The Unseen World and Other Essays
John Fiske

The Unseen World and Other Essays, by John Fiske




TO
JAMES SIME.

MY DEAR SIME:

Life has now and then some supreme moments of pure happiness,
which in reminiscence give to single days the value of months
or years. Two or three such moments it has been my good fortune
to enjoy with you, in talking over the mysteries which forever
fascinate while they forever baffle us. It was our midnight talks
in Great Russell Street and the Addison Road, and our bright May
holiday on the Thames, that led me to write this scanty essay on
the "Unseen World," and to whom could I so heartily dedicate it
as to you? I only wish it were more worthy of its origin. As for
the dozen papers which I have appended to it, by way of clearing
out my workshop, I hope you will read them indulgently, and
believe
me

Ever faithfully yours,
JOHN
FISKE.


HARVARD UNIVERSITY, February 3, 1876.




CONTENTS.

I.   THE UNSEEN WORLD
II.  "THE TO-MORROW OF DEATH"
III. THE JESUS OF HISTORY
IV.  THE CHRIST OF DOGMA
V.   A WORD ABOUT MIRACLES
VI.  DRAPER ON SCIENCE AND RELIGION
VII. NATHAN THE WISE
VIII.HISTORICAL DIFFICULTIES
IX.  THE FAMINE OF 1770 IN BENGAL
X.   SPAIN AND THE NETHERLANDS
XI.  LONGFELLOW'S DANTE
XII. PAINE'S "ST. PETER"
XIII.A PHILOSOPHY OF ART
XIV. ATHENIAN AND AMERICAN LIFE



ESSAYS.

I. THE UNSEEN WORLD.

PART FIRST.

"What are you, where did you come from, and whither are you
bound?"--the question which from Homer's days has been put to the
wayfarer in strange lands--is likewise the all-absorbing question
which man is ever asking of the universe of which he is himself
so tiny yet so wondrous a part. From the earliest times the
ultimate purpose of all scientific research has been to elicit
fragmentary or partial responses to this question, and philosophy
has ever busied itself in piecing together these several bits of
information according to the best methods at its disposal, in
order to make up something like a satisfactory answer. In old
times the best methods which philosophy had at its disposal for
this purpose were such as now seem very crude, and accordingly
ancient philosophers bungled considerably in their task, though
now and then they came surprisingly near what would to-day be
called the truth. It was natural that their methods should be
crude, for scientific inquiry had as yet supplied but scanty
materials for them to work with, and it was only after a very
long course of speculation and criticism that men could find out
what ways of going to work are likely to prove successful and
what are not. The earliest thinkers, indeed, were further
hindered from accomplishing much by the imperfections of the
language by the aid of which their thinking was done; for science
and philosophy have had to make a serviceable terminology by dint
of long and arduous trial and practice, and linguistic processes
fit for expressing general or abstract notions accurately grew up
only through numberless failures and at the expense of much
inaccurate thinking and loose talking. As in most of nature's
processes, there was a great waste of energy before a good result
could be secured. Accordingly primitive men were very wide of the
mark in their views of nature. To them the world was a sort of
enchanted ground, peopled with sprites and goblins; the quaint
notions with which we now amuse our children in fairy tales
represent a style of thinking which once was current among grown
men and women, and which is still current wherever men remain in
a savage condition. The theories of the world wrought out by
early priest-philosophers were in great part made up of such
grotesque notions; and having become variously implicated with
ethical opinions as to the nature and consequences of right and
wrong behaviour, they acquired a kind of sanctity, so that any
thinker who in the light of a wider experience ventured to alter
or amend the primitive theory was likely to be vituperated as an
irreligious man or atheist. This sort of inference has not yet
been wholly abandoned, even in civilized communities. Even to-day
books are written about "the conflict between religion and
science," and other books are written with intent to reconcile
the two presumed antagonists. But when we look beneath the
surface of things, we see that in reality there has never been
any conflict between religion and science, nor is any
reconciliation called for where harmony has always existed. The
real historical conflict, which has been thus curiously misnamed,
has been the conflict between the more-crude opinions belonging
to the science of an earlier age and the less-crude opinions
belonging to the science of a later age. In the course of this
contest the more-crude opinions have usually been defended in the
name of religion, and the less-crude opinions have invariably won
the victory; but religion itself, which is not concerned with
opinion, but with the aspiration which leads us to strive after a
purer and holier life, has seldom or never been attacked. On the
contrary, the scientific men who have conducted the battle on
behalf of the less-crude opinions have generally been influenced
by this religious aspiration quite as strongly as the apologists
of the more-crude opinions, and so far from religious feeling
having been weakened by their perennial series of victories, it
has apparently been growing deeper and stronger all the time. The
religious sense is as yet too feebly developed in most of us; but
certainly in no preceding age have men taken up the work of life
with more earnestness or with more real faith in the unseen than
at the present day, when so much of what was once deemed
all-important knowledge has been consigned to the limbo of
mythology.

The more-crude theories of early times are to be chiefly
distinguished from the less-crude theories of to-day as being
largely the products of random guesswork. Hypothesis, or
guesswork, indeed, lies at the foundation of all scientific
knowledge. The riddle of the universe, like less important
riddles, is unravelled only by approximative trials, and the most
brilliant discoverers have usually been the bravest guessers.
Kepler's laws were the result of indefatigable guessing, and so,
in a somewhat different sense, was the wave-theory of light. But
the guesswork of scientific inquirers is very different now from
what it was in older times. In the first place, we have slowly
learned that a guess must be verified before it can be accepted
as a sound theory; and, secondly, so many truths have been
established beyond contravention, that the latitude for
hypothesis is much less than it once was. Nine tenths of the
guesses which might have occurred to a mediaeval philosopher
would now be ruled out as inadmissible, because they would not
harmonize with the knowledge which has been acquired since the
Middle Ages. There is one direction especially in which this
continuous limitation of guesswork by ever-accumulating
experience has manifested itself. From first to last, all our
speculative successes and failures have agreed in teaching us
that the most general principles of action which prevail to-day,
and in our own corner of the universe, have always prevailed
throughout as much of the universe as is accessible to our
research. They have taught us that for the deciphering of the
past and the predicting of the future, no hypotheses are
admissible which are not based upon the actual behaviour of
things in the present. Once there was unlimited facility for
guessing as to how the solar system might have come into
existence; now the origin of the sun and planets is adequately
explained when we have unfolded all that is implied in the
processes which are still going on in the solar system. Formerly
appeals were made to all manner of violent agencies to account
for the changes which the earth's surface has undergone since our
planet began its independent career; now it is seen that the same
slow working of rain and tide, of wind and wave and frost, of
secular contraction and of earthquake pulse, which is visible
to-day, will account for the whole. It is not long since it was
supposed that a species of animals or plants could be swept away
only by some unusual catastrophe, while for the origination of
new species something called an act of "special creation" was
necessary; and as to the nature of such extraordinary events
there was endless room for guesswork; but the discovery of
natural selection was the discovery of a process, going on
perpetually under our very eyes, which must inevitably of itself
extinguish some species and bring new ones into being. In these
and countless other ways we have learned that all the rich
variety of nature is pervaded by unity of action, such as we
might expect to find if nature is the manifestation of an
infinite God who is without variableness or shadow of turning,
but quite incompatible with the fitful behaviour of the
anthropomorphic deities of the old mythologies. By thus
abstaining from all appeal to agencies that are extra-cosmic, or
not involved in the orderly system of events that we see
occurring around us, we have at last succeeded in eliminating
from philosophic speculation the character of random guesswork
which at first of necessity belonged to it. Modern scientific
hypothesis is so far from being a haphazard mental proceeding
that it is perhaps hardly fair to classify it with guesses. It is
lifted out of the plane of guesswork, in so far as it has
acquired the character of inevitable inference from that which
now is to that which has been or will be. Instead of the
innumerable particular assumptions which were once admitted into
cosmic philosophy, we are now reduced to the one universal
assumption which has been variously described as the "principle
of continuity," the "uniformity of nature," the "persistence of
force," or the "law of causation," and which has been variously
explained as a necessary datum for scientific thinking or as a
net result of all induction. I am not unwilling, however, to
adopt the language of a book which has furnished the occasion for
the present discussion, and to say that this grand assumption is
a supreme act of faith, the definite expression of a trust that
the infinite Sustainer of the universe "will not put us to
permanent intellectual confusion." For in this mode of statement
the harmony between the scientific and the religious points of
view is well brought out. It is as affording the only outlet from
permanent intellectual confusion that inquirers have been driven
to appeal to the principle of continuity; and it is by unswerving
reliance upon this principle that we have obtained such insight
into the past, present, and future of the world as we now
possess.

