, silent, and lives shut up in his

rooms. The activity of his mighty intellectual nature is
4

50 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

being borne over the world on the wings of Thought, and
works a revolution at every stroke. But otherwise the
man Newton is not essentially distinguishable from the
nearest infirm pauper, and has as few and as feeble rela-
tions with mankind. At last the man Newton dies — that
is, the body is dispersed into gas and dust. But the
world, which is affected enormously by his intellect, is not
in the smallest degree affected by his death.. His activity
continues the same ; if it were worth while to conceal the
fact of his death, no one of the millions who are so greatly
affected by his thoughts would perceive it or know it. If
he had discovered some means of prolonging a torpid ex-
istence till this hour, he might be living now, and it would
not signify to us in the slightest degree whether his body
breathed in the walls of his lodgings or mouldered in the
vaults of the Abbey.

It may be said that, if it does not signify much to us,
it signifies a great deal to Isaac Newton. But is this
true ? He no longer eats and sleeps, a burden to himself ;
he no longer is destroying his great name by feeble theo-
logy or querulous pettiness. But if the small weaknesses
and wants of the flesh are ended for him, all that makes
Newton (and he had always lived for his posthumous, not
his immediate, fame) rises into greater activity and purer
uses. We make no mystical or fanciful divinity of Death ;
we do not deny its terrors or its evils. We are not res-
ponsible for it, and should welcome any reasonable pros-
pect of eliminating or postponing this fatality, that waits
upon all organic Nature. But it is no answer to philoso-

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 51

phy or science to retort that Death is so terrible, therefore
man must be designed to escape it. There are savages
who persistently deny that men do die at all, either their
bodies or. their souls, asserting that the visible consequen-
ces of death are either an illusion or an artfully-contrived
piece of acting on the part of their friends, who have
really decamped to the happy hunting-fields. This seems
on the whole a more rational theory than that of imma-
terial souls flying about space, as the spontaneous fancies
of savages are sometimes more .rational than the elabor-
ate hypotheses of metaphysics.

But though we do not presume to apologize for death,
it is easy to see that many of the greatest moral and in-
tellectual results of life are only possible, can only begin,
when the claims of the animal life are satisfied ; when the
stormy, complex, and checkered career is over, and the
higher tops of the intellectual or moral nature alone stand
forth in the distance of time. What was the blind old
harper of Scio to his contemporaries, or the querulous
refugee from Florence, or even the boon-companion and
retired playwright of Stratford, or the blind and stern old
malignant of Bunhill Field ? The true work of Socrates
and his life only began with his resplendent death, to say
nothing of yet greater religious teachers, whose names I
refrain from citing ; and as to those whose lives have been
cast in conflicts — the Caesars, the Alfreds, the Hilde brands,
the Cromwells, the Fredericks — it is only after death,
oftenest in ages after death, that they cease to be com
batants, and become creators. It is not merely that they

52 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

are only recognized in after ages ; the truth is, that their
activity only begins when the surging of passion and sense
ends, and turmoil dies away. Great intellects and great
characters are necessarily in advance of their age ; the
care of the father and the mother begins to tell most
truly in the ripe manhood of their children, when the
parents are often in the grave, and not in the infancy
which they see and are confronted with. The great must
always feel with Kepler, " It is enough, as yet, if I have
a hearer now and then in a century." John Brown's body
lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul is marching
along.

We can trace this truth best in the case of great men ;
but it is not confined to the great. Not a single act of
thought or character ends with itself. Nay more ; not a
single nature in its entirety but leaves its influence for
good or for evil. As a fact the good prevail ; but all act,
all continue to act indefinitely, often in ever- widening
circles. Physicists amuse us by tracing for us the infinite
fortunes of some wave set in motion by force, its circles
and its repercussions perpetually transmitted in new com-
plications. But the career of a single intellect and charac-
ter is a far more real force when it meets with suitable
intellects and characters into whose action it is incorpo-
rated. Every life more or less forms another life, and
lives in another life. Civilization, nation, city, imply this
fact. There is neither mysticism noi hyperbole, but sim-
ple observation in the belief, that the career of every hu-
man being in society does not end with the death of its

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 53

body. In some sort its higher activities and potency can
only begin truly when change is no longer possible for it.
The worthy gain in influence and in range at each gene-
ration, just as the founders of some populous race gain a
greater fatherhood at each succeeding growth of their
descendants. And, in some infinitesimal degree, the
humblest life that ever turned a sod sends a wave — no,
more than a wave, a life — through the ever-growing har-
mony of human society. Not a soldier died at Marathon
or Salamis, but did a stroke by which our ^thought is en-
larged and our standard of duty formed to this day.

Be it remembered that this is not hypothesis, but some-
thing perfectly real — we may fairly say undeniable. We
are not inventing an imaginary world, and saying it must
be real because it is so pleasant to think of ; we are only
repeating truths on which our notion of history and so-
ciety is based. The idea, no doubt, is usually limited to
the famous, and to the great revolutions in civilization.
But no one who thinks it out carefully can deny that it
is true of every human being in society in some lesser
degree. The idea has not been, or is no longer, systema-
tically enforced, invested with poetry and dignity, and
deepened by the solemnity of religion. But why is that ?
Because theological hypotheses of a new and heterogene-
ous existence have deadened our interest in the realities?
the grandeur, and the perpetuity of our earthly life. In
the best days of Rome, even without a theory of history
or a science of society, it was a living faith, the true re-
ligion of that majestic race. It is the real sentiment of

54 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

all societies where the theological hypothesis has disap-
peared. It is no doubt now in England the great motive
of virtue and energy. There have been few seasons in
the world's history when the sense of moral responsibility
and moral survival after death was more exalted and
more vigorous than with the companions of Vergniaud
and Danton, to whom the dreams of theology were hardly
intelligible. As we read the calm and humane words of
Condorcet on the very edge of his yawning grave, we
learn how the conviction of posthumous activity (not of
posthumous fame), how the consciousness of a coming in-
corporation with the glorious future of his race, can give
a patience and a happiness equal to that of any martyr
of theology.

It would be an endless inquiry to trace the means
whereby this sense of posthumous participation in the life
of our fellows can be extended to the mass, as it certainly
affects already the thoughtful and the refined, Withou^
an education, a new social opinion, without a religion — I
mean an organized religion, not a vague metaphysic — it is
doubtless impossible that it should become universal and
capable of overcoming selfishness. But make it at once
the basis of philosophy, the standard of right and wrong,
and the centre of a religion, and this will prove, perhaps,
an easier task than that of teaching Greeks and Romans,
Syrians and Moors, to look forward to a future life of
ceaseless psalmody in an immaterial heaven. The aston-
ishing feat was performed ; and, perhaps, it may be easier
to fashion a new public opinion, requiring merely that an

THE SOUL AND FUTUKE LIFE. 55

accepted truth of philosophy should be popularized, which
is already the deepest hope of some thoughtful spirits
and which does not take the suicidal course of trying to
cast out the devil of selfishness by a direct appeal to the
personal self.

It is here that the strength of the human future over
the celestial future is so clearly pre-eminent. Make the
future hope a social activity, and we give to the present
life a social ideal. Make the future hope personal beati-
tude, and personality is stamped deeper on every act of
of our daily life. Now we make the future hope, in the
truest sense, social, inasmuch as our future is simply an
active existence prolonged by society. And our future
hope rests not in any vague yearning, of which we have
as little evidence as we have definite conception : it rests
on a perfectly certain truth, accepted by all thoughtful
minds, the truth that the actions, feelings, thoughts, of
every one of us — our minds, our characters, our souls, as
organic wholes — do marvellously influence and mould each
other ; that the highest part of ourselves, the abiding part
of us, passes into other lives and continues to live in other
lives. Can we conceive a more potent stimulus to recti-
tude, to daily and hourly striving after true life, than
this ever-present sense that we are indeed immortal ; not
that we have an immortal something within us, but that
in very truth we ourselves, our thinking, feeling, acting
personalities, are immortal; nay, cannot die, but must
ever continue what we make them, working and doing, if
no longer receiving and enjoying ? And not merely we

•56 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

ourselves, in our personal identity, are immortal, but each
act, thought, and feeling, is immortal ; and this immortal-
ity is not some ecstatic and indescribable condition in
space, but activity on earth in the real and known work
of life, in the welfare of those whom we have loved, and
in the happiness of those who come after us.

And can it be difficult to idealize and give currency to
a faith which is a certain and undisputed fact of common
sense as well as of philosophy ? As we live for others in
life, so we live in others after death, as others have lived
in us, and all for the common race. How deeply does
such a belief as this bring home to each moment of life
the mysterious perpetuity of ourselves ! For good, for evil,
we cannot die ; we cannot shake ourselves free from this
eternity of our faculties. There is here no promise, it is
true, of eternal sensations, enj oyments, meditations. There
is no promise, be it plainly said, of anything but an im-
mortality of influence, of spiritual work, of glorified activ-
ity. We cannot even say that we shall continue to love ;
but we know that we shall be loved. It may well be
that we shall consciously know no hope ourselves ; but we
shall inspire hopes. It may be that we shall not think ;
but others will think our thoughts, and enshrine our minds.
If no sympathies shall thrill along our nerves, we shall be
the spring of sympathy in distant generations ; and that,
though we be the humblest and the least of all the soldiers
in the human host, the least celebrated and the worst re-
membered. For our lives live when we are most forgot-
ten ; and not a cup of water that we may have given to

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 57

an unknown sufferer, or a wise word spoken in season to
a child, but has added (whether we remember it, whether
others remember it or not) a streak of happiness and
strength to the world. Our earthly frames, like the grain
of wheat, may be laid in the earth — and this image of our
great spiritual Master is more fit for the social than for the
celestial future — but the grain shall bear spiritual fruit,
and multiply in kindred natures and in other selves.

It is a merely verbal question if this be the life of the
Soul when the Soul means the sum of the activities, or if
there be any immortality where there is no consciousness.
It is enough for us that we can trust to a real prolongation
of our highest activity in the sensible lives of others, even
though our own forces can gain nothing new, and are not
reflected in a sensitive body. We do not get rid of Death,
but we transfigure Death. Does any religion profess to
do more ? It is enough for any creed that it can teach
non omnis moriar ; it would be gross extravagance to say
omnis non moriar, no part of me shall die. Death is the
one inevitable law of Life. The business of religion is to
show us what are its compensations. The spiritualist or-
thodoxy, like every other creed, is willing to allow that
Death robs us of a great deal, that very much of us does
die ; nay, it teaches that this dies utterly, forever, leaving
no trace but dust. And thus the spiritualist orthodoxy
exaggerates death, and adds a fresh terror to its power.
We, on the contrary, would seek to show that much of us,
and that the best of us, does not die, or at least does not
end. And the difference between our faith and that of

58 A MODEKN SYMPOSIUM.

the orthodox is this : we look to the permanence of the
activities which give others happiness ; they look to the
permanence of the consciousness which can enjoy happi-
ness. Which is the nobler ?

What need we then to promise or to hope more than an
eternity of spiritual influence? Yet, after all, 'tis no
question as to what kind of eternity man would prefer to
select. We have no evidence that he has any choice be-
fore him. If we are creating a universe of our own and
a human race on an ideal mould, it might be rational to
discuss what kind of eternity was the most desirable, and
it might then become a question if we should not begin by
eliminating death. But as we are, with death in the world,
and man as we know him submitting to the fatality of his
nature, the rational inquiry is this — how best to order his
life, and to use the eternity that he has. And an immor-
tality of prolonged activity on earth he has as certainly
as he has civilization, or progress, or society. And the wise
man in the evening of life may be well content to say :
" I have worked and thought, and have been conscious in
the flesh ; I have done with the flesh, and therewith with
the toil of thought and the troubles of sensation ; I am
ready to pass into the spiritual community of human
souls, and when this man's flesh wastes away from me,
may I be found worthy to become part of the influence of
humanity itself, and so

' . . . . join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.' "

That the doctrine of the celestial future appeals toHhe

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 59

essence of self appears very strongly in its special rebuke
to the doctrine of the social future. It repeats : " We
agree with all you say about the prolonged activity of
man after death, we see of course that the solid achieve-
ments of life are carried on, and we grant you that it sig-
nifies nothing to those who profit by his work that the
man no longer breathes in the flesh ; but what is all that
to the man, to you, and to me ? We shall not feel our
work ; we shall not have the indescribable satisfaction
which our souls now have in living, in effecting our work,
and profiting by others. What is the good of mankind
to me, when I am mouldering unconscious ?" This is the
true materialism ; here is the physical theory of another
life ; this is the unspiritual denial of the soul, the binding
it down to the clay of the body. We say, " All that is
great in you shall not end, but carry on its activity per-
petually and in a purer way ; " and you reply : " What
care I for what is great in me, and its possible work in this
vale of tears ? I want to feel life, I want to enjoy, I want
my personality" — in other words, " I want my senses, I
want my body." Keep your body and keep your senses
in any way that you know. We can only wonder
and say, with Frederick to his runaway soldiers, " Wollt
ihr immer leben ? " But we, who know that a higher
form of activity is only to be reached by a subjective life
in society, will continue to regard a perpetuity of sensation
as the true hell, for we feel that the perpetual worth of our
lives is the one thing precious to care for, and not a vacu-
ous eternity of consciousness.

60 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

It is not merely that this eternity of the tabor is so
gross, so sensual, so indolent, so selfish a creed ; but its
worst evil is that it paralyzes practical life, and throws it
into discord. A life of vanity in a vale of tears to be fol-
lowed by an infinity of celestial rapture, is necessarily a
life which is of infinitesimal importance. The incongruity
of the attempts to connect the two, and to make the vale
of tears the antechamber of the judgment-dock of heaven,
grows greater and not less as ages roll on. The more we
think and learn, and the higher rises our social philosophy
and our insight into human destiny, the more the reality
and importance of the social future impresses us, while the
fancy of the celestial future grows unreal and incongru-
ous. As we get to know what thinking means, and feel-
ing means, and the more truly we understand what life
means, the more completely do the promises of the celes-
tial transcendentalism fail to interest us. We have come to
see that to continue to live is to carry on a series of corre-
lated sensations, and to set in motion a series of corres-
ponding forces ; to think is to marshal a set of observed
perceptions with a view to certain observed phenomena
to feel implies something of which we have a real assur-
ance affecting our own consensus within. The whole
set of positive thoughts compels us to believe that it is an
infinite apathy to which your heaven would consign us,
without objects, without relations, without change, with-
out growth, without action, an absolute nothingness, a
nirvana, of impotence — this is not life; it is not conscious-
ness ; it is not happiness. So far as we can grasp the hy-

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 61

pothesis, it seems equally ludicrous and repulsive. You
may call it paradise ; but we call it conscious annihilation.
You may long for it, if you have been so taught ; just as
if you had been taught to cherish such hopes, you might
be now yearning for the moment when you might become
the immaterial principle of a comet, or as you might tell
me that you really were the ether, and were about to take
your place in space. This is how these sublimities affect
us. But we know that to many this future is one of
spiritual development, a life of growth and continual up-
soaring of still higher affection. It may be so ; but to our
mind these are contradictions in terms. We cannot un-
derstand what life and affection can mean, where you pos-
tulate the absence of every condition by which life and
affection are possible. Can there be development where
there is no law, thought or affection where object and
subject are confused into one essence ? How can that
be existence, where everything of which we have experi-
ence, and everything which we can define, is presumed to
be unable to enter ? To us these things are all incoher-
ences ; and in the midst of practical realities and the solid
duties of life, sheer impertinences. The field is full : each
human life has a perfectly real and a vast future to look
lorward to ; these hyperbolic enigmas disturb our grave
duties and our solid hopes. No wonder, then, while they
are still so rife, that men are dull to the moral responsi-
bility which, in its awfulness, begins only at the grave ;
that they are so little influenced by the futurity which
will judge them ; that they are blind to the dignity and
beauty of death, and shuffle off the dead life and the dead

62 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

body with such cruel disrespect. The fumes of the celes-
tial immortality still confuse them. It is only when an
earthly future is the fulfilment of a w'orthy, earthly life,
that we can see all the majesty as well as the glory of the
world beyond the grave ; and then only will it fulfil its
moral and religious purpose as the great guide of human
conduct.

R. H. BUTTON.

THE imaginative glow and rhetorical vivacity which
are visible throughout Mr. Harrison's essays on "The
Soul and Future Life" are very remarkable, and should guard
those of us who recoil in amazement from its creed or no-
creed from falling into the very common mistake of as-
suming that the effect which such ideas as these produce
on ourselves is the effect, which, apart from all questions of
the other mental conditions surrounding the natures into
which they are received, they naturally produce. It is
clear, at least, that if they ever tended to produce on the
author of these papers the same effect which they not only
tend to produce, but do produce on myself, that tendency
must have been so completely neutralized by the redun-
dant moral energy inherent in his nature, that the char-
acteristic effect which I should have ascribed to them is
absolutely unverifiable, and, for anything we have the
right to assert, non-existent. There is at least but one
instance in which I should have traced any shade of what

« THE SOUL AND FUTUEE LIFE. 63

I may call the natural view of death as presented in the
light of this creed, and that is the sentence in which Mr.
Harrison somewhat superfluously disclaims — and, more-
over, with an accent of hauteur, as though he resented
the necessity of admitting that death is a disagreeable
certainty — his own or his creed's responsibility for the
fact of death. " We make no mystical or fanciful divinity
of death," he says : " we do not deny its terrors or its
evils. We are not responsible for it, and should welcome
any reasonable prospect of eliminating or postponing this
fatality that waits upon all organic nature." After read-
ing that admission, I was puzzled when I came to the
assertion that " we who know that a higher form of
activity is only to be reached by a subjective life in
society, will continue to regard a perpetuity of sensation
as the true hell," a sentence in which Mr. Harrison would
commonly be understood to mean that he and all his
friends, if they had a vote in the matter, would give a
unanimous suffrage against this "perpetuity of sensation,"
and, so far from trying to eliminate and postpone death,
would be inclined to cling to and even hasten it. For, in
this place at least, it is not the perpetuation of deteriora-
ted energies of which Mr. Harrison speaks, but the
perpetuation of life pure and simple. Indeed, nothing
puzzles me more in this paper than the diametrical con-
tradictions, both of feeling and thought, which appear to
me to be embodied in it. Its main criticism on the com-
mon view of immortality seems to be that the desire for it
is a grossly selfish desire. Nay, nicknaming the conception

64 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

of a future of eternal praise, "the eternity of the tabor,"
he calls it a conception " so gross, so sensual, so indolent,
so selfish," as to be worthy of nothing but scorn. I think
he can never have taken the trouble to realize with any
care what he is talking of. Whatever the conception
embodied in what Mr. Harrison calls "ceaseless psalmody,"
may be — and certainly it is not my idea of immortal life
—it is the very opposite of selfish. No conception of life
can be selfish of which the very essence is adoration, that
is, wonder, veneration, gratitude to another. And gross
as the conception necessarily suggested by psalm-singing is
to those who interpret it, as we generally do, by the sten-
torian shoutings of congregations who are. often thinking
a great deal more of their own performances than of the
object of their praise, it is the commonest candour to
admit that this conception of immortality owes its origin
entirely to men who were thinking of a life absorbed in
the interior contemplation of a God full of all perfections
— a contemplation breaking out into thanksgiving only
in the intensity of their love and adoration. Whatever
else this conception of immortality may be, the very last
phrase which can be justly applied to it is " gross " or
" selfish." I fear that the positivists have left the
Christian objects of their criticism so far behind that they
have ceased not merely to realize what Christians mean,
but have sincerely and completely forgotten that Chris-
tians ever had a meaning at all. That positivists should
regard any belief in the " beatific vision " as a wild piece of
fanaticism, I can understand, but that, entering into the

THE SOUL AND FUTUKE LIFE. 65

meaning of that fanaticism, they should describe the
desire for it as a gross piece of selfishness, I cannot under-
stand ; and I think it more reasonable, therefore, to assume
that they have simply lost the key to the language of
adoration. Moreover, when I come to note Mr. Harrison's
own conception of the future life, it appears to me that it
differs only from the Christian's conception by its infinite
deficiencies, and in no respect by superior moral qualities
of any kind. That conception, is in a word, posthumous
energy. He holds that if we could get rid of the vulgar
notion of a survival of personal sensations and of growing
mental and moral faculties after death, we should conse-
crate the notion of posthumous activity, and anticipate
with delight our " coming incorporation with the glorious
future of our race," as we cannot possibly consecrate
those great hopes now.

But, in the first place, what is this " glorious future of
our race " which I am invited to contemplate ? It is the
life in a better organized society of a vast number of these
merely temporary creatures whose personal sensations, if
they ever could be " perpetuated," Mr. Harrison regards
as giving us the best conception of a " true hell." Now
if an improved and better organized future of ephemerals
be so glorious to anticipate, what elements of glory are
there in it which would not belong to the immortality
looked forward to by the Christian — a far more improved
future of endlessly growing natures ? Is it the mere fact
that I shall myself belong to the one future which renders
it unworthy, while the absence of any " perpetuity" of my
5

66 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

personal " sensations " from the other renders it unselfish ?
I always supposed selfishness to consist, not in the desire
for any noble kind of life in which I might share, but in
the preference for my own happiness at the expense of
some one else's. If it is selfish to desire the perpetuation
of a growing life, which not only does not, as far as I know,
interfere with the volume of moral growth in others, but
certainly contributes to it, then it must be the true un-
selfishness to commit suicide at once, supposing suicide to
be the finis to personal " sensation." But then universal
suicide would be inconsistent with the glorious future of
our race, so I suppose it must at least be postponed till our
own sensations have been so far " perpetuated " as to leave
heirs behind them. If Condorcet is to be held up to our
admiration for anticipating on the edge of the grave his
" coming incorporation with the glorious future of his
race," i. e., with ourselves and our posterity, may we not
infer that there is something in ourselves, i. e.} in human
society as it now exists, which is worthy of his vision —
something in which we need not think it " selfish " to
participate, even though our personal "sensations" do
form a part of it ? Where, then, does the selfishness of
desiring to share in a glorious future even through per-
sonal "sensations" begin? The only reasonable or
even intelligible answer, as far as I can see, is this : as
soon as that personal " sensation " for ourselves excludes a
larger and wider growth for others, but no sooner. But
then no Christian ever supposed for a moment that his
personal immortality could or would interfere with any

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 67

other being's growth. And, if so, where is the selfishness ?
What a Christian desires is a higher, truer, deeper union
with God for all, himself included. If his own life drop
out of that future, he supposes that there will be so much
less that really does glorify the true righteousness, and no
compensating equivalent. If it be Mr. Harrison's mission
to disclose to us that any perpetuity of sensation on our own
parts will positively exclude something much higher
which would exist if we consented to disappear, he may,
I think, prove his case. But in the absence of any
attempt "to do so, his conception that it is noble and
unselfish to be more than content — grateful — for ceasing
to live any but a posthumous life seems to me simply
irrational.

But, further, the equivalent which Mr. Harrison offers
me for becoming, as I had hoped to become in another
world, an altogether better member of a better society,
does not seem to me more than a very doubtful good.
My posthumous activity will be of all kinds, some of
which I am glad to anticipate, most of which I am very
sorry to anticipate, and much of which I anticipate with
absolute indifference. Even our best actions have bad
effects, as well'as good. Macaulay and most other historians
held that the Puritan earnestness expended a good deal
of posthumous activity in producing the license of the
world of the Restoration. Our activity, indeed, is strictly
posthumous in kind, even before our death from the very
moment in which it leaves our living mind and has begun
to work beyond ourselves. What I did as a child is, in

68 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

this sense, as much producing posthumous effects, i. e.,
effects over which I can no longer exert any control, now,
as what I do before death will be producing posthumous
effects after my death. Now, a considerable proportion
of these posthumous activities of ours, even when we can
justify the original activity as all that it ought to have
been, are unfortunate. Mr. Harrison's papers, for instance,
have already exerted a very vivid and very repulsive
effect on my mind — an activity which I am sure he will
not look upon with gratification, and I do not doubt that
what I am now writing will produce the same effect on
him, and in that effect I shall take no delight at all. A
certain proportion, therefore, of my posthumous activity is
activity for evil, even when the activity itself is on the
whole good. But when we come to throw in the posthu-
mous activity for evil exerted by our evil actions and the
occasional posthumous activity for good which evil also
fortunately exerts, but for the good results of which we
can take no credit to ourselves, the whole constitutes a
melange to which, as far as I am concerned, I look with
exceedingly mixed feelings, the chief element being humi-
liation, though there are faint lights mingled with it here
and there. But as for any rapture of satisfaction in
contemplating my "coming incorporation with the glorious
future of our race," I must wholly and entirely disclaim
it. What I see in that incorporation of mine with the
future of our race — glorious or the reverse, and I do not
quite see why the positivist thinks it so glorious, since
he probably holds that an absolute term must be put to

THE SOUL AND FUTUKE LIFE. 69

it, if by no other cause, by the gradual cooling of the sun
— is a very patchwork sort of affair indeed, a mere
miscellany of bad, good, and indifferent, without organiza-
tion and without unity. What I shall be, for instance,
when incorporated, in Mr. Harrison's phrase, with the
future of our race, I have very little satisfaction in con-
templating except so far, perhaps, as my " posthumous
activity " may retard the acceptance of Mr. Harrison's
glorious anticipations for the human race. One great
reason for my personal wish for a perpetuity of volition
and personal energy is, that I may have a better oppor-
tunity, as far as may lie in me, to undo the mischief I shall
have done before death comes to my aid. The vision of
" posthumous activity " ought indeed, I fancy, to give even
the best of us very little satisfaction. It may not be, and
perhaps is not, so mischievous as the vision of " posthu-
mous fame," but yet it is not the kind of vision which, to
my mind, can properly occupy very much of our attention
in this life. Surely, the right thing for us to do is to con-
centrate attention on the life of the living moment — to
make that the best we can — and then to leave its posthu-
mous effects, after the life of the present has gone out of
it, to that power which, far more than anything in it, trans-
mutes at times even our evil into good, though sometimes,
too, to superficial appearance at all events, even our good
into evil. The desire for an immortal life — that is, for a
perpetuation of the personal affections and of the will —
seems to me a far nobler thing than any sort of anticipa-
tion as to our posthumous activity ; for high affections

70 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

and a right will are good in themselves, and constitute,
indeed, the only elements in Mr. Harrison's " glorious
future of our race " to which I can attach much value —
while posthumous activity may be either good or evil, and
depends on conditions over which he who first puts the
activity in motion often has no adequate control.

And this reminds me of a phrase in Mr. Harrison's
paper, which I have studied over and over again without
making out his meaning. I mean his statement that on
his own hypothesis •" there is ample scope for the spiri-
tual life, for moral responsibility, for the world beyond
the grave, its hopes and its duties, which remain to us
perfectly real without the unintelligible hypothesis."
Now, I suppose, by " the hopes " of the " world beyond
the grave," Mr. Harrison means the hopes we form for the
" future of our race," and that I understand. But what
does he mean by its " duties ? " Not, surely, our duties
beyond the grave, but the duties of those who survive us ;
for he expressly tells us that our mental and moral powers
do not increase and grow, develop or vary within them-
selves— do not, in fact, survive at all except in their effects
— and hence duties for us in the world beyond the grave
are, I suppose, in his creed impossible. But if he only
means that there will be duties for those who survive us
after we are gone, I cannot see how that is in any respect
a theme on which it is either profitable or consolatory for
us to dwell by anticipation. One remark more : When
Mr. Harrison says that it is quite as easy to learn to
long for the moment when you shall become " the imma-
terial principle of a comet," or that you " really were the

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 71

ether, and were about to take your place in space," as to
long for personal immortality — he is merely talking at
random on a subject on which it is hardly seemly to talk
at random. He knows that what we mean by the soul is
that which lies at the bottom of the sense of personal
identity — the thread of the continuity running through
all our checkered life ; and how it can be equally un-
meaning to believe that this hitherto unbroken continuity
will continue unbroken, and to believe that it is to be
transformed into something else of a totally different
kind, I am not only unable to understand, but even to
understand how he could seriously so conceive us. My
notion of myself never had the least connection with the
principle of any part of any comet, but it has the closest
possible connection with thoughts, affections, and voli-
tions, which, as far as I know, are not likely to perish
with my body. I am sorry that Mr. Harrison should
have disfigured his paper by sarcasms so inapplicable and
apparently so bitter as these.

PROF. HUXLEY.

MR. HARRISON'S striking discourse on " The Soul
and Future Life " has a certain resemblance to the
famous essay on the snakes of Iceland. For its purport is to
show that there is no soul, nor any future life, in the ordinary
sense of the terms. With death, the personal activity of which

72 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

the soul is the popular hypostasis is put into commission
among posterity, and the future life is an immortality by
deputy.

Neither in these views nor in the arguments by which
they are supported is there much novelty. But that
which appears both novel and interesting to me is the
author's evidently sincere and heart-felt conviction
that his powerful advocacy of soulless spirituality and
mortal immortality is consistent with the intellectual
scorn and moral reprobation which he freely pours forth
upon the " irrational and debasing physicism " of mate-
rialism and materialists, and with the wrath with which
he visits what he is pleased to call the intrusion of phy-
sical science, especially of biology, into the domain of
social phenomena.

Listen to the storm :

"We certainly do reject, as earnestly as any school can, that
which is most fairly called materialism, and we will second every
word of those who cry out that civilization is in danger if the work-
ings of the human spirit are to become questions of physiology, and
if death is the end of a man, as it is the end of a sparrow. We not
only assent to such protests, but we see very pressing need for mak-
ing them. It is a corrupting doctrine to open a brain, and to tell us
that devotion is a definite molecular change in this and that convo-
lution of gray pulp, and that, if man is the first of living animals,
he passes away after a short space like the beasts that perish. And
all doctrines, more or less, do tend to this, which offer physical
theories as explaining moral phenomena, which deny man a spiri-
tual in addition to a moral nature, which limit his moral life to the
span of his bodily organism, and which have no place for ' religion '
in the proper sense of the word."

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 73

Now, Mr. Harrison can hardly think it worth while to
attack imaginary opponents, so that I am led to believe
that there must be somebody who holds the " corrupting
doctrine," " that devotion is a definite molecular change
in this and that convolution of gray pulp." Nevertheless,
my conviction is shaken by this passage : " No rational
thinker now pretends that imagination is simply the
vibration of a particular fibre." If no rational thinker
pretends this of imagination, why should any pretend it
of devotion ? And yet I cannot bring myself to think
that all Mr. Harrison's passionate rhetoric is hurled at
irrational thinkers : surely he might leave such to the
soft influences of time and due medical treatment of
their " gray pulp " in Colney Hatch or elsewhere.

On the other hand, Mr. Harrison cannot possibly be
attacking those who hold that the feeling of devotion is
the concomitant, or even the consequent, of a molecular
change in the brain ; for he tells us, in language the expli-
citness of which leaves nothing to be desired, that

"To positive methods every fact of thinking reveals itself as
having functional relation with molecular change. Every factor
of will or feeling is in similar relation with kindred molecular
facts. '

On mature consideration, I feel shut up to one or two
alternative hypotheses. Either the " corrupting doctrine "
to which Mr. Harrison refers is held by no rational
thinker — in which case, surely, neither he nor I need
trouble ourselves about it — or the phrase " Devotion is a
definite molecular change in this and that convolution of

r* A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

gray pulp/' means that devotion has a functional relation
with such molecular change : in which case it is Mr. Har-
rison's own view, and therefore, let us hope, cannot be a
" corrupting doctrine."

I am not helped out of the difficulty I have thus
candidly stated, when I try to get at the meaning of
another hard saying of Mr. Harrison's, which follows
after the " corrupting doctrine '' paragraph : " And all
doctrines, more or less, do tend to this [corrupting doc-
trine], which offer physical theories as explaining moral
phenomena."

Nevertheless, Mr. Harrison says, with great force and
tolerable accuracy :

' ' Man is one, however compound. Fire his conscience and he
blushes. Check his circulation and he thinks wildly, or thinks not
at all. Impair his secretions, and moral sense is dulled, discoloured,
or depraved ; his aspirations flag ; his hope, love, faith, reel. Impair
them still more, and he becomes a brute. A. cup of drink degrades
his moral nature below that of a swine. Again, a violent emotion
of pity or horror makes him vomit. A lancet will restore him from
delirium to clear thought. Excess of thought will waste his sinews ;
excess of muscular exercise will deaden thought. An emotion will
double the strength of his muscles ; and at last the prick of a needle
or a grain of mineral will in an instant lay to rest forever his body
and its unity, and all the spontaneous activities of intelligence,
feeling, and action, with which that compound organism was
charged.

1 ' These are the obvious and ancient observations about the human
organism. But modern philosophy and science have carried these
hints into complete explanations. By a vast accumulation of proof
positive, thought at last has established a distinct correspondence

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 75

between every process of thought or of feeling, and some corporeal
phenomenon."

I cry with Shylock :

" "Tis very true, O wise and upright judge."

But, if the establishment of the correspondence between
physical phenomena on the one side, and moral and intell-
ectual phenomena on the other, is properly to be called an
explanation (let alone a complete explanation), of the
human organism, surely Mr. Harrison's teachings come
dangerously near that tender of physical theories in ex-
planation of moral phenomena which he warns us leads
straight to corruption.

But perhaps I have misinterpreted Mr. Harrison ; for a
few lines further on we are told, with due italic emphasis,
that no man can explain volition by purely anatomical
study." I should have thought that Mr. Harrison might
have gone much further than this. No man ever ex-
plained any physiological fact by purely anatomical study.
Digestion cannot be so explained, nor respiration, nor
reflex action. It would have been as relevant to affirm
that volition could not be explained by measuring an arc
of the meridian.

