Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/473

Rh something altogether apart from bis bodily frame? Does it maintain its individuality, its elemental purity, while the body falls asunder? Does it necessarily endure eternally? And is it true that, the coil of earthly life once shaken off, every human soul departs into a condition either of everlasting bliss or of everlasting and unspeakable torment? To all of these questions the Christian religion has answered, and must still answer, "Yes." In what respect, then, it may be asked, does Professor Fiske seek to modify the Christian message; or does he simply state over again, on the authority of Science, what Christianity had affirmed on the authority of supernatural revelation?

In reply to these queries it may be briefly stated that Professor Fiske confines himself to asserting, in the name of Science, and particularly of the doctrine of evolution, the separate and essentially independent existence of the human soul. Whether, such being the case, he can claim to have thrown any light on the destiny of man, is perhaps a debatable point. It seems to me that he has rather dealt with the statics of human nature than with the question of the final outcome of human activity. It may be doubted whether, if the Christian missionaries at the court of the Northumbrian king had contented themselves with announcing that man had a soul, and that the soul was imperishable, they would have made much impression on their heathen listeners. Animistic interpretations of the phenomena of human life have been common in all ages—so common that, from their apparent universality, Mr. Spencer deduces the conclusion that all religion is based on primeval ghost-worship. Mr. Fiske comes forward to-day to say, in effect, that animism has the warrant of Science. Well and good! It may have; that all depends upon the interpretation of facts. But establish the point, and we shall at once want to know what are the fortunes of the soul after it leaves the body. Does it repair to happy hunting-grounds? Does it wander in a meadow of asphodel? Does it flit about in eternal twilight? Does it repair to the court of Minos and Rhadamanthus? Does it take on other animal forms and so revolve through a ceaseless round of changes? Or does a judgment await it that will place it irrevocably on one side or the other of the eternal dividing line, the everlasting gulf, which shall separate the saved from the lost? Unless some one will answer these questions for us, it seems almost vain to pretend that any light has been thrown on the "destiny of man" (beyond the present life) by the mere assertion, on whatever grounds, that the "soul" is something essentially distinct from the body.

It may be further affirmed that even the latter statement, when taken by itself, will prove unsatisfactory, unless a clear delimitation is established between what belongs to the soul and what to the body. It is to be feared that there is much the same uncertainty and vagueness in the use of the word "soul," which Matthew Arnold, in his "Literature and Dogma," has signalized in the case of the word "God."