The work just mentioned[1] is especially interesting as an
attempt to bring the probable destiny of the human soul into
connection with the modern theories which explain the past and
future career of the physical universe in accordance with the
principle of continuity. Its authorship is as yet unknown, but it
is believed to be the joint production of two of the most eminent
physicists in Great Britain, and certainly the accurate knowledge
and the ingenuity and subtlety of thought displayed in it are
such as to lend great probability to this conjecture. Some
account of the argument it contains may well precede the
suggestions presently to be set forth concerning the Unseen
World; and we shall find it most convenient to begin, like our
authors, with a brief statement of what the principle of
continuity teaches as to the proximate beginning and end of the
visible universe. I shall in the main set down only results,
having elsewhere[2] given a simple exposition of the arguments
upon which these results are founded.

[1] The Unseen Universe; or, Physical Speculations on a Future
State. [Attributed to Professors TAIT and BALFOUR STEWART.] New
York: Macmillan & Co. 1875. 8vo. pp. 212.

[2] Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, based on the Doctrine of
Evolution. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co. 1875. 2 vols. 8vo.


The first great cosmological speculation which has been raised
quite above the plane of guesswork by making no other assumption
than that of the uniformity of nature, is the well-known Nebular
Hypothesis. Every astronomer knows that the earth, like all other
cosmical bodies which are flattened at the poles, was formerly a
mass of fluid, and consequently filled a much larger space than
at present. It is further agreed, on all hands, that the sun is a
contracting body, since there is no other possible way of
accounting for the enormous quantity of heat which he generates.
The so-called primeval nebula follows as a necessary inference
from these facts. There was once a time when the earth was
distended on all sides away out to the moon and beyond it, so
that the matter now contained in the moon was then a part of our
equatorial zone. And at a still remoter date in the past, the
mass of the sun was diffused in every direction beyond the orbit
of Neptune, and no planet had an individual existence, for all
were indistinguishable parts of the solar mass. When the great
mass of the sun, increased by the relatively small mass of all
the planets put together, was spread out in this way, it was a
rare vapour or gas. At the period where the question is taken up
in Laplace's treatment of the nebular theory, the shape of this
mass is regarded as spheroidal; but at an earlier period its
shape may well have been as irregular as that of any of the
nebulae which we now see in distant parts of the heavens, for,
whatever its primitive shape, the equalization of its rotation
would in time make it spheroidal. That the QUANTITY of rotation
was the same then as now is unquestionable; for no system of
particles, great or small, can acquire or lose rotation by any
action going on within itself, any more than a man could pick
himself up by his waistband and lift himself over a stone wale So
that the primitive rotating spheroidal solar nebula is not a
matter of assumption, but is just what must once have existed,
provided there has been no breach of continuity in nature's
operations. Now proceeding to reason back from the past to the
present, it has been shown that the abandonment of successive
equatorial belts by the contracting solar mass must have ensued
in accordance with known mechanical laws; and in similar wise,
under ordinary circumstances. each belt must have parted into
fragments, and the fragments chasing each other around the same
orbit, must have at last coalesced into a spheroidal planet. Not
only this, but it has also been shown that as the result of such
a process the relative sizes of the planets would be likely to
take the order which they now follow; that the ring immediately
succeeding that of Jupiter would be likely to abort and produce a
great number of tiny planets instead of one good-sized one; that
the outer planets would be likely to have many moons, and that
Saturn, besides having the greatest number of moons, would be
likely to retain some of his inner rings unbroken; that the earth
would be likely to have a long day and Jupiter a short one; that
the extreme outer planets would be not unlikely to rotate in a
retrograde direction; and so on, through a long list of
interesting and striking details. Not only, therefore, are we
driven to the inference that our solar system was once a vaporous
nebula, but we find that the mere contraction of such a nebula,
under the influence of the enormous mutual gravitation of its
particles, carries with it the explanation of both the more
general and the more particular features of the present system.
So that we may fairly regard this stupendous process as veritable
matter of history, while we proceed to study it under some
further aspects and to consider what consequences are likely to
follow.

Our attention should first be directed to the enormous waste of
energy which has accompanied this contraction of the solar
nebula. The first result of such a contraction is the generation
of a great quantity of heat, and when the heat thus generated has
been lost by radiation into surrounding space it becomes possible
for the contraction to continue. Thus, as concentration goes on,
heat is incessantly generated and incessantly dissipated. How
long this process is to endure depends chiefly on the size of the
contracting mass, as small bodies radiate heat much faster than
large ones. The moon seems to be already thoroughly refrigerated,
while Jupiter and Saturn are very much hotter than the earth, as
is shown by the tremendous atmospheric phenomena which occur on
their surfaces. The sun, again, generates heat so rapidly, owing
to his great energy of contraction, and loses it so slowly, owing
to his great size, that his surface is always kept in a state of
incandescence. His surface-temperature is estimated at some three
million degrees of Fahrenheit, and a diminution of his diameter
far too small to be detected by the finest existing instruments
would suffice to maintain the present supply of heat for more
than fifty centuries. These facts point to a very long future
during which the sun will continue to warm the earth and its
companion planets, but at the same time they carry on their face
the story of inevitable ultimate doom. If things continue to go
on as they have all along gone on, the sun must by and by grow
black and cold, and all life whatever throughout the solar system
must come to an end. Long before this consummation, however, life
will probably have become extinct through the refrigeration of
each of the planets into a state like the present state of the
moon, in which the atmosphere and oceans have disappeared from
the surface. No doubt the sun will continue to give out heat a
long time after heat has ceased to be needed for the support of
living organisms. For the final refrigeration of the sun will
long be postponed by the fate of the planets themselves. The
separation of the planets from their parent solar mass seems to
be after all but a temporary separation. So nicely balanced are
they now in their orbits that they may well seem capable of
rolling on in their present courses forever. But this is not the
case. Two sets of circumstances are all the while striving, the
one to drive the planets farther away from the sun, the other to
draw them all into it. On the one hand, every body in our system
which contains fluid matter has tides raised upon its surface by
the attraction of neighbouring bodies. All the planets raise
tides upon the surface of the sun and the periodicity of
sun-spots (or solar cyclones) depends upon this fact. These tidal
waves act as a drag or brake upon the rotation of the sun,
somewhat diminishing its rapidity. But, in conformity with a
principle of mechanics well known to astronomers, though not
familiar to the general reader, all the motion of rotation thus
lost by the sun is added to the planets in the shape of annual
motion of revolution, and thus their orbits all tend to
enlarge,--they all tend to recede somewhat from the sun. But this
state of things, though long-enduring enough, is after all only
temporary, and will at any rate come to an end when the sun and
planets have become solid. Meanwhile another set of circumstances
is all the time tending to bring the planets nearer to the sun,
and in the long run must gain the mastery. The space through
which the planets move is filled with a kind of matter which
serves as a medium for the transmission of heat and light, and
this kind of matter, though different in some respects from
ordinary ponderable matter, is yet like it in exerting friction.
This friction is almost infinitely little, yet it has a wellnigh
infinite length of time to work in, and during all this wellnigh
infinite length of time it is slowly eating up the momentum of
the planets and diminishing their ability to maintain their
distances from the sun. Hence in course of time the planets will
all fall into the sun, one after another, so that the solar
system will end, as it began, by consisting of a single mass of
matter.

But this is by no means the end of the story. When two bodies
rush together, each parts with some of its energy of motion, and
this lost energy of motion reappears as heat. In the concussion
of two cosmical bodies, like the sun and the earth, an enormous
quantity of motion is thus converted into heat. Now heat, when
not allowed to radiate, or when generated faster than it can be
radiated, is transformed into motion of expansion. Hence the
shock of sun and planet would at once result in the vaporization
of both bodies; and there can be no doubt that by the time the
sun has absorbed the outermost of his attendant planets, he will
have resumed something like his original nebulous condition. He
will have been dilated into a huge mass of vapour, and will have
become fit for a new process of contraction and for a new
production of life-bearing planets.