I am obliged to note the fact that Mr. Harrison's bio-
logical studies have not proceeded so far as to enable him
to discriminate between the province of anatomy and
that of physiology, because it furnishes the key to an
otherwise mysterious utterance which occurs thus :

" A man whose whole thoughts are absorbed in cutting up dead

7C A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

monkeys and live frogs, has no more business to dogmatize about
religion than a mere chemist to improvise a zoology."

Qu is, negavit ? But if, as, on Mr. Harrison's own show-
ing, is the case, the progress of science (not anatomical,
but physiological) has " established a distinct correspond-
ence between every process of thought or of feeling, and
some corporeal phenomenon," and if it is true that " im-
paired secretions " deprave the moral sense, and make
"hope, love, and faith reel," surely the religious feelings
are brought within the range of physiological inquiry. If
impaired secretions deprave the moral sense, it becomes
an interesting and important problem to ascertain what
diseased viscus may have been responsible for the priest
in absolution ; and what condition of the gray pulp may
have conferred on it such a pathological steadiness of
faith as to create the hope of personal immortality, which
Mr. Harrison stigmatizes as so selfishly immoral.

I should not like to undertake the responsibility of
advising anybody to dogmatize about anything ; but
surely if, as Mr. Harrison so strongly urges, " the whole
range of man's powers, from the finest spiritual sensibility
down to a mere automatic contraction, falls into one co-
herent scheme, being all the multiform functions of a
living organism in presence of its encircling conditions,"
then the man who endeavours to ascertain the exact
nature of these functions, and to determine the influence
of conditions upon them, is more likely to be in a position
to tell us something worth hearing about them, than one
who is turned from such study by cheap* pulpit thunder

• THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 77

touching the presumption of " biological reasoning about
spiritual things."

Mr. Harrison, as we have seen, is not quite so clear as
is desirable respecting the limits of the provinces of ana-
tomy and physiology. Perhaps he will permit me to
inform him that physiology is the science which treats of
the functions of the living organism, ascertains their
coordinations and their correlations in the general chain
of causes and effects, and traces out their dependence up-
on the physical state of the organs by which these func-
tions are exercised. The explanation of a physiological
function is the demonstration of the connection of that
function with the molecular state of the organ which
exerts the function. Thus the function of motion is ex-
plained when the movements of the living body are found
to have certain molecular changes for their invariable
antecedents ; the function of sensation is explained when
the molecular changes, which are the invariable anteced-
ents of sensations, are discovered.

The fact that it is impossible to comprehend how it is
that a physical state gives rise to a mental state, no more
lessens the value of the explanation in the latter case,
than the fact that it is utterly impossible to comprehend
how motion is communicated from one body to another
weakens the force of the explanation of the motion of one
billiard-ball by showing that another has hit it.

" The finest spiritual sensibility," says Mr. Harrison
(and I think that there is a fair presumption that he is
right), is a function of a living organism — is iri relation

7N A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

with molecular facts. In that case the physiologist may
reply : "It is my business to find out what these molecular
facts are, and whether the relation between them and the
said spiritual sensibility is one of antecedence in the
molecular fact, and sequence in the spiritual fact, or vice
versa. If the latter result comes out of my inquiries, I
shall have made a contribution toward a moral theory of
physical phenomena; if the former, I shall have done
somewhat toward building up a physical theory of moral
phenomena. But in any case I am not outstepping the
limits of my proper province ; my business is to get at the
truth respecting such questions at all risks ; and if you
tell me that one of these two results is a corrupting doc-
trine, I can only say that I perceive the intended reproach
conveyed by the observation, but that I fail to recognize
its relevance. If the doctrine is true, its social septic or
antiseptic properties are not my affair. My business as a
biologist is with physiology, not with morals."

This plea of justification strikes me as complete; whence,
then, the following outbreak of angry eloquence ? —

" The arrogant attempt to dispose of the deepest moral truths of
human nature, on a bare physical or physiological basis, is almost
enough to justify the insurrection of some impatient theologians
against science itself."

" That strain again : it has a dying fall ;" nowise similar
to the sweet south upon a bank of violets, however, but
like the death-wail of innumerable " impatient theolo-
gians," as from the high " drum ecclesiastic " they view
the waters of science flooding the Church on all hands.

THE SOUL AND FUTUEE LIFE. 79

The beadles have long been washed away ; escape by pul-
pit stairs is even becoming doubtful, without kirtling
those outward investments which distinguish the priest
from the man so high, that no one will see that there is
anything but the man left. But Mr. Harrison is not an
impatient theologian — indeed, no theologian at all, unless,
as he speaks of " soul " when he means certain bodily
functions, and of " future life " when he means personal
annihilation, he may make his master's grand §tre supreme
the subject of a theology ; and one stumbles upon this
well-worn fragment of too-familiar declamation among his
vigorous periods with the unpleasant surprise of one who
finds a fly in a precious ointment.

There are people from whom one does not expect well-
founded statement and thoughtful, however keen, argu-
mentation, embodied in precise language ; from Mr.
Harrison one does. But I think he will be at a loss to
answer the question, if I pray him to tell me of any
representative of physical science who, either arrogantly
or otherwise, has ever attempted to dispose of moral truths
on a physical or physiological basis. If I am to take the
sense of the words literally, I shall not dispute the arrog-
ance of the attempt to dispose of a moral truth on a bare,
or even on a covered, physical or physiological basis ; for,
whether the truth is deep or shallow, I cannot conceive
how the feat is to be performed. Columbus's difficulty
with the egg is as nothing to it. But I suppose what is
meant is, that some arrogant people have tried to upset
morality by the help of physics and physiology. I am

80 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

sorry if such people exist, because I shall have to be much
ruder to them than Mr. Harrison is. I should not call them
arrogant, any more than I should apply that epithet to a
person who attempted to upset Euclid by the help of the
Rig- Veda. Accuracy might be satisfied, if not propriety,
by calling such a person a fool ; but it appears to me that
it would be the height of injustice to term him arrogant.

Whatever else they may be, the laws of morality, under
their scientific aspect, are generalizations based upon the
observed phenomena of society ; and, whatever may be
the nature of moral approbation and disapprobation, these
feelings are, as matter of experience, associated with cer-
tain acts.

The consequences of men's actions will remain the same,
however far our analysis of the causes which lead to them
may be pushed ; theft and murder would be none the less
objectionable if it were possible to prove that they were the
result of the activity of special theft and murder cells in
that "gray pulp" of which Mr. Harrison speaks so scorn-
fully. Does any sane man imagine that any quantity of
physiological analysis will lead people to think breaking
their legs or putting their hands into the fire desirable ?
And when men really believe that breaches of the moral
law involve their penalties as surely as do breaches of the
physical law, is it to be supposed that even the very
firmest disposal of their moral truths upon " a bare phy-
sical or physiological basis " will tempt them to incur
those penalties ?

I would gladly learn from Mr. Harrison where, in the

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 81

course of his studies, he has found anything inconsistent
with what I have just said in the writings of physicists
or biologists. I would entreat him to tell us who are the
true materialists, "the scientific specialists" who "neglect
all philosophical and religious synthesis," and who " sub-
mit religion to the test of the scalpel or the electric bat-
tery ;" where the materialism which is " marked by the
ignoring of religion, the passing by on the other side and
shutting the eyes to the spiritual history of mankind," is
to be found.

I will not believe that these phrases are meant to apply
to any scientific men of whom I have cognizance, or to any
recognized system of scientific thought — they would be
too absurdly inappropriate — and I cannot believe that Mr.
Harrison indulges in empty rhetoric. But I am disposed
to think that they would not have been used at all, ex-
cept for that deep-seated sympathy with the " impatient
theologian" which characterizes the positivist school, and
crops out, characteristically enough, in more than one part
of Mr. Harrison's essay.

Mr. Harrison tells us that "positivism is prepared to
meet the theologians." I agree with him, though not
exactly in his sense of the words — indeed, I have formerly
expressed the opinion that the meeting took place long
ago, and that the faithful lovers, impelled by the instinct of
a true affinity of nature, have met to part no more. Eccle-
siastical to the core from the beginning, positivism is now
exemplifying the law that the outward garment adjusts
itself, sooner or later, to the inward man. From its
6

82 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

founder onward, striken with metaphysical incompetence,
and equally incapable of appreciating the true spirit of
scientific method, it is now essaying to cover the naked-
ness of its philosophical materialism with the rags of a
spiritualistic phraseology out of which the original sense
has wholly departed. I understand and I respect the
meaning of the word "soul," as used by Pagan and Chris-
tian philosophers for what they believe to be the impe-
rishable seat of human personality, bearing throughout
eternity its burden of woe, or its capacity for adoration
and love. I confess that my dull moral sense does not
enable me to see anything base or selfish in the desire for
a future life among the spirits of the just made perfect :
or even among a few such poor fallible souls as one has
known here below.

And if I am not satisfied with the evidence that is
offered me that such a soul and such a future life exists,
I am content to take what is to be had and to make the
best of the brief span of existence that is within my reach,
without reviling those whose faith is more robust and
whose hopes are richer and fuller. But in the interest of
scientific clearness, I object to say that I have a soul, when
I mean, all the while, that my organism has certain mental
functions which, like the rest, are dependent upon its
molecular composition, and come to an end when I die ;
and I object still more to affirm that I look to a future
life, when all that I mean is, that the influence of my say-
ings and doings will be more or less felt by a number of

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 83

people after the physical components of that organism are
scattered to the four winds.

Throw a stone into the sea, and there is a sense in which
it is true that the wavelets which spread around it have an
effect through all space and all time. Shall we say that
the stone has a future life ?

It is not worth while to have broken awray, not without
pain and grief, from beliefs which, true or false, embody
great and fruitful conceptions, to fall back into the arms
of a half-breed, between science and theology, endowed,
like most half-breeds, with the faults of both parents and
the virtues of neither. And it is unwise by such a lapse
to expose one's self to the temptation of holding with the
hare and hunting with the hounds — of using the weapons
of one progenitor to damage the other. I cannot but think
that the members of the positivist school in this country
stand in some danger of falling into that fatal error ; and
I put it to them to consider whether it is either consistent
or becoming for those who hold that the " finest spiritual
sensibility" is a mere bodily function, to join in the view-'
halloo, when the hunt is up against biological science —
to use their voices in swelling the senseless cry that "civi-
lization is in danger if the workings of the human spirit
are to become questions of physiology."

84 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

LORD BLACHFORD.

MR. HARRISON is of opinion that the difference be-
tween l 'Imstians and himself on this question of
the soul and the future life, " turns altogether on habits of
thought." What appears to the positivist flimsy will, he
says, seem to the Christian sublime, and vice versa" simply
because our minds have been trained in different logical
methods," and this apparently because positivism "pretends
to no other basis than positive knowledge and scientific
logic." But if this is so, it is not, I think, quite consistent
to conclude, as he does, that " it is idle to dispute about our
respective logical methods, or to put this or that habit of
mind in a combat with that." As to the combatants this
may be true. But it surely is not idle, but very much to the
purpose, for the information of those judges to whom the
very act of publication appeals, to discuss habits and mej
thods on which, it is declared, the difference altogether
turns.

I note, therefore, in limine what, as I go on, I shall
have occasion to illustrate, one or two differences between
the methods of Mr. Harrison and those in which I have
been trained.

I have been taught to consider that certain words or
ideas represent what are called by logicians substances, by
Mr. Harrison, I think, entities, and by others, as the case
may be, persons, beings, objects, or articles. Such are air,
earth, man, horses, chairs, and tables. Their peculiarity

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 85

is that they have each of them a separate, independent,
substantive existence. They are.

There are other words or ideas which do not represent
existing things, but qualities, relations, consequences, pro-
cesses, or occurrences, like victory, virtue, life, order, or
destruction, which do but belong to substances, or result
from them without any distinct existence of their own. A
thing signified by a word of the former class cannot pos-
sibly be identical or even homogeneous with a thing sig-
nified by a word of the second class. A fiddle is not only
a different thing from a tune, but it' belongs to another
and totally distinct order of ideas. To this distinction the
English mind at some period of its history must have been
imperfectly alive. If a Greek confounded KTIO-IS with KTur/xa,
an act with a thing, it was the fault of the individual.
But the English language, instead of precluding such a
confusion, almost, one would say, labours to propagate
it. Such words as "building," "announcement," "prepa-
ration," or " power," are equally available to signify either
the act of construction or an edifice — either the act of
proclaiming or a placard — either the act of preparing or a
surgical specimen — either the ability to do something or
the being in which that ability resides. Such imperfections
of language infuse themselves into thought. And I ven-
ture to think that the slight superciliousness with which
Mr. Harrison treats the doctrines, which such persons as
myself entertain respecting the soul is in some degree due
to the fact that positive " habits of thought " and " logical
methods," <i<> not recognize so completely as ours the dis-

86 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

tinction which I have described as that between a fiddle
and a tune.

Again, my own habit of mind is to distinguish more
pointedly than Mr. Harrison does between a unit and a
complex whole. When I speak of an act of individual
will, I seem to myself to speak of an indivisible act pro-
ceeding from a single being. The unity is not merely in
my mode of representation, but in the thing signified. If
I speak of an act of the national will — say a determination
to declare war — I speak of the concurrence of a number of
individual wills, each acting for itself, and under an infi-
nite variety of influences, but so related to each other and
so acting in concert that it is convenient to represent them
under the aggregate term " nation." I use a term which
signifies unity of being, but I really mean nothing more
than cooperation, or correlated action and feeling. So,
when I speak of the happiness of humanity, I mean noth-
ing whatever but a number of particular happinesses of
individual persons. Humanity is not a unit, but a word
which enables me to bring a number of units under view
at once. In the case of material objects, I apprehend,
unity is simply relative and artificial — a grain of corn is
a unit relatively tc a bushel, and an aggregate relatively
to an atom. But I, believing myself to be a spiritual
being, call myself actually and without metaphor — one.

Mr. Harrison, who acknowledges the existence of no
being but matter, appears either to deny the existence of
any real unity whatever, or to ascribe the real unity to an
aggregate of things or beings who resemble each other,

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 87

like the members of the human race, or cooperate toward
a common result, like the parts of a picture, a melody, or
the human frame, and which may thus be conveniently
viewed in combination, and represented by a single word
or phrase.

I think that the little which I have to say will be the
clearer for these preliminary protests.

The questions in hand relate first to the claim of the
soul of man to be treated as an existing thing not bound
by the laws of matter : secondly to the immortality of
that existing thing.

The claim of the soul to be considered as an existing
and immaterial being presents itself to my mind as
follows :

My positive experience informs me of one thing per-
cipient— myself; and of a multitude of things per-
ceptible— perceptible, that is, not by way of consciousness,
as I am to myself, but by way of impression on other
things — capable of making themselves felt through the
channels and organs of sensation. These things thus per-
ceptible constitute the material world.

I take no account of percipients other than myself, for
I can only conjecture about them what I know about
myself. I take no account of things neither percipient
nor perceptible, for it is impossible to do so. I know of
nothing outside me of which I can say it is at once per-
cipient and perceptible. But I enquire whether I am
myself so — whether the existing being to which my sense
of identity refers, in which my sensations reside, and

A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

which for these two reasons I call " myself," is capable also
of being perceived by beings outside myself, as the ma-
terial world is perceived by me.

I first obs<-rv«> that things perceptible comprise not on-
ly objects, but instruments and media of perception — an
immense vaijpty of contrivances, natural or artificial, for
transmitting information to the sensitive being. Such
are telescopes, microscopes, ear-trumpets, the atmosphere,
and various other media which, if not at present the ob-
jects of direct sensation, may conceivably become so —
and such, above all, are various parts of the human body
—the lenses which collect the vibrations which are the
conditions of light ; the tympanum which collects the
vibrations which are the conditions of sound ; the muscles
which adjust these and other instruments of sensation to
the precise performance of their work ; the nerves which
convey to and fro molecular movements of the most in-
comprehensible significance and efficacy. Of all these it
is, I understand, more and more evident, as science ad-
vances, that they are perceptible, but do not perceive.
Ear, hand, eye, and nerves, are alike machinery — mere
machinery for transmitting the movement of atoms to
certain nervous centres — ascertained localities which (it
is proper to observe in passing), though small relatively
to ourselves and our powers of investigation, may — since
size is entirely relative — be absolutely large enough to
contain little worlds in themselves.

Here the investigation of things perceptible is stopped,
abruptly and completely. Our inquiries into the size,

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 89

composition and movement of particles, have been push-
ed, for the present at any rate, as far as they will go.
But at this point we come across a field of phenomena to
which the attributes of atoms, size, movement, and physi-
cal composition, are wholly inapplicable — the phenomena
of sensation or animal life.

Science informs me that the movements of these per-
ceptible atoms within my body bear a correspondence,
strange, subtle, and precise, to the sensations of which I,
as a percipient, am conscious ; a correspondence (it is again
proper to observe in passing) which extends not only to
perceptions, as in sight or hearing, but to reflection and
volition, as in sleep and drunkenness. The relation is
not one of similarity. The vibrations of a white, black,
or gray pulp are not in any sensible way similar to the
perception of colour or sound, or the imagination of a noble
act. There is no visible — may I not say no conceivable ?
— reason why one should depend on the other. Motion
and sensation interact, but they do not overlap. There
is no homogeneity between them. They stand apart.
Physical science conducts us to the brink of the chasm
which separates them, and by so doing only shews us its
depth.

I return then to the question, "What am I?" My
own habits of mind and logical methods certainly require
me to believe that I am something — something percipient
— bu t am I perceptible ? I find no reason for supposing it.
I believe myself to be surrounded by things percipient.
An- they perceptible? Not to my knowledge. Their

90

A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

existence is to me a matter of inference from their per-
ceptible appendages. Them — their very selves — I cer-
tainly cannot perceive. As far as I can understand
things perceptible, I detect in them no quality — no capac-
ity for any quality tike that of percipiency, which, with
its homogeneous faculties, intellect, affections, and so on,
is the basis of my own nature. Physical science, while
it develops the relation, seems absolutely to emphasize
and illuminate the ineradicable difference between the
motions of a material and the sensations of a living being.
Of the attributes of a percipient we have, each for him-
self, profound and immediate experience. Of the attri-
butes of the perceptible we have, I suppose, distinct
scientific conceptions. Our notions of the one and our
notions of the other appear to attach to a different order
of being.

It appears therefore to me that there is no reason to
believe, and much reason for not believing, that the per-
cipient is perceptible under our present conditions of
existence, or indeed under any conditions that our pre-
sent faculties enable us to imagine.

And this is my case, which of course covers the whole
animal creation. Perception must be an attribute of
something; and there is reason for believing that this
something is imperceptible. This is what I mean when I
say that I have, or more properly that I am, a soul Or
a spirit, or rather it is the point on which I join issue
with those who say that I am not.

I am not, as Mr. Harrison seems to suppose, running

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 91

about in search of a " cause." I am inquiring into the
nature of a being, and that being myself. I am sure I
am something. I am certainly not the mere tangible
structure of atoms which I affect, and by which I am af-
fected after a wonderful fashion. In reflecting on the
nature of my own operations I find nothing to suggest
that my own being is subject to the same class of physi-
cal laws as the objects from which my sensations are de-
rived, and I conclude that I am not subject to those laws.
The most substantial objection to this conclusion is con-
veyed, I conceive, in a sentence of Mr. Harrison's: "To
talk to us of mind, feeling and will, continuing their
functions in the ab§ence of physical organs and visible
organisms, is to use language which, to us at least, is pure
nonsense."

It is probably to those who talk thus that Mr. Harrison
refers when he says that argument is useless. And in
point of fact I have no answer but to call his notions
anthropomorphic, and to charge him with want of a cer-
tain kind of imagination. By imagination we commonly
mean the creative faculty which enables a man to give a
palpable shape to what he believes or thinks possible ;
and this, I do not doubt, Mr. Harrison possesses in a high
degree. But there is another kind of imagination which
enables a man to embrace the idea of a possibility to
which no such palpable shape can be given, or rather of
a world of possibilities beyond the range of his experi-
ence or the grasp of his faculties; as Mr. John Mill em-
braced the idea of a possible world in which the coiinec-

92 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

tion of cause and effect should not exist. The want of
this necvssary though dangerous faculty makes a man
the victim of vivid impressions, and disables him from
believing what his impressions do not enable him to rea-
lize. Questions respecting metaphysical possibility turn
much on the presence, or absence, or exaggeration, of this
kind of imagination. And when one man has said, " I
can perceive it possible," and another has said, "I can-
not," it is certainly difficult to get any further.

To me it is not in the slightest degree difficult to
conceive the possible existence of a being capable of love
and knowledge without the physical organs through
which human beings derive their knowledge, nor in sup-
posing myself to be such a being. Irideed, I seem actually
to exercise such a capacity (however I got it) when I shut
my eyes and try to think out a moral or mathematical
puzzle. If it is true that a particular corner of my brain
is concerned in the matter, I accept the fact not as a self-
evident truth (which would seem to be Mr. Harrison's
position), but as a curious discovery of the anatomists.
But having said this I have said everything, and, as Mr.
Harrison must* suppose that I deceive myself, so I sup-
pose that in his case the imagination which founds itself
on experience is so active and vivid as to cloud or dwarf
the imagination which proceeds beyond or beside exper-
ience.

Mr. Harrison's own theory I do not quite understand.
He derides the idea, though he does not absolutely deny
the possibility, of an immaterial entity which feels. And

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. . 93

he appears to be sensible of the difficulty of supposing
that atoms of matter which assume the form of a gray
pulp can feel. He holds accordingly, as I understand,
that feeling, and all that follows from it, are the results
of an " organism."

If he had used the word " organization," I should have
concluded unhesitatingly that he was the victim of the
Anglican confusion which I have above noticed, and that
in his own mind, he escaped the alternative difficulties of
the case by the common expedient of shifting as occasion
required from one sense of that word to the other. If
pressed by the difficulty of imagining sensation not resi-
dent in any specific sensitive thing, the word organiz-
ation would supply to his mind the idea of a thing, a
sensitive aggregate of organized atoms. If, on the con-
trary, pressed by the difficulty of supposing that these
atoms, one or all, thought, the word would shift its
meaning and present the aspect not of an aggregate bulk,
but of orderly arrangement — not of a thing, or a collec-
tion of things, but of a state of things. •

But the word " organism " is generally taken to indi-
cate a thing organized. And the choice of that word
would seem to indicate that he ascribed the spiritual acts
(so to call them) which constitute life to the aggregate
bulk of the atoms organized, or the appropriate part of
them. But this he elsewhere seems to disclaim. " The
philosophy which treats man as man simply affirms that
man loves, thinks, acts, not that ganglia, or the sinews,
or any organ of man loves, and thinks, and acts." Yes,

94- A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

but we recur to the question, " What is man ? " If the
ganglia do not think, what is it that does ? Mr. Harri-
son, as I understand, answers that it is a consensus of
faculties, an harmonious system of parts, and he denoun-
ces an attempt to introduce into this collocation of parts
or faculties an underlying entity or being which shall
possess those faculties or employ those parts. It is then
not after all to a being or aggregate of beings, but to a
relation or condition of beings, that will and thought and
love belong. If this is Mr. Harrison's meaning, I certainly
agree with him that it is indeed impossible to compose a
difference between two disputants of whom one holds, and
the other denies, that a condition can think. If my op-
ponent does not admit this to be an absurdity, I do not
pretend to drive him any further.

With regard to immortality, I have nothing material to
add to what has been said by those who have preceded
me. I agree with Prof. Huxley that the natural world
supplies nothing which can be called evidence of a future
life. Believing in God, I see in the constitution of the
world which he has made, and in £the yearnings and as-
pirations of that spiritual nature which he has given to
man, much that commends to my belief the revelation of
a future life which I believe him to have made. But it
is in virtue of his clear promise, not in virtue of these
doubtful intimations, that I rely on the prospect of a
future life. Believing that he is the author of that moral
insight which in its ruder forms controls the multitude,
and in its higher inspires the saint, I revere those great

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 95

men who were able to forecast this great announcement,
but I cannot and do not care to reduce that forecast to
any logical process, or base it on any conclusive reason-
ing. Rather I admire their power of divination the more
on account of the narrowness of their logical data. For
myself, I believe because I am told.

But whether the doctrine of immortality be true or
false, I protest, with Mr. Hutton, against the attempt to
substitute for what, at any rate, is a substantial idea,
something which can hardly be called even a shadow or
echo of it.

The Christian conception of the world is this : It is a
world of moral as of physical waste. Much seed is sown
which will not ripen, but some is sown that will. This
planet is a seat, among other things, of present goodness
and happiness. And this our goodness and happiness,
like our crime and misery, propagate or fail to propagate
themselves during our lives and after our deaths. But,
apart from these earthly consequences, which are much to
us and all to the positivist, the little fragment of the uni-
verse on which we appear and disappear is, we believe,
a nursery for something greater. The capacities for love
and knowledge, which in some of us attain a certain de-
velopment here, we must all feel to be capable, with
greater opportunities, of an infinitely greater development;
and Christians believe that such a development is in fact
reserved for those who, in this short time of apprentice-
ship, take the proper steps for approaching it.

This conception of a glorious and increasing company,

96 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

into which the best of men are continually to be gathered
to be associated with each other (to say no more) in all
that can make existence happy and noble, may be a dream,
and Mr. Harrison may be right in calling it so. In de-
riding it he cannot be right. " The eternity of the tabor "
he calls it ! Has he never felt, or, at any rate, is he not
able to conceive, a thrill of pleasure at a sympathetic in-
terchange of look, or word, or touch, with a fellow-crea-
ture kind and noble and brilliant, and engaged in the
exhibition of those qualities of heart and intellect which
make him what he is ? Multiply and sustain this — sup-
pose yourself surrounded by beings with whom this in-
terchange of sympathy is warm and perpetual. Intensify
it. Increase indefinitely the excellence of one of those
beings, the wonderful and attractive character of his
operations, our own capacities of affection and intellect,
the vividness of our conception, the breadth and firmness of
of our mental grasp, the sharp vigour of our admiration ; and,
to .exclude satiety, imagine if you like that the operations
which we contemplate and our relations to our companions
are infinitely varied — a supposition for which the size of
the known and unknown universe affords indefinite scope
— or otherwise suppose that sameness ceases to tire, as the
old Greek philosopher thought it might do if we were

better than we are (//-era/JoA.^ TTOLVTW yXvKvrarov BLOL TTovypiav

nva), or as it would do, I suppose, if we had no memory
of the immediate past. Imagine all this as the very least
that may be hoped, if our own powers of conception are
as slight in respect to the nature of what is to be as our

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 97

bodies are in relation to the physical universe. And re-
member that, if practical duties are necessary for the per-
fection of life, the universe is not so small but that in
some corner of it its Creator might always find something
to do for the army of intelligences whom he has thus
formed and exalted.

All this, I repeat, may be a dream, but to characterize
it as " the eternity of the tabor " shows surely a feeble-
ness of conception or carelessness of representation more
worthy of a ready writer than of a serious thinker. And
to place before us as a rival conception the fact that some
of our good deeds will have indefinite consequences — to
call this scanty and fading chain of effects, which we shall
be as unable to perceive or control as we have been un-
able to anticipate — to call this a " posthumous activity,"
" an eternity of spiritual influence," and a " life beyond
the grave," and finally, under the appellation of " incor-
poration into the glorious future of our race," to claim for
it a dignity and value parallel to that which would attach
to the Christian's expectation (if solid) of a sensible life
of exalted happiness for himself and all good men, is surely
nothing more or less than extravagance founded on mis-
nomer.

With regard to the ^promised incorporation, I should
really like to know what is the exact process, or event, or
condition, which Mr. Harrison considers himself to under-
stand by the incorporation of a consensus of faculties with
a glorious future ; and whether he arrived at its appre-

98 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

hension by way of " positive knowledge," or by way of
" scientific logic."

Mr. Harrison's future life is disposed of by Professor
Huxley in a few words : " Throw a stone into the sea,
and there is a sense in which it is true that the wavelets
which spread around it have an effect through all space
an«l time. Shall we say that the stone has a future life?"

To this I only add the question whether I am not jus-
tified in saying that Mr. Harrison does not adequately
distinguish between the nature of a fiddle and the nature
of a tune, and would contend (if consistent) that a violin
which had been burnt to ashes would, notwithstanding,
continue to exist, at least as long as a tune which had
been played upon it survived in the memory of any one
who had heard it — the consensus of its capacities being,
it would seem, incorporated into the glorious future of
music.

HON. RODEN NOEL.

DEATH is a phenomenon ; but are we phenomena ?
The question of immortality seems, philosophically
speaking, very much to resolve itself into that of person-
ality. Are we persons, spirits, or are we things ? Perhaps
we are a loose collection of successive qualities ? That
seems to be the latest conclusion of positive and Agnostic
biological philosophy. The happy thought 'which, as Dr.

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 99

Stirling suggests, was probably thrown out in a spirit of
persiflage by Hume has been adopted in all seriousness by
his followers. Mr. Harrison is very bitter with those who
want to explain mental and moral phenomena by physi-
ology. But, as Prof. Huxley remarks, he seems in many
parts of his essay to do the same thing himself. What
could Biichner, or Carl Vogt, say stronger than this ? "At
last, the priek of a needle, or a grain of mineral, will in
an instant lay to rest forever man's body and its unity,
and all the spontaneous activities of intelligence, feeling,
and action, with which that compound organism was
charged." Again, he says^ the spiritual faculties are " di-
rectly dependent on physical organs " — "stand forth as
functions of living organs in given conditions of the or-
ganism." Again : " At last the man Newton dies, that is,
the body is dispersed into gas and dust." Mr. Harrison,
then, though a positivist, bound to know only successive
phenomena, seems to know the body as a material entity
possessed of such functions as conscience, reason, imagina-
tion, perception — to know that Newton's body thought out
the " Principia," and Shakespeare's conceived " Hamlet."
Indeed, Agnosticism generally, though with a show of
humility, seems rather arbitrary in its selection of what we
shall know, and what we shall not ; we must know something ;
so we shall know that we have ideas and feelings, but not-
the personal identity that alone makes them intelligible, or
we shall use the word, and yet speak as if the idea were
a figment ; we shall know qualities, but not substance ;
" functions " and " forces," but not the some one or some-

100 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

thing of which they must be functions and forces to be
conceivable at all. Yet naturam ixpellas furca, etc.
Common-sense insists on retaining the fundamental laws
of human thought, not being able to get rid of them ; and
hence the hap-hazard, instead of systematic and orderly,
fashion in which the new philosophy deals with universal
convictions, denying even that they exist out of theology
and me't< ij>li // x / q lie.

Thus (in apparent contradiction to the statements
quoted), we are told that it is " man who loves,
thinks, acts ; not the ganglia, or sinuses, or any
organ" that does so. But perhaps the essayist means
that all the body together does so. He says a man is " the
consensus, or combined activity of his faculties." What
is meant by this phraseology ? It is just this " his" this
•• consensus," or "combined acting," that is inconceivable
without the focus of unity, in which many contemporane-
ous phenomena, and many past and present, meet to be
compared, remembered, identified, as belonging to the
same self ; so only can they be known phenomena at all.
Well, do we find in examining the physical structure of
man's body as solid, heavy, extended, devisible, or its
living organs and their physical functions, or the rear-
rangement of molecules of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen,
etc., into living tissue, or its oxidation, anything corres-
ponding to the consciousness of personal moral agency,
and personal identity ? We put the two classes of con-
ception side by side, and they seem to refuse to be
identified — man as one and the same conscious moral

THE SOUL AND FUTUBTC LlVfi. 161

agent — and his body, or the bumps on his skull ; or is
man indeed a function of his own body ? Are we right
in talking of our bodies as material things, and of our-
selves as if we were not things, but persons with mights,
rights, and duties ? We ought, perhaps, to talk — theolo-
gies and philosophies being now exploded — not of our
having bodies, but of bodies having us, and of bodies
having rights or duties. Perhaps Dundreary was mis-
taken, and the tail may wag the dog after all.

Mr. Harrison says : " Orthodoxy has so long been
accustomed to take itself for granted, that we are apt to
forget how very short a period of human history this
sublimated essence" (the immaterial soul) " has been cur-
rent. There is not a trace of it in the Bible in its
present sense." This reminds one rather of Mr. Matthew
Arnold's contention that the Jews did not believe in God.
But really it does not much signify what particular intel-
lectual theories have been entertained by different men
at different times about the nature of God or of the soul :
the question is whether you do not find on the whole
among them all a consciousness or conviction that there
is a Higher Being above them, together with a power of
distinguishing themselves from their own bodies, and the
world around them — in consequence of this, too, a belief
in personal immortality. Many in all ages believe that
the dead have spoken to us from beyond the grave. But
into that I will not enter. Are we our bodies ? that seems
to be the point. Now, I do not think positivism has
any right to assume that we are, even on its own princi-
ples and professions.

A >HM>:;|;\; SYMPOSIUM.

