But even

scheme of salvation, as generally understood. in the worst cases (except, indeed, under the Calvinistic theology), the soul, so far lost, can be recovered by the appropriate means of grace. Who are the depositaries of the means is a question, it is true, which divides Christian Churches and sects; but still it is a consolation held out by all forms of Christianity except Calvinism, that the old vessel of self, after disastrous voyage and seemingly total wreck on earth, can yet be repaired and refitted for another and a happier venture, if not for a final, sure, and certain haven of rest; but whether, on quitting the earth and leaving this life, the soul launches on prosperous or perilous seas, whether it reaches the islands of the blest or is pent with "those whom lawless and uncertain thoughts imagine howling," the soul, according to all theologians, is immortal, and will preserve its individuality and its present consciousness for ever.

§ 3. But Science, for her part, finds no grounds for the beliefs of theology or metaphysics in a future life-beliefs, moreover, which she regards as little comforting at the best. If her instruments and methods of research, so successful in other fields of inquiry, can be relied upon when applied to man himself, as adequate to measure the full range and to sound the lowest depths of his nature; and if, moreover, the report handed in respecting that nature is accurate and exhaustive, which assures us that man is only the higher and more developed animal, whose mental nature is only a function of his bodily organism;-then the final conclusion seems to follow irresistibly, that immortality, the eternal prolongation of the mental individuality after the dissolution of the associated organism, is an inconceivable and an incredible thing. This is, indeed, the

distinct conclusion of all merely scientific thought when directed to the question; and here the arguments advanced demand our greatest and most serious attention. Let us proceed to unfold them more fully.

Thought, emotion, volition, the psycho-physiologist tells us, the three things which make up consciousness, or the mental side of the man, are inseparably bound up with the brain and nervous system, whose functions they are, just as it is the function of the heart to pump up the blood, and of the lungs to aërate it; and as all functions one day evidently cease their work together-the heart to beat, the eye to see, the lungs to breathe-by what logic, it is demanded, can an exception be made in favour of thinking, the function of the brain, which as palpably ceases as all the rest? Can thought go on after the dissolution of the brain, the thinking organ? Indeed, if thought, if consciousness be only a function of the brain, to put the question thus is to show the absurdity of the doctrine of a future life. For can a function be even imagined to exist without the organ whose action in fact constituted its sole existence? The soul, of whose future existence you speak, is nothing but our consciousness composed of its threefold contents, and these are only functions of the bodily organism-the highest functions, it is allowed, but still only functions, all of which must cease together with the body. Is not the power of muscular movement palpably arrested when the limbs become rigid; and the power of thought, is it not to all appearance as palpably? why should the appearance be deceptive in the one case rather than in the other? It is not a case of an independent entity temporarily lodged in the body which merely changes its residence at death, or of an entity which could exist without any bodily residence,

as Plato and Butler and the metaphysicians generally conceived it; it is the case of a power, or function, or faculty, which ceases with its appropriate bodily organ. Or, if you prefer it, it is the case of an effect which ceases, like every effect, with its proper cause; for the brain is the cause of thought in the strict scientific sense, that the former is the sum of the antecedent conditions, in the absence of which thought is never produced, but which, being given, carries the power of thought invariably with it. And that thought is fully and adequately described as the function of the brain; that it is nothing more, and nothing other (for to regard it as a case of causation amounts to the same thing), is proved, according to physiologists, by abundant and increasing evidence.* It is proved by our own varied experience in the effort of thinking, as well as by the report of the most competent psychologists and physiologists who have studied the subject, and who show us in proof of the statement the constant concomitant variations in the state of the brain, and in the faculty of thought, in youth and in age, in sickness and in health. In short, thought grows with the growth of the brain, it strengthens with its strength, it varies with its health, declines with its general vigour, and, must we not conclude, by the canons of inductive logic, that it finally dies, as it appears to do, with its dissolution?

Add to this what embryology shows us, that consciousness came by slow degrees from unconsciousness. Once there was absolutely no thought, no consciousness, which was gradually evolved from the growing organism as the final outcome and flower of it. We are sure from this circumstance that the relation between the body and soul is *Bain's Mind and Body.

of the most intimate and essential nature. The soul was evolved out of the body, as the flower from the plant; it came with the body, and must it not go with the body, as Haeckel argues? *

§ 4. Moreover, there is a wholly new argument now adduced by naturalists as a result of the Darwinian doctrine of descent, which, it is thought, should finally lay this question of man's immortality for ever at rest.

According to this argument, which is wholly independent of the physiological ones just considered, man is only the higher animal slowly evolved from the lower, with intellectual and moral qualities differing only in degree, and not in kind, from the lower; why, then, should he not share the common final fate of all the animals? He is not an infinitely superior being, separated, as he once fondly supposed, by an impassable gulf from the rest of living beings; the very attributes which he possesses only in higher degree, and in virtue of which the claim to immortality has been preferred in his behalf, the other animals possess in in some degree, and, indeed, together with intellectual qualities not inconsiderable, in the possession of some of the highest moral attributes-courage, fidelity, patience, self-sacrifice, affection-some of the lower animals, the dog, the horse, the ant, far surpass him; while in the human species itself, as is well known, these same higher qualities, mental and moral, exist in all degrees, from their almost total absence in the savage whether untutored or civilized, up to the intellectual height of a Shakespeare or a Newton, and to the moral splendour of a Socrates or a Buddha;-is it, then, to be contended that every man, from the saint, the sage, and the *History of Creation, vol. ii. p. 361.

martyr, to the savage, the fool, and the man "more brutish than the brute," and still more that every animal, from the man down to the mollusc, is to possess the dread and extraordinary attribute of immortality? No, certainly; not every animal; only the man, we are told. But even with this sharp separation of man, there would be abundant difficulties in admitting all men equally to immortality, as we have just seen. Unfortunately, however, this separation, this arbitrary exclusion of the lower animals, can no longer be made, if once the Darwinian doctrine of man's descent be admitted. And, indeed, long before Darwin's doctrine had been heard of, Bishop Butler almost admitted that the arguments for man's immortality apply equally to the case of the brutes; all of them except one, specified as peculiar to mankind, namely, our capacity for intellectual life independent of the body, after ideas had been once gained through the senses;-an exception which he would scarce have made if he had known all that Science, after the research of a century and a half, has since revealed to us in physiology, psychology, and natural history;if he had only fully realized the truth that the very highest life of the intellect and the soul is, at bottom, conditioned by physiological processes, and that the intelligence as well as the moral qualities of the brutes differs not in nature, but only in degree from our own.*

But the doctrine of man's descent once granted, there can be no arbitrary exclusion of the brutes, and no special

* See Butler's Analogy, ch. i., "On a Future Life;" in which he speaks of the "natural immortality of brutes," and even of the possibility of their being endowed with latent mental and moral capacities, though it does not seem to have occurred to him that they have actual faculties of this sort, both of which are clearly manifested in all social communities, as the ants, bees, and many others (see Darwin's Descent of Man, vol. i. ch. ii. and iii.).