We are now, however, confronted by an interesting but difficult
question. Throughout all this grand past and future career of the
solar system which we have just briefly traced, we have been
witnessing a most prodigal dissipation of energy in the shape of
radiant heat. At the outset we had an enormous quantity of what
is called "energy of position," that is, the outer parts of our
primitive nebula had a very long distance through which to travel
towards one another in the slow process of concentration; and
this distance was the measure of the quantity of work possible to
our system. As the particles of our nebula drew nearer and nearer
together, the energy of position continually lost reappeared
continually as heat, of which the greater part was radiated off,
but of which a certain amount was retained. All the gigantic
amount of work achieved in the geologic development of our earth
and its companion planets, and in the development of life
wherever life may exist in our system, has been the product of
this retained heat. At the present day the same wasteful process
is going on. Each moment the sun's particles are losing energy of
position as they draw closer and closer together, and the heat
into which this lost energy is metamorphosed is poured out most
prodigally in every direction. Let us consider for a moment how
little of it gets used in our system. The earth's orbit is a
nearly circular figure more than five hundred million miles in
circumference, while only eight thousand miles of this path are
at any one time occupied by the earth's mass. Through these eight
thousand miles the sun's radiated energy is doing work, but
through the remainder of the five hundred million it is idle and
wasted. But the case is far more striking when we reflect that it
is not in the plane of the earth's orbit only that the sun's
radiance is being poured out. It is not an affair of a circle,
but of a sphere. In order to utilize all the solar rays, we
should need to have an immense number of earths arranged so as to
touch each other, forming a hollow sphere around the sun, with
the present radius of the earth's orbit. We may well believe
Professor Tyndall, therefore, when he tells us that all the solar
radiance we receive is less than a two-billionth part of what is
sent flying through the desert regions of space. Some of the
immense residue of course hits other planets stationed in the way
of it, and is utilized upon their surfaces; but the planets, all
put together, stop so little of the total quantity that our
startling illustration is not materially altered by taking them
into the account. Now this two-billionth part of the solar
radiance poured out from moment to moment suffices to blow every
wind, to raise every cloud, to drive every engine, to build up
the tissue of every plant, to sustain the activity of every
animal, including man, upon the surface of our vast and stately
globe. Considering the wondrous richness and variety of the
terrestrial life wrought out by the few sunbeams which we catch
in our career through space, we may well pause overwhelmed and
stupefied at the thought of the incalculable possibilities of
existence which are thrown away with the potent actinism that
darts unceasingly into the unfathomed abysms of immensity. Where
it goes to or what becomes of it, no one of us can surmise.

Now when, in the remote future, our sun is reduced to vapour by
the impact of the several planets upon his surface, the resulting
nebulous mass must be a very insignificant affair compared with
the nebulous mass with which we started. In order to make a
second nebula equal in size and potential energy to the first
one, all the energy of position at first existing should have
been retained in some form or other. But nearly all of it has
been lost, and only an insignificant fraction remains with which
to endow a new system. In order to reproduce, in future ages,
anything like that cosmical development which is now going on in
the solar system, aid must be sought from without. We must
endeavour to frame some valid hypothesis as to the relation of
our solar system to other systems.

Thus far our view has been confined to the career of a single
star,--our sun,--with the tiny, easily-cooling balls which it has
cast off in the course of its development. Thus far, too, our
inferences have been very secure, for we have been dealing with a
circumscribed group of phenomena, the beginning and end of which
have been brought pretty well within the compass of our
imagination. It is quite another thing to deal with the actual or
probable career of the stars in general, inasmuch as we do not
even know how many stars there are, which form parts of a common
system, or what. are their precise dynamic relations to one
another. Nevertheless we have knowledge of a few facts which may
support some cautious inferences. All the stars which we can see
are undoubtedly bound together by relations of gravitation. No
doubt our sun attracts all the other stars within our ken, and is
reciprocally attracted by them. The stars, too, lie mostly in or
around one great plane, as is the case with the members of the
solar system. Moreover, the stars are shown by the spectroscope
to consist of chemical elements identical with those which are
found in the solar system. Such facts as these make it probable
that the career of other stars, when adequately inquired into,
would be found to be like that of our own sun. Observation daily
enhances this probability, for our study of the sidereal universe
is continually showing us stars in all stages of development. We
find irregular nebulae, for example; we find spiral and
spheroidal nebulae; we find stars which have got beyond the
nebulous stage, but are still at a whiter heat than our sun; and
we also find many stars which yield the same sort of spectrum as
our sun. The inference seems forced upon us that the same process
of concentration which has gone on in the case of our solar
nebula has been going on in the case of other nebulae. The
history of the sun is but a type of the history of stars in
general. And when we consider that all other visible stars and
nebulae are cooling and contracting bodies, like our sun, to what
other conclusion could we very well come? When we look at Sirius,
for instance, we do not see him surrounded by planets, for at
such a distance no planet could be visible, even Sirius himself,
though fourteen times larger than our sun, appearing only as a
"twinkling little star." But a comparative survey of the heavens
assures us that Sirius can hardly have arrived at his present
stage of concentration without detaching, planet-forming rings,
for there is no reason for supposing that mechanical laws out
there are at all different from what they are in our own system.
And the same kind of inference must apply to all the matured
stars which we see in the heavens.

When we duly take all these things into the account, the case of
our solar system will appear as only one of a thousand cases of
evolution and dissolution with which the heavens furnish us.
Other stars, like our sun, have undoubtedly started as vaporous
masses, and have thrown off planets in contracting. The inference
may seem a bold one, but it after all involves no other
assumption than that of the continuity of natural phenomena. It
is not likely, therefore, that the solar system will forever be
left to itself. Stars which strongly gravitate toward each other,
while moving through a perennially resisting medium, must in time
be drawn together. The collision of our extinct sun with one of
the Pleiades, after this manner, would very likely suffice to
generate even a grander nebula than the one with which we
started. Possibly the entire galactic system may, in an
inconceivably remote future, remodel itself in this way; and
possibly the nebula from which our own group of planets has been
formed may have owed its origin to the disintegration of systems
which had accomplished their career in the depths of the bygone
eternity.

When the problem is extended to these huge dimensions, the
prospect of an ultimate cessation of cosmical work is
indefinitely postponed, but at the same time it becomes
impossible for us to deal very securely with the questions we
have raised. The magnitudes and periods we have introduced are so
nearly infinite as to baffle speculation itself: One point,
however, we seem dimly to discern. Supposing the stellar universe
not to be absolutely infinite in extent, we may hold that the day
of doom, so often postponed, must come at last. The concentration
of matter and dissipation of energy, so often checked, must in
the end prevail, so that, as the final outcome of things, the
entire universe will be reduced to a single enormous ball, dead
and frozen, solid and black, its potential energy of motion
having been all transformed into heat and radiated away. Such a
conclusion has been suggested by Sir William Thomson, and it is
quite forcibly stated by the authors of "The Unseen Universe."
They remind us that "if there be any one form of energy less
readily or less completely transformable than the others, and if
transformations constantly go on, more and more of the whole
energy of the universe will inevitably sink into this lower grade
as time advances." Now radiant heat, as we have seen, is such a
lower grade of energy. "At each transformation of heat-energy
into work, a large portion is degraded, while only a small
portion is transformed into work. So that while it is very easy
to change all of our mechanical or useful energy into heat, it is
only possible to transform a portion of this heat-energy back
again into work. After each change, too, the heat becomes more
and more dissipated or degraded, and less and less available for
any future transformation. In other words," our authors continue,
"the tendency of heat is towards equalization; heat is par
excellence the communist of our universe, and it will no doubt
ultimately bring the system to an end. .... It is absolutely
certain that life, so far as it is physical, depends essentially
upon transformations of energy; it is also absolutely certain
that age after age the possibility of such transformations is
becoming less and less; and, so far as we yet know, the final
state of the present universe must be an aggregation (into one
mass) of all the matter it contains, i. e. the potential energy
gone, and a practically useless state of kinetic energy, i. e.
uniform temperature throughout that mass." Thus our authors
conclude that the visible universe began in time and will in time
come to an end; and they add that under the physical conditions
of such a universe "immortality is impossible."