Mr. ILirri-ui ha^ a \vry i'oiviMr passage, in which
he enlarges upon this theme : that "the laws of the
separate functions of body, mind, or feeling, have
visible relations to each other; are inextricably woven in
with each other, act and react. . . . From the summit of
spiritual life TO the 1 »ase of corporeal life, whether we pass
ii}» m- down the gamut of human forces, there runs one
organic corn-hit inn and sympathy of parts. Touch the
smallest film- in the corporeal man, and in some infini-
tesimal way we may watch the effect in the moral man.
When we rouse chords of the most glorious ecstasy of the
soul, we may see the vibrations of them visibly thrilling
upon the skin." Here we are in the region of positive
facts as specially made manifest by recent investigation.
And the orthodox schools need to recognize the signifi-
cance of such facts. The close interdependence of body
and soul is a startling verity that must be looked in the
face ; and the discovery has, no doubt, gone far to shake
the faith of many in human immortality, as well as in
other momentous kindred truths. It has been so with myself.
But I think the old dictum of Bacon about the effect of
a little and more knowledge will be found applicable
after all. Let us look these facts very steadily in the
face. When we have thought for a long time, there is a
feeling of pain in the head. That is a feeling, observe, in
our own conscious selves. Further, by observation and
experiment, it has been made certain that some molecular
change in the nervous substance of the brain (to the
renewal of which oxygenated blood is necessary) is going

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 103

on, while the process of thinking takes place — though we
are not conscious of it in our own case, except as a matter
of inference. The thought itself seems, when we renecJ
on it, partly due to the action of an external world or
cosmos upon us ; partly to our own " forms of thought,"
or fixed ways of perceiving and thinking, which have
been ours so long as we can remember, and which do not
belong to us more than to other individual members of
the human family ; again partly to our own past experi-
ence. But what is this material process accompanying
thought, which conceivably we might perceive if we could
see the inside of our own bodies ? Why it too can only
seem what it seems by virtue of our own . personal past
experience, and our own human as well as individual
modes of conceiving. Is not *that " positive " too ? Will
not men of sciertee agree with me that such is the fact ?
In short, our bodies, on any view of them, Science herself
has taught us, are percepts and concepts of ours — I don't
say of the " soul," or the mind, or any bete noire of the
sort, but of ourselves, who surely cannot be altogether
betes noires. They are as much percepts and concepts of
ours as is the material world outside them. Are they
coloured ? Colour, we are told, is- a sensation. Are they
hard or soft ? These are our sensations, and relative to
us. The elements of our food enter into relations we
name living ; their molecules enter into that condition of
unstable equilibrium ; there is motion of parts fulfilling
definite intelligible and constant uses, in some cases subject
to our own intelligent direction. But all this is what

104 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

appeai-s to our intelligence, and it appears different,
According to the stages of intelligence at which we arrive ;
a good deal of it is Irypothesis of our own minds.
Readers of Berkeley and Kant need not be told this ; it is
now universally acknowledged by the competent. The
atomic tin-on- is a working hypothesis of our minds only.
Spa iv and tinu- arc relative to our intelligence, to the

—ion of our thoughts, to our own faculties of motion,
motion being also a conception of ours. Our bodies, in
fact, as positivists often tells us, and as we now venture
to remind ///-//i, are phenomena, that is, orderly appear-
ances to U8. They further tell us generally that there is
nothing which thus appears, or that we cannot know that
there is anything beyond the appearance. What, then,

ling to positivism itseli*, is the most we are entitled
to attirm with regard to the dead ? Simply that there
arc no <> /'/" durances f<> 'us of a living personality in con-

>n with those phenomena which we call a dead
body, any more than there are in conneciion with the
used-up materials of burned tissues that pass by osmosis
into the capillaries, and away by excretory ducts. But
are we entitled to affirm that the person is extinct is
dissolved — the one conscious self in whom these bodily
phenomena centred (except so far as they centred in us),
who was the focus of them, gave them form, made them
what they were ; whose thoughts wandered up and down
through eternity ; of whom, therefore, the bodily as well
as mental and spiritual functions were functions, so far as
the body entered into the conscious self at all, ? We can,

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 105

on the contrary, only affirm that probably the person no
longer perceives, and is conscious, in connection with
this form we look upon, wherein so-called chemical affini-
ties now prevail altogether over so-called vital power.
But even in life the body is always changing and decom-
posing— foreign substances are always becoming a new
body, and the old body becoming a foreign substance. Yet
the person remains one and the same. True, positivism
tries to eliminate persons, and reduce all to appearances ;
but this is too glaring a violation of common-sense, and
I do not think from his language Mr. Harrison quite
means to do this. Well, by spirit, even by " soul," most
people, let me assure him, only mean our own conscious
personal selves. For myself, indeed, I believe that there
cannot be appearances without something to appear. But
seeing that the material world is in harmony with our
intelligence, and presents all the appearance of intelligent
cooperation of parts with a view to ends, I believe, with
a great English thinker, whose loss we have to deplore
(James Hinton), that all this is the manifestation of life
— of living spirits or persons, not of dead, inert matter,
though from our own spiritual deadness or inertness it
appears to us material. Upon our own moral and
spiritual life, in fact, depends the measure of our
knowledge and perception. I can indeed admit with
Mr. Harrison that probably there must always be to
us the phenomenon, the body, the external ; but it may
be widely different from what it seems now. We may be
made one with the great Elohim, or angels of Nature who

100 A MODKRN SYMPOSIUM.

us, 01- \\r may still grovel in dead material bodily
life. We now appear to ourselves and to others as bodily,
as material. Body, and soul or mind, are two opposite
phenomenal poles of one reality, which is self or spirit ;
but though these phenomena may vary, the creative,
informing spirit, which underlies all, of which we par-
take, which is absolute, divine, this can never be destroyed.
" In God we live, move, and have our being." It is held,
indeed, by the new philosophy, that the temporal, the
physical, and the composite (elements of matter and
" feeling"), are the basis of our higher consciousness : on
the contrary, I hold that this is absurd, and that the one
eternal consciousness or spirit must be the basis of the
physical, composite, and temporal ; is needed to give unity
and harmony to the body. One is a little ashamed of
agreeing with an old-fashioned thinker, whom an old-
fashioned poet pronounced the " first of those who know,"
that the spirit is organizing vital principle of the body,
not vice versa. The great difficulty, no doubt, is that
apparent irruption of the external into the personal, when,
as the essayist says, " impair a man's secretions, and moral
sense is dulled, discoloured, depraved." But it is our spiritual
deadness that has put us into this physical condition ; and
probably it is we who are responsible in a fuller sense
than we can realize now for this effect upon us, which
must be in the end too for purposes of discipline; it
belongs to our spiritual history and purpose. Moreover,
this external world is not so foreign to us as we imagine ;
it is spiritual, and between all spirit there is solidarity.

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 107

Mr. Hinton observes (and here I agree with him rather
than with Mr. Harrison) that the defect and falseness of
our knowing must be in the knowing by only part of
ourselves. Whereas sense had to be supplemented by
intellect, and proved misleading without it, so intellect,
even in the region of knowledge, has to be supplemented
by moral sense, which is the highest faculty in us. We
are at present misled by a false view of the world, based
on sense and intellect only. Death is but a hideous il-
lusion of our deadness —

" Death is the veil which those who live-call life :
We sleep and it is lifted."

The true definition of the actual is that which is true for,
which satisfies the whole being of humanity. We must
ask of a doctrine, " Does it answer in the moral region ?"
if so, it is as true as we can have it with our present
knowledge ; but, if the moral experiment fails, it is not
true. Conscience has the highest authority about know-
ledge, as it has about conduct. Now apply this to the
negations of positivism, and the belief Comte would sub-
stitute for faith in God, and personal immortality. Kant
sufficiently proved that these are postulates required by
Practical Reason, and on this ground he believed them.
I am not blind to the beauty and nobleness of Comte's
moral ideal (not without debt to Christ's as expounded)
by himself, and here by Mr. Harrison. Still I say, The
moral experiment fails. Some of us may seek to benefit
the world, and then desire rest. But what of the
maimed and broken and aimless lives around us ? What

108 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

of those we have lost, who were dearer to us than our own
selves, full of fairest hope and promise, unaware annihi-
lated in earliest dawn, whose dewy bud yet slept unfolded ?
If they were things, doubtless we might count them as
so much manure, in which to grow those still more
beautiful though still brief-flowering human aloes, which
positivism, though knowing nothing but present pheno-
mena, and denying God, is able confidently to promise us
in some remote future. But alas ! they seemed living
spirits, able to hope for infinite love, progressive virtue,
the beautific vision of God himself ! And they really
ivere — so much manure ! Why, as has already been asked,
are such ephemerals worth living for, however many of
them there may be, whose lives are as an idle flash in the
pan, always promising, yet failing to attain any sub-
stantial or enduring good ? What of these agonizing
women and children, now the victims of Ottoman blood-
madness ? What of all the cramped, unlovely, debased,
or slow-tortured yet evanescent lives of myriads in our
great cities ? These cannot have the philosophic aspira-
tions of culture. They have too often none at all. Go
proclaim to them this gospel, supplementing it by the
warning that in the end there will remain only a huge
block of ice in a " wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled
world!" I could believe in the pessimism of Schopen-
hauer, not in this jaunty optimism of Comte.

Are we then indeed orphans ? Will the tyrant go ever
unpunished, the wrong ever unredressed, the poor and
helpless remain always trampled and unhappy ? Must the

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 109

battle of good and evil in ourselves and others hang al-
ways trembling in the balance, forever undecided ; or does
it all mean nothing more than we see now, and is the
glorious world but some ghastly illusion of insanity ?
When " the fever called living is over at last," is all in-
deed over ? Thank God that through this Babel of dis-
cordant voices modern men can still hear His accents who
said, " Come unto me, all ye that are weary and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest."

LORD SELBORNE.

I AM too well satisfied with Lord Blachford's paper
to think that I can add anything of importance to
it. The little I would say has reference to our actual
knowledge of the soul during this life — meaning by the
soul what Lord Blachford means, viz., the conscious
being which each man calls " himself."

It appears to me that what we know and can observe
tends to confirm the testimony of our consciousness to
the reality of the distinction between the body and the
soul. From the necessity of the case, we cannpt observe
any manifestations of the soul except during the time of
its association with the body. This limit of our experi-
ence applies, not to the " ego " of which alone each man
has any direct knowledge, but to the perceptible indica-

110 . A MODKHN SYMPOSIUM.

tion of consciousness in others. It is impossible, in the
nature of things, that any man can ever have had experi-
ence of the total cessation of his own consciousness ; and
the idea of such a cessation is much less natural and much
more difficult to realize than that of its continuance. We
observe the phenomena of death in others, and infer, by
irresistible induction, that the same thing will also hap-
pen to ourselves. But these phenomena carry us only to
the dissociation of the " ego " from the body, not to its
extinction.

Nothing else can be credible if our consciousness is not ;
and I have said that this bears testimony to the reality
of the distinction between soul and body. Each man is
conscious of using his own body as an instrument, in the
same sense in which he would use any other machine.
He passes a different moral judgment on the mechanical
and involuntary actions of his body, from that which he
feels to be due to its actions resulting from his own free-
will. The unity and identity of the " ego," from the be-
ginning to the end of life, is of the essence of his con-
sciousness.

In accordance with this testimony are such facts as the
following : that the body has no proper unity, identity, or
continuity, through the whole of life— all its constituent
parts being in a constant state of flux and change ; that
many parts and organs of the body may be removed with
no greater effect upon the " ego " than when we take off
any article of clothing ; and that those organs which can-
not be removed or stopped in their action without death

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. Ill

are distributed over different parts of the body, and are
homogeneous in their material and structure with others
which we can lose without the sense that any change has
passed over our proper selves. If, on the one hand, a
diseased state of some bodily organs interrupts the rea-
sonable manifestations of the soul through the body, the
cases are, on the other, not rare in which the whole body
decays and fells into extreme age, weakness, and even
decrepitude, while vigour, freshness, and youthfulness, are
characteristic of the mind.

The attempt, in Butler's work, to reason from the in-
divisibility and indestructibility, of the soul as ascertained
facts, is less satisfactory than most of that great writer's
arguments, which are generally rather intended to be
destructive of objections than demonstrative of positive
truths. But the modern scientific doctrine, that all
matter and all force are indestructible, is not without
interest in relation to that argument. There must at
least be a natural presumption from that doctrine that, if
the soul during life has a real existence distinct from the
body, it is not annihilated by death. If, indeed, it were
a mere " force " (such as heat, light, etc., are supposed by
modern philosophers to be — though men who are not
philosophers may be excused if they find some difficulty
in understanding exactly what is meant by the term when
so used), it would be consistent with that doctrine that
the soul might be transmuted after death into some other
form of force. But the idea of " force " in this sense
(whatever may be its exact meaning) seems wholly

11- A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

inapplicable to the conscious being which a man calls
" himself."

The resemblances in the nature and organization of
animal and vegetable bodies seem to me to confirm, in-
stead of weakening, the impression that the body of man
is a machine under the government of the soul, and quite
• listinct from it. Plants manifest no consciousness ; all
our knowledge of them tends irresistibly to the conclu-
sion that there is in them no intelligent, much less any
reasonable, principle of life. Yet they are machines very
like the human body ; not, indeed, in their formal devel-
opment or their exact chemical processes, but in the
general scheme and functions of their organism — in their
laws of nutrition, digestion, assimilation, respiration, and
especially reproduction. They are bodies without souls,
living a physical life, and subject to a physical death.
The inferior animals have bodies still more like our own ;
indeed in their higher orders, resembling them very closely
indeed ; and they have also a principle of life quite differ-
ent from that of plants, with various degrees of conscious-
ness, intelligence, and volition. Even in their principle
of life, arguments founded on observation and comparison
(though not on individual consciousness), more or less
similar to those which apply to man, tend to show that
there is something distinct from, and more than, the body.
But, of all these inferior animals, the intelligence differs
from that of man, not in degree only, but in kind. Nature
is their simple, uniform, and sufficient law ; their very
arts (which are often wonderful) come to them by

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 113

Nature, except when they are trained by man ; there is
in them no sign of discourse, of reason, of morality, or of
the knowledge of good and evil. The very similarity of
their bodily structure to that of man tends, when these
differences are noted, to add weight to the other natural
evidence of the distinctness of man's soul from his body.

The immortality of the soul seems to me to be one of
those truths for the belief in which, when authoritatively
declared, man is prepared by the very constitution of his
nature.

CANON BARRY.

ANY one who from the ancient position of Christianity
looks on the controversy between Mr. Harrison and
Prof. Huxley on " The Soul and Future Life " (to which 1
propose mainly to confine myself) will be tempted with
Faulconbridge to observe, not without a touch of grim
satisfaction, how, " from north to south, Austria and
France shoot in each other's mouth." The fight is fierce
enough to make him ask, Tantatne animis sapientibus irce?
But he will see that each is far more effective in battering
the lines of the enemy than in strengthening his own.
Nor will he be greatly concerned if both from time to
time lodge a shot or two in the battlements on which he
stands, with some beating of that " drum scientific "
which seems to me to be in these days always as resonant,
8

114 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

sometimes with as much result of merely empty sound, as
" the drum ecclesiastic," against which Prof. Huxley is so
fond of warning us. Those whom Mr. Harrison calls
" theologians," and whom Prof. Huxley less appropriately
terms " priests " (for of priesthood there is here no ques-
tion), may indeed think that, if the formidable character
of an opponent's position is to be measured by the scorn
and fuiy with which it is assailed, their ground must be
strong indeed ; and they will possibly remember an old
description of a basis less artificial than " pulpit-stairs,"
from which men may look without much alarm, while
" the floods come and the winds blow." Gaining from
this conviction courage to look more closely, they will per-
ceive, as I have said, that each of the combatants is far
stronger on the destructive than on the constructive side.
Mr. Harrison's earnest and eloquent plea against the
materialism which virtually, if not theoretically, makes
all that we call spirit a mere function of material organ-
ization (like the dp/xovta of the " Phsedo "), and against the
exclusive " scientism " which, because it cannot find cer-
tain entities along its line of investigation, asserts
loudly that they are either non-existent or " unknowable,"
is strong, and (pace Prof. Huxley) needful; not, indeed,
against him (for he knows better than to despise the
metaphysics in which he is so great an adept), but against
many adherents, prominent rather than eminent, of the
school in which he is a master. Nor is its force destroyed
by exposing, however keenly and sarcastically, some in-
consistencies of argument, not inaptly corresponding (as

THE SOUL AND FUTUKE LIFE. 115

it seems to me) with similar inconsistencies in the popular
exposition of the views which it attacks. If Prof. Huxley
is right (as surely he is) in pleading for perfect freedom
and boldness in the investigation of the phenomena of
humanity from the physical side, the counter-plea is
equally irresistible for the value of an independent philo-
sophy of mind, starting from the metaphysical pole of
thought, and reasoning positively on the phenomena
which, though they may have many connections with
physical laws, are utterly inexplicable by them. We
might, indeed, demur to his inference that the discovery
of " antecedence in the molecular fact " necessarily leads
to a " physical theory of moral phenomena," and vice versa,
as savouring a little of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc. In-
separable connection it would imply ; but the ultimate
causation might lie in something far deeper, underlying
both " the molecular " and " the spiritual fact." But still
to establish such antecedence would be an 'important
scientific step, and the attempt might be made from
either side.

On the other hand, Prof. Huxley's trenchant attack on
the unreality of the positivist assumption of a right to
take names which in the old religion at least mean some-
thing firm and solid, and to sublime them into the cloudy
forms of transcendental theory, and on the arbitrary ap-
plication of the word " selfishness," with all its degrading
associations, to the consciousness of personality here and
the hope of a nobler personality in the future, leaves
nothing to be desired. I fear that his friends the priests

11(> A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

would be accused of the crowning sin of " ecclesiasticism"
(whatever that may be) if they used denunciations half
so sharp. Except with a few sarcasms which he cannot
resist the temptation of flinging at them by the way, they
will have nothing with which to quarrel ; and possibly
they may even learn from him to consider these as claps
of - " cheap thunder " from the " pulpit," in that old
sense of the word in which it designates the professorial
chair.

The whole of Mr. Harrison's two papers may be resolved
into an attack on the true individuality of man, first on
the speculative, then on the moral side; from the one
point of view denouncing the belief in it as a delusion,
from the other branding the desire of it as a moral
degradation. The connection of the two arguments is
instructive and philosophical. For no argument merely
speculative, ignoring all moral considerations, will really
be listened to. His view of the soul as " a consensus of
human faculties " reminds us curiously of the Buddhist
" groups ;" his description of a " perpetuity of sensation as
the true hell " breathes the very spirit of the longing for
Nirvana. Both he and his Asiatic predecessors are cer-
tainly right in considering the " delusion of individual
existence " as the chief delusion to be got rid of on the
way to a perfect Agnosticism, in respect of all that is nob
merely phenomenal. It is true that he protests in terms
against a naked materialism, ignoring all spiritual phen-
omena as having a distinctive character of their own ; but
yet, when he tells us that " to talk about a bodiless being

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 117

thinking and loving is simply to talk of the thoughts and
feelings of Nothing," he certainly appears to assume sub-
stantially the position of the materialism he denounces,
which (as has been already said) holds these spiritual
energies to be merely results of the bodily organization,
as the excitation of an electric current is the result of the
juxtaposition of certain material substances. If a bodiless
being is Nothing, there can be no such thing as an intrinsic
or independent spiritual life; and it is difficult for ordinary
minds to attach any distinct meaning to the declaration
that the soul is " a conscious unity of being," if that being
depends on an organization which is unquestionably dis-
cerptible, and of which (as Butler remarks) large parts
may.be lost without affecting this consciousness of per-
sonality.

Now this is, after all, the only point worth fighting
about. Mr. Hutton has already said with perfect truth
that by " the soul " we mean that " which lies at the
bottom of the sense of personal identity — the thread of
the continuity running through all our checkered life,"
and which remains unbroken amidst the constant flux of
change both in our material body, and in the circum-
stances of our material life. This belief is wholly inde-
pendent of any " metaphysical hypothesis " of modern
" orthodoxy," whether it is, or is not, rightly described as
a "juggle of ideas," and of any examination of the ques-
tion (on which Lord Blachford has touched) whether, if
it seem such to "those trained in positive habits of
though t," the fault lies in it or in them. I may remark^

118 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

in passing, that in this broad and simple sense it certainly
runs through the whole Bible, and has much that is " akin
to it in the Old Testament." For even in the darkest
and most shadowy ideas of the Shedl of the other world,
the belief in a true personal identity is taken absolutely
for granted ; and it is not a little curious to notice how in
the Book of Job the substitution for it of " an immor-
tality in the race " (although there, not in the whole of
humanity, but simply in the tribe or family) is offered,
and rejected as utterly insufficient to satisfy either the
speculation of the intellect or the moral demands of the
conscience. * Now is it not worth while to protest against
the caricature of this belief, as a belief in " man plus a
hetereogeneous entity " called the soul, which can be only
intended as a sarcasm. But we cannot acquiesce in any
statement which represents the belief in this immaterial
and indivisible personality as resting simply on the no-
tion that it is needed to explain the acts of the human
organism. For, as a matter of fact, those who believe in
it conceive it to be declared by a direct consciousness, the
most simple and ultimate of all acts of consciousness.
They hold this consciousness of a personal identity and
individuality, unchanging amid material change, to be
embodied in all the language and literature of man ; and
they point to the inconsistencies in the very words of
those who argue against it, as proofs that man cannot
divest himself of it. No doubt they believe that so the
acts of the organism are best explained, but it is not on the

i See Job, xiv. 21, 22.

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 119

necessity of such explanation that they base their belief,
and this fact separates altogether their belief in the human
soul, as an immaterial entity, from those conceptions of
a soul, in animal, vegetable, or even inorganic substances,
with which Mr. Harrison insists on confounding it. Of
the true character of animal nature we know nothing
(although we may conjecture much), just because we
have not in regard to it the direct consciousness which
we have in regard to our own nature. • Accordingly, we
need not trouble our argument for a soul in man with
any speculation as to a true soul in the brute creatures.

In what relation this personality stands to the particles
which at any moment compose the body, and which are
certainly in a continual state of flux, or to the law of
structure which in living beings, by some power to us un-
known, assimilates these particles, is a totally different
question. I fear that Mr. Harrison will be displeased
with me if I call it " a mystery." But, whatever future
advances of science may do for us in the matter — and I
hope they may do much — I am afraid I must still say
that this relation is a mystery which has been at differ-
ent times imperfectly represented, both by formal theories
and by metaphors, all of which by the very nature of
language are connected with original physical conceptions.
Let it be granted freely that the progress of modern phy-
siological science has rendered obsolete the old idea that
the various organs of the body stand to the true personal
being in a purely instrumental relation, such as (for
example) is described by Butler in his " Analogy," in the

120 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

celebrated chapter on " The Future Life." The power of
physical influences acting upon the body to affect the
energies of thought and will is unquestionable. The be-
lief that the action of all these energies is associated with
the molecular change is, to say the least, highly probable.
And I may remark that Christianity has no quarrel with
these discoveries of modern science ; for its doctrine is that
for the perfection of man's being a bodily organization is
necessary, and that the " intermediate state " is a state of
suspense and imperfection, out of which at the word of
the Creator, the indestructible personality of man shall
rise, to assimilate to itself a glorified body. The doc-
trine of the resurrection of the body boldly faces the per-
plexity as to the connection of a body with personality,
which so greatly troubled ancient speculation on the im-
mortality of the soul. In respect of the intermediate
" state," it only extends (I grant immeasurably) the expe-
rience of those suspensions of the will and the full con-
sciousness of personality which we have in life, in sleep,
swoon, stupor, dependent on normal and abnormal con-
ditions of the bodily organization ; and in respect of the
resurrection, it similarly extends the action of that mys-
terious creative will which moulds the human body of the
present life slowly and gradually out of the mere germ,
and forms with marvellous rapidity and exuberance of
prolific power, lower organisms of high perfection and
beauty.

But while modern science teaches us to recognize the
influence of the 'bodily organization on mental energy, it

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 121

has, with at least equal clearness, brought out in compen-
sation the distinct power of that mental energy, acting
by a process wholly different from the chain of physical
causation, to alter functionally, and even organically, the
bodily frame itself. The Platonic Socrates (it will be re-
membered) dwells on the power of the spirit to control
bodily appetite and even passion (TO 0v/xo€i8eY), as also on
its having the power to assume qualities, as a proof that
it is more appovia. Surely modern science has greatly
strengthened the former part of his argument, by these dis-
coveries of the power of mind over even the material
of the body. This is strikingly illustrated (for exam-
ple to the physician, both by the morbid phenomena
of what is called " hysteria," in which the belief in the
existence of physical disease actually produces the most
remarkable physical effects on the body ; and also by
the more natural action of the mind on the body, when
in sickness a resolution to get well masters the force
of disease, or a desire to die slowly fulfils itself. Per-
haps even more extraordinary is the fact (I believe
sufficiently ascertained) that during pregnancy the pre-
sentation of ideas to the mind of the mother actually
affects the physical organization of the offspring. Hence
I cannot but think that, at least as distinctly as ever, our
fuller experience discloses to us two different processes of
causation acting upon our complex humanity — the one
wholly physical, acting sometimes by the coarser mechani-
cal agencies, sometimes by the subtiler physiological
agencies, and in both cases connecting man through the

122 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

I " H 1 y with the great laws ruling the physical universe —
the other wholly metaphysical, acting by the simple pre-
sentation of ideas to the mind (which may, indeed, be so
purely subjective that they correspond to no objective
reality whatever), and through them, secondarily acting
upon the body, producing, no doubt, the molecular
changes in the brain and the affections of the nervous
tissue which accompany and exhibit mental emotion.
In the normal condition of the earthly life, these two
powers act and react upon each other, neither being abso-
lutely independent of the other. In the perfect state of
the hereafter we believe that it shall be so still. But we
do know of cases in which the metaphysical power is
apparently dormant or destroyed, in which accordingly
all emotions can be produced automatically by physical
processes only, as happens occasionally in dreams
(whether of the day or night), and in morbid conditions,
as of idiocy, which may themselves be produced either by
physical injury or by mental shock. I cannot myself see
any difficulty in conceiving that the metaphysical power
might act, though no doubt in a way of which we have
no present experience, and (according to the Christian
doctrine) in a condition of some imperfection, when the
bodily organization is either suspended or removed. For
to me it seems clear that there is something existent,
which is neither material nor even dependent on mate-
rial organization. Whether it be stigmatized as a " hetero-
geneous entity," or graciously designated by the " good
old word soul," is a matter of great indifference. There,

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE.

it is ; and if it is, I cannot see why it is inconceivable
that it should survive all material change. For here, as
in other cases, there seems to be a frequent confusion
between conceiving that a thing may be, and conceiving
how it may be. Of course, we cannot figure to ourselves
the method of the action of a spiritual energy apart from
a bodily organization ; in the attempt to do so the mind
glides into quasi-corporeal conceptions and expressions,
which are a fair mark for satire. But that there may be such
action is to me far less inconceivable than that the mere
fact of the dissolution of what is purely physical should
draw with it the destruction of a soul that can think, love
and pray.

I do not think it necessary to dwell at any length on
the second of Mr. Harrison's propositions, denouncing the
desire of personal and individual existence as " selfish-
ness," with a vigour quite worthy of his royal Prussian
model. But history, after all, has recognized that the
poor grenadiers had something to say for themselves.
Mr. Hutton has already suggested that, if Mr. Harrison
had studied the Christian conception of the future life,
he could not have written some of his most startling pas-
sages, and has protested against the misapplication of the
word " selfishness," which in this, as in other controver-
sies, quietly begs the question proposed for discussion.
The fact is, that this theory of " altruism," so eloquently
set forth by Mr. Harrison and others of his school, simply
contradicts human nature, not in its weaknesses or sins, but
in its essential characteristics. It is certainly not the

124 A Mt)DERN SYMPOSIUM.

weakest or ignoblest of human souls who have felt, at the
times of deepest thought and feeling, conscious of but
two existences — their own and the Supreme Existence,
whether they call it Nature, Law or God. Surely^ this
humanity is a very unworthy deity, at once a vague and
shadowy abstraction, and so far as it can be distinctly
conceived, like some many-headed idol, magnifying the
evil and hideousness as well as the good and beauty of the
individual nature. But if it were not so still that indivi-
duality, as well as unity, is the law of human nature, is
singularly indicated by the very nature of our mental
operations. In the study and perception of truth, each
man, though he may be guided to it by others, stands
absolutely alone; in love, on the other hand, he
loses all but the sense of unity ; while the conscience
holds the balance, recognizing at once individuality and
unity. Indeed, the sacredness of individuality is so
guarded by the darkness which hides each soul from all
perfect knowledge of man, so deeply impressed on the
mind by the consciousness of independent thought and
will, and on the soul by the sense of incommunicable
responsibility, that it cannot merge itself in the life of
the race. Self-sacrifice or unselfishness is the conscious
sacrifice, not of our own individuality, but of that which
seems to minister to it, for the sake of others. The law
of human nature, moreover, is such that the very attempt
at such sacrifice inevitably strengthens the spiritual indi-
viduality in all that makes it worth having. To talk of
" a perpetuity of sensation as a true hell " in a being sup-

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 125

posed capable of indefinite growth in wisdom, righteous-
ness, and love, is surely to use words which have no intel-
ligible meaning.

No doubt, if we are to take as our guiding principle
either altruism or what is rightly designated " selfish-
ness," we must infinitely prefer the former. But where
is the necessity ? No doubt the task of harmonizing the
two is difficult. But all things worth doing are difficult ;
and it might be worth while to consider whether there is
not something in the old belief which finds the key to
this difficult problem in the consciousness of the relation
to One Supreme Being, and, recognizing both the love of
man and the love of self, bids them both agree in conscious
subordination to a higher' love of God. What makes our
life here will, we believe, make it up hereafter, only in a
purer and nobler form. On earth we live at once in our
own individuality and in the life of others. Our heaven is
not the extinction of either element of that life — either
of individuality, as Mr. Harrison would have it, or of the
life in others, as in that idea of a selfish immortality
which he has, I think, set up in order to denounce it —
but the continued harmony of both under an infinitely
increased power of that supreme principle.

126 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

MR. W. R. GREG.

IT would seem impossible for Mr. Harrison to write
anything that is not stamped with a vigour and racy
eloquence peculiarly his own ; and the paper which has
opened the present discussion is probably far the finest
he has given to the world. There is a lofty tone in its
imaginative passages which strikes us as unique among
negationists, and a vein of what is almost tenderness per-
vading them, which was not observed in his previous
writings. The two combined render the second portion
one of the most touching and impressive speculations we
have read. Unfortunately, however, Mr. Harrison's in-
nate energy is apt to boil over into a vehemence approach-
ing the intemperate ; and the antagonistic atmosphere is
so native to his spirit that he can scarcely enter the lists
of controversy without an irresistible tendency to become
aggressive and unjust ; and he is too inclined to forget
the first duty of the chivalric militant logician — namely,
to select the adversary you assail from the nobler and
not the lower form and rank of the doctrine in dispute.
The inconsistencies and weaknesses into which this ne-
glect has betrayed him in the instance before us have,
however, been so severely dealt with by Mr. Hutton and
Prof. Huxley, that I wish rather to direct attention to
two or three points of his argument that might otherwise
be in danger of escaping the appreciation and gratitude
they may fairly claim.

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 127

We owe him something, it appears to me, for having
inaugurated a discussion which has stirred so many minds
to give us on such a question so much interesting and
profound, and more especially so much suggestive,
thought. We owe him much, too, because, in dealing
with a thesis which it is specially the temptation and the
practice to handle as a theme for declamation, he has so
written as to force his antagonists to treat it argumenta-
tively and searchingly as well. Some gratitude, more-
over, is due to the man who had the moral courage
boldly to avow his adhesion to the negative view when
that view is not only in the highest degree unpopular,
but is regarded for the most part as condemnable into the
bargain, and when, besides, it can scarcely fail to be pain-
ful to every man of vivid imagination and of strong af-
fections. It is to his credit also, I venture to think, that,
holding this view, he has put it forward, not as an
opinion or speculation, but as a settled and deliberate con-
viction, maintainable by distinct and reputable reason-
ings, and to be controverted only by pleas analogous in
character. For if there be a topic within the wide range
of human questioning in reference to which tampering
with mental integrity might seem at first sight pardon-
able, it is that of a future and continued existence. If
belief be ever permissible — perhaps I ought to say, if be-
lief be ever possible — on the ground that " there is peace
and joy in believing," it is here, where the issues are so
vast, where the conception in its highest form is so enno
bling, where the practical influences of the Creed are, in

128 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

appearance at least, so beneficent. But faith thus arrived
at has ever clinging to it the curse belonging to all ille-
gitimate possessions. It is precarious, because the flaw
in its title-deeds, barely suspected perhaps and never
acknowledged, may any moment be discovered; misgivings
crop up most surely in those hard and gloomy crises of
our lives when unflinching confidence is most essential to
our peace ; and the fairy fabric, built up not on grounded
conviction but on craving need, crumbles into dust, and
leaves the spirit with no solid sustenance to rest upon.

