Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/509

Rh seen of the work, and a better one than we could prepare, appeared in Nature, and we shall best serve our readers by quoting freely from the review:

"The preliminary chapter states the fact of the all but universal belief in, or aspiration after, immortality. It admits that that doctrine is inconsistent with the doctrine of continuity as generally understood and as applied solely to the visible universe. It accepts and explains the principle of continuity in the fullest sense, and it attempts to reconcile it, as thus apprehended, with the doctrine of immortality. Incidentally—out of the apparent waste of energy in space, and on other indications chiefly teleological—it constructs an hypothesis of an invisible universe, perhaps developed out of another invisible universe, and so on ad infinitum. It is another consequence of the theory that our natural bodies are probably accompanied by a sort of invisible framework or spiritual body, and that the phosphonis and other substances of which the natural body is built up are not really identical with these elements in their ordinary condition of inorganic atoms, but are somehow transubstantiated by the coexistence, along with the mere chemical substance or with its chemical properties, of this invisible, imponderable, immaterial, accompanying essence, which derives a kind of vis vivida from a connection with the unseen universe. The passage from the visible universe to the invisible seems to be made intelligible to the authors by the existence of the ether, a substance into which energy is continually being passed, and into which it is perpetually, and, so far as any obvious or sensible effect is concerned, finally, absorbed.

"As a first postulate the authors assume the existence of a Creator. Finite beings, creatures, are conditioned by the laws of the universe, and it is in these conditions that we must seek to discover its nature. The first pair of subjects for human thought are matter and mind, and the materialists tell us that, whereas mind or mental activity never exists without being associated with some forms of matter, we may perfectly conceive matter, as for instance a block of wood or a bar of iron, existing without intelligence. Is mind, then, the dependent—is there nothing in matter which serves as the vehicle of intelligence different from all other matter? The authors answer that we have no right to assume that the brain consists of particles of phosphorus or carbon such as we know these substances chemically, that we cannot say that there may not be something superadded to their chemical and physical qualities. They dwell upon another fact—the fact that individual consciousness returns after sleep or trance; a fact inferring some continuous existence. The assumptions of the materialist are less inevitable than he supposes. Turning to mind, finite conditioned intelligence, the authors ask, what is essential to it? It must have some organ by which it can have a hold upon the past, and such a frame and such a universe as supply the means of activity in the present. Outside they find physical laws, and they look on the principle of continuity as something like a physical axiom. By this principle we are compelled to believe that the Supreme Governor of the universe will not put us to permanent intellectual confusion. It is in the nature of man, certainly in the nature of scientific man, to carry the explanation of every thing back ad infinitum, and to refuse perpetually to grant what is perpetually demanded of him, that he has arrived at the inexplicable and unconditioned. On this principle scientific men have supposed themselves to prove that the physical universe must one day become mere dead matter. The authors consider that this is a monstrous supposition, although they grant that the visible, or by-sense-perceivable universe, must in transformable energy, and probably in matter, come to an end. They think that the principle of continuity itself demands a continuance of the universe, and they are driven to believe in something beyond that which is visible as the only means of explaining how this system of things can endure in the future, or can have endured forever in the past. They see a visible universe, finite in extent and finite in duration, beyond which, on both sides stretching infinitely forward and infinitely backward, there is an invisible, its forerunner and its continuation. It is natural to infer that these two invisibles must meet across the existing finite visible universe. As we are driven to admit the invisible in the past and in the future, there must be an invisible framework of things accompanying us in the present.

"What, then, is this present visible universe; and can we point to sure signs of this invisible substance which accompanies what may prove after all to be the mere shadow of things? Matter has two qualities. The first is that it is indestructible; the second, that the senses of all men alike point to the same quantity, quality, and