Concerning the latter inference we shall by and by have something
to say. Meanwhile this whole speculation as to the final
cessation of cosmical work seems to me--as it does to my friend,
Professor Clifford[3]--by no means trustworthy. The conditions of
the problem so far transcend our grasp that any such speculation
must remain an unverifiable guess. I do not go with Professor
Clifford in doubting whether the laws of mechanics are absolutely
the same throughout eternity; I cannot quite reconcile such a
doubt with faith in the principle of continuity. But it does seem
to me needful, before we conclude that radiated energy is
absolutely and forever wasted, that we should find out what
becomes of it. What we call radiant heat is simply transverse
wave-motion, propagated with enormous velocity through an ocean
of subtle ethereal matter which bathes the atoms of all visible
or palpable bodies and fills the whole of space, extending beyond
the remotest star which the telescope can reach. Whether there
are any bounds at all to this ethereal ocean, or whether it is as
infinite as space itself, we cannot surmise. If it be limited,
the possible dispersion of radiant energy is limited by its
extent. Heat and light cannot travel through emptiness. If the
ether is bounded by surrounding emptiness, then a ray of heat, on
arriving at this limiting emptiness, would be reflected back as
surely as a ball is sent back when thrown against a solid wall.
If this be the case, it will not affect our conclusions
concerning such a tiny region of space as is occupied by the
solar system, but it will seriously modify Sir William Thomson's
suggestion as to the fate of the universe as a whole. The
radiance thrown away by the sun is indeed lost so far as the
future of our system is concerned, but not a single unit of it is
lost from the universe. Sooner or later, reflected back in all
directions, it must do work in one quarter or another, so that
ultimate stagnation be comes impossible. It is true that no such
return of radiant energy has been detected in our corner of the
world; but we have not yet so far disentangled all the
force-relations of the universe that we are entitled to regard
such a return as impossible. This is one way of escape from the
consummation of things depicted by our authors. Another way of
escape is equally available, if we suppose that while the ether
is without bounds the stellar universe also extends to infinity.
For in this case the reproduction of nebulous masses fit for
generating new systems of worlds must go on through space that is
endless, and consequently the process can never come to an end
and can never have had a beginning. We have, therefore, three
alternatives: either the visible universe is finite, while the
ether is infinite; or both are finite; or both are infinite. Only
on the first supposition, I think, do we get a universe which
began in time and must end in time. Between such stupendous
alternatives we have no grounds for choosing. But it would seem
that the third, whether strictly true or not, best represents the
state of the case relatively to our feeble capacity of
comprehension. Whether absolutely infinite or not, the dimensions
of the universe must be taken as practically infinite, so far as
human thought is concerned. They immeasurably transcend the
capabilities of any gauge we can bring to bear on them.
Accordingly all that we are really entitled to hold, as the
outcome of sound speculation, is the conception of innumerable
systems of worlds concentrating out of nebulous masses, and then
rushing together and dissolving into similar masses, as bubbles
unite and break up--now here, now there--in their play on the
surface of a pool, and to this tremendous series of events we can
assign neither a beginning nor an end.

[3] Fortnightly Review, April, 1875.


We must now make some more explicit mention of the ether which
carries through space the rays of heat and light. In closest
connection with the visible stellar universe, the vicissitudes of
which we have briefly traced, the all-pervading ether constitutes
a sort of unseen world remarkable enough from any point of view,
but to which the theory of our authors ascribes capacities
hitherto unsuspected by science. The very existence of an ocean
of ether enveloping the molecules of material bodies has been
doubted or denied by many eminent physicists, though of course
none have called in question the necessity for some interstellar
medium for the transmission of thermal and luminous vibrations.
This scepticism has been, I think, partially justified by the
many difficulties encompassing the conception, into which,
however, we need not here enter. That light and heat cannot be
conveyed by any of the ordinary sensible forms of matter is
unquestionable. None of the forms of sensible matter can be
imagined sufficiently elastic to propagate wave-motion at the
rate of one hundred and eighty-eight thousand miles per second.
Yet a ray of light is a series of waves, and implies some
substance in which the waves occur. The substance required is one
which seems to possess strangely contradictory properties. It is
commonly regarded as an "ether" or infinitely rare substance;
but, as Professor Jevons observes, we might as well regard it as
an infinitely solid "adamant." "Sir John Herschel has calculated
the amount of force which may be supposed, according to the
undulatory theory of light, to be exerted at each point in space,
and finds it to be 1,148,000,000,000 times the elastic force of
ordinary air at the earth's surface, so that the pressure of the
ether upon a square inch of surface must be about
17,000,000,000,000, or seventeen billions of pounds."[4] Yet at
the same time the resistance offered by the ether to the
planetary motions is too minute to be appreciable. "All our
ordinary notions," says Professor Jevons, "must be laid aside in
contemplating such an hypothesis; yet [it is] no more than the
observed phenomena of light and heat force us to accept. We
cannot deny even the strange suggestion of Dr. Young, that there
may be independent worlds, some possibly existing in different
parts of space, but others perhaps pervading each other, unseen
and unknown, in the same space. For if we are bound to admit the
conception of this adamantine firmament, it is equally easy to
admit a plurality of such."

[4] Jevons's Principles of Science, Vol. II. p. 145. The figures,
which in the English system of numeration read as seventeen
billions, would in the American system read as seventeen
trillions.


The ether, therefore, is unlike any of the forms of matter which
we can weigh and measure. In some respects it resembles a fluid,
in some respects a solid. It is both hard and elastic to an
almost inconceivable degree. It fills all material bodies like a
sea in which the atoms of the material bodies are as islands, and
it occupies the whole of what we call empty space. It is so
sensitive that a disturbance in any part of it causes a "tremour
which is felt on the surface of countless worlds." Our old
experiences of matter give us no account of any substance like
this; yet the undulatory theory of light obliges us to admit such
a substance, and that theory is as well established as the theory
of gravitation. Obviously we have here an enlargement of our
experience of matter. The analysis of the phenomena of light and
radiant heat has brought us into mental relations with matter in
a different state from any in which we previously knew it. For
the supposition that the ether may be something essentially
different from matter is contradicted by all the terms we have
used in describing it. Strange and contradictory as its
properties may seem, are they any more strange than the
properties of a gas would seem if we were for the first time to
discover a gas after heretofore knowing nothing but solids and
liquids? I think not; and the conclusion implied by our authors
seems to me eminently probable, that in the so-called ether we
have simply a state of matter more primitive than what we know as
the gaseous state. Indeed, the conceptions of matter now current,
and inherited from barbarous ages, are likely enough to be crude
in the extreme. It is not strange that the study of such subtle
agencies as heat and light should oblige us to modify them; and
it will not be strange if the study of electricity should entail
still further revision of our ideas.

We are now brought to one of the profoundest speculations of
modern times, the vortex-atom theory of Helmholtz and Thomson, in
which the evolution of ordinary matter from ether is plainly
indicated. The reader first needs to know what vortex-motion is;
and this has been so beautifully explained by Professor Clifford,
that I quote his description entire: "Imagine a ring of
india-rubber, made by joining together the ends of a cylindrical
piece (like a lead-pencil before it is cut), to be put upon a
round stick which it will just fit with a little stretching. Let
the stick be now pulled through the ring while the latter is kept
in its place by being pulled the other way on the outside. The
india-rubber has then what is called vortex-motion. Before the
ends were joined together, while it was straight, it might have
been made to turn around without changing position, by rolling it
between the hands. Just the same motion of rotation it has on the
stick, only that the ends are now joined together. All the inside
surface of the ring is going one way, namely, the way the stick
is pulled; and all the outside is going the other way. Such a
vortex-ring is made by the smoker who purses his lips into a
round hole and sends out a puff of smoke. The outside of the ring
is kept back by the friction of his lips while the inside is
going forwards; thus a rotation is set up all round the
smoke-ring as it travels out into the air." In these cases, and
in others as we commonly find it, vortex-motion owes its origin
to friction and is after a while brought to an end by friction.
But in 1858 the equations of motion of an incompressible
frictionless fluid were first successfully solved by Helmholtz,
and among other things he proved that, though vortex-motion could
not be originated in such a fluid, yet supposing it once to
exist, it would exist to all eternity and could not be diminished
by any mechanical action whatever. A vortex-ring, for example, in
such a fluid, would forever preserve its own rotation, and would
thus forever retain its peculiar individuality, being, as it
were, marked off from its neighbour vortex-rings. Upon this
mechanical truth Sir William Thomson based his wonderfully
suggestive theory of the constitution of matter. That which is
permanent or indestructible in matter is the ultimate homogeneous
atom; and this is probably all that is permanent, since chemists
now almost unanimously hold that so-called elementary molecules
are not really simple, but owe their sensible differences to the
various groupings of an ultimate atom which is alike for all.
Relatively to our powers of comprehension the atom endures
eternally; that is, it retains forever unalterable its definite
mass and its definite rate of vibration. Now this is just what a
vortex-ring would do in an incompressible frictionless fluid.
Thus the startling question is suggested, Why may not the
ultimate atoms of matter be vortex-rings forever existing in such
a frictionless fluid filling the whole of space? Such a
hypothesis is not less brilliant than Huyghens's conjectural
identification of light with undulatory motion; and it is
moreover a legitimate hypothesis, since it can be brought to the
test of verification. Sir William Thomson has shown that it
explains a great many of the physical properties of matter: it
remains to be seen whether it can explain them all.