Unconsciously, and by implication, Mr. Harrison bears
a testimony he little intended, not, indeed, to the future
existence he denies, but to the irresistible longing and ne-
cessity for the very belief he labours to destroy. Perhaps
no writer has more undesignedly betrayed his conviction
that men will not and cannot be expected to surrender
their faith and hope without at least something like a
compensation ; certainly no one has ever toiled with more
noble rhetoric to gild and illuminate the substitute with
which he would fain persuade us to rest satisfied. The
nearly universal craving for posthumous existence and
enduring consciousness, which he depreciates with so
harsh a scorn, and which he will not accept as offering
even the shadow or simulacrum of an argument for the
Creed, he yet respects enough to recognize that it has its
foundation deep in the framework of our being, that it
cannot be silenced, and may not be ignored. Having no
precious metal to pay it with, he issues paper-money in-
stead, skilfully engraved and gorgeously gilded to look

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 129

as like the real coin as may be. It is in vain to deny
that there is something touching and elevating in the
glowing eloquence with which he paints the picture of
lives devoted to efforts in the service of the race, spent in
labouring, each of us in his own sphere, to bring about
the grand ideal he fancies for humanity, and drawing
strength and reward for long years of toil in the antici-
pation of what man will be when those noble dreams
shall have been realized at last — even though we shall
never see what we have wrought so hard to win. It is
vain to deny, moreover, that these dreams appear more
solid and less wild or vague when we remember how close
an analogy we may detect in the labours of thousands
around us who spend their whole career on earth in
building up, by sacrifice and painful struggles, wealth,
station, fame, and character, for their children, whose en-
joyment of these possessions they will never live to wit-
ness, without their passionate zeal in the pursuit being
in any way cooled by the discouraging reflection. Does
not this oblige us to confess that the posthumous exis-
tence Mr. Harrison describes is not altogether an airy fic-
tion ? Still, somehow, after a few moments spent in the
thin atmosphere into which his brilliant language and
unselfish imagination have combined to raise us, we —
ninety-nine out of every hundred of us at the least — sink
back breathless and wearied after the unaccustomed soar-
ing amid light so dim, and craving, as of yore, after some-
thing more personal, more solid, and more certain.

To that more solid certainty I am obliged to confess,
9

130 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

sorrowfully and with bitter .disappointment, that I can
contribute nothing — nothing, I mean, that resembles evi-
dence, that can properly be called argument, or that I
can hope will be received as even the barest confirmation.
Alas ! can the wisest and most sanguine of us all bring
anything beyond our own personal sentiments to swell
the common hope ? We have aspirations to multipty,
but who has any knowledge to enrich our store ? I have
of course read most of the pleadings in favour of the or-
dinary doctrine of the future state ; naturally also, in
common with all grayer natures, I have meditated yet
more ; but these pleadings, for the most part, sound to
anxious ears little else than the passionate outcries of
souls that cannot endure to part with hopes on which they
have been nurtured, and which are entertwined with their
tenderest affections. Logical reasons to compel conviction,
I have met with none — even from the interlocutors in
this actual Symposium. Yet few can have sought for
such more yearningly. I may say I share in the antici-
pations of believers; but I share them as aspirations,
sometimes approaching almost to a faith, occasionally, and
for a few moments, perhaps rising into something like a
trust, but never able to settle into the consistency of a
definite and enduring creed. I do not know how far even
this incomplete state of mind may not be merely the resi-
duum of early upbringing and habitual associations. But
I must be true to my darkness as courageously as to my
light. I cannot rest in comfort on arguments that to my
spirit have no cogency, nor can I pretend to respect or be

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 131

content with reasons which carry no penetrating convic-
tion along with them. I will not make buttresses do the
work or assume the posture of foundations. I will not
cry " Peace, peace, when there is no peace." I have said
elsewhere, and at various epochs of life, why the ordinary
" proofs " confidently put forward and gorgeously arrayed
" have no help in them; " while, nevertheless, the pictures
which imagination depicts are so inexpressibly alluring.
The more I think and question, the more do doubts and
difficulties crowd around my horizon, and cloud over my
sky. Thus it is that I am unable to bring aid or sustain-
ment to minds as troubled as my own, and perhaps less
willing to admit that the great enigma is, and must remain,
insoluble. Of two things, however, I feel satisfied — that
the negative doctrine is no more susceptible of proof than
the affirmative, and that our opinion, be it only honest
can have no influence whatever on the issue, nor upon its
bearing on ourselves.

Two considerations that have been borne in upon my
mind while following this controversy may be worth men-
tioning, though neither can be called exactly helpful. One
is, that we find the most confident, unquestioning, dog-
matic belief in heaven (and its correlative) in those whose
heaven is the most unlikely and impossible, the most en-
tirely made up of mundane and material elements, of gor-
geous glories and of fading splendours1 — just such things

1 " There may be crowns of material splendour, there may be trees of un-
fading loveliness, there may be pavements of emerald, and canopies of the
brightest radiance, and gardens of deep and tranquil security, and palaces

132 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

as uncultured and undisciplined natures most envied or
pined after on earth, such as the lower order of minds
could best picture and would naturally be most dazzled
by. The higher intelligences of our race, who need a
spiritual heaven, find their imaginations fettered by the
scientific training which, imperfect though it be, clips
their wings in all directions, forbids their glowing fancy,
and annuls that gorgeous creation, and bars the way to
each successive local habitation that is instinctively want-
ed to give reality to the ideal they aspire to ; till, in the
effort to franie a future existence without a future world,
to build up a state of being that shall be worthy of its
denizens, and from which everything material shall be ex-
cluded, they at last discover that in renouncing the " phy-
sical " and inadmissible they have been forced to renounce
the " conceivable " as well ; and a dimness and fluctuating
uncertainty gathers round a scene from which all that is
concrete and definable, and would therefore be incongru-
ous, has been shut out. The next world cannot, it is felt,
be a material one ; and a truly " spiritual " one even the
saint cannot conceive so as to bring it home to natures
still shrouded in the garments of the flesh.

The other suggestion that has occurred to me is this

of proud and stately decoration and a city of lofty pinnacles, through which
there unceasingly flows a river of gladness, and where jubilee is ever sung by
a concord of seraphic voices. "—Dr. Chalmers Sermons.

" Poor fragments all of this low earth-
Such as in dreams could hardly soothe
A soul that once had tasted of immortal truth."

Christian Year.

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 133

It must be conceded that the doctrine of a future life is
by no means as universally diffused as it is the habit
loosely to assert. It is not always discoverable among
primitive and savage races. It existed among pagan na-
tions in a form so vague and hazy as to be describable
rather as a dream than a religious faith. It can scarcely
be determined whether the Chinese, whose cultivation is
perhaps the most ancient existing in the world, can be
ranked among distinct believers ; while the conception of
Nirvana, which prevails in the meditative minds of other
Orientals, is more a sort of conscious non-existence than a
future life. With the Jews, moreover, as is well known,
the belief was not indigenous, but imported, and by no
means an early importation. But what is not so generally
recognized is that, even among ourselves in these days, the
convictio|i of thoughtful natures varies curiously in strength
and in features at different periods of life. In youth,
when all our sentiments are most vivacious and dogmatic,
most of us not only cling to it as an intellectual creed, but
are accustomed to say and feel that, without it as a solace
and a hope to rest upon, this world would be stripped of
its deepest fascinations. It is from minds of this age,
whose vigour is unimpaired and whose relish for the joys
of earth is most expansive, that the most glowing deline-
ations of heaven usually proceed, and on whom the thirst
for felicity and knowledge, which can be slaked at no
earthly fountains, has the most exciting power. Then
comes the busy turmoil of our mid-career, when the pres-
ent curtains off the future from our thoughts, and when a

134 A MODEKN SYMPOSIUM.

renewed existence in a different scene is recalled to our
fancy chiefly in crises of bereavement. And, finally, is it
not the case that in our fading years — when something of
the languor and placidity of age is creeping over us, just
when futurity is coming consciously and rapidly more
near, and when one might naturally expect it to occupy
us more incessantly and with more anxious and searching
glances — we think of it less frequently, believe in it less
confidently, desire it less eagerly, than in our youth ?
Such, at least, has been my observation and experience,
especially among the more reflective and inquiring order
of men. The life of the hour absorbs us most completely*
as the hours grow fewer and less full ; the pleasures, the
exemptions, the modest interests, the afternoon peace, the
gentle affections, of the present scene, obscure the
future from our view, and render it, curiously enough,
even less interesting than the past. To-day, which may
be our last, engrosses us far more than to-morrow, which
may be our FOREVER; and the grave into which we are just
stepping down troubles us far less than in youth, when
half a century lay between us and it.

What is the explanation of this strange phenomenon ?
Is it a merciful dispensation arranged by the Ruler of our
life to soften and to ease a crisis which would be too grand
and awful to be faced with dignity or calm, if it were
actually realized at all ? Is it that thought — or that vague
substitute for thought which we call time — has brought
us, half unconsciously, to the conclusion that the whole
question is insoluble, and that reflection is wasted where

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 135

reflection can bring us no nearer to an issue ? Or, finally,
as I know is true far oftener than we fancy, is it that three-
score years and ten have quenched the passionate desire
for life with which at first we stepped upon the scene ? We
are tired, some of us, with unending and unprofitable toil ;
we are satiated, others of us, with such ample pleasures as
earth can yield us; we have had enough of ambition, alike in
its successes and its failures; the joys and blessings of hu-
man affection on which, whatever their crises and vicissi-
tudes, no righteous or truthful man will cast a slur, are
yet so blended with pains which partake of their intensity ;
the thirst for knowledge is not slaked, indeed, but the
capacity for the labour by which alone it can be gained
has consciously died out ; the appetite for life, in short, is
gone, the frame is worn and the faculties exhausted ; and
— possibly this is the key to the phenomenon we are ex-
amining— age CANNOT, from the ve*ry law of its nature,
conceiveitself endowed with the bounding energies of youth,
and without that vigour, both of exertion and desire, re-
newed existence can offer no inspiring charms. . Our being
upon earth has been enriched by vivid interests and rm>-
cious joys, and we are deeply grateful for the gift ; but
we are wearied with one life, and feel scarcely qualified
to enter on the claims, even though balanced by the felici-
ties and glories, of another. It may be the fatigue which
comes with age — fatigue of the fancy as well as of the
frame ; but, somehow, what we yearn for most instinctive-
ly at last is rest, and the peace which we can imagine the
easiest because we know it best is that of sleep.

136 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

REV. BALDWIN BROWN.

^ I ^ HE theologians appear to have fallen upon evil days.
Like some of old, they are filled with rebuke from all
sides. They are bidden to be silent, for their day is over.
But some things, like nature, are hard to get rid of. Expelled,
they " recur " swiftly. Foremost among these is theology.
It seems as if nothing could long restrain man from this,
the loftiest exercise of his powers. The theologians and
the Comtists have met in the sense which Mr. Huxley
justly indicates ; he is himself working at the foundations
of a larger, nobler, and more complete theology. But, for
the present, theology suffers affliction, and the theologians
have in no small measure themselves to thank for it. The
protest rises from all sides, clear and strong, a-gainst the
narrow, formal, and in these last days, selfish system of
thought and expectation, which they have presented as
their kingdom of heaven to the world.

I never read Mr. Harrison's brilliant essays, full as they
always are of high aspiration and of stimulus to noble en-
deavour, without finding the judgment which I cannot but
pass in my own mind on his unbeliefs and denials, largely
tempered by thankfulness. I rejoice in the passionate
earnestness with which he lifts the hearts of his readers
to ideals which it seems to me that Christianity — that
Christianity which as a living force in the apostles' days
turned the world upside down, that is, right side up, with
ts face toward heaven and God — alone can realize fqr
man.

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 137

I recall a noble passage written by Mr. Harrison some
years ago : " A religion of action, a religion of social duty
devotion to an intelligible and sensible Head, a real sense
of incorporation with a living and controlling force, the
deliberate effort to serve an immortal Humanity — this,
and this alone, can absorb the musings and the cravings
of the spiritual man."1 It seems to me that it would be
difficult for any one to set forth in more weighty and elo-
quent words the kind of object which Christianity pro-
poses, and the kind of help toward the attainment of the
object which the Incarnation affords. And in the matter
now under debate, behind the stern denunciation of the
selfish striving toward a personal immortality which Mr.
Harrison utters with his accustomed force, there seems to
lie not only a yearning for, but a definite vision of, an im-
mortality which shall not be selfish, but largely fruitful
to public good. It is true that, as has been forcibly
pointed out, the form which it wears is utterly vain and
illusory, and wholly incapable, one would think, of ac-
counting for the enthusiastic eagerness with which it ap-
pears to be sought. May not the eagerness be really
kindled by a larger and more far-reaching vision — the
Christian vision, which has become obscured to so many
faithful servants of duty by the selfishness and vanity
with which much that goes by the name of the Christian
life in these days has enveloped it ; but which has not
ceased and will not cease, in ways which even conscious-

, vol. xii.. p. r,-j<»

138 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

ness cannot always trace, to cast its spell on human
hearts ?

Mr. Harrison seems to start in his argument with the
conviction that there is a certain baseness in this longing
for immortality, and he falls on the belief with a fierce-
ness which the sense of its baseness alone could justify.
But surely he must stamp much more with the same
brand. Each day's struggle to live is a bit of the base-
ness, and there seems to be no answer to Mr. Button's re-
mark that the truly unselfish action under such conditions
would be suicide. But, at any rate, it is clear from his-
tory that the men who formulated the doctrine and per-
fected the art of suicide in the early days of imperial
Rome belonged to the most basely selfish and heartless
generation that has ever cumbered this sorrowful world.
The love of life is, on the whole, a noble thing, for the
staple of life is duty. The more I see of classes in which,
at first sight, selfishness seems to reign, the more am I
struck with the measure in which duty, thought for others,
and work for others, enters into their lives. The desire
to live on, to those who catch the Christian idea, and
would follow him who " came, not to be ministered unto,
but to minister," is a desire to work on, and by living to
bless more richly a larger circle in a wider world.

I can even cherish some thankfulness for the fling at
the eternity of the tabor, in which Mr. Harrison indulges
and which draws on him a rebuke from his critics the
severity of which one can also well understand. It is a
Jast fling at the Iwiis perennis, which once seemed so beau-

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 139

tiful to monastic hearts, and which, looked at ideally, to
those who can enter into Mr. Hutton's lofty view of ado-
ration, means all that he describes. But practically it
was a very poor, narrow, mechanical thing ; and base
even when it represented, as it did to multitudes, the
loftiest form of a soul's activity in such a sad, suffering
world as this. I, for one, can understand, though I could
not utter, the anathema which follows it as it vanishes
from sight. And it bears closely on the matter in hand.
It is no dead, mediaeval idea. It tinctures strongly the
popular religious notions of heaven. The favourite hymns
of the evangelical school are set in the same key. There
is an easy, self-satisfied, self-indulgent temper in the
popular way of thinking and praying, and above all of
singing, about heaven, which, sternly as the singers would
denounce the cloister, is really caught from the monastic
choir. There is a very favourite verse which runs thus :

' ' There, on a green and .flowery mount,

Our weary souls shall sit,
And with transporting joys recount
The labours of our feet."1

It is a fair sample of the staple of much pious forecast-
ing of the occupations and enjoyments of heaven. I can-
not but welcome very heartily any such shock as Mr.
Harrison administers to this restful and self-centred
vision of immortality. Should he find himself at last en-

1 Mr. Martin's picture of " The Plains of Heaven" exactly presents it.
and it is a picture greatly admired in the circles of which we speak.

140 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

dowed with the inheritance which he refuses, and be
thrown in the way of these souls mooning on the mount*
it is evident that he would feel tempted to give them a
vigorous shake, and to set them with some stinging words
about some good work for God and for their world. And
as many of us want the shaking now badly enough, I can
thank him for it, although it is administered by an over-
rough and contemptuous hand.

I feel some hearty sympathy, too, with much which he
says about the unity of the man. The passage to which
I refer commences with the words "The philosophy
which treats man as man simply affirms that man loves,
thinks, acts, not that the ganglia, the senses, or any
organ of man, loves, thinks, and acts."

So far as Mr. Harrison's language and line of thought
are a protest against the vague, bloodless, bodiless notion
of the life of the future, which has more affinity with
Hades than with Heaven, I heartily thank him for it.
Man is an embodied spirit, and wherever his lot is cast he
will need and will have the means of a spirit's manifesta-
tion to and action on its surrounding world. But this is
precisely what is substantiated by the resurrection. The
priceless value of the truth of the resurrection lies in the
close interlacing and interlocking of the two worlds which
it reveals. It is the life which is lived here, the life of
the embodied spirit, which is carried through the veil and
lived there. The wonderful powers of the gospel of
" Jesus and the resurrection " lay in the homely human
interest which it lent to the life of the immortals. The.

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 141

risen Lord took up life just where he left it. The things
which he had taught His disciples to care about here, were
the things which those who had passed on were caring
about there, the reign of truth, righteousness and love. I
hold to the truth of the resurrection, not only because it
appears to be firmly established on the most valid testi-
mony, but because it alone seems to explain man's consti-
tution as a spirit embodied in flesh which he is sorely
tempted to curse as a clog. It furnishes to man the key
to the mystery of the flesh on the one hand, while on the
other it justifies his aspiration and realizes his hope.

Belief in the risen and reigning Christ was at the heart
of that wonderful uprising and outburst of human energy
which marked the age of the Advent. The contrast is
most striking between the sad and even despairing tone
which breathes through the noblest heathen literature
which utters perhaps its deepest wail in the cry of Epic-
tetus, " Show me a Stoic — by Heaven, I long to see a
Stoic ! " and the sense of victorious power, of buoyant, ex-
ulting hope, which breathes through the word and shines
from the life of the infant Church : " As dying, and be-
hold we live; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor,
yet making many rich ; as having nothing, and yet pos-
sessing all things." The Gospel which brought life and
immortality to light won its way just as dawn wins its
way, when " jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty moun-
tain-tops," and flashes his rays over a sleeping world.
Everywhere the radiance penetrates ; it shines into every
nook of shade ; and all living creatures stir, awake, and

142 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

come forth to bask in its beams. Just thus the flood of
kindling light streamed forth from the resurrection, and
spread like the dawn in the morning sky ; it touched all
forms of things in a dark, sad world with its splendour
and called man forth from the tomb in which his higher
life seemed to be buried, to a new career of fruitful, sun-
lit activity ; even as the Saviour prophesied, " The hour
is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice
of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live."

The exceeding readiness and joyfulness with which the
truth was welcomed, and the measure in which Christen-
dom— and that means all that is most powerful and pro-
gressive in human society — has been moulded by it, are
the most notable facts of history. Be it truth, be it fic-
tion, be it dream, one thing is clear : it was a fcaptism of
new life to the world which was touched by it, and it has
been near the heart of all the great movements of human
society from that day until now. I do not even exclude
" the Revolution," whose current is under us still. Space
is precious, or it would not be difficult to show how deeply
the Revolution was indebted to the ideas which this gos-
pel brought into the world. I entirely agree with Lord
Blachford that revelation is the ground on which faith
securely rests. But the history of the quickening and
the growth of Christian society is a factor of enormous
moment in the estimation of the arguments for the truth
of immortality. We are assured that the idea had the
dullest and even basest origin. Man has a shadow, it
suggested the idea of a second self to him ! he has me-

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 143

mories of departed friends, he gave them a body and
made them ghosts ! Very wonderful, surely, that mere
figments should be the strongest and most productive
things in the whole sphere of human activity, and should
have stirred the spirit and led the march of the strongest,
noblest, and most cultivated peoples ; until now, in this
nineteenth century, we think that we have discovered, as
Miss Martineau tersely puts it, that " the theological be-
lief of almost everybody in the civilized world is baseless."
Let who will believe it, I cannot.

It may be urged that the idea has strong fascination,
that man naturally longs for immortality, and gladly
catches at any figment which seems to respond to his
yearning and to justify his hope. But this belief is among
the clearest, broadest, and strongest features of his ex-
perience and history. It must flow out of something very
deeply imbedded in his constitution. If the force that is
behind all the phenomena of life is responsible for all that
is, it must be responsible for this also. Somehow man,
the masterpiece of the Creation, has got himself wedded
to the belief that all things here have relations to issues
which lie in a world that is behind the shadow of death.
This belief has been at the root of his highest endeavour
arid of his keenest pain ; it is the secret of his chronic un-
rest. Now Nature, through all her orders, appears to have
made all creatures contented with the conditions of
their life. The brute seems fully satisfied with the re-
sources of his world. He shows no sign of being tor-
mented by dreams ; his life withers under no blight of re-

144 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

gret. All things rest, and are glad and beautiful in their
spheres. Violate the order of their nature, rob them of
their fit surroundings, and they grow restless, sad, and
poor. A plant shut out from light and moisture will
twist itself into the most fantastic shapes, and strain it-
self to ghastly tenuity ; nay, it will work its delicate tis-
sues through stone walls or hard rock, to find what its
nature had made needful to its life. Having found it,
it rests and is glad in its beauty once more. Living things,
perverted by human intelligent effort, revert swiftly the
moment that the pressure is removed. This marked
tendency to reversion seems to be set in Nature as a sign
that all things are at rest in their natural conditions, con-
tent with their life and its sphere. Only in ways of
which they are wholly unconscious, and which rob them
of no contentment with their present, do they prepare the
way for the higher developments of life.

What then, means this restless longing in man for that
which lies beyond the range of his visible world ? Has
Nature wantonly and cruelly made man, her masterpiece
alone of all the creatures, restless and sad ? Of all beings
in the Creation must he alone be made wretched by an
unattainable longing, by futile dreams of a visionary
world ? This were an utter breach of the method of Na-
ture in all her operations. It is impossible to believe
that the harmony that runs through all her spheres fails
and falls int,o discord in man. The very order of Nature
presses us to the conviction that this insatiable longing
which somehow she generates and sustains in man, and

THE SOUL AND FUTUKE LIFE. 14)5

which is unquestionably the largest feature of his life, is not
visionary and futile, but profoundly significant ; pointing
with firm finger to the reality of that sphere of being to
which she has taught him to lift his thoughts and aspira-
tions, and in which he will find, unless the prophetic or-
der of the Creation has lied to him, the harmonious com-
pleteness of his life.

And there seems to be no fair escape from the conclu-
sion by giving up the order, and writing Babel on the
world and its life. Whatever it is, it is not confusion.
Out of its disorder, order palpably grows ; out of its con-
fusion arises a grand' and stately progress. Progress is a
sacred word with Mr. Harrison. In the progress of hu-
manity he finds his longed-for immortality. But, if I
may repeat in other terms a remark which I offered
some time ago, while progress is the human law,
law, the world, the sphere of the progress, is tending
slowly but inevitably to dissolution. Is there discord
again in this highest region ? Mr. Harrison writes of an
immortal humanity. How immortal, if the glorious pro-
gress is striving to accomplish itself in a world of wreck ?
Or is the progress that of a race born with sore but joyful
travail from the highest level of the material creation in-
to a higher region of being, whence it can watch with
calmness the dissolution of all the perishable worlds ?

The belief in immortality is so dear to man because he
grasps through it the complement of his else unshaped
and imperfect life. It seems to be equally the comple-
ment of this otherwise hopelessly jangled and disordered
10

14(5 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

world. It is asked triumphantly, " Why, of all the hosts
of creatures, does man alone lay claim to this great inheri-
tance ? " Because in man alone we see the experiences >
the strain, the anguish, that demand it, as the sole key to
what he does and endures. There is to me something
horrible hi the thought of such a life as ours, in which
for all of us, in some form or other, the cross must be the
most sacred symbol, lived out in that bare, heartless,
hopeless world of the material, to which Prof. Clifford so
lightly limits it. And I cannot but think that there are
strong signs in many quarters of an almost fierce revul-
sion from the ghastly drearihood of such a vision of
life.

There seems to me to run through Mr. Harrison's utter-
ances on these great subjects — I say it with honest diffi-
dence of one whose large range of power I so fully recog-
nize, but one must speak frankly if this Symposium is to
be worth anything — an instinctive yearning toward
Christian ideas, while that faith is denied which alone
can vivify them, and make them a living power in our
world. There is everywhere a shadowy image of a
Christian substance ; but it reminds one of that formless
form, wherein " what seemed a . head, the likeness of a
kingly crown had on." And it is characteristic of much
of the finest thinking and writing of our times. The sa-
viour Deronda, the prophet Mordecai, lack just that living
heart of faith which would put blood into their pallid
lineaments, and make them breathe and move among men.
Again I say that we have largely ourselves to thank for

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 147

this saddening feature of the higher life of our times — we
who have narrowed God's great kingdom to the dimen-
sions of our little theological sphere. I am no theologian,
though intensely interested in the themes with which the
theologians occupy themselves. Urania, with darkened
brow, may, perhaps, rebuke my prating. But I seem to
see quite clearly that the sad strain and anguish of our
life, social, intellectual, and spiritual, is but the pain by
which great stages of growth accomplish themselves. We
have quite outgrown our venerable, and in its time large
and noble, theological shell. We must wait, not fearful,
far less hopeless, while by the help of those who are work-
ing with such admirable energy, courage, and fidelity, out-
side the visible Christian sphere, that spirit in man which
searches and cannot but search " the deep things of God,"
creates for. itself a new instrument of thought which will
give to it the mastery of a wider, richer, and nobler
world.

PR. W. G. WARD.

MR. HARRISON considers that the Christian's con-
ception of a future life is "so gross, so sensual, so in-
dolent, so selfish," as to be unworthy of respectful consider-
ation. He must necessarily be intending to speak of this
conception in the shape of which we Christians entertain it;
because otherwise his words of reprehension are unmeaning.
But our belief as to the future life is intimately and indis-

148 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

solubly bound up with our belief as to the present ; with
our belief as to what is the true measure and standard of
human action in this world. And I would urge that no
part of our doctrine can be rightly apprehended, unless it
be viewed in its connection with all the rest. This is a
fact which (I think) infidels often drop out of sight, and
for that reason fail of meeting Christianity on its really
relevant and critical issues.

Of course, I consider Catholicity to be exclusively the
one authoritative exhibition of revealed Christianity.
I will set forth, therefore, the doctrine to which I would
call attention, in that particular form in which Catholic
teachers enounce it ; though I am very far indeed from
intending to deny that there are multitudes of non-Cath-
olic Christians who hold it also. What, then, according
to Catholics, is the true measure and standard of human
action ? This is in effect the very first question pro-
pounded in our English elementary Catechism : " Why
did God make you ? " The prescribed answer is, " To know
him, serve him, and love him in this world, and to be
happy with him forever in the next." And St. Ignatius's
" Spiritual Exercises " — a work of the very highest author-
ity among us — having laid down the very same " founda-
tion," presently adds that " we should not wish on our
part for health rather than for sickness, wealth rather
than poverty, honour rather than ignominy ; desiring
and choosing those things alone which are more expedient
to us for the end for which we were created." Now, what
will be the course of a Christian's life in proportion as he

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 149

is profoundly imbued with such a principle as this, and
vigorously aims at putting it into practice? The
number of believers, who apply themselves to this task
with reasonable consistency, is no doubt comparatively
small. But in proportion as any given person does so, he
will in the first place be deeply penetrated with a sense of
his moral weakness ; and (were it for that reason alone)
his life will more and more be a life of prayer. Then he
will necessarily give his mind with great earnestness and
frequency to the consideration what it is which at this
or that period God desires at his hands. On the whole
(not to dwell with unnecessary detail on this part of my
subject), he will be ever opening his heart to Almighty
God ; turning to him for light and strength under emer-
gencies, for comfort under affliction ; pondering on his
adorable attributes ; animated toward him by intense love
and tenderness. Nor need I add how singularly — how
beyond words — this personal love of God is promoted and
facilitated by the fact that a Divine Person has assumed
human nature, and that God's human acts and words are
so largely offered to the loving contemplation of redeemed
souls.

In proportion, then, as a Christian is faithful to his
creed, the thought of God becomes the chief joy of «his
life. "The thought of God," says F. Newman, "and
nothing short of it, is the happiness of man ; for though
^ there is much besides to serve as the subject of knowledge,
or motive for action, or instrument of excitement, yet the
affections require a something more vast and more en-

150 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

during than anything created. He alone is sufficient for
the heart who made it. The contemplation of him, and
nothing but it, is able fully to open and relieve the mind,
to unlock, occupy, and fix our affections. We may indeed
1 ove things created with great intenseness ; but such af-
fection, when disjoined from the love of the Creator, is
like a stream running in a narrow channel, impetuous,
vehement, turbid. The heart runs out, as it were, only
at one door ; it is not an expanding of the whole man.
Created natures cannot open to us, or elicit, the ten
thousand mental senses which belong to us, and through
which we really love. None but the presence of our
Maker can enter us ; for to none besides can the whole
heart in all its thoughts and feelings be unlocked and sub-
jected. It is this feeling of simple and absolute confidence
and communion which soothes and satisfies those to whom
it is vouchsafed. We know that even our nearest friends
enter into us but partially, and hold intercourse with us
only at times ; whereas the consciousness of a perfect and
enduring presence, and it alone, keeps the heart open.
Withdraw the object on which it rests, and it will relapse
again into its state of confinement and constraint; and in
proportion as it is limited, either to certain seasons or to
certain affections, the heart is straitened and distressed."

Now, Christians hold that God's faithful servants will
enjoy hereafter unspeakable bliss, through the most inti-
mate imaginable contact with him whom they have here
so tenderly loved. They will see face to face him whose
beauty is dimly and faintly adumbrated by the most

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 151

exquisitely transporting beauty which can be found on
earth ; him whose adorable perfection they have in this
life imperfectly contemplated, and for the fuller appre-
hension of which they have so earnestly longed here
below. I by no means intend to imply that the hope of
this blessedness is the sole or even the chief inducement
which leads saintly men to be diligent in serving God.
Their immediate, reason for doing so is their keen sense
of his claim on their allegiance ; and, again, the misery
which they would experience, through their love of him,
at being guilty of any failure in that allegiance. Still the
prospect of that future bliss, which I have so imperfectly
sketched, is doubtless found by them at times of invalu-
able service in stimulating them to greater effort, and in
cheering them under trial and desolation.

Such is the view taken by Christians of life in heaven;
and, surely, any candid infidel will at once admit that it
is profoundly harmonious and consistent with their view
of what should be man's life on earth. To say that their
anticipation of the futuie, as it exists in them, is gross,
sensual, indolent, and selfish, is so manifestly beyond the
mark that I am sure Mr. Harrison will, on reflection,
retract his affirmation. Apart, however, from this par-
ticular comment, my criticism of Mr. Harrison would be
this : He was bound, I maintain, to consider the Christian
theory of life as a whole ; and not to dissociate that part
of it which concerns eternity from that part of it which
concerns time.

now as to the merits of this Christian theory. For

152 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

my own part, I am, of course, profoundly convinced that,
as on the one hand it is guaranteed by revelation, so on
the other hand it is that which alone harmonizes with
the dicta of reason and the facts of experience, so far as
it comes into contact with these. Yet I admit that
various very plausible objections may be adduced against
its truth. Objectors may allege very plausibly that by
the mass of men it cannot be carried into practice : that
it disparages most unduly the importance of things secu-
lar ; that it is fatal to what they account genuine
patriotism ; that it has always been, and will always be,
injurious to the progress of science ; above all, that it
puts men (as one may express it) on an entirely wrong
scent, and leads them to neglect many pursuits which, as
being sources of true enjoyment, would largely enhance
the pleasurableness of life. All this, and much more may
be urged, I think, by antithesists with very great super-
ficial plausibility ; and the Christian controversialist is
bound on occasion steadily to confront it. B.ut there is
one accusation which has been brought against this
Christian theory of life — and that the one mainly (as
would seem) felt by Mr. Harrison — which to me seems so
obviously destitute of foundation that I find difficulty in
understanding how any infidel can have persuaded him-
self of its truth : I mean the accusation that this theory
is a selfish one. There is no need of here attempting a
philosophical discussion on the respective claims of what
are now called " egoism " and " altruism :" a discussion in
itself (no doubt) one of much interest and much im-

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 153

portance, and one, moreover, in which I should be quite
prepared (were it necessary) to engage. Here, however,
I will appeal, not to philosophy, but to history. In the
records of the past we find a certain series of men, who
stand out from the mass of their brethren, as having pre-
eminently concentrated their energy on the love and
service of God, and preeminently looked away from
earthly hopes to the prospect of their future reward. I
refer to the saints of the Church. And it is a plain
matter of fact, which no one will attempt to deny, that
these very men stand out no less conspicuously from the
rest in their self-sacrificing and (as we ordinary men re-
gard it) astounding labours in behalf of what they believe
to be the highest interests of mankind.

Before I conclude, I must not omit a brief comment on
one other point, because it is the only one on which I
cannot concur with Lord Blachford's masterly paper. I
cannot agree with him that the doctrine of human
immortality fails of being supported by " conclusive
reasoning." I do not, of course, mean that the dogma of
the Beatific Vision is discoverable apart from revelation ;
but I do account it a truth cognizable with certitude by
reason, that the human soul is naturally immortal, and
that retribution of one kind or an'other will be awarded
us hereafter, according to what our conduct has been in
this our state of probation. Here, however, I must
explain myself. When theists make this statement,
sometimes they are thought to allege that human immor-
tality is sufficiently proved by phenomena ; and some-

154 A MODEKN SYMPOSIUM.

times they are thought to allege that it is almost
intuitively evident. For myself, however, I make neither
of these allegations. I hold that the truth in question is
conclusively established by help of certain premises; and
that these premises themselves can previously be known
with absolute certitude, on grounds of reason or ex-
perience.

They are such as these : 1. There exists that Personal
Being, infinite in all perfections, whom we call God. 2.
He has implanted in his rational creatures the sense of
right and wrong ; the knowledge that a deliberate perpe-
tration of certain acts intrinsically merits penal retribu-
tion. 3. Correlatively, he has conferred freedom on the
human will ; or in other words, has made acts of the
human will exceptions to that law of uniform sequence
which otherwise prevails throughout the phenomenal
world.1 4. By the habit of prayer to God we can obtain
augmented strength for moral action, in a degree which
would have been quite incredible antecedently to ex-
perience. 5. Various portions of our divinely given
nature clearly point to an eternal destiny. 6. The
conscious self or ego is entirely heterogeneous to the
material world : entirely heterogeneous, therefore, to
that palpable body of ours which is dissolved at the
period of death.

