THE SEAT OF THE SOUL.

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modern scientific thought makes it always harder to conceive conscious psychic existence without the connection of a brain, by which our conscious states are determined, but then our philosophy is quite opposed to the too current mode of setting matter and spirit into real opposition. Because we hold to the basal spiritual character of that which is material, we reject a material seat and find the seat of that spiritually developing principle called the soul in the soul itself, with its grand potenciesboth spiritual and material. John Fiske, in his 'Destiny of Man,' says that "the Platonic view of the soul as a spiritual substance, as an effluence from Godhood which under certain conditions becomes incarnate in perishable forms of matter, is doubtless the view most consonant with the present state of our knowledge.'

Theistic philosophy of religion has more distinctly felt that the theme of immortality, though one outwith the region of physical science, as belonging to a sphere where science has as yet no foothold, grows more certain as an inference of our own rational and spiritual constitution, which craves a further chance of development than the present life affords-an inference taken, that is to say, in conjunction with the character of God as known by us.

"Du hast Unsterblichkeit im Sinn,
Kannst du uns deine Gründe nennen?
Ja wohl, der Hauptgrund liegt darin,
Das wir sie nicht entbehren können."

REESE

That is to say, "Can you tell the grounds of your belief in immortality? The weightiest is just this, that we cannot do without it." Or, in the words of a poet of our own

"Whatever crazy sorrow saith,

No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly long'd for death.

'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant,
Oh life, not death, for which we pant;
More life, and fuller, that I want."

We

When the harp of life becomes here broken, what reason is there that the soul should not find for itself other ways or modes of showing its inherent energies and activities in perpetuated life? know no reason why we should not make our own the words of the philosopher Fichte when, speaking of "The Vocation of the Scholar," he says: "My work must go on to its completion, and it cannot be completed in time; hence my existence is limited by no time, and I am eternal: with the assumption of this great task, I have also laid hold of eternity." And he continues: "My will, secure in its own firm purpose, shall soar undisturbed and bold over the wreck of the universe: for I have entered upon my vocation, and it is more enduring than ye [the elements] are: it is eternal, and I am eternal, like it."

There surely can be no doubt that the Christian philosophy of religion has in recent times linked our belief in immortality to our faith in God in

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Not

a way that is perfectly natural and normal. only so, but the actual advantages accruing to our unselfish ideals, in matters of morality and religion, from such facts as those of God and Immortality not being more obtrusively thrust upon us have been very explicitly and forcibly set forth, and cannot legitimately be brushed aside. It surely

must be allowed that, as the true or infinite ideal for man has, as we hold, been made more real and vivid in this time, so as a double consequence his ideal aspirations must have become quickened, and his apprehensions of the idea of an immortal life strengthened. It has, we suppose, suppose, been more cordially welcomed as an accepted fact that the impulse towards immortality reaches its highest strength only as man attains his largest spiritual development, where the desirableness of life as itself a good is most felt. Hence, though we grant that there may be nothing in the conception of evolution, abstractly considered, which is incompatible with the extinction of the race and the cessation of its history, may we not very well question whether it would be at all consistent with rational possibility to postulate such an issue in face of the actual development and the spiritual capabilities of the race? We, for our part, regard the true philosophy of religion as having borne a deeper feeling of persuasion that "to deny the everlasting persistence of the spiritual element in Man is to rob the whole process of its meaning." Even so

unprejudiced a writer on this score as John Stuart Mill has expressed the possibility of such existence in the clearest terms.

Emerson

"If the present contain all man's treasure,
How light were his loss or his gain,
Though he ransacked the roses of pleasure,
Or gleaned all the gall-nuts of pain."

that says

The loss of individual immortality has been loudly proclaimed, no doubt, from the extreme evolutionary side, which has yet allowed a certain race-immortality; but recent theistic philosophy has, we venture to think, more unequivocally affirmed the inseparability of the race from the individual, for which last it claims a sacred and eternal worth, and has more emphatically declared its belief in personality after death-a true personal immortality, not an immortality of vital force or impersonal life. When everything connected with our personality fails," he simply makes a sad mistake. For the individual life is not to be simply lost in God-merged in Him in some pantheistic sort. So far is personality from failing that it is just that which because it is true personality and has a really altruistic character-must endure for ever, and increase with the increase that is of God. Immortality is not simply some vague and isolated existence that awaits us, but is something with which history must reckon, for the progress of the present must run on beyond the gulf

CRITICISM OF MONISTIC THEORY.

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of the grave, and the perfection of the race must be found in its unity in Jesus Christ.

When we turn to Haeckel, we find his naturalistic pantheism affirming, in the interests of a supposed monism, that immortality in a scientific sense is conservation of substance, and therefore the same in his view as conservation of energy or of matter as defined by physics or chemistry respectively. We say "supposed" monism, for who knows whether a system is really monistic or not which takes the liberty to unite energy to matter and does not take the trouble to tell us of what sort this energy is, or whither it may go? The theistic philosophy of religion certainly fulfils Haeckel's expectation that his view be rejected as materialism, whose God is only the infinite sum of forces purely natural. Instead of sharing the uncertainty of a recent writer who thinks it matters nothing whether theism is true or not should it be that we perish helplessly with our organisms, it feels profoundly sure that being cannot be broken-as Goethe said, "Kein Wesen kann zu Nichts zerfallen."

If our evolution is to be of a rational sort, theistic philosophy sees it must demand, in view of the discords, woes, confusions, maladjustments, of the present, such ulterior issue and completed result as only that bloom of evolution, Immortality, can yield -the freedom of the Jenseits, the Beyond. So that it is as far as may be from seeing any such pantheistic triumph as that foreshadowed in the