Of course the ether which conveys thermal and luminous
undulations is not the frictionless fluid postulated by Sir
William Thomson. The most conspicuous property of the ether is
its enormous elasticity, a property which we should not find in a
frictionless fluid. "To account for such elasticity," says
Professor Clifford (whose exposition of the subject is still more
lucid than that of our authors), "it has to be supposed that even
where there are no material molecules the universal fluid is full
of vortex-motion, but that the vortices are smaller and more
closely packed than those of [ordinary] matter, forming
altogether a more finely grained structure. So that the
difference between matter and ether is reduced to a mere
difference in the size and arrangement of the component
vortex-rings. Now, whatever may turn out to be the ultimate
nature of the ether and of molecules, we know that to some extent
at least they obey the same dynamic laws, and that they act upon
one another in accordance with these laws. Until, therefore, it
is absolutely disproved, it must remain the simplest and most
probable assumption that they are finally made of the same stuff,
that the material molecule is some kind of knot or coagulation of
ether."[5]

[5] Fortnightly Review, June, 1875, p. 784.


Another interesting consequence of Sir William Thomson's pregnant
hypothesis is that the absolute hardness which has been
attributed to material atoms from the time of Lucretius downward
may be dispensed with. Somewhat in the same way that a loosely
suspended chain becomes rigid with rapid rotation, the hardness
and elasticity of the vortex-atom are explained as due to the
swift rotary motion of a soft and yielding fluid. So that the
vortex-atom is really indivisible, not by reason of its hardness
or solidity, but by reason of the indestructibleness of its
motion.

Supposing, now, that we adopt provisionally the vortex
theory,--the great power of which is well shown by the
consideration just mentioned,--we must not forget that it is
absolutely essential to the indestructibleness of the material
atom that the universal fluid in which it has an existence as a
vortex-ring should be entirely destitute of friction. Once admit
even the most infinitesimal amount of friction, while retaining
the conception of vortex-motion in a universal fluid, and the
whole case is so far altered that the material atom can no longer
be regarded as absolutely indestructible, but only as
indefinitely enduring. It may have been generated, in bygone
eternity, by a natural process of evolution, and in future
eternity may come to an end. Relatively to our powers of
comprehension the practical difference is perhaps not great.
Scientifically speaking, Helmholtz and Thomson are as well
entitled to reason upon the assumption of a perfectly
frictionless fluid as geometers in general are entitled to assume
perfect lines without breadth and perfect surfaces without
thickness. Perfect lines and surfaces do not exist within the
region of our experience; yet the conclusions of geometry are
none the less true ideally, though in any particular concrete
instance they are only approximately realized. Just so with the
conception of a frictionless fluid. So far as experience goes,
such a thing has no more real existence than a line without
breadth; and hence an atomic theory based upon such an assumption
may be as true ideally as any of the theorems of Euclid, but it
can give only an approximatively true account of the actual
universe. These considerations do not at all affect the
scientific value of the theory; but they will modify the tenour
of such transcendental inferences as may be drawn from it
regarding, the probable origin and destiny of the universe.

The conclusions reached in the first part of this paper, while we
were dealing only with gross visible matter, may have seemed bold
enough; but they are far surpassed by the inference which our
authors draw from the vortex theory as they interpret it. Our
authors exhibit various reasons, more or less sound, for
attributing to the primordial fluid some slight amount of
friction; and in support of this view they adduce Le Sage's
explanation of gravitation as a differential result of pressure,
and Struve's theory of the partial absorption of light-rays by
the ether,--questions with which our present purpose does not
require us to meddle. Apart from such questions it is every way
probable that the primary assumption of Helmholtz and Thomson is
only an approximation to the truth. But if we accredit the
primordial fluid with even an infinitesimal amount of friction,
then we are required to conceive of the visible universe as
developed from the invisible and as destined to return into the
invisible. The vortex-atom, produced by infinitesimal friction
operating through wellnigh infinite time, is to be ultimately
abolished by the agency which produced it. In the words of our
authors, "If the visible universe be developed from an invisible
which is not a perfect fluid, then the argument deduced by Sir
William Thomson in favour of the eternity of ordinary matter
disappears, since this eternity depends upon the perfect fluidity
of the invisible. In fine, if we suppose the material universe to
be composed of a series of vortex-rings developed from an
invisible universe which is not a perfect fluid, it will be
ephemeral, just as the smoke-ring which we develop from air, or
that which we develop from water, is ephemeral, the only
difference being in duration, these lasting only for a few
seconds, and the others it may be for billions of years." Thus,
as our authors suppose that "the available energy of the visible
universe will ultimately be appropriated by the invisible," they
go on to imagine, "at least as a possibility, that the separate
existence of the visible universe will share the same fate, so
that we shall have no huge, useless, inert mass existing in after
ages to remind the passer-by of a form of energy and a species of
matter that is long since out of date and functionally effete.
Why should not the universe bury its dead out of sight?"

In one respect perhaps no more stupendous subject of
contemplation than this has ever been offered to the mind of man.
In comparison with the length of time thus required to efface the
tiny individual atom, the entire cosmical career of our solar
system, or even that of the whole starry galaxy, shrinks into
utter nothingness. Whether we shall adopt the conclusion
suggested must depend on the extent of our speculative audacity.
We have seen wherein its probability consists, but in reasoning
upon such a scale we may fitly be cautious and modest in
accepting inferences, and our authors, we may be sure, would be
the first to recommend such modesty and caution. Even at the
dimensions to which our theorizing has here grown, we may for
instance discern the possible alternative of a simultaneous or
rhythmically successive generation and destruction of
vortex-atoms which would go far to modify the conclusion just
suggested. But here we must pause for a moment, reserving for a
second paper the weightier thoughts as to futurity which our
authors have sought to enwrap in these sublime physical
speculations.



PART SECOND.


UP to this point, however remote from ordinary every-day thoughts
may be the region of speculation which we have been called upon
to traverse, we have still kept within the limits of legitimate
scientific hypothesis. Though we have ventured for a goodly
distance into the unknown, we have not yet been required to
abandon our base of operations in the known. Of the views
presented in the preceding paper, some are wellnigh certainly
established, some are probable, some have a sort of plausibility,
others--to which we have refrained from giving assent--may
possibly be true; but none are irretrievably beyond the
jurisdiction of scientific tests. No suggestion has so far been
broached which a very little further increase of our scientific
knowledge may not show to be either eminently probable or
eminently improbable. We have kept pretty clear of mere
subjective guesses, such as men may wrangle about forever without
coming to any conclusion. The theory of the nebular origin of our
planetary system has come to command the assent of all persons
qualified to appreciate the evidence on which it is based; and
the more immediate conclusions which we have drawn from that
theory are only such as are commonly drawn by astronomers and
physicists. The doctrine of an intermolecular and interstellar
ether is wrapped up in the well-established undulatory theory of
light. Such is by no means the case with Sir William Thomson's
vortex-atom theory, which to-day is in somewhat the same
condition as the undulatory theory of Huyghens two centuries ago.
This, however, is none the less a hypothesis truly scientific in
conception, and in the speculations to which it leads us we are
still sure of dealing with views that admit at least of definite
expression and treatment. In other words, though our study of the
visible universe has led us to the recognition of a kind of
unseen world underlying the world of things that are seen, yet
concerning the economy of this unseen world we have not been led
to entertain any hypothesis that has not its possible
justification in our experiences of visible phenomena.

We are now called upon, following in the wake of our esteemed
authors, to venture on a different sort of exploration, in which
we must cut loose altogether from our moorings in the world of
which we have definite experience. We are invited to entertain
suggestions concerning the peculiar economy of the invisible
portion of the universe which we have no means of subjecting to
any sort of test of probability, either experimental or
deductive. These suggestions are, therefore, not to be regarded
as properly scientific; but, with this word of caution, we may
proceed to show what they are.

Compared with the life and death of cosmical systems which we
have heretofore contemplated, the life and death of individuals
of the human race may perhaps seem a small matter; yet because we
are ourselves the men who live and die, the small event is of
vastly greater interest to us than the grand series of events of
which it is part and parcel. It is natural that we should be more
interested in the ultimate fate of humanity than in the fate of a
world which is of no account to us save as our present
dwelling-place. Whether the human soul is to come to an end or
not is to us a more important question than whether the visible
universe, with its matter and energy, is to be absorbed in an
invisible ether. It is indeed only because we are interested in
the former question that we are so curious about the latter. If
we could dissociate ourselves from the material universe, our
habitat, we should probably speculate much less about its past
and future. We care very little what becomes of the black ball of
the earth, after all life has vanished from its surface; or, if
we care at all about it, it is only because our thoughts about
the career of the earth are necessarily mixed up with our
thoughts about life. Hence in considering the probable ultimate
destiny of the physical universe, our innermost purpose must be
to know what is to become of all this rich and wonderful life of
which the physical universe is the theatre. Has it all been
developed, apparently at almost infinite waste of effort, only to
be abolished again before it has attained to completeness, or
does it contain or shelter some indestructible element which
having drawn sustenance for a while from the senseless turmoil of
physical phenomena shall still survive their final decay? This
question is closely connected with the time-honoured question of
the meaning, purpose, or tendency of the world. In the career of
the world is life an end, or a means toward an end, or only an
incidental phenomenon in which we can discover no meaning?
Contemporary theologians seem generally to believe that one
necessary result of modern scientific inquiry must be the
destruction of the belief in immortal life, since against every
thoroughgoing expounder of scientific knowledge they seek to hurl
the charge of "materialism." Their doubts, however, are not
shared by our authors, thorough men of science as they are,
though their mode of dealing with the question may not be such as
we can well adopt. While upholding the doctrine of evolution, and
all the so-called "materialistic" views of modern science, they
not only regard the hypothesis of a future life as admissible,
but they even go so far as to propound a physical theory as to
the nature of existence after death. Let us see what this
physical theory is.

