Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/43

Rh intuitions of the human mind, all the glowing aspirations enshrined in Greek poetry, legend, and art, all the natural theology contained in the works of Socrates and Plato, had come at last. Will any reasonable man affirm that an age, which breathes the very air of materialism, and whose children suck in the notions of changeless law with their mother's milk, will arrive at any thing better if it has no facts upon which to rely as proofs that its hopes are not unfounded? And how can that be called a truth of human nature, or be allowed to exercise a real influence upon men's minds, which is capable of being either entirely suppressed, or earnestly striven against, or contemptuously rejected?

3. The remaining two arguments need not detain us long; indeed, I should not have mentioned them, were it not that very eminent divines have based the belief in immortality upon the existence of God or the necessities of man. Let it once be granted that we are the creatures of a personal, loving, and sustaining God, concerning whom it is possible to form adequate conceptions, and then doubts as to our immortality would be vain indeed. But the rejoinder from the scientific view is plain enough. This, it would be said, is a mere obscurum per obscurius. The belief in God is simply the working of the human mind striving to account for the beginning of its own existence, exactly as the belief in immortality is the result of the attempt to think about the end thereof. If the definition of God be a stream or tendency of things that we cannot otherwise account for, then it will not help us to a belief in immortality. It is surprising indeed to see how the plain conditions of the case are evaded by enthusiastic controversialists; and I am almost ashamed of being obliged to make statements that have an inevitable air of being the baldest truisms.

4. The idea that immortality is essential to the moral development of man, and that therefore it is demonstrably true, seems to receive some little countenance from Prof. Max Muller in the close of his article on Buddhism, in which he thinks it improbable that—

The true bearing, in all its immense importance, of man's morality upon his belief in immortality will have to be considered hereafter; but, when used as a demonstration, it is at once seen to belong to the class of arguments from final causes which science resolutely rejects. A much more fatal answer, however, is found in a simple appeal to history, from which it will be found that, in Mr. Froude's words, no doctrine whatever, even of immortality, has a mere "mechanical