I do not think any one will account it extravagant to
hold that the doctrine of human immortality is legiti-

1 I shall not, of course, be understood to deny the existence and fre-
quency of miracles.

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 155

mately deducible from a combination of these and similar
truths. The anti-theist will of course deny that they
are truths. Mr. Greg, who has himself " arrived at no
conviction" on the subject of immortality, yet says that
considerations of the same kind as those which I have
enumerated " must be decisive " in favour of immortality
" to all to whose spirits communion with their Father is
the most absolute of verities.."1 Nor have I any reason
to think that even Mr. Huxley and Mr. Harrison, if they
could concede my premises, would demur to my conclusion.

MR. FREDERIC HARRISON.

I HAVE now, not so much to close a symposium, or
general discussion, as to reply to the convergent fire of
nine separate papers. Neither time, nor space, nor the in-
dulgence of the reader, would enable me to do justice to the
weight of this array of criticism, which reaches me in frag-
ments while I am otherwise occupied abroad. I will ask
those critics whom I have not been able to notice to believe
that I have duly considered the powerful appeals they
have addressed to me. And I will ask those who are
interested in this question to refer to the original papers
in which my views were stated. And I will only add,
by way of reply, the following remarks, which were, for

l See his letter in the London Spectator of August 25th, 1877.

156 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

the most part, written and printed, while I had nothing
before me but the first three papers in this discussion.
They contain what I have to say on the theological, the
metaphysical, and the materialist aspect of this question.
For the rest, I could only repeat what I have already
said in the two original essays.

Whether the preceding discussion has given much new
strength to the doctrine of man's immaterial soul and
future existence I will not pretend to decide. But I can-
not feel that it has shaken the reality of man's posthumous
influence, my chief and immediate theme. It seemed to
me that the time had come, when, seeing how vague and
hesitating were the prevalent beliefs on this subject, it
was most important to remember that, from a purely
earthly point of view, man had a spiritual nature, and
could look forward after death to something that marked
him off from the beasts that perish. I cannot see that
what I urged has been in substance displaced ; though
much criticism (and some of it of a verbal kind) has been
directed at the language which I used of others. My
object was to try if this life could not be made richer ;
not to destroy the dreams of another. But has the old
doctrine of a future life been in any way strengthened ?
Mr. Hutton, it is true, has a " personal wish " for a per-
petuity of volition. Lord Blachford " believes because he
is told." And Prof. Huxley knows of no evidence that
" such a soul and a future life exist ;" and he seems not to
believe in them at all.

Philosophical discussion must languish a little, if, when

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 157

we ask for the philosophical grounds for a certain belief,
we find one philosopher believing because he has a " per-
sonal wish " for it, and another " believing because he is
told." Mr. Hutton says that, as far as he knows, " the
thoughts, affections, and volitions, are not likely to perish
with his body." Prof. Huxley seems to think it just as
likely that they should. Arguments are called for to
enable us to decide between these two authorities. And
the only argument we have hitherto got is Mr. Hutton's
" personal wish," and Lord Blachford's ita scriptum est.
I confess myself unable to continue an argument which
runs into believing " because I am told." It is for this
reason that the lazzarone at Naples believed in the blood
of St. Januarius.

My original propositions may be stated thus':

1. Philosophy as a whole (I do not say specially biolo-
gical science) has established a functional relation to ex-
ist between every fact of thinking, willing, or feeling, on
the one side, and some molecular change in the body on
the other side.

2. This relation is simply one of correspondence be-^
tween moral and physical facts, not one of assimilation.
The moral fact does not become a physical fact, is not
adequately explained by it, and must be mainly studied
as a moral fact, by methods applicable to morals — not as
a physical fact, by methods applicable to physics.

3. The moral facts of human life, the laws of man's
mental, moral, and affective nature, must consequently
be studied, as they have always been studied, by direct

158 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

observation of these facts ; yet the correspondence, spe-
cially discovered by biological science, between man's
mind and his body, must always be kept in view. They
are an indispensible, inseparable, but subordinate part of
moral philosophy.

4. We do not diminish the supreme place of the spirit-
ual facts in life and in philosophy by admitting these
spiritual facts to have a relation with molecular and or-
ganic facts in the human organism — provided that we
never forget how small and dependent is the part which
the study of the molecular and organic phenomena must
play in moral and social science.

5. Those whose minds have been trained in the modern
philosophy of law cannot understand what is meant by
sensation,' thought, and energy, existing without any
basis of molecular change ; and to talk to them of sensa-
tion, thought and energy, continuing in the absence
of any molecules whatever, is precisely such a contradic-
tion in terms as to suppose that civilization will continue
in the absence of any men whatever.

6. Yet man is so constituted as a social being that the
energies which he puts out in life mould the minds,
characters, and habits, of his fellow-men ; so that each
man's life is, in effect, indefinitely prolonged in human so-
ciety. This is a phenomenon quite peculiar to man and
to human society, and of course depends on there being
men in active association with each other. Physics and
biology can teach us nothing about it ; and physicists and
biologists may very easily forget its importance. It can

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 159

be learned only by long and refined observations in moral
and mental philosophy as a whole, and in the history of
civilization as a whole.

7. Lastly, as a corollary, it may be useful to retain the
words soul and future life for their associations; provided
we make it clear that we mean by soul the combined fa-
culties of the living organism, and by future life the sub-
jective effect of each man's objective life on the actual
lives of his fellow-men.

I. Now, I find in Mr. Hutton's paper hardly any at-
tempt to disprove the first six of these propositions. He
is- employed for the most part in asserting that his hypo-
thesis of a future state is a more agreeable one than mine,
and in earnest complaints that I should call his view of a
future state a selfish or personal hope. As to the first, I
will only remark that it is scarcely a question whether
his notion of immortality is beautiful or not, but whether
it is true. If there is no rational ground for expecting
such immortality to be a solid fact, it is to little purpose
to show us what a sublime idea it would be if there were
anything in it. As to the second, I will only say that I
do not call his notion of a future existence a selfish or
personal hope. In the last paragraph of my second
paper I speak with respect of the opinion of those who
look forward to a future of moral development instead of
to an idle eternity of psalm-singing. My language as to
the selfishness of the vulgar ideas of salvation was di-
rected to those who insist that, unless they are to feel a
continuance of pleasure, they do not care for any continu-

160 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

ance of their influence at all. The vulgar are apt to say
that what they desire is the sense of personal satisfaction,
and, if they cannot have this, they care for nothing else.
This, I maintain, is a selfish and debasing idea. It is the
common notion of the popular religion, and its tendency
to concentrate the mind on a merely personal salvation
does exert an evil effect on practical conduct. I once
heard a Scotch preacher, dilating on the narrowness of the
gate, etc., exclaim, " 0 dear brethren, who would care to
be saved in a crowd ? "

I do not say this of the life of grander activity in
which Mr. Hutton believes, and which Lord Blachford so
eloquently describes. This is no doubt a fine ideal, and
I will not say other than an elevating hope. But on what
does it rest ? Why this ideal rather than any other ?
Each of us may imagine, as I said at the outset, his own
Elysian fields, or his own mystic rose. But is this phil-
osophy? Is it even religion? Besides, there is this
other objection to it : It is not Christianity, but Neo-
Christianity. It is a fantasia with variations on the
orthodox creed. There is not a word of the kind in the
Bible. Lord Blachford says he believes in it " because he
is told." But it so happens that he is not told this, at
any rate in the creeds and formularies of orthodox faith.
If this view of future life is to rest entirely on revelation,
it is a very singular thing that the Bible is silent on the
matter. Whatever kind of future ecstacy may be sug-
gested in some texts, certain it is that such a glorified en-
ergy as Lord Blachford paints in glowing colours is no-

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 161

where described in the Bible. There is a constant prac-
tice nowadays, when the popular religion is criticised,
that earnest defenders of it come forward exclaiming :
" Oh ! that is only the vulgar notion of our religion. My
idea of the doctrine is so and so," something which the
speaker has invented without countenance from the offi-
cial authority. For my part, I hold Christianity to be
what is taught in average churches and chapels to the
millions of professing Christians. And I say it is a very
serious fact when philosophical defenders of religion begin
by repudiating that which is taught in average pulpits.

Perhaps a little more attention to my actual words
might have rendered unnecessary the complaints in all
these papers as to my language about the hopes which
men cherish for the future. In the first place I freely
admit that the hopes of a grander energy in heaven are
not open to the charge of vulgar selfishness. I said that
they are unintelligible, not that they are unworthy. They
are unintelligible to those who are continually alive- to the
fact I have placed as my first proposition — that every
moral phenomenon is in functional relation with some
physical phenomenon. To those who deny or ignore this
truth, there is, doubtless, no incoherence in all the ideals
so eloquently described in the papers of Mr. Hutton and
Lord Blachford. Bur, once get this conception as the
substratum of your entire mental and moral philosophy,
and it is as incoherent to talk to us of your immaterial
development as it Vould be to talk of obtaining redness
without any red thing.
11

162 A MODERN. SYMPOSIUM.

I will try to explain more fully why this idea of a
glorified activity implies a contradiction in terms to those
who are imbued with the sense of correspondence be-
tween physical and moral facts. When we conceive any
process of thinking, we call up before us a complex train
of conditions : objective facts outside of us, or the re-
vived impression of such facts ; the molecular effect of
these facts upon certain parts of our organism, the asso-
ciation of these with similar facts recalled by memory, an
elaborate mechanism to correlate these impressions, an
unknown to be made known, and a difficulty to be over-
come. All systematic thought implies relations with the
external world present or recalled, and it also implies
some shortcoming in our powers of perfecting those re-
lations. When we meditate, it is on a basis of facts which
we are observing, or have observed and are now recalling,
and with a view to get at some result which baffles our
direct observation and hinders some practical purpose.

The same holds good of our moral energy. Ecstasy
and mere adoration exclude energy of action. Moral de-
velopment implies difficulties to be overcome, qualities
balanced against one another under opposing conditions,
this or that appetite tempted, this or that instinct tested
by proof. Moral development does not grow like a fun-
gus ; it is a continual struggle in surrounding conditions
of a specific kind, and an active putting forth of a var-
iety of practical faculties in the midst of real obstacles.

So, too, of the affections : they Equally imply condi-
tions. Sympathy does not spurt up like a fountain in

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 163

the air ; it implies beings in need of help, evils to be alle-
viated, a fellowship of giving and taking, the sense of
protecting and being protected, a pity for suffering, an
admiration of power, goodness and truth. All of these
imply an external world to act in, human beings and ob-
jects, and human life under human conditions.

Now, all these conditions are eliminated from the ortho-
dox ideal of a future state. There are to be no physical
impressions, no material difficulties, no evil, no toil, no
struggle, no human beings, and no human objects. The
only condition is a complete absence of all conditions, or
all conditions of which we have any experience. And we
• say, we cannot imagine what you mean by your intensi-
fied sympathy, your broader thought, your infinitely
varied activity, when you begin by postulating the ab-
sence of all that makes sympathy, thought, and activity
possible, all that makes life really noble.

A mystical and inane ecstacy is an appropriate ideal
for this paradise of negation, and this is the orthodox
view ; but it is not a high view. A glorified existence of
greater activity and development may be a high view,
but it is a contradiction in terms ; exactly, I say, as if you
were to talk of a higher civilization without any human
beings. But this is simply a metaphysical after-thought
to escape from a moral dilemma. Mr. Hutton is surely
mistaken in saying that Positivists have forgotten that
Christians ever had any meaning in their hopes of a
" beatific vision." He must know that Dante and Thomas
a; Kempis form the religious books of Positivists, and they

164 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

are, with some other manuals of Catholic theology, among
the small number of volumes which Comte recommended
for constant use. We can see in the celestial " visions "
of a mystical and unscientific age, much that was beauti-
ful in its time, though not the highest product even of
theology. But in our day, these visions of paradise have
lost what moral value they had, while the progress of
philosophy has made them incompatible with our modern
canons of thought.

Mr. Button supposes me to object to any continuance
of sensation as an evil in itself. My objection was. not
that consciousness should be. prolonged in immortality,
but that nothing else but consciousness should be pro1
longed. All real human life, energy, thought, and active
affection, are to be made impossible in your celestial para-
'dise, but you insist on retaining consciousness. To retain
the power of feeling, while all means and objects are
taken away from thinking, all power of acting, all oppor-
tunity of cultivating the faculties of sympathy are stifled;
this seems to me something else than a good. It would
seem to me that simply to be conscious, . and yet to lie
thoughtless, inactive, irresponsive, with every faculty of
a man paralyzed within you, as if by that villainous drug
which produces torpor while it intensifies sensation —
such a consciousness as this must be a very place of tor-
ment.

I think some contradictions, which Mr. Hutton supposes
he detects in my paper, are not very hard to reconcile. I
admitted that death is an evil, it seems ; but I spoke of

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 165

our posthumous activity as a higher kind of influence.
We might imagine, of course, a Utopia, with neither
suffering, waste, nor loss; and compared with such a
world, the world, as we know it, is full of evils, of which
death is obviously one. But relatively, in such a world
as alone we know, death becomes simply a law of orga/iized
Nature, from which we draw some of our guiding motives
of conduct. In precisely the same way the necessity of
toil is an evil in itself ; but, with man and his life as we
know them, we dj:aw from it some of our highest moral
energies. The grandest qualities of human nature, such
as we know it at least, would become forever impossible
if Labour and Death were not the law of life.

Mr. Hutton again takes but a pessimist view of life
when he insists how much of our activity is evil, and how
questionable is the future of the race. I am no pessimist,
and I believe in a providential control over all human
actions by the great Power of Humanity, which indeed
brings good out of evil, and assures, at least for some
thousands of centuries, a certain progress toward the
higher state. Pessimism, as to the essential dignity of
man and the steady development of his race, is one of the
surest marks of the enervating influence of this dream of
a celestial glory. If I called it as wild a desire as to go
roving through space in a comet, it is because I can attach
no meaning to a human life to be prolonged without a
human frame and a human world ; and it seems to me as
rational to talk of becoming an angel as to talk of becom-
ing an ellipse.

166 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

By " duties " of the world beyond the grave, I meant
the duties which are imposed on us in life, by the certainty
that our action must continue to have an indefinite effect.
The phrase may be inelegant, but I do not think the
meaning is obscure.

II.. I cannot agree with Lord Blachford that I have
fallen into any confusion between a substance and an
attribute. I am quite aware that the word li soul " has
been hitherto used for some centuries as an entity. And
I proposed to retain the term for an attribute. It is a
very common process in the history of thought. Electri-
city, life, heat, were once supposed to be substances; We
now very usefully retain these words for a set of observed
conditions or qualities.

I agree with Mr. Spencer that the unity of the social
organism is quite as complete as that of the individual
organism. I do not confuse the two kinds of unity ; but
I say that man is in no important sense a unit that society
is not also a unit.

With regard to the " percipient " and the "perceptible" I
cannot follow Lord Blachford. He speaks a tongue thatl do
not understand. 1 have no means of dividing the universe
into "percipients'* and "perceptibles." I know no reason
why a "percipient" should not be a "perceptible," none why
I should not be " perceptible," and none why beings about
me should not be " perceptible." I think we are all per-
fectly " perceptible " — indeed, some of us are more " per-
ceptible " than "percipient" — though I cannot say that
Lord Blachford is always " perceptible " to me. And how

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE 167

does my being " perceptible " or not being " perceptible,"
prove that I have an immortal soul ? Is a dog " percep-
tible ?" is he "percipient?" Has he not some of the
qualities of a "percipient?" and if so, has he an immortal
soul ? Is an ant, a tree, a bacterium, " percipient ?" and
has any of these an immortal soul ? for I find Lord Blach-
ford declaring there is an " ineradicable difference between
the motions of a material and the sensations of a living
being," as if the animal world were " percipient," and the
inorganic " perceptible." But surely in the sensations of
a living being the animal world must be included. Where
does the vegetable world come in ?

I used the word " organism " advisedly, when I said
that will, thought, and affection, are functions of a living
organism. I decline exactly to localize the organ of any
function of mind or will. When I am asked, What are
we ? I reply, We are men. When I am asked, Are we our
bodies ? I say, No, nor are we our minds. Have we no
sense of personality, of unity ? I am asked. I say, Cer-
tainly ; it is an acquired result of our nervous organiza-
tion, liable to be interrupted by derangements of that
nervous organization. What is it that makes us think
and feel ? The facts of our human nature ; I cannot get
behind this, and I need no further explanation. We are
men, and can do what men can do. I say the tangible
collection of organs known as a " man" (not the consensus
or the condition, but the man), thinks, wills, and feels,
just as much as that visible organism lives and grows.
We do not say that this or that ganglion in particular

A MnpKUN SYMPOSIUM.

lives and grows ; we say tho rna it grows. It is as easy to
nit1 to imagine that we shall grow fifteen feet high, when
we have no body, as that we shall grow in knowledge,
goodness, activity, etc., etc., etc., when we have no organs.
And the absence of all molecular attributes would be, I
should think, particularly awkward in that life of comet-
ary motion in the interstellar spaces with which Lord
Blachford threatens us. But, as the poet says :

" Trasumanar significar per verba
Non si porria "-

" If" says he, " practical duties are necessary for the per-
fection of life," we can take a little interstellar exercise.
Why, practical duties are the sum and substance of life ;
and life which does not centre in practical duties is not
life, but a trance.

Lord Blachford, who is somewhat punctilious in terms,
asks me what I consider myself to understand " by the
incorporation of a consensus of faculties with a glorious
future." Well, it so happens that I did not use that phrase.
I have never spoken of an immortal soul anywhere, nor
do I use the word soul of any but the living man. I said
a man might look forward to incorporation with the
future of his race, explaining that to mean his " posthum-
ous activity." And I think at any rate the phrase is
quite as reasonable as to say that I look forward, as Mr.
Hutton does, to a "union with God." What does Mr.
Hutton or Lord Blachford understand himself to mean by
that?

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 169

Surely Lord Blachford's epigram about the fiddle and
the tune is hardly fortunate. Indeed, that exactly ex-
presses what I find faulty in the view of himself and the
theologians. He thinks the tune will go on playing when
the fiddle is broken up and burned. I say nothing of the
kind. I do not say the man will continue to exist after
death. I simply say that his influence will ; that other
men will do and think what he taught them to do or to
think. Just so, a general would be said to win a battle
which he planned and directed, even if he had been killed
in an early part of it. What is there of fiddle and tune
about this ? I certainly think that when Mozart and
Beethoven have left us great pieces of music, it signifies
little to art if the actual fiddle, or even the actual com-
poser continue to exist or not. I never said the tune
would exist. I said that men would remember it and
repeat it. I must thank Lord Blachford for a happy
illustration of my own meaning. But it is he who ex-
pects the tune to exist without the fiddle, /say you can't
have a tune without a fiddle, nor a fiddle without wood.

III. I have reserved the criticism of Prof. Huxley, be-
cause it lies apart from the principal discussion, and turns
mainly on some incidental remarks of mine on " biologi-
cal reasoning about spiritual things."

I note three points at the outset. Prof. Huxley does
not himself pretend to any evidence for a theological soul
and future life. Again, he does not dispute the account
I give of the functional relation of physical and moral
facts. He seems surprised that I should understand it,

170 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

not being a biologist ; but he is kind enough to say that
my statement may pass. Lastly, he does not deny the
reality of man's posthumous activity. Now, these three
are the main purposes of my argument ; and in these I
have Prof. Huxley with me. He is no more of a theolo-
gian than I am. Indeed, he is only scandalized that I
should see any good in priests at all. He might have said
more plainly that, when the man is dead, there is an end
of the matter. But this clearly is his opinion, and he in-
timates as much in his paper. Only he would say no
more about it, bury the carcass, and end the tale, leaving
all thoughts about the future to those whose faith is more
robust and whose hopes are richer ; by which I under-
stand him to mean persons weak enough to listen to the
priests.

Now, this does not satisfy me. I call it materialism,
for it exaggerates the importance of the physical facts
and ignores that of the spiritual facts ; and the object of
my paper was simply this that as the physical facts
are daily growing quite irresistible, it is of urgent impor-
tance to place the spiritual facts on a sound scientific
basis at once. Prof. Huxley implies that his business is
with the physical facts, and the spiritual facts must take
care of themselves. I cannot agree with him. That is
precisely the difference between us. The spiritual facts
of man's nature are the business of all who undertake to
denounce priestcraft, and especially of those who preach
" Lay Sermons."

Prof. Huxley complains that I should join in the view-

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 171

halloo against biological science. Now, I never have sup-
posed that biological science was in the position of the
hunted fox. I thought it was the hunter, booted and
spurred and riding over us all, with Prof. Huxley leaping
the most terrific gates and cracking his whip with intense
gusto. As to biological science, it is the last thing that I
should try to run down ; and I must protest, with all sin-
cerity, that I wrote without a thought of Prof. Huxley
at all. He insists on knowing, in the most peremptory
way of whom I was thinking, as if I were thinking of
him. Of whom else could I be thinking, forsooth, when
I spoke of biology ? Well ! I did not bite my thumb at
him, but I bit my thumb.

Seriously, I was not writing at Prof. Huxley, or I
should have named him. I have a very great admiration
for his work in biology ; I have learned much from him ;
I have followed his courses of lectures years and years
ago, and have carefully studied his books. If, in questions
which belong to sociology, morals, and to general philoso-
phy, he seems to me hardly an authority, why need we
dispute ? Dog should not bite dog ; and he and I have
many a wolf that we both would keep from the fold.

But, if I did not mean Prof. Huxley, whom did I mean ?
Now, my paper, I think clearly enough, alluded to two
very different kinds of materialism. There is systematic
materialism, and there is the vague materialism. The
eminent example of the first is the unlucky remark of
Cabanis that the brain secretes thought, as the liver sec-
retes bile ; and there is much of the same sort in many

IT'2 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

foreign theories — in the tone of Moleschott, Biichiier, and
the like. The most distinct examples of it in this coun-
try are found among phrenologists, spiritualists, some
mental pathologists, and a few communist visionaries.
The far wider, vaguer, and more dangerous school of ma-
terialism is found in a multitude of quarters — in all those
who insist exclusively on the physical -side of moral
phenomena — all, in short, who, to use Prof. Huxley's
phrase, are employed in " building up a physical theory
of moral phenomena." Those who confuse moral and
physical phenomena are indeed few. Those who exag-
gerate the physical side of phenomena are many.

Now, though I did not allude to Prof. Huxley in what
I wrote, his criticism convinces me that he is sometimes
at least found among these last. I' is paper is an excel-
lent illustration of the very error which I condemned.
The issue between us is this : We both agree that every
mental and moral fact is in functional relation with some
molecular fact. So far we are entirely on the same side,
as against all forms of theological and metaphysical doc-
trine which conceive the possibility of human feeling
without a human body. But, then, says Prof. Huxley, if
I can trace the molecular facts which are the antecedents
of the mental and moral facts, I have explained these
mental and moral facts. That I deny ; just as much as I
should deny that a chemical analysis of the body could
ever lead to an explanation of the physical organism.
Then, says the professor, when I have traced out the
molecular facts, I have built up a physical theory of moral

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 173

phenomena. That again I deny. I say there is no such
thing, or no rational thing, that can be called a phy-
sical theory of moral phenomena, any more than there
is a moral theory of physical phenomena. What sort
of a thing would be a physical theory of history-
history explained by the influence of climate or the
like ? The issue between us centres in this : I say
that the physical side of moral phenomena bears about
the same part in the moral sciences that the facts
about climate bear in the sum of human civilization. And
that to look to the physical facts as an explanation of the
moral, or even as an independent branch of the study of
moral facts, is perfectly idle; just as it would be if a
mere physical geographer pretended to give us, out of his
geography, a climatic philosophy of history. Yet Prof.
Huxley has not been deterred from the astounding para-
dox of proposing to us a physiological theory of religion.
He tells us how " the religious feelings may be brought
within the range of physiological inquiry." And he pro-
poses as a problem — " What diseased viscus may have
been responsible for the ' priest in absolution ? " I will
drop all epithets ; but -I must say that I call that materi-
alism, and materialism not very nice of its kind. One
might as reasonably propose as a problem — What barome-
trical readings are responsible for the British Constitution ?
and suggest a congress of meteorologists to do the work
of Hallam, Stubbs, and Freeman. Mo doubt there is
some connection between the House of Commons and the
English climate, and so there is no doubt some connection

174- A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

between religious theories and physical organs. But to
talk of " bringing religion within the range of physiolo-
gical inquiry " is simply to stare through the wrong end
of the telescope, and to turn philosophy and science up-
side down. Ah ! Prof. Huxley, this is a bad day's work
for scientific progress —

Ilpia/xos, Ilpta/xoio re

Pope Pius1 and his people will be glad when they read that
fatal sentence of yours. When I complained of the "at-
tempt to dispose of the deepest moral truths of human
nature on a bare physical or physiological basis," I could
not have expected to read such an illustration of my
meaning by Prof. Huxley.

Perhaps he will permit me to inform him (since that is
the style which he affects) that there once was — and, in-
deed, we may say still is — an institution called the Catho-
lic Church ; that it has had a long and strange history,
and subtile influences of all kinds ; and I venture to
think that Prof. Huxley may learn more about the priest
in absolution by a few weeks' study of the Catholic
system than by inspecting the diseased 'viscera of the
whole human race. When Prof. Huxley's historical and
religious studies " have advanced so far as to enable him
to explain " the history of Catholicism, I think he will
admit that " priestcraft " cannot well be made a chapter
in a physiological manual. It may be cheap pulpit thunder,
but this idea of his of inspecting a " diseased viscus " is

1 This was written previous to the death of Pope Pius IX.

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 175

precisely what I meant by " biological reasoning about
spiritual things." And I stand by it, that it is just as
false in science as it is deleterious in morals. It is an
attempt (I will not say arrogant, I am inclined to use an-
other epithet) to explain, by physical observations, what
can only be explained by the most subtile moral, sociolo-
gical, and historical observations. It is to think you can
find the golden eggs by cutting up the goose, instead ol
watching the goose to see where she lays the eggs.

I am quite aware that Prof. Huxley has elsewhere for-
mulated his belief that biology is the science which " in-
cludes man and all his ways and works." If history, law,
politics, morals, and political economy, are merely branches
of biology, we shall want new dictionaries indeed ; and
biology will embrace about four-fifths of human know-
ledge. But this is not a question of language ; for we
here have Prof. Huxley actually bringing religion within
the range of physiological inquiry, and settling its pro-
blems by references to " diseased viscus." But the differ-
ences between us are a long story ; and since Prof. Huxley
has sought me out, and in somewhat monitorial tone has
proposed to set me right, I will take an early occasion to
try and set forth what I find paradoxical in his notions
of the relations of biology and philosophy.

I note a few special points between us, and I have done.
Prof. Huxley is so well satisfied with his idea of a " phy-
sical theory of moral phenomena," that he constantly at-
tributes that sense to my words, though I carefully
guarded my language from such a construction. Thus

176 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

he quotes from me a passage beginning, " Man is one,
however compound," but he breaks off the quotation just
as I go on to speak of the direct analysis of mental and
moral faculties by mental and moral science, not by phy-
siological science. I say : " philosophy and science " have
accomplished explanations ; I do not say biology ; and
the biological part of the explanation is a small and sub-
ordinate part of the whole. I do not say that the corres-
pondence between physical and moral phenomena is an
explanation of the human organism. Prof. Huxley says
that, and T call it materialism. Nor do I say that " spiri-
tual sensibility is a bodily function." I say, it is a moral
function ; and I complain that Prof. Huxley ignores the
distinction between moral and physical functions of the
human organism.

As to the distinction between anatomy and physiology,
if he will look at my words again, he will see that I use
these terms with perfect accuracy. Six lines below the
passage he quotes, I speak of the human mechanism being
only explained by a " complete anatomy a fid biology,"
showing that anatomy is merely one of the instruments
of biology.

He might be surprised to hear that he does not himself
give an accurate definition of physiology. But so it is.
He says, " Physiology is the science which treats of the
functions of the living organism." Not so, for the finest
spiritual sensibility is, as Prof. Huxley admits, a function
of living organism ; and physiology is not the science
which treats of spiritual sensibilities. They belong to

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 177

•

moral science. There are mental, moral, affective func-
tions of the living organism ; and they are not within the
province of physiology. Physiology is the science which
treats of the bodily functions of the living organism ; as
Prof. Huxley says in his admirable " Elementary Lessons/'
it deals with the facts " concerning the action of the body'1
I complain of the pseudo-science which drops that distinc-
tion for a minute. He says, " The explanation of a phy-
siological function is the demonstration of the connection
of that function with the molecular state of the organ
which exerts the function." That I dispute. It is only
a small part of the explanation. The explanation sub-
stantially is the demonstration of the laws and all the
conditions of the function. The explanation of the cir-
culation of the blood is the demonstration of all its laws,
modes, and conditions ; and the molecular antecedents of
it are but a small part of the explanation. The principal
part relates to the molar (and not the molecular) action
of the heart and other organs. " The function of motion
is explained," he says, " when the movements of the living
body are found to have certain molecular changes for
their invariable antecedents." Nothing of the kind. The
function of bodily motion is explained when the laws,
modes, and conditions, of that motion are demonstrated ;
and molecular antecedents are but a part of these condi-
tions. The main part of the explanation, again, deals
with molar, not molecular, states of certain organs. " The
function of sensation is explained," says Prof. Huxley,
"when the molecular changes, which are the invariable
12

178 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

antecedents of sensations, are discovered." Not a bit of
it. The function of sensation is only explained when the
laws and conditions of sensation are demonstrated. And
the main part of this demonstration will come from direct
observation of the sensitive organism organically, and by
no molecular discovery whatever. All this is precisely
the materialism which I condemn ; the fancying that one
science can do the work of another, and that any molecu-
lar discovery can dispense with direct study of organisms
in their organic, social, mental, and moral aspects. Will
Prof. Huxley say that the function of this Symposium is
explained, when we have chemically analyzed the solids
and liquids which are now effecting molecular change in
our respective digestive apparatus ? If so, let us ask the
butler if he cannot produce us a less heady and more mel-
low vintage. What irritated viscus is responsible for the
materialist 'in philosophy? We shall all philosophize
aright, if our friend Tyndall can hit for us the exact
chemical formula for our drinks.

It does not surprise me, so much as it might, to find
Prof. Huxley slipping into really inaccurate definitions in
physiology, when I remember that hallucination of his
about questions of science all becoming questions of mole-
cular physics. The molecular facts are valuable enough;
but we are getting molecular-mad, if we forget that mole-
cular facts have only a special part in physiology, and
hardly any part at all in sociology, history, morals, and
politics ; though I quite agree that there is no single fact
in social, moral, or mental philosophy, that has not its

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 179

correspondence in some molecular fact, if we only could
know it. All human things undoubtedly depend on, and
are certainly connected with, the general laws of the
solar system. And to say that questions of human organ-
isms, much less of human society, tend to become ques-
tions of molecular physics, is exactly the kind of confu-
sion it would be, if I said that questions of history tend
to become questions of astronomy, and that the more
refined calculations of planetary movements in the future
will explain to us the causes of English Rebellion and the
French Revolution.

There is an odd instance of this confusion of thought
at the close of Prof. Huxley's paper, which still more
oddly Lord Blachford, who is so strict in his logic, cites
with approval. " Has a stone a future life," says Prof.
Huxley, " because the wavelets it may cause in the sea
persist through space and time ? " Well ! has a stone a
life at all ? because if it has no present life, I cannot see
why it should have a future life. How is any reasoning
about the inorganic world to help us here in reasoning
about the organic world ? Prof. Huxley and Lord Blach-
ford might as well ask if a stone is capable of civilization
because I said that man was. I think that man is wholly
different from a stone ; and from a fiddle ; and even from
a dog ; and that to say that a man cannot exert any
influence on other men after his death, because a dog can-
not, or because a fiddle or because a stone cannot, may be
to reproduce with rather needless affectation the verbal
quibbles and pitfalls which Socrates and the sophists

180 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

prepared for each other in some wordy symposium of
old.

Lastly, Prof. Huxley seems to think that he has dis-
posed of me altogether, so soon as he can point to a sym-
pathy between theologians and myself. I trust there are
great affinity and great sympathy between us ; and pray
let him not think that I am in the least ashamed of that
coi i n non ground. Positivism has quite as much sympathy
with the genuine theologian as it has with the scientific
specialist. The former may be working on a wrong
intellectual basis, and often it may be by most perverted
methods ; but, in the best types, he has a high social aim
and a great moral cause to maintain among men. The
latter is usually right in his intellectual basis as far as it
goes ; but it does not go very far, and in the great moral
cause of the spiritual destinies of men he is often content
with utter indifference and simple nihilism. Mere raving
at priestcraft, and beadles, and outward investments, is
indeed a poor solution of the mighty problems of the
human soul and of social organization. And the instinct
of the mass of mankind will long reject a biology which
has nothing for these but a sneer. It will not do for
Prof. Huxley to say that he is only a poor biologist and
careth for none of these things. His biology, however,
" includes man and all his ways and works." Besides, he
is a leader in Israel ; he has preached an entire volume of
" Lay Sermons ; " and he has waged many a war with
theologians and philosophers on religious and philoso-
phic problems. What, if I may. ask him, are his own

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 181

religion and his own philosophy ? He says that he
knows no scientific men who " neglect all philosophical
and religious synthesis." In that he is fortunate in his
circle of acquaintances. But since he is so earnest in
asking me questions, let me ask him to tell the world
what is his own synthesis of philosophy, what is his own
idea of religion ? He can laugh at the worship of priests
and positivists : whom, or what, does he worship? If he
dislikes the word soul, does he think that man has any-
thing that can be called a spiritual nature ? If he derides
my idea of a future life, does he think that there is any-
thing which can be said of a man, when his carcass is
laid beneath the sod, beyond a simple final vole ?