As far as the visible universe is concerned, we do not find in it
any evidence of immortality or of permanence of any sort, unless
it be in the sum of potential and kinetic energies on the
persistency of which depends our principle of continuity. In
ordinary language "the stars in their courses" serve as symbols
of permanence, yet we have found reason to regard them as but
temporary phenomena. So, in the language of our authors, "if we
take the individual man, we find that he lives his short tale of
years, and that then the visible machinery which connects him
with the past, as well as that which enables him to act in the
present, falls into ruin and is brought to an end. If any germ or
potentiality remains, it is certainly not connected with the
visible order of things." In like manner our race is pretty sure
to come to an end long before the destruction of the planet from
which it now gets its sustenance. And in our authors opinion even
the universe will by and by become "old and effete, no less truly
than the individual: it is a glorious garment this visible
universe, but not an immortal one; we must look elsewhere if we
are to be clothed with immortality as with a garment."

It is at this point that our authors call attention to "the
apparently wasteful character of the arrangements of the visible
universe." The fact is one which we have already sufficiently
described, but we shall do well to quote the words in which our
authors recur to it: "All but a very small portion of the sun's
heat goes day by day into what we call empty space, and it is
only this very small remainder that is made use of by the various
planets for purposes of their own. Can anything be more
perplexing than this seemingly frightful expenditure of the very
life and essence of the system? That this vast store of
high-class energy should be doing nothing but travelling outwards
in space at the rate of 188,000 miles per second is hardly
conceivable, especially when the result of it is the inevitable
destruction of the visible universe."

Pursuing this teleological argument, it is suggested that perhaps
this apparent waste of energy is "only an arrangement in virtue
of which our universe keeps up a memory of the past at the
expense of the present, inasmuch as all memory consists in an
investiture of present resources in order to keep a hold upon the
past." Recourse is had to the ingenious argument in which Mr.
Babbage showed that "if we had power to follow and detect the
minutest effects of any disturbance, each particle of existing
matter must be a register of all that has happened. The track of
every canoe, of every vessel that has yet disturbed the surface
of the ocean, whether impelled by manual force or elemental
power, remains forever registered in the future movement of all
succeeding particles which may occupy its place. The furrow which
is left is, indeed, instantly filled up by the closing waters;
but they draw after them other and larger portions of the
surrounding element, and these again, once moved, communicate
motion to others in endless succession." In like manner, "the air
itself is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written
all that man has ever said or even whispered. There in their
mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest as well
as the latest sighs of mortality, stand forever recorded vows
unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united
movements of each particle the testimony of man's changeful
will."[6] In some such way as this, records of every movement
that takes place in the world are each moment transmitted, with
the speed of light, through the invisible ocean of ether with
which the world is surrounded. Even the molecular displacements
which occur in our brains when we feel and think are thus
propagated in their effects into the unseen world. The world of
ether is thus regarded by our authors as in some sort the obverse
or complement of the world of sensible matter, so that whatever
energy is dissipated in the one is by the same act accumulated in
the other. It is like the negative plate in photography, where
light answers to shadow and shadow to light. Or, still better, it
is like the case of an equation in which whatever quantity you
take from one side is added to the other with a contrary sign,
while the relation of equality remains undisturbed. Thus, it will
be noticed, from the ingenious and subtle, but quite defensible
suggestion of Mr. Babbage, a leap is made to an assumption which
cannot be defended scientifically, but only teleologically. It is
one thing to say that every movement in the visible world
transmits a record of itself to the surrounding ether, in such a
way that from the undulation of the ether a sufficiently powerful
intelligence might infer the character of the generating movement
in the visible world. It is quite another thing to say that the
ether is organized in such a complex and delicate way as to be
like a negative image or counterpart of the world of sensible
matter. The latter view is no doubt ingenious, but it is
gratuitous. It is sustained not by scientific analogy, but by the
desire to find some assignable use for the energy which is
constantly escaping from visible matter into invisible ether. The
moment we ask how do we know that this energy is not really
wasted, or that it is not put to some use wholly undiscoverable
by human intelligence, this assumption of an organized ether is
at once seen to be groundless. It belongs not to the region of
science, but to that of pure mythology.

[6] Babbage, Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, p. 115; Jevons,
Principles of Science, Vol. II. p. 455.


In justice to our authors, however, it should be remembered that
this assumption is put forth not as something scientifically
probable, but as something which for aught we know to the
contrary may possibly be true. This, to be sure, we need not
deny; nor if we once allow this prodigious leap of inference,
shall we find much difficulty in reaching the famous conclusion
that "thought conceived to affect the matter of another universe
simultaneously with this may explain a future state." This
proposition, quaintly couched in an anagram, like the discoveries
of old astronomers, was published last year in "Nature," as
containing the gist of the forthcoming book. On the
negative-image hypothesis it is not hard to see how thought is
conceived to affect the seen and the unseen worlds
simultaneously. Every act of consciousness is accompanied by
molecular displacements in the brain, and these are of course
responded to by movements in the ethereal world. Thus as a series
of conscious states build up a continuous memory in strict
accordance with physical laws of motion,[7] so a correlative
memory is simultaneously built up in the ethereal world out of
the ethereal correlatives of the molecular displacements which go
on in our brains. And as there is a continual transfer of energy
from the visible world to the ether, the extinction of vital
energy which we call death must coincide in some way with the
awakening of vital energy in the correlative world; so that the
darkening of consciousness here is coincident with its dawning
there. In this way death is for the individual but a transfer
from one physical state of existence to another; and so, on the
largest scale, the death or final loss of energy by the whole
visible universe has its counterpart in the acquirement of a
maximum of life by the correlative unseen world.

There seems to be a certain sort of rigorous logical consistency
in this daring speculation; but really the propositions of which
it consists are so far from answering to anything within the
domain of human experience that we are unable to tell whether any
one of them logically follows from its predecessor or not. It is
evident that we are quite out of the region of scientific tests,
and to whatever view our authors may urge we can only languidly
assent that it is out of our power to disprove it.

[7] See my Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, Vol. II. pp. 142-148.


The essential weakness of such a theory as this lies in the fact
that it is thoroughly materialistic in character. It is currently
assumed that the doctrine of a life after death cannot be
defended on materialistic grounds, but this is altogether too
hasty an assumption. Our authors, indeed, are not philosophical
materialists, like Dr. Priestley,--who nevertheless believed in a
future life,--but one of the primary doctrines of materialism
lies at the bottom of their argument. Materialism holds for one
thing that consciousness is a product of a peculiar organization
of matter, and for another thing that consciousness cannot
survive the disorganization of the material body with which it is
associated. As held by philosophical materialists, like Buchner
and Moleschott, these two opinions are strictly consistent with
each other; nay, the latter seems to be the inevitable inference
from the former, though Priestley did not so regard it. Now our
authors very properly refuse to commit themselves to the opinion
that mind is the product of matter, but their argument
nevertheless implies that some sort of material vehicle is
necessary for the continuance of mind in a future state of
existence. This material vehicle they seek to supply in the
theory which connects by invisible bonds of transmitted energy
the perishable material body with its counterpart in the world of
ether. The materialism of the argument is indeed partly veiled by
the terminology in which this counterpart is called a "spiritual
body," but in this novel use or abuse of scriptural language
there seems to me to be a strange confusion of ideas. Bear in
mind that the "invisible universe" into which energy is
constantly passing is simply the luminiferous ether, which our
authors, to suit the requirements of their hypothesis, have
gratuitously endowed with a complexity and variety of structure
analogous to that of the visible world of matter. Their language
is not always quite so precise as one could desire, for while
they sometimes speak of the ether itself as the "unseen
universe," they sometimes allude to a primordial medium yet
subtler in constitution and presumably more immaterial. Herein
lies the confusion. Why should the luminiferous ether, or any
primordial medium in which it may have been generated, be
regarded as in any way "spiritual"? Great physicists, like less
trained thinkers, are sometimes liable to be unconsciously
influenced by old associations of ideas which, ostensibly
repudiated, still lurk under cover of the words we use. I fear
that the old associations which led the ancients to describe the
soul as a breath or a shadow, and which account for the
etymologies of such words as "ghost" and "spirit," have had
something to do with this spiritualization of the interstellar
ether. Some share may also have been contributed by the Platonic
notion of the "grossness" or "bruteness" of tangible matter,--a
notion which has survived in Christian theology, and which
educated men of the present day have by no means universally
outgrown. Save for some such old associations as these, why
should it be supposed that matter becomes "spriritualized" as it
diminishes in apparent substantiality? Why should matter be
pronounced respectable in the inverse ratio of its density or
ponderability? Why is a diamond any more chargeable with
"grossness" than a cubic centimetre of hydrogen? Obviously such
fancies are purely of mythologic parentage. Now the luminiferous
ether, upon which our authors make such extensive demands, may be
physically "ethereal" enough, in spite of the enormous elasticity
which leads Professor Jevons to characterize it as "adamantine";
but most assuredly we have not the slightest reason for speaking
of it as "immaterial" or "spiritual." Though we are unable to
weigh it in the balance, we at least know it as a transmitter of
undulatory movements, the size and shape of which we can
accurately measure. Its force-relations with ponderable matter
are not only universally and incessantly maintained, but they
have that precisely quantitative character which implies an
essential identity between the innermost natures of the two
substances. We have seen reason for thinking it probable that
ether and ordinary matter are alike composed of vortex-rings in a
quasi-frictionless fluid; but whatever be the fate of this subtle
hypothesis, we may be sure that no theory will ever be
entertained in which the analysis of ether shall require
different symbols from that of ordinary matter. In our authors'
theory, therefore, the putting on of immortality is in no wise
the passage from a material to a spiritual state. It is the
passage from one kind of materially conditioned state to another.
The theory thus appeals directly to our experiences of the
behaviour of matter; and in deriving so little support as it does
from these experiences, it remains an essentially weak
speculation, whatever we may think of its ingenuity. For so long
as we are asked to accept conclusions drawn from our experiences
of the material world, we are justified in demanding something
more than mere unconditioned possibility. We require some
positive evidence, be it ever so little in amount; and no theory
which cannot furnish such positive evidence is likely to carry to
our minds much practical conviction.

This is what I meant by saying that the great weakness of the
hypothesis here criticized lies in its materialistic character.
In contrast with this we shall presently see that the assertion
of a future life which is not materially conditioned, though
unsupported by any item of experience whatever, may nevertheless
be an impregnable assertion. But first I would conclude the
foregoing criticism by ruling out altogether the sense in which
our authors use the expression "Unseen Universe." Scientific
inference, however remote, is connected by such insensible
gradations with ordinary perception, that one may well question
the propriety of applying the term "unseen" to that which is
presented to "the mind's eye" as inevitable matter of inference.
It is true that we cannot see the ocean of ether in which visible
matter floats; but there are many other invisible things which
yet we do not regard as part of the "unseen world." I do not see
the air which I am now breathing within the four walls of my
study, yet its existence is sufficiently a matter of
sense-perception as it fills my lungs and fans my cheek. The
atoms which compose a drop of water are not only invisible, but
cannot in any way be made the objects of sense-perception; yet by
proper inferences from their behaviour we can single them out for
measurement, so that Sir William Thomson can tell us that if the
drop of water were magnified to the size of the earth, the
constituent atoms would be larger than peas, but not so large as
billiard-balls. If we do not see such atoms with our eyes, we
have one adequate reason in their tiny dimensions, though there
are further reasons than this. It would be hard to say why the
luminiferous ether should be relegated to the "unseen world" any
more than the material atom. Whatever we know as possessing
resistance and extension, whatever we can subject to mathematical
processes of measurement, we also conceive as existing in such
shape that, with appropriate eyes and under proper visual
conditions, we MIGHT see it, and we are not entitled to draw any
line of demarcation between such an object of inference and
others which may be made objects of sense-perception. To set
apart the ether as constituting an "unseen universe" is therefore
illegitimate and confusing. It introduces a distinction where
there is none, and obscures the fact that both invisible ether
and visible matter form but one grand universe in which the sum
of energy remains constant, though the order of its distribution
endlessly varies.

Very different would be the logical position of a theory which
should assume the existence of an "Unseen World" entirely
spiritual in constitution, and in which material conditions like
those of the visible world should have neither place nor meaning.
Such a world would not consist of ethers or gases or ghosts, but
of purely psychical relations akin to such as constitute thoughts
and feelings when our minds are least solicited by
sense-perceptions. In thus marking off the "Unseen World" from
the objective universe of which we have knowledge, our line of
demarcation would at least be drawn in the right place. The
distinction between psychical and material phenomena is a
distinction of a different order from all other distinctions
known to philosophy, and it immeasurably transcends all others.
The progress of modern discovery has in no respect weakened the
force of Descartes's remark, that between that of which the
differential attribute is Thought and that of which the
differential attribute is Extension, there can be no similarity,
no community of nature whatever. By no scientific cunning of
experiment or deduction can Thought be weighed or measured or in
any way assimilated to such things as may be made the actual or
possible objects of sense-perception. Modern discovery, so far
from bridging over the chasm between Mind and Matter, tends
rather to exhibit the distinction between them as absolute. It
has, indeed, been rendered highly probable that every act of
consciousness is accompanied by a molecular motion in the cells
and fibres of the brain; and materialists have found great
comfort in this fact, while theologians and persons of little
faith have been very much frightened by it. But since no one ever
pretended that thought can go on, under the conditions of the
present life, without a brain, one finds it rather hard to
sympathize either with the self-congratulations of Dr. Buchner's
disciples[8] or with the terrors of their opponents. But what has
been less commonly remarked is the fact that when the thought and
the molecular movement thus occur simultaneously, in no
scientific sense is the thought the product of the molecular
movement. The sun-derived energy of motion latent in the food we
eat is variously transformed within the organism, until some of
it appears as the motion of the molecules of a little globule of
nerve-matter in the brain. In a rough way we might thus say that
the chemical energy of the food indirectly produces the motion of
these little nerve-molecules. But does this motion of
nerve-molecules now produce a thought or state of consciousness?
By no means. It simply produces some other motion of
nerve-molecules, and this in turn produces motion of contraction
or expansion in some muscle, or becomes transformed into the
chemical energy of some secreting gland. At no point in the whole
circuit does a unit of motion disappear as motion to reappear as
a unit of consciousness. The physical process is complete in
itself, and the thought does not enter into it. All that we can
say is, that the occurrence of the thought is simultaneous with
that part of the physical process which consists of a molecular
movement in the brain.[9] To be sure, the thought is always there
when summoned, but it stands outside the dynamic circuit, as
something utterly alien from and incomparable with the events
which summon it. No doubt, as Professor Tyndall observes, if we
knew exhaustively the physical state of the brain, "the
corresponding thought or feeling might be inferred; or, given the
thought or feeling, the corresponding state of the brain might be
inferred. But how inferred? It would be at bottom not a case of
logical inference at all, but of empirical association. You may
reply that many of the inferences of science are of this
character; the inference, for example, that an electric current
of a given direction will deflect a magnetic needle in a definite
way; but the cases differ in this, that the passage from the
current to the needle, if not demonstrable, is thinkable, and
that we entertain no doubt as to the final mechanical solution of
the problem. But the passage from the physics of the brain to the
corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that
a definite thought and a definite molecular action in the brain
occur simultaneously; we do not possess the intellectual organ,
nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us
to pass by a process of reasoning from the one to the other. They
appear together, but we do not know why."[10]

[8] The Nation once wittily described these people as "people who
believe that they are going to die like the beasts, and who
congratulate themselves that they are going to die like the
beasts."

[9] For a fuller exposition of this point, see my Outlines of
Cosmic Philosophy, Vol. II. pp. 436-445.

[10] Fragments of Science, p. 119.