P.S. — And now space fails me to reply to the appeals
of so many critics. I cannot enter with Mr. Roden Noel
on that great question of the materialization of the spirits
of the dead ; I know not whether we shall be " made one
with the great Elohim, or angels of Nature, or if we shall
grovel in dead material bodily life." I know nothing of
this high matter: I do not comprehend this language.
Nor can I add anything to what I have said on that
sense of personality which Lord Selborne and Canon
Barry so eloquently press on me. To me that sense of
personality is a thing of somewhat slow growth, resulting
from our entire nervous organization and our composite
mental constitution. It seems to me that we can often
trace it building up and trace it again decaying away.
We feel ourselves to be men, because we have human

182 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

bodies and human minds. Is that not enough ? Has the
baby of an hour this sense of personality ? Are you sure
that a dog or an elephant has not got it ? Then has the
baby no soul ; has the dog a soul ? Do you know more
of your neighbour, apart from inference, than you know
of the dog? Again, I cannot enter upon Mr. Greg's
beautiful reflections, save to point out how largely he
supports me. He shows, I think with masterly logic,
how difficult it is to fit this new notion of a glorified
activity on to the old orthodoxy of beatific ecstacy.
Canon Barry reminds us how this orthodoxy involved the
resurrection of the body, and the same difficulty has
driven Mr. Roden Noel to suggest that the material world
itself may be the debris of the just made perfect. But
Dr. Ward, as might be expected, falls back on the beatific
ecstacy as conceived by the mystics of the thirteenth
centuiy. No word here about moral activity and the
social converse, as in the Elysian fields, imagined by
philosophers of less orthodox severity.

One word more. If my language has given any belie-
ver pain, I regret it sincerely. It may have been some-
what obscure, since it has been so widely arraigned, and
I think misconceived. My position is this : The idea of
a glorified energy in an ampler life is an idea utterly
incompatible with exact thought, one which evaporates
in contradictions, in phrases which when pressed have no
meaning. The idea of beatific ecstacy is the old and
orthodox idea ; it does not involve so many contradictions
as the former idea, but then it does not satisfy our moral

THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 183

judgment. I say plainly that the hope of such an infinite
ecstacy is an inane and unworthy crown of a human life.
And when Dr. Ward assures me that it is merely the
prolongation of the saintly life, then I say the saintly life
is an inane and unworthy life. The words I used about
the " selfish " views of futurity, I applied only to those who
say they care for nothing but personal enjoyment, and to
those whose only aim is "to save their own souls." Mr.
Baldwin Brown has nobly condemned this creed in words
far stronger than mine. And here let us close with the
reflection that the language of controversy must always
be held to apply not to the character of our opponents,
but to the logical consequences of their doctrines, if
uncorrected and if forced to their extreme.

THE INFLUENCE UPON MORALITY

OF A

DECLINE IN EELIGIOUS BELIEF.

THE

INFLUENCE UPOIN MORALITY

OF A

DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF.

SIR JAMES STEPHEN.

MANY persons regard everything which tends to
discredit theology with disapprobation, because
they think that all such speculations must endanger
morality as well. Others assert that morality has a basis
of its own in human nature, and that, even if all theo-
logical belief were exploded, morality would remain
unaffected.

My own view is, that each party is to a considerable
extent right, but that the true practical inference is often
neglected.

Understanding by the theology of an age or country
the theory of the universe generally accepted then and
there, and by its morality the rules of life then and
there commonly regarded as binding, it seems to me
extravagant to say that the one does not influence the

188 .A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

other. The difference between living in a country where
the established theory is that existence is an evil, and an-
nihilation the highest good, and living in a country where
the established theory is that the earth is the Lord's and the
fullness thereof, the round world and they that dwell there-
in, has surely a good deal to do with the other differences
which distinguish Englishmen from Buddhists.

Even if it be said that such differences are merely a
way of expressing the result of a difference of tempera-
ment and constitution otherwise caused, this does not
diminish the effect of a belief in the truth of the theory.
Kali, Bhowanee, and other malevolent deities worshipped
in India, are probably phantoms engendered by fear
working on a rank fancy ; but this does not make the
belief in their real existence less influential in those who
hold it. A man who cuts off the end of his tongue to
propitiate Kali would let it alone if he ceased to believe
in her existence, though the temper of mind which created
her might still remain, and show itself in other ways.

The belief that the course of the world is ordered by a
good God, that right and wrong are in the nature of a
divine law, that this world is a place of trial, and part
only of a wider existence — in a word, the belief in God
and a future state — may be accounted for in various ways.
Now that in this country (to go no farther) the vast
majority of people believe these doctrines to be true, in
fact, just as they believe it to be true, in fact, that ships
and carriages can be driven by steam, and that their con-
duct is in innumerable instances as distinctly influenced

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 189

by the one belief as by the other, appear to me to be pro
positions too plain to be proved.

On the other hand, it seems at least equally evident
that morality has a basis of its own quite independent of
all theology whatever. It is difficult to imagine any
doctrine about theology which has not prevailed at some
time or place ; but no one ever heard of men living to-
gether without some rules of life — that is, without some
sort of morality. Given human action and human pas-
sion, and a vast number of people all acting and feeling,
moral rules of conduct of some sort are a necessary con-
sequence. The destruction of religion would, I think, in-
volve a moral revolution ; but it would no more destroy
morality than a political revolution destroys law. It
would substitute one set of moral rules and sentiments for
another, just as the establishment of Christianity and
Mohammedanism did when they superseded various forms
of paganism.

It would be scarcely worth while to write down these
commonplaces, if it were not for the sake of the practical
inference. It is that theology and morality ought to
stand to each other in precisely the same relation as facts
and legislation.

No one would propose to support by artificial means
a law passed under a mistake, for fear it should have to
be altered. To say that the truth of a theological doctrine
must not be questioned, lest the discovery of its falsehood
should produce a bad moral effect, is in principle precisely
the same thing. It is at least as unlikely that false

190 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

theology should produce good morals as that legislation
based on a mistaken view of facts should work well in
practice.

I will give two illustrations of this — any number mi^ht
be given : Suicide is commonly regarded as wrong; and
this moral doctrine is defended on theological grounds >
which are summed up in the old saying that the soldier
must not leave his post till he is relieved. I will not in-
quire whether any other argument can be produced for-
bidding suicide to a person labouring under a disease which
converts his whole life into one long scene of excruciating
agony, and which must kill him in the course of a few
useless months, during which he is a source of misery, and
perhaps danger, to his nearest and dearest friends. I con-
fine myself to saying that, if it could be shown that there
is no reason to suppose that God has in fact forbidden
such an act, its morality might be discussed and decided
upon on different grounds from those, on which it must
be considered and decided upon on the opposite hypothesis.

Take again, the law of marriage. Suppose a man's wife
is hopelessly insane — ought he be allowed to marry again ?
Ought divorce to be permitted in any case ? These ques-
tions will be discussed in a very different spirit, though it
is possible that they might be answered in the same way
by persons who do and by persons who do not believe in
sacraments, and that marriage is a sacrament.

Now, let us suppose for the sake of argument that it
could be shown that, if all theological considerations were
set aside, it would be desirable that a person dying of

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 191

cancer should be permitted to commit suicide, and that a
man whose wife was incurably mad should be allowed to
marry again ; and that, on the other hand, if theological
considerations were taken into account, the opposite was
desirable. Upon these suppositions the question whether
the theological beliefs which make the difference are
beneficial or not will depend on the question whether
they are true or not. Applied generally, this shows that
the support which an existing creed gives to an existing
system of morals is irrelevant to its truth, and that the
question whether a given system of morals is good or bad
cannot be fully determined until after the determination
of the question whether the theology on which it rests is
true or false. The morality is good if it is founded on a
true estimate of the consequences of human actions. But
if it is founded on a false theology, it is founded on a
false estimate of the consequences of human actions ; and,
so far as that is the case, it cannot be good ; and the cir-
cumstance that it is supported by the theology to which
it refers is an argument against, and not in favour of, that
theology.

LORD SELBORNE.

I BEGIN by observing that (putting special cases aside,
and looking at the question in a general way) morality
has not flourished, among either civilized or uncivilized
men, when religious belief has been generally lost, or

192 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

utterly debased. Not to dwell upon the case of savage
races, the modern Hindoos and Chinese have long been
civilized, but are certainly not moral ; nor can anything
worse be conceived than the morality of the Greeks and
Romans, at the height of their civilization. The morality
of the Romans, in the old republican times when they
knew nothing of Greek philosophy, was praised by Poly-
bius, who connected it, directly and emphatically, with
the influence among them of religious belief. After their
intellectual cultivation had taken its tone from the irre-
religious or agnostic materialism of Epicurus (hardly dis-
tinguishable, I think, from that sort of philosophy which
some persons think destined to supplant religious belief
in the present day), their morality became what is de-
scribed in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans
and in the Satires of Juvenal ; nor does it seern to have
been worse than that of the other civilized races on the
shores of the Mediterranean, over whom, at the same time,
religion had equally lost its influence.

On the other hand, it seems to me certain, as an his-
torical fact, that the place which the principles of love and
benevolence, humility and self-abnegation, have assumed
in the morality of Christian nations (with a wide-spread-
ing influence which has been advancing till the present
time with the growth of civilization) is specifically due
to Christianity. To Christianity are specially due — 1.
Our respect for human life, which condemns suicide, in-
fanticide, political assassination, and I might almost say
homicide generally, in a way previously unknown, and

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 193

still unknown* where Christianity does not prevail ; 2.
recognition of such moral and spiritual relations between
man and man as are inconsistent with the degradation of
women, and with the practice of slavery ; 3. Our rever-
ence for the bond of marriage ; and, 4. Our abhorrence of
some particular forms of vice. I do not mean to deny
that traces of a state of opinion, more or less similar upon
some of these points, are discoverable in what we know
of the manners of some non-Christian nations ; but it is
historically true to say that the prevalence of each of
these principles, as manifested among ourselves, is speci-
fically due to Christianity. Of Christianity I speak
in a sense inclusive of all that it derives from the ante-
cedent Jewish system ; of which it claims to be the true
continuation and development.

If freedom of inquiry is not to be stopped, after the re-
jection of religious belief, it must gradually extend itself
to the whole circle of morality, most, if not all, of which
is as little capable of demonstrative proof through the
evidence of the senses as any of the doctrines of religion.
Those who reject religion will not voluntarily submit to
moral restraints founded upon the religion which they
reject, unless they can be placed upon some other intel-
lectual basis, sufficiently cogent to themselves to resist the
attractions of appetite or self-interest. That large part of
mankind who are always too much under the government
of their inclinations and passions will be quicker in draw-
ing moral corollaries from irreligious principles than the
philosophers by whom those principles are propounded ;
13

194 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

and the advanced posts of morality, in which the influence
of religion culminates, and of which the necessity may
not be so evident on natural or social grounds, are not
likely to be very strenuously defended by those philoso-
phers themselves.

If the religious foundations and sanctions of morality
are given up, what is to be substituted for them ?

First : will the modern notion of a duty to act so as may
conduce to the greatest happiness of the greatest number
of men be sufficient ? I think, certainly not. The idea
of duty is not, to my mind, practical or intelligible without
religious conceptions ; and this particular conception of
duty depends entirely upon a test extrinsic, and not per-
sonal, to the individual — a test, too, which it is difficult
(not to say impossible) for each individual to verify for
himself ; though it may be verified, to their own satis-
faction, by philosophical students of casuistry or political
economy. Those motives are of necessity strongest which
directly concern the man himself : and a moral principle
which attempts to counteract influences operating directly
and immediately upon the will by others which are
speculative and remote, without any higher sanctions
realized by and reacting upon the individual, must neces-
sarily be weak.

But, secondly : will this idea be sufficient, if so modified
as to present to the man the pursuit of his own happiness
in this world as the rule of life, but teach him to discover
it by observing and doing those things which most con-
duce to the happiness of men in general ? In this f orm it

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 195

is older and more plausible ; but the difficulties of making
it practical are really very much the same. This doctrine,
as Aristotle observes, depends upon a general induction :
it deals only with general truths and general conclusions,
to which there are many apparent and (if there were no
jaw of moral retribution and adjustment behind) many
real exceptions. The foundations of a man's moral
character and habits must .be laid in his youth : when (as
Aristotle also says) he is inexperienced, naturally inclined
to follow his passions, and not predisposed to accept the
disquisitions of philosophers as proof that his own happi-
ness will not be promoted by seeking it in his own way.
The temperament most likely to act consciously on such
a rule of life is not the most generous ; it is rather that
which is cold and calculating, and which values the
reputation more than the reality of virtue. Upon such
men, at the best, its influence is to establish a low stand-
ard of virtue : perhaps only to check and impose limits
on their tendency to vice. Over others it can have little
or no power, except when operating in combination with,
and subordination to, higher principles.

Not only did the ethical systems of the ancients which
were based upon this principle fail to make men moral,
but we see its impotence constantly exemplified among
those whom we call " men of the world " — a class of per-
sons who are by no means indifferent to their own happi-
ness, or to the good opinion of the world, but by whom
the influence of religious belief is not practically felt ;
exemplified, too, on points of morality of which the

196 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

reasonaMciK-ss st-cms most manifest. There are no virtues,
I suppose, which can more readily be shown to be con-
ducive to happiness, whether particular or general, than
that which the Greeks called eyK/aareta, and that of -benevo-
lence. What can be more contrary, to both at once of
these, than the irregular indulgence of sensual appetite at
the cost of the permanent degradation, and almost certain
misery, of human beings who are its instruments and
victims, and of innumerable physical as well as moral
evils to individuals, families, and mankind at large ? Yet
how very common is this sort of immorality, even among
cultivated men, living on good terms with society ! How
little is it reproved, how seldom restrained, except by the
authority, or through the influence, direct or indirect, of
religion ! All readers of Horace remember the sententia
dia Catonis, and I doubt whether non-religious opinion
among ourselves is much stricter on this subject, though
. it may be less freely expressed. If it is otherwise as to
some of the more abnormal forms of d/cpao-ia, I have al-
ready said that is specifically due to Christianity. The
cultivated Greeks and Romans spoke and wrote lightly
and familiarly of vices of which we do not speak at all : they
regarded them, indeed, as effeminate, but not as infamous,
and certainly did not visit them with grave social penal
ties. So tainted was their moral atmosphere, that even
such really religious men among them as Socrates and
Plato (to whom, however, a religion teaching morals with
definiteness and authority was unknown) surprise us by
their want of sensitiveness on these points, as manifested
in some passages of the Socratic Dialogues.

•

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 197

- I will next inquire whether a sufficient rule of morality
is to be found, when religion is set aside, in any law of our
nature : first, regarding the constitution of our nature
apart from, and, secondly, taking into account, the exist-
ence in it, of a moral instinct or sense.

If any one calls the application of right reason to human
conduct generally a law of our nature, from which such a
rule is to be derived, without taking into account the
moral sense — this, as it seems to me, would be only a
different and more indefinite mode of expressing substan-
tially the same theories, which have been already dealt
with.

But it may, perhaps, be suggested that laws of our
nature, from which such a rule may be derived, are to be
found in the final causes and purposes of the several
organs and powers which exist in that nature ; and
that the use of any of those organs or powers in
a manner aberrant from their proper causes and pur-
poses is a breach of natural morality. I do not pause
to inquire whether the idea of " cause " and " pur-
pose," which is involved in such a view, can be veri-
fied apart from religion. But such a rule would, at best,
be far from co-extensive with the whole field of morality ;
some most necessary parts of a moral code (such, e. g., as
the regulation of the relations between the sexes) being
incapable of being deduced, with any approach to cer-
tainity, from the mere constitution of our nature. As to
some of our faculties, the determination, with sufficient
accuracy, to furnish a rule of life, of their final causes and

198 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

purposes, might involve difficult philosophical inquiries,
As to others, though there might be no such difficulty, it
is to be remembered that we have a complex nature, in
which the forces which operate, either mechanically or in
a way resembling the mechanical, • upon the will, are
constantly in practical antagonism to the regulative
faculty. The faculties of which the final causes are most
obvious exist, not apart from, but in combination with,
other elements of our nature which (either generally or
often) result in tendencies to their use without any direct
view to the fulfilment of their proper purposes. The
gratification of some of those tendencies (such, e. g., as
eating and drinking for the mere pleasure of taste, and not
for nourishment) can hardly be condemned as immoral,
on natural grounds, unless carried so far as to overpower
reason, or impair strength or health. When it is carried
to that excess (as in the case of intemperance), it is still
true that the origin of the vice has been in the natural
constitution of men's bodies, by which a sensible gratifi-
cation has been found in its indulgence : which (as it seems
to me) goes far to prove that this conception of a physical
law cannot be relied upon, even in the cases to which it
is most directly applicable, as a practical basis of morality
— a view which is confirmed by the actual prevalence
among men of that class of vices, even when, to all natural
safeguards, is superadded the external influence of re-
ligion.

When we proceed to take into account the moral
instinct or sense, we come upon the border-ground, if not

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 199

into the proper territory, of Religion. To a man who
believes in a moral government of the universe, in the
distinctness of the Ego, the real man, from his bodily
organization, and in the doctrines of moral responsibility
and moral adjustment in a future state, nothing can be
more real, nothing more intelligible, than this moral
instinct or sense, with its suggestions of right and wrong,
of duty, guilt and sin, and its judicial conscience. But, if all
these postulates are denied, what is then to be thought of
this moral instinct or sense ? Why is it, on that hypo-
thesis, less a mere accident of the nervous system, or of
some other part of the bodily organization, than the
religious instinct, which is already supposed to be set
aside, as resting upon no demonstrable ground ? As a
phenomenon, and in some sense a fact, it exists, just as
the religious instinct does (if they be not really the same) ;
but those principles of thought which explain away the
one, as having no proper objective cause, and as indicative
of no objective truth, may as easily explain away the
other also. The one is not more susceptible of sensible
and experimental demonstration than the other. If man
were merely a higher order of the organization of matter,
homogeneous with, and produced by spontaneous develop-
ment from inorganic substances, plants, and inferior
animals, and under no responsibility to any moral intel-
ligence greater than his own, what reality would there be
in the conception of a moral law of obligation, inappli-
cable to all other known forms of matter, and applicable
only to man,

200 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

These questions are practical. Experience, on the large
scale, shows that men who disregard the religious, cannot
generally be trusted to pay regard to the moral, sense. A
moral sense, not believed in, can never supply a practical
foundation for morality. On the other hand, a moral
sense, believed in, is (in reality) itself religion — possibly
inarticulate, but religion still. Such a belief cannot exist,
without accepting the evidence of the moral sense as
equally trustworthy concerning those things of which it
informs us, as the evidence of the bodily senses is concern-
ing those things of which they inform us. It is, of
course, only from the impressions made upon our own
minds that we can know anything about any of the
subjects, either of physical, or of intellectual, or of moral
sensation : their intrinsic nature, abstracted from those
impressions, is to us, in each case alike,an inaccessible mys-
tery. But belief in the sense is belief in the truth of the
information which the sense gives to us ; that is, that this
information, if rightly apprehended, is trustworthy, as far
as it goes ; that there are objective realities corresponding
with it. The moral sense, believed .in, is not merely a
possible, but I suppose it to be the only possible, human
foundation of morality. An intelligent belief in the
moral sense naturally takes the man beyond himself, to a
higher source of his moral conceptions, which it really
presupposes ; and any truths correlative to it, which are
either ascertainable by the processes of reason, or capable
of being otherwise made known, will naturally, when they
become known, be recognized, in their proper relation to

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 201

it, and cannot be rejected without doing it violence. Any
such correlative knowledge of the higher truths (to the
existence of which the moral sense testifies, though it does
not fully reveal them) must enlighten, inform, and
strengthen it. It is the office of such knowledge to ans-
wer authoritatively those questions, as to the real nature,
the proper work, the true happiness, the true place in the
universe of man, which philosophy has always been asking
and has never, by itself, been able to solve. It harmonizes,
accounts for, and enforces by authoritative sanctions, the
concurrent testimonies of the moral sense, the religious
1nstinct, Nature interpreted by reason, and reason en-
lightened by experience. On the other hand, the want,
and still more the rejection of such knowledge (supposing
it to be attainable and true) must, in a corresponding
degree, obscure, perplex, or discredit, the moral sense.

I am well aware that some who seem to reject all dog-
matic theology and even the principles of natural religion,
do nevertheless live up to a high moral standard ; just as
there are too many others, professing (not always insin-
cerely) to believe in religion, who do the reverse. The
moral sense never has been, and never will be, extinguished
among mankind ; and in all ages and countries, of which
we have any real historical knowledge, there have been
conspicuous examples of men who have made it their rule
of life. Doubtless there have been many more who did so3of
whom we know nothing ; nor is it unreasonable to believe
that there may be many such even among very degraded
races. But these facts do not invalidate general conclu-

202 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

sions as to the general moral tendency of a decline of
religious belief. Those examples of exceptional goodness
have not been sufficient to prevent or to arrest a progres-
sive deterioration of general morality when the light of
religion has been absent or obscured ; and the best ancient
schemes of philosophy, which were founded upon the
moral sense, failed to compete practically with that of
materialism, which did all that was possible to destroy it.
" Live while we may " — " let us eat and drink, for to-
morrow we die " — are natural corollaries from the doctrine
of Epicurus ; whatever more refined conceptions that
philosophers or any of his followers may have propounded.
Such will ever be the effect, in the world generally, of a
popular disbelief in the doctrines of immortality and re-
tribution ; not because the hope of rewards or the fear of
punishments is the foundation of religious morality (which
to fulfil the requirements either of religion or of the
moral sense, must ascend much higher), but because our
nature is so constituted that the destiny of the individual,
for good or evil, for happiness or the reverse, is insepar-
ably bound up with the moral law of his being ; and
because those aids and defences which result from the
recognition of this truth are necessary for the ascendency
of the higher over the lower elements of our nature, and
for the education of man to virtue. A boy, whose main-
springs of right action are conscience and love, will not
endeavour to fulfil the objects for which he is sent to
school more selfishly, or from less worthy motives, when
he is informed of their relation to his future life, than if

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 203

he were left in ignorance of it; but the knowledge of
that relation, by making him understand the importance
of the future as compared with the present, and the mean-
ing and reasonableness of his present duties, may enable
him better to fulfil them.

All that has been said assumes, of course, that there is
such a thing as religious truth : nor is it possible to deny
that, if this could really be disproved, the morality founded
upon it would fail. But it cannot be without importance,
whenever the proper evidences of the truth of religion are
considered, to take into account, as one of them, its rela-
tion to morality : the certainty that, if it were displaced,
the system of morality now received among men would,
to a great extent, fall with it ; and the extreme intellectual
difficulty of maintaining, in that event, the supremacy of
the moral sense, or placing the morality of the future
upon a new basis, likely to acquire general authority
among mankind. If it should be suggested that a suffi-
cient moral code, for practical purposes, might be main-
tained by increasing the stringency of human laws in
proportion to the failure of religious sanctions, J should
reply that the power of human laws depends upon morality,
and not morality upon human laws ; and that any legis-
lation, greatly in advance of the moral sentiment of the
community, would certainly not be effectual, and could
not long be maintained.

It has been no part of my purpose to enter into an
examination of any questions as to particular doctrines of
religion. I have throughout used the word " religion " in

204 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

a sense exclusive of all systems, usurping that name,
which take no cognizance of morality, or which are repug-
nant, in their practical precepts, to the general moral sense
of mankind; and I have not dissembled my belief that
( 'hristianity (regarded in its general aspect, with reference
to the points of agreement rather than those of difference
among Christians) does fulfil the conditions necessary for
moral efficacy. Error, inconsistency, incompleteness, or
admixture of foreign elements, in particular modes of ap-
prehending or representing it, must, no doubt, as far as
they prevail, and in proportion to their importance, de-
tract from the authority, or deteriorate the quality, of its
influence. So also must the mere fact of disagreement.
But, notwithstanding all these drawbacks, Christianity is
the great moral power of the world. It has often been
supposed to be declining, but has, as often, renewed its
strength ; nor has any other power been found to take its
place, where it has seemed to lose ground. As to other
forms of religion it may, without difficulty, be admitted
that such elements as they have in common with Christi-
anity may be expected (except so far as they are neutralized
or counteracted by other contrary elements) to tend, in their
measure, toward the same standard of morality. It is proper
(as I suppose) to Christianity, rightly understood, to assert
the identity of its own essential principles with those of
natural religion, while teaching that the moral govern-
ment of the world has been so conducted as not to leave
mankind dependent upon natural religion only ; and it
refers to a common origin with itself all the elements of

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 205

religious belief, consistent with its own doctrines, which
have been, at any time or place, accepted among the na-
tions of the world These propositions, and also that of
the presence of the religious principle in any -practical
belief of the moral sense, appear to be in accordance with
what is said by St. Paul in the nineteenth and twentieth
verses of the first, and the fourteenth and fifteenth verses
of the second chapter of the Epistle to the Romans.

REV. DR. MARTINEAU.

IN order to estimate aright the moral influence of de-
clining religious belief, the relation between morals
and religion must be accurately conceived. They may be
regarded as independent, or as identical, or, again, either
may be taken to be the foundation of the other. The
following positions will serve as a sufficient ground for the
opinion which I shall offer :

A sense of duty is inherent in the constitution of our
nature, and cannot be escaped till we can escape from
ourselves. It does not wait on any ontological conditions,
and incur the risk of non-existence should no assurance
be gained with regard to a being and a life beyond us.
Even though we came out of nothing, and returned to
nothing, we should be subject to the claim of righteous
ness so long as we are what we are. Morals have their
own base, and are second to nothing.

206 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

Apart from this intrinsic consciousness of ethical dis-
tinctions, no ontological discoveries would avail to set up
a law of duty, and give us the characteristics of moral
beings. A Supreme Power might dictate an external rule,
and break us in to obedience by hopes and fears of un-
limited extent. But by this sway of preponderant interests
we are not carried beyond prudence ; and in the absence
of a law within, responding to the demands from without,
we do not reach the confines of moral obligation ; and, in
case of failure, we incur the sense only of error, not of sin.
Theology cannot supply a base for morals that have lost
their own.

Does it follow that, because morals are indigenous, they
are therefore self-sufficing ? By no means. Though re-
ligion is not their foundation, it is assuredly their crown
— related to them as Plato says dialectic is to the sciences,
worrrep OpiyKos rot? /xaflrj/xao-ii/1 — the coping that consummates
them. Be the genesis of the conscience what it' may, we
learn from it at last that there is a better and a worse in
the springs of action which contend for us, and that, while
it is open to us as a possibility, it is closed against us as a
right, to follow the lower when the higher calls. The
authority which stamps the one as a temptation, and
other as a peremptory claim, is not, we are well aware, of
our own making ; for it masters us with compunction, and
defies all repeal. Nor is it the mere expression of public
self-interest ; for it extends beyond the range of social
action, and covers the whole voluntary field. Speaking

i Rep., vii.,534E,

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 207

with a voice before which our whole personality bows,
and which equally gives law to other men, it issues from
a source transcending human life, and infusing into it a
moral order from a more comprehensive sphere. It pos-
tulates a superior will in communion with ours, and
administering this world as a school of character.

To this result our moral experience naturally runs up,
and stops short of it only where its course is artificially
arrested. Till it is reached, the ethical demands upon us
seem to address us in tones too portentous for their imme-
diate significance ; remorse clings to us with a tenacity,
aspiration returns upon us with a power, which reason can-
not adequately justify. But in the presence of an object-
ive moral law pervading the universe, administered by a
Mind wherein it perfectly lives, and continued for man be-
yond his present term of years, the scale of the ethical
passions, and the intensity of admiration and reverence
for the good, fall into proportionate place, and escape the
irony of being at once the ultimate nobleness and the su-
preme extravagance of our nature. Religion, on this side,
is but the open blossom of the moral germs implanted
within us — the explicit form, developed in thought, of
faiths implicitly contained in the sense of responsibility
and the foreboding of guilt. Its eifect, therefore, is to
suffuse with a divine light relations and duties which be-
fore were simply personal and social.

A similar transfiguration befalls the pleasures and pains
attending voluntary conduct, and constituting its natural
'* sanctions." Treated as ultimate facts, they can never

208 \ MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

acquire more than a prudential significance. Treated as
symbolical lineaments of a world under moral government*
they are invested with an .expression of character, and
look into us with living eyes. Their appeal alights no
longer on self -regarding hope and fear, but on the springs
of sympathy and shame : they pass from sensitive to ethi-
cal phenomena. The new and ideal meaning thus given to
a large portion of actual human experience cannot pause
there ; it completes itself in the congenial anticipation of
a further and invisible store of awards consummating the
incipient justice of this world. The faith in a future life
— where it is more than a belief at second hand — has
its sheet-anchor in the moral affections. But for the felt
interval between what we are and what we ought to
be, for the indignation at wrong, for compassion toward
innocent suffering, and reverence for high excellence,
vaticinations of renewed existence would have no origin
and no support.

In assigning this method of growth to religion, I do not
mean to deny that it may have other lines of formation.
The Nature-worship which plays so great a part in ancient
civilization has a different history, and stands in much
less intimate relations with the moral life of its votaries.
We pay, I am disposed to think, too great a compliment
to the Greek mythology when we attribute the ethical
decay of later Athens and Corinth to the growing scepti-
cism about its gods. The public life was dead. The the-
atre of great passion and great action was closed. The
calls for sacrifice, the opportunities for national expansion
were gone, and the political school for the discipline of

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 209

character was no longer there. With the loss of a pro-
gressive history , the springs of heroic emulation suffered
atrophy, a sickly hue passed over literature, philosophy
and art : and the subsidence of human loves and cares
upon low Epicurean levels was inevitable, though the Olym-
pian deities had never been dethroned. In the absence of
any moral religion, no efficacious resistance could be set
up, with or without a pantheistic polytheism, against the
canker of social degeneracy .r*"s

In dealing with the present problem, however, we con-
fine our attention to the Christian type of religion, which
has its hold upon our nature from the moral side. The
question is, what practical effect might be expected from
a decay of that religion.

Under that change morality would lose, not its base,
but its summit. The ground and principles of duty would
remain ; the means for deducing rules of action, estimating
the worth of conflicting impulses, and measuring the
grades of obligation, would in the main be unaffected ; so
that the moral code which would emerge from the labours
of a mere philosopher need not materially differ from that
recognized by a Christian. This is only an inverse method
of saying that the Christian ethics are true to human life
and the expression of right reason. I do not think, there-
fore, that the form and contents of a moral system would
be essentially modified by the decline of religious belief.
It may, no doubt, happen that particular problems of con-
duct, as in the cases of suicide and of marriage, have be-
come the subjects of ecclesiastical legislation, and so have
14

A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

passed into preoccupation of religious feeling, and, on the
disappearance of that feeling, may be flung back into an
indeterminate condition. But to the real solution of such
problems it would be difficult to show that religion con-
tributes any new elements, so as to turn into duty that
which was not duty before. Its ministers and temporary
interpreters can give an historical consecration to all sorts
of ungrounded opinions, and these will in any case
have to look out for an adequate base, whether or not the
religious view of life is still upheld. But it is quite pos-
sible that a rule of life, once thoughtfully constituted,
should be acknowledged in common over the whole range
of social duty by persons simply ethical and by those who
are also religious.

But though the decay of religion may leave the insti-
tutes of morality intact, it drains off their inward power.
The devout faith of men expresses and measures the in-
tensity of their moral nature, and it cannot be lost with-
out a remission of enthusiasm, and under this low pressure,
the successful reentrance of importunate desires and clam-
orous passions which had been driven back. To believe
in an ever-living and perfect Mind, supreme over the uni-
verse, is to invest moral distinctions with immensity and
eternity, and lift them from the provincial stage of human
society to the imperishable theatre of all being. When
planted thus in the very substance of things, they justify
and support the ideal estimates of the conscience ; they
deepen every guilty shame ; they guarantee every right-
eous hope ; and they help the will with a divine casting-

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 211

vote in every balance of temptation. The sanctity thus
given to the claims of duty, and the interest that gathers
around the play of character, appear to me more important
elements in the power of religion than its direct sanctions
of hope and fear. Yet to these also it is hardly possible to deny
great weight, not only as extending the range of persona}
interests, but as the answer of reality to the retributory
verdicts of the moral sense. Cancel these beliefs, and
morality will be left reasonable still, but paralyzed ; pos-
sible to temperaments comparatively passionless, but with
no grasp on vehement and poetic natures ; and gravitating
toward the simply prudential wherever it maintains its
ground.

Historical experience appears to confirm this estimate.
In no race (notwithstanding conspicuous individual ex-
ceptions) have the excesses of sensual passion been so kept
in check as among the Jews. There is no more striking
feature in their literature during the moral declension of
Greek and Roman society (e. g,, in the Sibylline Oracles)
than the horror which it expresses of the pervading dis-
soluteness of the pagan world. It certainly cannot be said
that the problem was rendered easy by the coolness of the
Jewish temperament. The phenomena of Christendom
presents a more complicated tissue. But a just analysis
yields, I believe, the same result, and attests the force of
religious conviction as the only successful antagonist, on
any large scale, of the animal impulses. True it is that,
in the very presence of the Church, and even among its
representatives, gross vices have at times prevailed. But

212 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

these have been hollow times, in which/with large classes of
persons, the outer shell of religion sheltered no sincere life,
and the private Kabits betrayed the inward disintegration
which policy or indifference concealed. To test the power
of religion, we must limit ourselves to cases where that
power is not effete. In the Puritan families of the seven-
teenth century, among the present Catholic peasantry of
Ireland, throughout the Society of Friends, and in the
Wesleyan classes, it can hardly be denied that the control
of irregular desires has been attained with an exceptional
ease and completeness.

One source of this distinctive power yet remains to be
indicated. A simply conscientious man may surrender
himself unreservedly to the sense of moral obligation, and
be so possessed by it as to feel it more than reasonable,
and own a certain sacredness in its appeal. Duty, honour,
self-f orgetfulness in other's good, may obtain the real com-
mand of such a one. But the persuasive force with which
the right speaks to him is beyond all intellectual measure ;
it stirs him in depths he cannot reach ; its heat is in excess
of its light ; it is something mystic which must have him,
but of which he can render no account. Here, in truth,
js religion pressing into life, only with form still indistinct,
and its organism of thought not yet differentiated and ar-
ticulate. Let it complete its development, and what
change will ensue ? Once rendered conscious of the Su-
preme Source of his moral perceptions, the responsible
agent no longer obeys a pressure out of the dark, but
rather a drawing toward higher light ; for an impersonal

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 213

drift of Nature is substituted a profound personal venera-
tion, and enthusiasm is turned from a blind nobleness in-
to the clear allegiance of living affection. It is not with-
out reason that this change has been treated as an emer-
gence into new life. Its vast influence is attested by the
whole literature of devotion, and especially by its most
popular element, the hymns of every age from the Psalter
to the " Christian Year."

Though in theory the contents of morality are not al-
tered by acquiring divine obligation, the efficacy of religion
is more immediately felt in some parts of the character
than in others. The scene to which it introduces the mind
is one which throws it instantly into the attitude of look-
ing up toward an Infinite Perfection, whose presence it
never quits, and thus supplies the true condition of hu-
mility, of aspiration, and of felt equality of moral trust for
all men before God. These moods of thought are specifi-
cally induced by the contract of higher excellence and a
most capacious rule of righteousness ; and they are but
poorly simulated by the mere sense of personal insignifi-
cance amid the immensity of Nature, and the awe of the
unknown, and the conscious partnership of us all in the
human liabilities. The moral characteristics of the Chris-
tian temper are nothing but the natural posture of a mind
standing face to face with the invisible reality of the high-
est ideals of its conscience and its love. If that presence
departs, they cannot survive.

214 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

MR. FREDERIC HARRISON.

AND all this, to me, describes the moral characteristics,
not of the Christian, but of the religious temper.
With what has been so finely said in the preceding discourse
we ought, I think, most cordially to join. Only for the
words " theology " and " Christian " we must put the
wider and more ancient terms " religion " and "human ; "
and again, for the intrinsic consciousness and emotional
intuitions, whereby these are said to prove themselves,
we must substitute the reasonable proof of science, phil-
osophy, and positive psychology.

We have had before us three distinctive views, as to
the relations of religion and morality. Each of the three
has pressed on us a very powerful thought. The recon-
ciliation is obscure, yet I hold on to the hope that it may
one day be found ; that we shall have to surrender nei-
ther religion nor science, neither demonstration on the
one hand, nor dogma, worship, and discipline, on the
other ; that we shall end by accepting a purely human
base for our morality, and withal come to see our moral-
ity transfigured into a true religion.

It is the purport of the first of the arguments before us
to establish : that morality has a basis of its own quite
independent of all theology whatever; but that, since
morality must be deeply affected by any theology, the
morality will be undermined if based on a theology
which is not true. We must all agree, I think, to that.

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 215

The second argument insists that, if the religious
foundations and sanctions of morality be given up, human
life runs the risk of sinking into depravity, since moral-
ity without religion is insufficient for general civilization.
For my part; I entirely assent to that.

The third argument rejoins, that theology cannot sup-
ply a base for morals that have lost their own ; but that
morals, though they have their own base, and are second
to nothing, are not adequate to direct human life until
they be transfused into that sense of resignation, ador-
ation, and communion with an overruling Providence,
which is the true mark of religion. I assent entirely to
that.

We, who follow the teaching of Comte, humbly look
forward to an ultimate solution of all such difficulties by
the force of one common principle. That we acknow-
ledge a religion, of which the creed shall be science ; of
which the faith, hope, charity, shall be real, not transcen-
dental— earthly, not heavenly: a religion in a word,
which is entirely human in its evidences, in its purposes,
in its sanctions and appeals. Write the word; " religion "
where we find the word " theology ; " write the word
" human " where we find the word " Christian," or the
words " theist," " Mussulman," or " Buddhist," and these
discussions grow practical and easily reconciled ; the as-
pirations and sanctions of religion burst open to us anew
in greater intensity, without calling on us to surrender
one claim of reality and humanity ; the realm of faith
and adoration becomes again conterminous with life,

216 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

without disturbing — nay, while sanctifying — the invinci-
ble resolve of modern men to live in this world, for this
world, ivith their fellow-men.

And this brings us to the source of all difficulties about
the relations of morality and religion. We place our
morality — we are compelled by the conditions of all our
positive knowledge to place it — in a strictly human
world. But it is the mark of every theology (the name of
theology assumes it) to place our religion in a non-human
world. And thus our human system of morals may pos-
sibly be distorted— it cannot be supported — by a non-
human religion. But, on the other hand, it is dwarfed
and atrophied for want of being duly expanded into a
truly human religion. Our morality, with its human
realities, our theology, with its non-human hypotheses,
will not amalgamate. Their methods are in conflict. In
their base, in their logic, in their aim, they are heterogen-
eous. They do not lie in pari inaterid. Give, us a re-
ligion as truly human, as really scientific,^ is our moraL
system, ami all is harmony. Our morals based as they,
must be on our knowledge of life and of society, are then
ordered and inspired by a religion which belongs, just as
truly as our moral science does, to the world of science
and of man. And then religion will be no longer that
quicksand of possibility which two thousand years of
debate have still left it to so many of us. It becomes, at
last, the issue of our knowledge, the meaning of our
science, the soul of our morality, the ideal of our imagin-
ation, the fulfilment of our aspirations, the law-giver, in

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 217

short, of our whole lives. Can it ever be this while we
still pursue religion into the bubble-world of the whence
and the whither ?

That morality is dependent on theology ; that moral-
ity is independent of religion : each of these views pre-
sents insuperable difficulties, and brings us to an alterna-
tive from which we recoil. To assert that there is no
morality but what is based on theology, is to assert
what experience, history, and philosophy, flatly contradict
— nay, that which revolts the conscience of all manly pur-
pose within us. History teaches us that some of the best
types of morality, in men and in races, have been found
apart from anything that Christians can call theology at
all. Morality has been advancing for centuries in modern
Europe, while the theology, at least in authority, has been
visibly declining. The morality of Confucius and of
Sakya Mouni, of Socrates and Marcus Aurelius, of Vauve-
nargues, Turgot, Condorcet, Hume, was entirely independ-
ent of any theology. The moral system of Aristotle was
framed without any view to theology, as completely as
that of Comte or of our recent moralists. We have ex-
perience of men with the loftiest ideal of life and of strict
fidelity to their ideal, who expressly repudiate theology,
and of many more whom theology never touched. Lastly,
there is a spirit within us which will not believe that to
know and to do the right we must wait until the mysteries
of existence and the universe are resolved1 — its origin, its
government, and its future. To make right conduct a
corollary of a theological creed, is not only contrary to

218 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

fact, but shocking to our self-respect. We know that
the just spiiit can find the right path, even while the
judgment hangs bewildered amid the churches.

To hold, as would seem to require of us the second ar-
gument, that, though theology is necessary as a base for
morality, yet almost any theology will suffice — polytheist,
Mussulman, or deist — so long as some imaginary being is
postulated, this is, indeed, to reduce theology to a mini-
mum ; since in this case, it does not seem to matter in
which God you may believe. To say that morality is
dependent on one particular theology, is to deny that
men are moral outside your peculiar orthodoxy ; to say
that morality is dependent merely on some form of the-
ology, is to say that it matters little to practical virtue
which of a hundred creeds you may profess. And when
we shrink from the arrogance of the first and the loose-
ness of the second position, we have no alternative but to
admit that our morality must have a human, and not a
super-human, base.

It does not follow that morality can suffice for life
without religion. Morality, if we mean by that the
science of duty, after all can supply us only with a know-
ledge of what we should do. Of itself it can neither touch
the imagination, nor satisfy the thirst of knowledge, nor
order the emotions. It tells us of human duty, but noth-
ing of the world without us ; .it prescribes to us our duties,
but it does not kindle the feelings which are the impulse
to duty. Morality has nothing to tell us of a paramount
power outside of us, to struggle with which is confusion

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 219

and annihilation, to work with which is happiness and
strength ; it has nothing to teach us of a communion with
a great goodness, nor does it 'touch the chords of vener-
ation, sympathy and love, within us. Morality does not
profess to organize our knowledge and give symmetry to
life. It does not deal with beauty, affection, adoration.
If it order conduct, it does not correlate this conduct
with the sum of our knowledge, or with the ideals of our
imagination, or with the deepest of our emotions. To do
all this is the part of religion, not of morality ; and inas-
much as the sphere of this function is both wider and
higher, so does religion transcend morality. Morality
has to do with conduct, religion with life. The first is tlie"
code of a part of human nature, the second gives its har-
mony to the whole of human nature. And morality can
no more suffice for life than a just character would suffice
for any one of us without intellect, imagination, or affection,
and the power of fusing all these into the unity of a man.
The lesson, I think, is twofold. On the one hand,
morality is independent of theology, • is superior to it,
is growing. while theology is declining, is steadfast while
theology is shifting, unites men while theology separates
them, and does its work when theology disappears.
There is something like a civilized morality, a standard
of morality, a convergence about morality. There is no
civilized theology, no standard of theology, no converg-
ence about it. Ori_the other hand, morality will never
suffice for life ; and every attempt to base our existence
with morality alone, or to crown our existence with mor*

220 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

ality alone, must certainly fail ; for this is to fling away
the most powerful motives of human nature. To reach
these is the privilege of religion alone. And those who
trust that the future can ever be built upon science and
civilization, without religion, are attempting to build a
pyramid of bricks without straw. The solution, we be-
lieve, is a non-theloogical religion.

There are some who amuse themselves by repeating
that this is a contradiction in terms, that religion implies
theology. Yet no one refuses the name of religion to the
systems of Confucius and Buddha, though neither has a
trace of theology. But disputes about a name are idle.
If they could debar us from the name of religion, no one
could disinherit us of the thing. We mean by religion a
scheme which shall explain to us the relations of the
faculties of the human soul within, of man to his fellow-
men beside him, to the world and its order around him ;
next, that which brings him face to face with a Power to
which he must bow, with a Providence which he must
love and serve, with a being which he must adore — that
which, in fine, gives man a doctrine to believe, a discipline
1 to live by, and an object to worship. This is the ancient/
• meaning of religion, and the fact of religion all over the
world in every age. What is new in our scheme is merely
that we avoid such terms as infinite, absolute, immaterial,
and vague negatives altogether ; resolutely confining our-
selves to the sphere of what can be shown by experience,
of what is relative and not absolute, and wholly an4
frankly human.

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 221

THE DEAtf OF ST. PAUL'S.

IT seems to me difficult to discuss this question till it is
settled, at least generally, what morality is influenced,
and what religious belief is declining.

The morality generally acknowledged in Europe differs
in most important points from that of the Hebrews in the
days of Moses, of the Greeks in the days of Socrates, of
the Romans under the Empire, of the monks of Egypt, of
the Puritans of the seventeenth century. All of these
had among them high types of character, — higher, it may
be, than any types among us ; but who among us would
accept their morality as a whole ? Our morality has come
to be recognized as it is by a definite progress, of which
the steps may be traced. It is plain that one form of
religious thought and religious faith might aid this pro-
gress of morality by its decline, and another might, by its
decline, impede or reverse it. On such a morality as we
acknowledge, whencesoever derived, the decline of Budd-
hist belief or ancient Roman religious belief might act as
a stimulus and a help. The decline of another kind of
religious belief might, on the other hand, act most in-
juriously.

It seems to me, therefore, that till the question is
presented in a concrete and historical form, nothing can
be made of it. I do not understand the two terms of the
comparison. Before I can attempt to answer it, I must
know, at least approximately, what morality, and what
religion.

222 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

•If by morality is meant the morality generally recog
nized in Europe, on the points of truthfulness, honesty,
humanity, purity, self-devotion, kindness, justice, fellow-
feeling, — and not only recognized, but judged by a con-
scious superiority of reason and experience to be the right
standard as compared with other moralities, such as those
of the Puritans, the monks, the Romans, the Hebrews, —
then I observe that as a matter of fact and history, which
to me seems incontrovertible, this morality has synchron-
ized in its growth and progress with an historical religion,
viz., Christianity. We are come to the end of eighteen of
the most eventful and fruitful centuries of all, at least,
that are known to us; and we are landed in what we
accept as a purer morality than any which has been
known in the world before, and one which admits itself
not to be perfect, but contains in itself principles of im
provement and self -purification. With this progress from
the first — sometimes, I quite admit, with gross and mis-
chievous mistakes, but always with deliberate aim and
intention of good, — Christianity has been associated.
And in proportion as Christian religious belief has thrown
off additions not properly belonging to it, and has aimed
at its own purification and at a greater grasp of truth, the
standard and ideas of morality have risen with it. The
difficulty at this moment is to determine how much of our
recognized morality, both directly and much more indir-
ectly, has come from Christianity, and could not conceiv-
ably have come at all supposing Christianity absent.

I do not here, in these few lines, assume that in

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 223

Christianity and its long association with human morality,
we have a vera causa of its improved and improving
character. But with this immense fact of human experi-
ence before me, unique, it seems to me, in its kind, and in
its broad outlines undeniable, no abstract reasonings can
re-assure me as to the probability that with the failing
powers of what has hitherto been, directly or indirectly,
the source of much, and the support and sanction of still
more, of our morality, our morality will fail too. It seems
to me quite as easy to be sceptical about morality as it is
about religion. If the religion has been proved to be not
true, then of course it is no use talking about the matter.
But if not, a declining belief in it may, with our present
experience, be thought, at least by those who believe in
it, to be attacking the roots of morality, if not in our own
generation, at least in those which come after.

It is matter of history that in what we now generally
accept as true morality, there are two factors : 1, On the
one hand, human experience, human reasonableness, human
good-feeling, human self-restraint ; and (2) on the other,
the belief, the laws, the ideas, the power of Christianity.
It is difficult to conceive what reason there is to expect
that if one factor is taken away the result will continue
the same ; that the removal or weakening of such an im-
portant one as Christianity would not seriously affect
such departments of morals as purity, the relations of the
strong to the weak, respect for human life, slavery.

224: A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

THE DUKE OF ARGYLL.

CONSIDERING that these papers are contributed
by men belonging to very different schools of
thought, and that they deal with a question very abstract
and very ill-defined, it is surely very remarkable that so
much agreement should- emerge on certain fundamental
points.

Most remarkable of all in this respect, is the paper
emanating from one of those who " follow the teaching of
Comte."

In that paper I find the following propositions :

I. That morality is independent of theology ; but,

II. That it is not independent of religion, inasmuch as
morality without religion cannot " suffice for life."

III. That religion means a scheme which (among other
things), " brings man face to face with a Power to which
he must bow, with a Providence which he must love and
serve, with a Being which he must adore — that which, in
fine, gives man a doctrine to believe, a discipline to live
by, and an object to worship."

IV. That this scheme or conception of religion is "new,"
and differs from mere theology in the following distinctive
points :

1. That it avoids certain words or phrases, such as "in-
finite," " absolute," " immaterial."

2. That it avoids also all " vague negatives."

3. That it resolutely confines us to the sphere of what

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 225

can be shown by experience — " of what is relative and
not absolute," and " of what is wholly and frankly
human."

I will examine these propositions in their order.

Proposition I. clearly depends entirely on what is meant
by theology, and on the distinction which is drawn in the
propositions which follow between theology and religion.
Two things, however, may be said of this proposition :
First, that, as a matter of historical fact, men's concep-
tions of moral obligation have been deeply influenced by
their conceptions and beliefs about theology, or about the
" whence and whither." Secondly, that as all branches of
truth are and must be closely related to each other, it
cannot possibly be true that morality is independent of
theology, except upon the assumption that there is no
truth in any theology. But this is an assumption which
cannot be taken for granted, being very different indeed
from the assumption (which may be reasonable), that no
existing theology is unmixed with error. The absolute
independence of morality as regards theology assumes
much more than this ; it assumes that there is no theology
containing even any important element of truth.

Proposition II. is, I think, perfectly true.

Proposition III. contains a definition of religion which
might probably be accepted by any theological professor
in any of our schools of divinity as good and true, if not
in all respects adequate or complete.

Proposition IV. defines the elements in all theologies
which constitute their fundamental errors, and which dis-
15

•2'2(> A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

tinguish them from religion as defined in Proposition III.
In short, Proposition III. defines affirmatively what re-
ligion is ; and Proposition IV. defines negatively what it
is not. It adds also a few more affirmative touches to
complete the picture of what it is.

Looking now at the erroneous theological elements
which are to be thrown away, we find three words fixed
upon as specimens of what is vicious. One of them is
" the Absolute." Most heartily do I wish it were abol-
ished. More nonsense has been talked and written under
cover of it than under cover of any other of the volumin-
ous vocabulary of unintelligible metaphysics. It is
admitted that the Absolute is " unthinkable," and things
which are unthinkable had better be considered as also
unspeakable, or at least be left unspoken.

Next " immaterial " is another word to be cast away.
The worst of this demand is, that the words " material "
and " immaterial " express a distinction of which we can-
not get rid in thought. I do know that the pen with
which I now write is made of that which to me is known
as matter ; but I do not know that the ideas which are
expressed in this writing are made of any like substance,
nor even of any substance like the brain. On the con-
trary, it seems to me that these ideas cannot be so made,
and that there is an absolute difference between thought
and the external substances which it thinks about. This
may be my ignorance, but until that ignorance is removed
I must accept those distinctions which are founded on
the experience and observation of my own nature, and

A DECLINE IN KELIGIOUS BELIEF. 227

I must retain words which are necessary to express
them.

Then, as regards the word " infinite," in like manner, I
cannot dispense with it, for the simple reason that the
idea of infinity is one of which I cannot get rid, and
which all science teaches me is an idea inseparable from
our highest conception of the realities of Nature. Infinite
time and infinite space, and the infinite duration of mat-
ter and of force, are conceptions which are part of my
intellectual being, and I cannot "think them away."
Metaphysicians may tell me that they are " forms of
thought." But if so, they are at least all the more
" frankly human," and I accept them as such.

Next we are to avoid "vague negatives altogether."
Well, but surely a definition of religion as distinguished
from theology, which consists in " avoiding " certain
terms such as we have now examined, is a definition con-
sisting of " vague negatives," and of nothing else.

But then we come next to an affirmative definition :
" confining ourselves resolutely to the sphere of what can
be shown by experience." To this I assent, provided
experience be not confined to the sphere of sense, and
provided everything which any man has ever felt, or
known, or conceived, be accepted as in its own place
and rank coming within the sphere which is thus de-
scribed.

Again, it is demanded of us that we confine ourselves
resolutely within " what is relative and not absolute." To
this I assent. All knowledge is relative — both to the

228 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

mind which knows, and relative also to all other things
which remain to be known. Absolute goodness, and
absolute power, and absolute knowledge, are all conceiva-
ble, but they are all relative ; and to talk of any object
of knowledge, or of any subject of knowledge, as non-rela-
tive, is, or seems to me to be, simply nonsense.

Lastly, it is demanded of us to confine ourselves to
what is " wholly and frankly human." If this means
that we are not to think of any power or any being who
is not related to our human faculties in a most definite
and intelligible sense, I accept the limitation. But if it
means that we are not to think of any such power or
being except under all the imperfections, weaknesses, and
vices of humanity, then the limitation is one which I
cannot accept either as conceivable in itself, or as consis-
tent with what I can see or understand of Nature.

But ought we not to be agreed in this ? If there is
a Power to which man " must bow," " a Being which he
must adore," and a " Providence which he must love and
serve," it is clearly impossible that this Being, Power, or
Providence can be " wholly human," in the sense of being
no greater, no wiser, no better, than man himself.

The whole of this language is the language of theology
and of nothing else — language, indeed, which may be
held consistently with a vast variety of theological
creeds, but which is inseparable from those fundamental
conceptions which all such creeds involve, which is bor-
rowed from them, and without which it has to me no
intelligible sense.

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 229

With these explanations I accept the tenth paragraph
of Paper No. IV. , and that part of the last paragraph
which has been already quoted, as expressing "with ad-
mirable force and truth at least one aspect of the con-
nection between morals and religion.

PROF. CLIFFORD.

IN the third of the preceding discourses there is so
much which I can fully and fervently accept, that I
should find it far more grateful to rest in that feeling of
admiration and sympathy, then to attend to points of
difference which seem to me to be of altogether secondary
import. But for the truth's sake this must first be done,
because it will then be more easy to point out some of the
bearings of the position held in that discourse upon the
question which is under discussion.

That the sense of duty in a man is the prompting of a
self other than his own, is the very essence of it. Not
only would morals not be self-sufficing if there were no
such prompting of a wider self, but they could not exist ;
one might as well suppose a fire without heat. Not only
is a sense of duty inherent in the constitution of our
nature, but the prompting of a wider self than that of
the individual is inherent in a sense of duty. It is no
more possible to have the right without unselfishness, than
to have man without a feeling for the right.

230 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

We may explain or account for these facts in various
ways, but we shall not thereby alter the facts. No
theories about heat and light will ever make a cold fire.
And no doubt or disproof of any existing theory can any
more extinguish that self other than myself, which speaks
to me in the voice of conscience, than doubt or disproof
of the wave-theory of light can put out the noonday sun.

One such theory is defended in the discourse here dealt
with, and, if I may venture to say so, is not quite
.sufficiently distinguished from the facts which it is meant
to explain. The theory is this : that the voice of con-
science in my mind is the voice of a conscious being
external to me and to all men, who has made us and all
the world. When this theory is admitted, the observed
discrepancy between our moral sense and the government
of the world, as a whole, makes it necessary to suppose
another world and another life in it for men, whereby
this discord shall be resolved in a final harmony.

I fully admit that the theistic hypothesis, so grounded,
and considered apart from objections otherwise arising, is
a reasonable hypothesis and an explanation of the facts.
The idea of an external conscious being is unavoidably
suggested, as it seems to me, by the categorical imperative
of the moral sense ; and, moreover, in a way quite inde-
pendent, by the aspect of Nature, which seems to answer
to our questionings with an intelligence akin to our own-
It is more reasonable to assume one consciousness than
two, if by that one assumption we can explain two dis-
tinct facts ; just as if we had been led to assume an ether

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 231

to explain light and an ether to explain electricity, we
might have run before experiment and guessed that these
two ethers were but one. But since there is a discordance
between Nature and conscience, the theory of their com-
mon origin in a mind external to humanity has not met
with such acceptance as that of the divine origin of each.
A large number of theists have rejected it, and taken
refuge in Manichseism and the doctrine of the Demiurgus
in various forms; while others have endeavoured, as
aforesaid, to redress the balance of the old world by call-
ing into existence a new one.

It is, however, a very striking and significant fact, that
the very great majority of mankind who have thought
about these questions at all, while acknowledging the
existence of divine beings and their influence in the
government of the world, have sought for the spring and
sanction of duty in something above and beyond the
gods. The religions of Brahmanism and of Buddhism,
and the moral system of Confucius, have together ruled
over more than two-thirds of the human race during the
historic period : and in all of these the moral sense is re-
garded as arising indeed out of a universal principle, but
not as personified in any conscious being. This vast body
of dissent might well, it should seem, make us ask if
there is anything unsatisfying in the theory which repre-
sents the voice of conscience as the voice of a god.

Although, as I have said, the idea of an external con-
scious being is unavoidably suggested by the moral sense,
yet, if this idea should be found untrue, it does not follow

232 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

that Nature has been fooling us. The idea is not in the
facts, but in our inference from the facts. A mirror
unavoidably suggests the idea of a room behind it ; but it
is not our eyes that deceive us, it is only the inference
we draw from their testimony. Further consideration
may lead to a different inference of far greater practical
value.

Now, whether or no it be reasonable and satisfying to
the conscience, it cannot be doubted that theistic belief is
a comfort and a solace to those who hold it, and that the
loss of it is a very painful loss. It cannot be doubted, at
least by many of us in this generation, who either profess
it now, or received it in our childhood and have parted
from it since with such searching trouble as only cradle-
faiths can cause. We have seen the spring sun shine out
of an empty heaven, to light up a soulless earth ; we have
felt with utter loneliness that the Great Companion is
dead. Our children, it may be hoped, will know that
sorrow only by the reflex light of a wondering compas-
sion. But to say that theistic belief is a comfort and a
solace, and to say that it is the crown or coping of morality,
these are different things.

For in what way shall belief in God strengthen my sense
of duty ? He is a great one working for the right. But I
already know so many, and I know these so well. His
righteousness is unfathomable ; it transcends all ideals.
But I have not yet fathomed the goodness of living men
whom I know ; still less of those who have lived, and
whom I know. And the goodness of all these is a striving

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 233

for something better ; now it is not the goal, but the
striving for it, that matters to me. The essence of their
goodness is the losing of the individual self in another
and a wider self ; but God cannot do this ; his goodness
must be something different. He is infinitely great and
powerful, and he lives forever. I do not understand this
mensuration of goodness by foot-pounds, and seconds, and
cubic miles. A little field-mouse, which busies itself in
the hedge, and does not mind my company, is more to
me than the longest ichthyosaurus that ever lived, even if
he lived a thousand years. When we look at a starry
sky, the spectacle whose awfulness Kant compared with
that of the moral sense, does it help out our poetic emo-
tion to reflect that these specks are really very very big,
and very very hot, and very very far away ? Their heat
and their bigness oppress us ; we should like them to be
taken still farther away, the great blazing lumps. But
when we think of the unseen planets that surround
them, of the wonders of life, of reason, of love, that may
dwell therein, then indeed there is something sublime in
the sight. Fitness and kinship : these are the truly great
things for us, not force and massiveness and length of
days.

Length of days, said the old rabbi, is measured not by
their number, but by the work that is done in them. We
are all to be swept away in the final ruin of the earth.
The thought of that ending is a sad thought ; there is no
use in trying to deny this. But it has nothing to do with
right and wrong ; it belongs to another subject. Like

234 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

All-father Odin, we must ride out gayly to do battle with
the wolf of doom, even if there be no Balder to come back
and continue our work. At any rate the right will have
been done ; and the past is safer than all store-houses.

The conclusion of the matter is, that belief in God and
in a future life is a source of refined and elevated pleasure
to those who can hold it. But the foregoing of a refined
and elevated pleasure, because it appears that we have no
right to indulge in it, is not in itself, and cannot produce as
its consequence, a decline of morality.

There is Another theory of the facts of the moral sense
set forth in the succeeding discourse, and this seems to me
to be the true one. The voice • of conscience is the voice
of our father-man who is within us ; the accumulated in-
stinct of the- race is poured into each one of us, and over-
flows us, as if the ocean were poured into a cup.1 Our
evidence for this explanation is that the cause assigned is
a vera causa ; it undoubtedly exists ; there is no perhaps
about that. And those who have tried tell us that it is
sufficient ; the explanation, like the fact, " covers the whole
voluntary field." The lightest and the gravest action may
be consciously done in and for man. And the sym-
pathetic aspect of Nature is explained to us in the same
way. In so far as our conception of Nature is akin to
our minds that conceive it, man made it ; and man made
us, with the necessity to conceive it in this way.2

1 Schopenhauer. There is a most remarkable article on the "Natural
History of Morals " in the North British Review, December, 1867.

2 For an admirable exposition of the doctrine of the social origin of our
conceptions, see Prof. Croom Robertson's paper, "How we come by our
Knowledge," in the first number of The Nineteenth Century.

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 235

I do not, however, suppose that morality would practi-
cally gain much from the wide acceptance of true views
about its nature, except in a way which I shall presently
suggest. I neither admit the moral influence of theism
in the past, nor look forward to the moral influence of
humanism in the future. Virtue is a habit, not a senti-
ment or an -ism. The doctrine of total depravity seems
to have been succeeded by a doctrine of partial depravity,
according to which there is hope for human affairs, but
still men cannot go straight unless some tremendous, all-
embracing theory has a finger in the pie. Theories are
most important and excellent things when they help us
to see the matter as it really is, and so to judge what is
the right thing to do in regard to it. They are the guides
of action, but not the springs of it. Now the springs of
virtuous action is the social instinct, which is set to work
by the practice of comradeship. The union of men in a
common effort for a common object — band-work, if I may
venture to translate cooperation into English — this is, and
always has been, the true school of character. Except in
times of severe struggle for national existence, the practice
of virtue by masses of men has always been coincident
with municipal freedom, and with the vigour of such
unions as are not large enough to take from each man his
conscious share in the work and in the direction of it.

What really affects morality is not religious belief, but
a practice which, in some times and places, is thought to
be religious — namely, the practice of submitting human
life to clerical control. The apparent destructive tendency

230 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

of modern times, which arouses fear and foreboding of
evil in the minds of many of the best of men, seems to me
to be not mainly an intellectual movement. It has its in-
tellectual side, but that side is the least important, and
touches comparatively few souls. The true core of it is
a firm resolve of men to know the right at first hand,
which has grown out of the strong impulse given to the
moral sense by political freedom. Such a resolve is a
necessary condition to the existence of a pure and noble
theism like that of the third discourse, which learns what
God is like by thinking of man's love for man. Although
that doctrine has been prefigured and led up to for many
ages by the best teaching of Englishmen, and — what is
far more important — by the best practice of Englishmen,
yet it cannot be accepted on a large scale without what
will seem to many a decline of religious belief. For as-
suredly if men learn the nature of God from the moral
sense of man, they cannot go on believing the doctrines
of popular theology. Such change of belief is of small
account in itself, for any consequences it can bring about ;
but it is of vast importance a,s a symptom of the increas-
ing power and clearness of the sense of duty.

On the other hand, there is one " decline of religious
belief," inseparable from a revolution in human conduct,
which would indeed be a frightful disaster to mankind.
A revival of any form of sacerdotal Christianity would
be a matter of practice and not a matter of theory. The
system which sapped the foundation of patriotism in the
old world ; which well nigh eradicted the sense of intel-

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 237

lectual honesty, and seriously weakened the habit of truth -
speaking; which lowered men's reverence for the marriage-
bond by placing its sanctions in a realm outside of Nature
instead of in the common life of men, and by the institu-
tions of monasticism and a celibate clergy ; which stunted
the moral sense of the nations by putting a priest between
every man and his conscience — this system, if it should
ever return to power, must be expected to produce worse
evils than those which it has - worked in the past. The
house which it has once made desolate has been partially
swept and garnished by the free play gained for the na-
tural goodness of men. It would come back accompanied
by social diseases perhaps worse than itself, and the wreck
of civilized Europe would be darker than the darkest of
past ages.

DR. WARD.

I AGREE with the Dean of St. Paul's, that the wording
of our question is unfortunately ambiguous ; and I
think that this fact has made the discussion in several
respects less pointed and less otherwise interesting than
it might have been.

For my present purpose, I understand the term " reli-
gious belief " as including essentially belief in a personal
God and in personal immortality. Less than this is not
worthy the name of religious belief ; and, on the other
hand, I will not refer to any other religious truths than

238 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

these. I am to inquire, therefore, what would be the in-
fluence on morality of a decline in these two beliefs.

But next, what is meant by " morality ? " I will explain,
as clearly as brevity may permit, what I should myself
understand by the term; though I am, of course, well
a \vare that this is by no means the sense in which Sir J.
Fitzjames Stephen, or Mr. Harrison, or Prof. Clifford, un-
derstands it.

I consider that there is a certain authoritative rule of
life,1 necessarily not contingently existing, which may be
regarded under a twofold aspect. It declares that certain
acts (exterior or interior) are intrinsically and necessarily
evil ; it declares, again, that some certain act (exterior or
interior), even where not actually evil, is by intrinsic ne-
cessity, under the circumstances of some given moment,
less morally excellent than some certain other act. Any
given man, therefore, more effectively practises "morality,"
in proportion as he more energetically, predominantly, and
successfully aims at adjusting his whole conduct, interior
and exterior, by this authoritative rule. Accordingly, when
I am asked what is the bearing of some particular influ-
ence on morality, I understand myself to be asked how
far such influence affects for good or evil the prevalence
of that practical habit which I have just described ; how
far such influence disposes men (or the contrary) to adjust
their conduct by this authoritative rule.

1 To prevent misapprehension I may explain that, in my view, those
various necessary truths which collectively constitute this rule are, like all
other necessary truths, founded on the essence of God ; they are what they
are because he is what he is.

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 239

These explanations having been premised, my answer
to the proposed question is this : The absence of religious
belief — of a belief in a personal God and personal immor-
tality— does not simply injure morality, but, if the dis-
believers carry their view out consistently, utterly destroys
it. I affirm — which, of course, requires proof, though I
have no space here to give it — that no one except a theist
can, in consistency, recognize the necessarily existing au-
thoritative rule of which I have spoken. But for prac-
tical purposes there is no need of this affirmation, because
in what follows I shall refer to no other opponents of re-
ligion, except that antitheistic body — consisting of agno-
stics, positivists, and the like — which in England just
now heads the speculative irreligious movement. . Now,
it is manifest on the very surface of philosophical litera-
ture that, SM a matter of fact, these men deny in theory
the existence of any such necessary authoritative rule as
that on which I have dwelt. A large proportion of theists
accept it, and call it " the Natural Law ; "l an agnostic or
positivist denies its existence. It is very clear that he
who denies that there is such a thing as a necessarily ex-
isting authoritative rule of life cannot consistently aim
at adjusting any, even the smallest, part of his conduct by
the intimations of that rule ; or, in other words, cannot

1 The Natural Law more strictly includes only God's prohibition of acts
intrinsically evil, and his preception of acts which cannot be omitted without
doing what is intrinsically evil. But we may with obvious propriety so ex-
tend the term as to include under it God's counselling of those acts which,
as clothed in their ]full circumstances, are by intrinsic necessity the more
morally excellent.

240 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

consistently do so much as one act which (on the theory
which 1 follow) can be called morally good.

Here, however, a most important explanation must be
made. It continually happens that some given philoso-
pher holds some given doctrine speculatively and theore-
tically, while he holds the precisely contradictory doctrine
implicitly and unconsciously ; inasmuch that it is the lat-
ter, and not the- former, which he applies to his estimate
of events as they successively arise. Now | the existence
of the Natural Law — so I would most confidently main-
tain— is a truth so firmly rooted by God himself in the
conviction of every reasonable creature, that practically to
leaven the human mind with belief of its contradictory is,
even under the circumstances most favourable to that
purpose, a slow and up-hill process. In the early stages,
therefore, of antitheistic persuasion, there is. $ vast gulf
between the antitheist's speculative theory and his prac-
tical realization of that theory. Mr. Mallock has set forth
this fact, I think, with admirable force, in an article con-
tributed by him to the Contemporary of last January.
When' antitheists say — such is his argument — that the
pursuit of truth is a " sacred," " heroic," " noble " exercise
— when they call one way of living mean, and base, and
hateful, and another way of living great, and blessed, and
admirable — they are guilty of most flagrant inconsistency.
They therein use language and conceive thoughts which
are utterly at variance with their own speculative theory.
If it be admitted (1) that the idea expressed by the term
" moral goodness " is a simple idea, an idea incapable of

A DECLINE IN KELIGIOUS BELIEF. 241

analysis ; and (2) that to this idea there corresponds a
necessary objective reality in rerum natura — if these
two propositions be admitted, the existence of the Natural
Law is a truth which irresistibly results from the admis-
sion. On the other hand, if these two propositions be not
postulated, then to talk of one human act being " higher"
or " nobler " than another is as simply unmeaning as to
talk of a bed being nobler than a chair, or a plough than
a harrow. Whether it be the bed, or the plough, or the
human act, it may be more useful than the other article
with which it is brought into comparison ; but to speak
in either case of " nobleness " is as the sound of a tinkling
cymbal. Or rather, which is my present point, the fact
of antitheists using such language shows that their prac-
tical belief is so far essentially opposed and (as I, of course,
should say) immeasurably superior to their speculative
theory. To my mind there is hardly any truth which
needs more to be insisted on than this, in the present
crisis of philosophical thought : when antitheism success-
fully conceals its hideous deformity from its own votaries,
by dressing itself up in the very garments of that rival
creed which it derides as imbecile and obsolete. I heartily
wish I had space for setting forth in full and clear light
the argument on which I would here insist. I may refer,
however, to Mr. Mallock's article, for an excellent exposi-
tion of it from his own point of view j and, in particular,
I cannot express too strongly my concurrence with the
following remarks :

" All the moral feelings " (he says) " at present anoat in the world

16

242 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

depend, as I have already shown, on the primary doctrines of re-
ligion ; but that the former would outlive the latter is nothing more
than we should naturally expect ; just as water may go on boiling
after it is taken oft' the fire, as flowers keep their scent and colour
after we have plucked them, or as a tree whose roots have been cut
may yet put out green leaves for one spring more. But a time
must come when all this will be over, and when the true effects of
what has been done will begin to show themselves. Nor can there
be any reason brought forward to show why, if the creed of unbelief
was once fully assented to by the world, all morality — a thing al-
ways attended by some pain and struggle — would not gradually
wither away, and give place to a more or less successful seeking after
pleasure, no matter of what kind."

I would also recall to Sir J. Fitzjames Stephen's remem-
brance an admirable statement of his, which occurred in
the work on ' Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity." " We
cannot judge of the effects of atheism," he says, " from
the conduct of persons who have been educated as be-
lievers in God, and in the midst of a nation which believes
in God. If we should ever see a generation of men,
especially a generation . of Englishmen, to whom the.
word ' God ' has no meaning at all, we should get a light
on the subject which might be lurid enough."1

So far I have used the word " morality " in that sense
which I account the true one. But a different acceptation
of the word is very common ; and it will be better per-
haps briefly to consider our proposed question in the sense
which that acceptation would give it. Morality, then, is
often spoken of as consisting in a man's sacrifice of his

1 Second edition, p. 326.

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 243

personal desires for the public good ; so that each man
more faithfully practises " morality " in proportion as he
more effectively postpones private interests to public ones.
I have always been extremely surprised that any theist
can use this^ terminology ; though I am well aware, of
course, that many do so. To mention no other of its de-
fects, it excludes [from the sphere of morality precisely
what a theist must consider the most noble and elevating
branch thereof, viz., men's duties to their Creator. Con-
stant rememberance of God's presence, prayer to him for
moral strength, purging the heart from any such wordly
attachment as may interfere with his sovereignty over
the affections — these, and a hundred others, which are
man's highest moral actions, are excluded by this strange
terminology from being moral actions at all. Still, in one
respect there is great agreement between the two " moral-
ities " in question, for under either of them morality very
largely consists in self-denial and self-sacrifice.

Now, if it be asked in what way morality, as so under-
stood, would be affected by the absence of religious belief,
I think the true reply is one which has so often been
drawn out that I need do no more than indicate it. Firstly,
apart from theistic motives there is no sufficient moral
leverage ; men would not have the moral strength re-
quired for sustained self -denial and self-sacrifice. Secondly
and more importantly, if theistic sanctions were away, no
theory could be drawn out explaining why it should be
reasonable that a man sacrifice his personal interest to
that of his fellows.

-44 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

On this matter I am glad that I have the opportunity
of ilrawing attention to a very fine passage of Mr.
(Joldwin Smith's, published in the Macmillan of last
January r1

"Materialism has, in fact, already begun to show its effects on
human conduct and on society. They may perhaps be more visible
in communities where social conduct depends greatly on individual
conviction and motive than in communities which are more ruled by
tradition and bound together by strong class organizations though
the decay of morality will perhaps be more complete and disastrous
in the latter than in the former. God and future retribution being
out of the question, it is difficult to see what can restrain the sel-
fishness of an ordinary man, and induce him, in the absence of ac-
tual coercion, to sacrifice his personal desires to the public good.
The service of humanity is the sentiment of a refined mind conver-
sant with history ; within no calculable time is it likely to overrule
the passions and direct the conduct of the mass. And after all,
without God or spirit, what'is ' humanity ? ' One school of science
reckons a hundred and fifty different species of man. What is the
bond of unity between all these species, and wherein consists the
obligation to mutual love and help ? A zealous servant of science
told Agassiz that the age of real civilization would have begun when
you could go out and shoot a man for scientific purposes ; and in the
controversy respecting the Jamaica massacre we had proof enough
that the ascendancy of science and a strong sense of human brother-
hood might be very different things. l Apparent dirse facies. ' We
begin to perceive, looming through the mist, the lineaments of an
epoch of selfishness compressed by a government of force."

In fact, even in the present early stage of English anti-
theistic philosophy, if its adherents are directly asked what

1877.

A DECLINE IN KELIGIOUS BELIEF. 245

is man's reasonable rule of life, I know of no other answer
they will theoretically give except one. They will say
that any given person's one reasonable pursuit on earth is
to aim at his own earthly happiness — to obtain for him-
self out of life the greatest amount he can of gratification
No doubt they will make confident statements on the in-
dissoluble connections between happiness and " virtue."
Still, according to their speculative theory, the only rea-
sonable ground for practising " virtue " is its conducive-
ness to the agent's happiness.

Now, let us suppose a generation to grow up, profoundly
imbued with this principle, carrying it consistently into
detail, emancipated from the unconscious influence of
(what I must be allowed to call) a more respectable creed.
What would be the result ? Evidently a man so trained,
in calculating for himself the balance of pleasure and pain,
will give no credit on the former side to such gratifica-
tions as might arise from consciousness of conquest over
his lower nature, or from the pursuit of lofty and gener-
ous aims. These, I say, will have no place in his list of
pleasures : because he will have duly learned his lesson,
that there is no " lower " or " higher " nature ; that no one
aim can be "loftier" than any other; that there is nothing
more admirable in generosity than in selfishness. On the
other hand, neither will he include, under his catalogue
of pains, any feeling of remorse for evil committed, or any
dread of possible punishment in some future life ; for he
will look with simple contempt on those doctrines, which
are required as the foundation for such pains. His com-

246 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

mon-sense course will be to make this world as* comfort-
able a place as he can, by bringing every possible pru-
dential calculation to bear on his purpose. Before all
things, he will keep his digestion in good order. He will
keep at arms'-length (indeed at many arms' -lengths) every
disquieting consideration, such, e. g., as might arise from
a remembrance of other men's misery, or from a thought
of that repulsive spectre which the superstitious call moral
obligation.

It is plain that duly to pursue the subject thus opened
would carry me indefinitely beyond my limits j1 and I will
only, therefore, make one concluding observation. If the
term " virtue " be retained by those of whom I am speak-
ing, it will be used, I suppose to express any habitual
practice which solidly conduces to the agent's balance of
earthly enjoyment. I am confident that — should this be
the recognized terminology, and should the new school be
permitted to arrive at its legitimate development — there
is one habit which would be very prominent among its
catalogue of " virtues." The habit to which I refer is in-
dulgence in licentiousness — licentiousness practised, no
doubt, prudently, discreetly, calculatingly, but at the same
time habitually, perse veringly, and with keen zest.

1 I have treated at somewhat greater length in an article which I con-
tributed to the Dublin .Review of January, 1877, pp. 15-21.

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 247

PROF. HUXLEY.

WE are led to do this thing, and to avoid that, partly
by instinct and partly by conscious motives ; and
our conduct is said to be moral or the reverse, partly on
the ground of its effects upon other beings, partly upon
that of its operation upon ourselves.

Social morality relates to that course of action which
tends to increase the happiness or diminish the misery of
other beings ; personal morality relates to that which has
the like effect upon ourselves.

If this be so, the foundation of morality must ne"eds lie
in the constitution of Nature, and must depend on the
mental construction of ourselves and of other sentient
beings.

The constitution of man remaining what it is, his ca-
pacity for the pleasures and pains afforded by sense, by
sympathy, or by the contemplation of moral beauty and
ugliness, is obviously in no way affected by the abbrevia-
tion or the prolongation of his conscious life ; nor by the
mere existence or non-existence of anything not included
in Nature ; nor, so long as he believes that actions have
consequences, does it matter to him what connection there
may be between these actions and other phenomena of
Nature.

The assertion that morality is any way dependent up-
on the views respecting certain philosophical problems a
person may chance to hold, produces the same effect upon

248 A MODEEN SYMPOSIUM.

my mind as if one should say that a man's vision depends
on his theory of light; or that he has no business to be
sure that ginger is hot in the mouth unless he has formed
definite views, in the first place, as to the nature of ginger,
and, secondly, as to whether he has or has not a sensitive
soul

Social morality belongs to the realm of inductive and
deductive investigation. Given a society of human beings
under certain circumstances : and the question whether a
particular action on the part of one of the members of
that society will tend to the increase of the general hap-
piness or not is a question of natural knowledge, and, as
such, is a perfectly legitimate subject of scientific inquiry.
And the morality or immorality of the action will depend
upon the answer which the question receives.

If it can be shown, by observation or experiment, that
theft, murder, and adultery, do not tend to diminish the
happiness of society, then, in the absence of any but na-
ural knowledge, they are not social immoralities.

It does not follow, however, that they might not be
personal immoralities. Without committing myself to
any theory of the origin of the moral sense, or even as to
the existence of any such special sense, I may suggest
that it is quite conceivable that discords and harmonies
may affect the congeries of feelings to which we give the
name, as they do others.

I see no reason for doubting that the beauty of holi-
ness and the ugliness of sin are, to a great many minds,
no mere metaphors, but feelings as real and as intense as

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 249

those with which the beauty or ugliness of form or colour
fills the artist-mind, and that they are as independent of
intellectual beliefs, and even of education, as are all the
true aesthetic powers and impulses.

On the other hand, I do not doubt the existence of per-
sons, like the hero of the " Fatal Boots," devoid of any
sense of moral beauty or ugliness, and for them personal
morality has no existence. They may offend, but they
cannot sin ; they may be sorry for having stolen or mur-
dered, because society punishes them for their social im-
moralities, but they are incapable of repentance.

Before going further, I think it may be needful to dis-
criminate between religion and theology.

I object to the very general use of the terms religion
and theology, as if they were synonymous, or indeed had
anything whatever to do with one another. Religion is
the affair of the affections, theology of the intellect. The
religious man loves an ideal perfection, which may be na-
tural or non-natural ; the theologian expounds the attri-
butes of what he terms " supernatural." Being as so many
scientific truths, the consequences of which work into the
general scheme of Nature, and are there discernible by
ordinary methods of investigation. What the theologian
affirms may be put in this way : that beyond the natura
naturata, mirrored or made by the natural operations of
the human mind, there is a natura naturana, sufficient
knowledge of which is attainable only through the chan-
nel of revelation.

Now, I think it cannot be doubted that both religion

250 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

and theology, ds. thus defined, have exercised, and must
exercise, a profound influence on morality. For it may
be that the object of a man's religion — the ideal which
he worships — is an ideal of sensual enjoyment, or of dom-
ination, or of the development of all his faculties toward
perfection, or of self-annihilation, or of benevolence ; and
his personal morality will, in part, contribute largely to the
formation of his ideal, and will, in part, be swayed and
bent until it harmonizes with that ideal.

Moreover, it is clear that a man's theology may give
him such views of the action of the natura naturans
as will profoundly modify or even reverse his social mor-
ality.

He may see ground for believing that conduct of evil
effect upon society, which is part of the natura naturata,
is in harmony with the laws of action of the natura na-
turans ; and that, as the rewards and punishments of
men are but slight and temporary, while those inflicted
by the greater power behind the natura naturata, are
grievous and endless, common prudence may dictate
obedience to the stronger. And history proves that there
is no social crime that man can commit which has not
been dictated by theology and committed on theological
grounds. On the other hand, the belief that the divine
commands are identical with the laws of social morality
has lent infinite strength to the latter in all ages.

In like manner it seems to me impossible to over-estimate
the influence of speculative beliefs as to the nature of the
Deity, apart from all idea of rewards and punishments,

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 251

upon personal morality. The lover of moral beauty 3
struggling through a world full of sorrow and sin, is sure-
ly as much the stronger for believing that sooner or later
a vision of perfect peace and goodness will burst upon
him, as the toiler up a mountain for the belief that beyond
crag and snow lie home and rest. For the other side of
the picture, who shall exaggerate the deadly influence on
personal morality of those theologies which have repre-
sented the Deity as vain-glorious, irritable, and revenge-
ful— as a sort of pedantic drill-sergeant of mankind, to
whom no valour, no long-tried loyalty, could atone for the
misplacement of a button of the uniform, or the misun-
derstanding of a paragraph of the " regulations and in-
structions ? "

While no one can dare histoiy, or even look about him,
without admitting the enormous influence of theology on
morality, it would perhaps be hard to say whether it has
been greater or less than the influence of morality on
theology. But the latter topic is not at present under
discussion ; and the only further remark I would ven-
ture to add is this — that the intensity and reality of the
action of theological beliefs upon morality are precisely
measured by the conviction of those who hold them that
they are true. That such and such a doctrine conduces
to morality, and disbelief in it to immorality, may
be demonstrated by an endless array of convincing
syllogisms ; but, unless the doctrine is true, the prac-
tical result of this expenditure of logic is not appar-
ent. I have not the slightest doubt that if mankind

252 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

could be got to believe that every socially immoral act
would be instantly followed by three months' severe
toothache, such acts would soon cease to be perpetrated.
It would be a faith charged with most beneficent works,
but unfortunately this faith can so easily be shown to be
disaccordant with fact that it is not worth while to be-
come its prophet.

For my part I do not for one moment admit that mor-
ality is not strong enough to hold its own. But if it is
demonstrated to me that I am wrong, and that without
this or that theological dogma the human race will lapse
into bipedal cattle, more brutal than the beasts by the
measure of their greater cleverness, my next question is
to ask for the proof of the truth of the dogma.

If this proof is forthcoming, it is my conviction that
no drowning sailor ever clutched a hen-coop more ten-
aciously than mankind will hold by such dogma, what-
ever it may be. But if not, then I verily believe that
the human race will go its evil way ; and my only con-
solation lies in the reflection that, however bad our pos-
terity may become, so long as they hold by the plain rule
of not pretending to believe what they have no reason to
believe because it may be to their advantage so to pre-
tend, they will not have reached the lowest depths of
immorality.

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 253

MR. R H. HUTTON.

THAT has happened to us which happened to the
disputants in that Attic Symposium from which, I
suppose, the name for our discussion was taken. We have
been interrupted by a " great knocking at the door " and
the entrance of an unbidden guest, who, however, shows no
sign either of Alcibiades's intoxication, or of that gener-
ous disposition to crown the most deserving with garlands
which may perhaps have had some connection with the
excesses of the brilliant Athenian's potations. The Sat-
urday Reviewer, who, without dropping his mask, has
thrust upon us his own criticism on our discussion,1 has
certainly not conferred the most meagre of wreaths on
any one, unless indeed it may be said that he grudgingly
crowns the Dean of St. Paul's and the Duke of Argyll
with a withered sprig or two of parsley, for pointing out
that our subject is much too vague, and for trying to
narrow a discussion so " abstract and ill-defined." His
general criticism is contained in the harsh remark that
" all the fine talk of the chosen illuminati is a mass of
words with very little meaning," and that " the delibera-
tions of the Symposium bear a* very strong resemblance
to those of the diplomatists who have been lately con-
cocting protocols ; that is, they consist of empty phrases
to which all the parties can agree because they do not

i See Saturday Revietg for March 31, 1877. Article, " A Modern Sym-
posium."

-•">4 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

touch any of the points on which the co-signataries would
be likely to differ." That is a much crueler interruption
than any caused by Alcibiades to the guests assembled at
the Symposium of Plato, nor do I think it is quite just,
though there is enough justice in it to make me try to
bring out what seem to me the clearly-understood issues
between us a little more distinctly, in the few words I
have to say. To limit the subject as much as possible, I
will speak of nothing but the effect likely to be produced
on morality by any decline in the belief in a righteous
God independent of. and external to, the human race —
in one, that is, whose leading purpose in relation to us is
believed to be to mould our motives and characters into
the likeness of his own. Now it seems to me that all
the previous speakers except two, Mr. Frederic Harrison
and Prof. Clifford, believe, for different reasons, and in
different degrees, that such a decline in such a belief in
God would probably result' in a parallel decline in human
morality ; though some insist most, like Sir James Ste
phen and Prof. Huxley, on the point that any attempt
to bolster up the belief artificially for the sake of its
moral consequences, by discountenancing free discussion,
would result in a worse decline of morality, and others
insist most, like Dr. Martineau, Lord Selborne, and Dean
Church, on the point that the same causes which result
in a decline in this belief (especially as it is represented
in Christianity) are likely to result also in a' decline in
the force of the ethical principles so closely associated
with it. But I do not understand any o»e to differ with

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 255

Prof. Huxley, that if the belief can be shown to be false,
be the moral consequence what it may, it ought to go.
On the other hand, I understand both Mr. Harrison and
Prof. Clifford to assert that the causes which, as they
think, have undermined and are undermining the beliet
in a righteous God, external to the human race, have no
tendency to undermine the binding power of the highest
human ethics, but, on the contrary, have a direct ten-
dency to elevate and refine them, though Prof. Clifford
regards this tendency as, on the whole, slight, and con-
fined chiefly to the blow which such a change in belief
will have in diminishing the control of the clergy, while
Mr. Harrison expects very much indeed from it, if only
through its tendency to concentrate on the desirable aims
of a real world, an enthusiasm now so much dissipated in
his opinion, by lavishing it on imaginary objects.

Now, while I heartily admit with Prof. Huxley the
conceivability that a gross delusion — like the belief that
" every socially immoral act would instantly be followed
by three months' severe toothache" — if it could be palmed
off successfully upon our race, would have some very ben-
eficial consequences — (some, also, by no means beneficial)
— and should not a bit the less regard a conspiracy, even
if one were practicable, to impose such a delusion on our
race, as a great sin, I cannot the more on that account
see how to disentangle the question whether there be a
righteous God external to men from the question whether
there would be a great moral loss to human nature in the
dissipation of the belief in such a God. It is quite con-

256 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

ceivable — nay, it has often happened — that a sincere de-
lusion has produced the best results. The belief in an
imaginary danger of death, for instance, has often made
a man take life more seriously ; and the belief in an
imaginary danger of invasion has probably often bound
a divided nation together and given it a greater nervous
strength and manliness. But though it is easy to con-
ceive a belief, in some respects beneficial, which is wholly
false, it seems to me, in the case before us, that the very
element in the belief we are discussing, which makes it
beneficial, is also a clear note of its truth. What makes
the belief in such a God as I have spoken of beneficial is
that this belief, and this only, gives to the attitude of man's
mind, in relation to right motive and right action, that
mixture of courage and cheerful irresponsibility for the
result characteristic of a faith. Luther's great saying,
" We say to our Lord God that if he will have his Church,
he must uphold it, for we cannot uphold it, and, even if
we could, we should become the proudest asses under
heaven,"1 would be of course simply untranslatable into
any humanist or positivist dialect at all. I do not indeed
quite know what Mr. Harrison means when he talks of a
" frankly human " religion which shall provide us with
a " Providence " whom we are " to love and serve ;" but
I suppose he must mean that we are to love that law of
the universe which produces a certain amount of corres-
pondence between our nature and its " environment,"

" Tisohreden," edition Fdrstemaun, Leipsic, 1844, vol. ii., p. 330. •

A DECLINE IN KELIGIOUS BELIEF. 257

and that we are to cooperate with that law. At least
this is the only meaning I am able to attach to " loving
and serving" a Providence without believing in God.
Now for myself I am incapable of loving a mere law of
any kind, whether it be a law of gravitation, a law of
assimilation between my organism and its environment,
or any other ; and as for " serving" it, I like to judge for
myself, and, instead of allowing myself always to be
assimilated to my "environment," I sometimes prefer
what is called, in the language of the same philosophy,
" differentiating " myself from it.* But I think even Mr.
Harrison would hardly justify language of trust like
Luther's, toward a " Being " of whom we are supposed to
know nothing except that it has given rise to the earth
we live on, and will most likely, in a few thousand years,
also put a final end to it. You cannot trust a being of
whose purposes, or capacity for having purposes, you
know nothing, because trust implies approving those
purposes and believing them to be accompanied by a far
higher range of knowledge and foresight than your own.
Yet has not all the benefit of trust in God arisen from that
humility and courage, that self-abandonment to a higher
will,. -that sense of complete irresponsibility for the result
when the right thing is once done, which constitute moral
heroism ? Could such moral heroism sustain the belief
in a divine will which is shaping all right action to a per-
fect end ? Suppose we believed in unknown causes which
produce indeed such moral phenomena as those of human
life for a moment in the long ages of evolution — which
17

258 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

bring them like a ripple to the surface, but quench them,
like that ripple, for evermore, and which are as certain
so to quench them as the sun is one day to be burned
out — is it possible we could cast ourselves on such un-
known causes with the sort of faith in God that has
" moved mountains," and that will move mountains
again that will say, for instance, to this huge dead weight
of secularism and positivism, "Be thou cast into the sea,"
and it will obey ?

Nor can I see any better help in Prof. Clifford's
substitute for God — namely, the higher self represented
by " the voice of our Father Man who is within us," i.e.,
by " the accumulated instinct of the race poured into each
one of us " and overflowing us, " as if the ocean were
poured into a cup." The " accumulated instinct of our
race" includes a great deal of evil as well as good, and is
often unaccompanied by any accumulation of instinct for
the suppressing of the evil by the good. I quite agree
with those who have urged that it was the " accumulated
instinct " of the Athenian people which taught them the
necessity of putting down Socrates as one who was under-
mining the social order to which he belonged. I do not
doubt that Socrates shared that accumulated instinct not
less — nay, probably much more — than the rest of his coun-
trymen. Probably it overflooded him " as an ocean might
overflow a cup." Nevertheless the solitary voice within
him, which he attributed to his " daemon," though it could
not drown the voice of this " accumulated instinct," was
heard above it, and prevailed over the pleas of comrade-

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 259

ship, and over what Prof. Clifford deems the only " spring
of virtuous action," the impulse which invites men to
make individual sacrifices to promote the greater effi-
ciency of the social bond.

" Some one may wonder (says Socrates, in Plato's Apology)
why I go about in private giving advice and busying myself with
the concerns of others, but do not venture to come forward in pub-
lic and advise the state. I will tell you the reason of this. You
have often heard me speak of an oracle or sign which comes to me,
and is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in the indictment. This
sign I have had ever since I was a child. The sign is a voice which
comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am
going to do, but never commands me to .do anything, and this
is what stands in the way of my being a politician. And rightly, as
I think. For I am certain, O men of Athens, that if I had engaged
in politics I should have perished long ago, and done no good either
to you or to myself. And don't be afraid of my telling you the
truth, for the truth is that no man who goes to war with you or any
other multitude, honestly struggling against the commission of
unrighteousness and wrong in the state, will save his life ; he will
really fight for the right, if he would live even for a little while,
must have a private station and not a public one."1

This is unsocial doctrine enough, and, of course, Prof.
Clifford will say that, though fatal to the existing
Athenian state, it had its source in instincts essential to
a higher political virtue and to the cohesion of a nobler
kind of state. Grant it for a moment. Yet how can we
expect moral heroism of the same type as that which is
convinced that invisible Power is on its side, and trusts to

i Prof. Jowett's " Plato," vol. i., p. 346, first edition,

260 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

the vindication of the future, if instead of ascribing the
origin of its impulses to a divine power which is the same
yesterday, to-day and forever — a power above it and
beyond it — he who has to evince this moral heroism be-
lieves that there is no inspiring mind higher than his own,
and holds, therefore, that he must rely on himself, and
on himself alone, for the fine faculty to discriminate be-
tween the inchoate order of a new society and the worn-out
guarantees of an order which is passing away ? How is
one who is fully aware that he is dissolving the ancient
bonds of a venerable society and polity, but who only
hopes that he is creating the germs of something better,
to set his face against the brotherhood among whom he
lives, and to defy the wrath of the fellow-citizens whom
he sees, and all without the whisper of approval from
any spiritual being behind the veil ? Surely the hesita-
ting inspiration of that long-buried ancestor, " our Father
Man " — to admit, for a moment, Prof. Clifford's assump-
tion— when it spells out dubious and unaccustomed les-
sons which the voices of our brother-men join, in loud
chorus, to decry, would not be very likely to triumph
over fears and scruples which " our Father Man " also
authenticates, and authenticates much more positively
than he ever can authenticate the first faintly uttered
principles of a new kind of social union against the
old. What was it, as I asked before, which stimulated
Luther to his gigantic enterprise ? Not the doubtful
guess that buried generations had transmitted to him the
glimpse of a reform which would transfigure society, but

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 261

the belief that he could honestly use the language of that
psalm that he so much delighted to appropriate to him-
self : " They came about me like bees, and are extinct
even as the fire among the thorns, for in the name of the
Lord I will destroy them." Whether the belief in " our
Father Man " and in a tentative Providence which does
not foresee, but only accommodates the individual to his
" environment," as the only guides of our moral life, be
wild or sober, this, I think, is clear, that it does not provide
the martyr or the reformer with the stimulating power of
a faith ; that it can give no confidence like that in an in-
spiration of far wider grasp and far deeper purpose than
any which the reformer himself commands ; that it leaves
him a mere pioneer amid dangers and difficulties to which
it may turn out that both he and his race are quite un-
equal, instead of a humble follower obeying the beckoning
of one who holds both past and future in his hand.

And now as to my second point — that the very element
which gives so beneficial a character to the belief that
conscience is the inspiration of God — the very element
which makes it a useful and practically stimulating be-
lief, and not, as Prof. Clifford calls it, a mere source of

" refined and elevated pleasure" — is also a note of its

•

truth. I hold this to be so because the very experience
which produces the trust is an experience of life, and of
life morally higher than one's self. Surely, if we are
competent, as we are, to say when our friends and our
favourite books tempt us, and when they raise us above
temptation, we are also competent to say when thoughts

262 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

that strike with a living power upon the heart come
from a higher and when they come from a lower source
than that of our own habitual principles of action —
when they come with promise and command, and when
they come with discordant sneers, discouragement and
enervation. When we grasp dimly at a great moral prin-
ciple which is full, to use Prof. Tyndall's language, of
" the promise and potency " of all forms of life — when
the more we consider it, the less we see where it is lead-
ing us, and yet only feel the more confidence in it on
that account — when we recognize a clue and a guide
without recognizing where that clue and that guide are
pointing to — when we know that it is our duty to defy
the world in the name of a principle of which we cannot
gauge the full meaning, or measure even the immediate
effects (and this is as I maintain, the true phenomenon
visible in all great moral, as in all great intellectual, origina-
tion)— then it does seem to me to be a sober and whole-
some conviction that that which we do not know, there
is one who puts the clue into our hands, who does know ;
that what we cannot foresee, there is one who does foresee ;
that we are grasping the hand of a Power which knows
the way before as well as behind; that we are fol-
lowing the glimmer of a ray which will lead us on to the
day-spring from which it descended. I cannot but believe
that we have as secure a faculty to discriminate the superi-
ority of the life in which a moral impression orginates
as we have to discriminate its rightness itself — that it is
one and the same act of discrimination which says, "This

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 263

is obligatory," and which says, " This is instinct with
divine life and promise." To suppose that a dead ances-
try are flashing though us these commands which at once
repudiate their principles and nerve us against the wrath
of their descendants, seems to me, I confess, a degrading
superstition. If " we boast to be better than our fathers."
It must be some one better than our fathers who is giv-
ing us our watchword. This is why I hold that to lose
the faith in God would be to lose a great inheritance of
moral order and moral progress, and also to lose at the
same moment a truth in comparison with which all other
truths are as dim and isolated sparks beside a pillar of
fire that can guide us though a wilderness that we have
never even explored.

SIR JAMES STEPHEN.

THE paper which began this discussion was entitled
" The Influence upon Morality of a Decline in Reli-
gious Belief." The Dean of St. Paul's remarks : "It seems to
me difficult to discuss this question till it is settled, at least
generally, what morality is influenced, and what religious
belief is declining." The Duke of Argyll observes that
these papers " deal with a question very abstract and
ill-defined." Dr. Ward says that " the wording of our
question is unfortunately ambiguous, and 1 think that
this fact has made the discussion in several respects less

264 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.

pointed and less otherwise interesting than it might
have been."

To these criticisms I reply that the title of my paper
contains no question at all, and was not intended to do
so. It is simply an indication, in the most general terms
of the subject to which the paper of which it is the title
relates. Any one who will take the trouble to read the
paper will see that its principal object was to assert the
proposition with which it concludes, which is in these
words:

" This [i. e., the whole of the preceding argument] shows that the
support which an existing creed gives to an existing system of
morals is irrelevant to its truth, and that the question whether a
given system of morals is good or bad cannot be fully determined
until after the determination of the question whether the theology
on which it rests is true or false. The morality is [I should have
said " may be "] good if it is founded on a true estimate of the con-
sequences of human actions. But if it is founded on a false the-
ology it is founded on a false estimate of the consequences of human
actions ; and, so far as that is the case, it cannot be good ; and the
circumstance that it is supported by the theology to which it refers
is an argument against, and not in favour of, that theology."

" The only " question " which my paper was intended
to raise is the question whether that proposition is true
or not ? I do not see how its truth can depend (as the
Dean of St. Paul's suggests) upon further particulars as
to " what morality is influenced,'"' or " what theology
is declining." I said nothing about the decline of any
partciular theological belief, or its influence on any par-

A DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 265

ticular system of morals. My proposition would apply
to all creeds and all forms of morality.

As to the Duke of Argyll's statement that " the ques-
tion is very abstract and ill-defined," I should admit its
justice if the title of the paper were taken as the state-
ment of a question. But this is not the case. The pro-
position which I put forward, in the hope that it would
be discussed, is no doubt general in its terms, but it
seemed, and still seems to me, definite enough to be dis-
cussed. As to the " ambiguity " of which Dr. Ward
complains, I cannot see how my Jproposition can have
more meanings than one.

The papers which have been written subsequently to
my paper raise a great variety of points which I feel much
tempted to discuss, but I hardly feel at liberty to do so,
as they do not in any way qualify anything said by me.
Each paper, indeed, is an illustration of the truth of some
part of my proposition or of the assertions by which it
is introduced ; for each shows in various ways how very
close is the connection in the writer's mind between the
theological system which he believes to be true and the
moral system which he considers to be good; and this,
again, shows that the question of truth must precede the
question of goodness, and cannot be determined by any
answer which may be given to the latter question. I can-
not help thinking that if this were understood generally
it would affect very deeply the character of a great pro-
ionrpto of current theological speculation.

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