An unseen world consisting of purely psychical or spiritual
phenomena would accordingly be demarcated by an absolute gulf
from what we call the material universe, but would not
necessarily be discontinuous with the psychical phenomena which
we find manifested in connection with the world of matter. The
transfer of matter, or physical energy, or anything else that is
quantitatively measurable, into such an unseen world, may be set
down as impossible, by reason of the very definition of such a
world. Any hypothesis which should assume such a transfer would
involve a contradiction in terms. But the hypothesis of a
survival of present psychical phenomena in such a world, after
being denuded of material conditions, is not in itself absurd or
self-contradictory, though it may be impossible to support it by
any arguments drawn from the domain of human experience. Such is
the shape which it seems to me that, in the present state of
philosophy, the hypothesis of a future life must assume. We have
nothing to say to gross materialistic notions of ghosts and
bogies, and spirits that upset tables and whisper to ignorant
vulgar women the wonderful information that you once had an aunt
Susan. The unseen world imagined in our hypothesis is not
connected with the present material universe by any such
"invisible bonds" as would allow Bacon and Addison to come to
Boston and write the silliest twaddle in the most ungrammatical
English before a roomful of people who have never learned how to
test what they are pleased to call the "evidence of their
senses." Our hypothesis is expressly framed so as to exclude all
intercourse whatever between the unseen world of spirit
unconditioned by matter and the present world of spirit
conditioned by matter in which all our experiences have been
gathered. The hypothesis being framed in such a way, the question
is, What has philosophy to say to it? Can we, by searching our
experiences, find any reason for adopting such an hypothesis? Or,
on the other hand, supposing we can find no such reason, would
the total failure of experimental evidence justify us in
rejecting it?

The question is so important that I will restate it. I have
imagined a world made up of psychical phenomena, freed from the
material conditions under which alone we know such phenomena. Can
we adduce any proof of the possibility of such a world? Or if we
cannot, does our failure raise the slightest presumption that
such a world is impossible?

The reply to the first clause of the question is sufficiently
obvious. We have no experience whatever of psychical phenomena
save as manifested in connection with material phenomena. We know
of Mind only as a group of activities which are never exhibited
to us except through the medium of motions of matter. In all our
experience we have never encountered such activities save in
connection with certain very complicated groupings of highly
mobile material particles into aggregates which we call living
organisms. And we have never found them manifested to a very
conspicuous extent save in connection with some of those
specially organized aggregates which have vertebrate skeletons
and mammary glands. Nay, more, when we survey the net results of
our experience up to the present time, we find indisputable
evidence that in the past history of the visible universe
psychical phenomena have only begun to be manifested in
connection with certain complex aggregates of material phenomena.
As these material aggregates have age by age become more complex
in structure, more complex psychical phenomena have been
exhibited. The development of Mind has from the outset been
associated with the development of Matter. And to-day, though
none of us has any knowledge of the end of psychical phenomena in
his own case, yet from all the marks by which we recognize such
phenomena in our fellow-creatures, whether brute or human, we are
taught that when certain material processes have been gradually
or suddenly brought to an end, psychical phenomena are no longer
manifested. From first to last, therefore, our appeal to
experience gets but one response. We have not the faintest shadow
of evidence wherewith to make it seem probable that Mind can
exist except in connection with a material body. Viewed from this
standpoint of terrestrial experience, there is no more reason for
supposing that consciousness survives the dissolution of the
brain than for supposing that the pungent flavour of table-salt
survives its decomposition into metallic sodium and gaseous
chlorine.

Our answer from this side is thus unequivocal enough. Indeed, so
uniform has been the teaching of experience in this respect that
even in their attempts to depict a life after death, men have
always found themselves obliged to have recourse to materialistic
symbols. To the mind of a savage the future world is a mere
reproduction of the present, with its everlasting huntings and
fightings. The early Christians looked forward to a renovation of
the earth and the bodily resurrection from Sheol of the
righteous. The pictures of hell and purgatory, and even of
paradise, in Dante's great poem, are so intensely materialistic
as to seem grotesque in this more spiritual age. But even to-day
the popular conceptions of heaven are by no means freed from the
notion of matter; and persons of high culture, who realize the
inadequacy of these popular conceptions, are wont to avoid the
difficulty by refraining from putting their hopes and beliefs
into any definite or describable form. Not unfrequently one sees
a smile raised at the assumption of knowledge or insight by
preachers who describe in eloquent terms the joys of a future
state; yet the smile does not necessarily imply any scepticism as
to the abstract probability of the soul's survival. The
scepticism is aimed at the character of the description rather
than at the reality of the thing described. It implies a tacit
agreement, among cultivated people, that the unseen world must be
purely spiritual in constitution. The agreement is not habitually
expressed in definite formulas, for the reason that no mental
image of a purely spiritual world can be formed. Much stress is
commonly laid upon the recognition of friends in a future life;
and however deep a meaning may be given to the phrase "the love
of God," one does not easily realize that a heavenly existence
could be worth the longing that is felt for it, if it were to
afford no further scope for the pure and tender household
affections which give to the present life its powerful though
indefinable charm. Yet the recognition of friends in a purely
spiritual world is something of which we can frame no conception
whatever. We may look with unspeakable reverence on the features
of wife or child, less because of their physical beauty than
because of the beauty of soul to which they give expression, but
to imagine the perception of soul by soul apart from the material
structure and activities in which soul is manifested, is
something utterly beyond our power. Nay, even when we try to
represent to ourselves the psychical activity of any single soul
by itself as continuing without the aid of the physical machinery
of sensation, we get into unmanageable difficulties. A great part
of the contents of our minds consists of sensuous (chiefly
visual) images, and though we may imagine reflection to go on
without further images supplied by vision or hearing, touch or
taste or smell, yet we cannot well see how fresh experiences
could be gained in such a state. The reader, if he require
further illustrations, can easily follow out this line of
thought. Enough has no doubt been said to convince him that our
hypothesis of the survival of conscious activity apart from
material conditions is not only utterly unsupported by any
evidence that can be gathered from the world of which we have
experience, but is utterly and hopelessly inconceivable.

It is inconceivable BECAUSE it is entirely without foundation in
experience. Our powers of conception are closely determined by
the limits of our experience. When a proposition, or combination
of ideas, is suggested, for which there has never been any
precedent in human experience, we find it to be UNTHINKABLE,--the
ideas will not combine. The proposition remains one which we may
utter and defend, and perhaps vituperate our neighbours for not
accepting, but it remains none the less an unthinkable
proposition. It takes terms which severally have meanings and
puts them together into a phrase which has no meaning.[11] Now
when we try to combine the idea of the continuance of conscious
activity with the idea of the entire cessation of material
conditions, and thereby to assert the existence of a purely
spiritual world, we find that we have made an unthinkable
proposition. We may defend our hypothesis as passionately as we
like, but when we strive coolly to realize it in thought we find
ourselves baulked at every step.

[11] See my Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, Vol. I. pp. 64-67.


But now we have to ask, How much does this inconceivability
signify? In most cases, when we say that a statement is
inconceivable, we practically declare it to be untrue; when we
say that a statement is without warrant in experience, we plainly
indicate that we consider it unworthy of our acceptance. This is
legitimate in the majority of cases with which we have to deal in
the course of life, because experience, and the capacities of
thought called out and limited by experience, are our only guides
in the conduct of life. But every one will admit that our
experience is not infinite, and that our capacity of conception
is not coextensive with the possibilities of existence. It is not
only possible, but in the very highest degree probable, that
there are many things in heaven, if not on earth, which are
undreamed of in our philosophy. Since our ability to conceive
anything is limited by the extent of our experience, and since
human experience is very far from being infinite, it follows that
there may be, and in all probability is, an immense region of
existence in every way as real as the region which we know, yet
concerning which we cannot form the faintest rudiment of a
conception. Any hypothesis relating to such a region of existence
is not only not disproved by the total failure of evidence in its
favour, but the total failure of evidence does not raise even the
slightest prima facie presumption against its validity.

These considerations apply with great force to the hypothesis of
an unseen world in which psychical phenomena persist in the
absence of material conditions. It is true, on the one hand, that
we can bring up no scientific evidence in support of such an
hypothesis. But on the other hand it is equally true that in the
very nature of things no such evidence could be expected to be
forthcoming: even were there such evidence in abundance, it could
not be accessible to us. The existence of a single soul, or
congeries of psychical phenomena, unaccompanied by a material
body, would be evidence sufficient to demonstrate the hypothesis.
But in the nature of things, even were there a million such souls
round about us, we could not become aware of the existence of one
of them, for we have no organ or faculty for the perception of
soul apart from the material structure and activities in which it
has been manifested throughout the whole course of our
experience. Even our own self-consciousness involves the
consciousness of ourselves as partly material bodies. These
considerations show that our hypothesis is very different from
the ordinary hypotheses with which science deals. The entire
absence of testimony does not raise a negative presumption except
in cases where testimony is accessible. In the hypotheses with
which scientific men are occupied, testimony is always
accessible; and if we do not find any, the presumption is raised
that there is none. When Dr. Bastian tells us that he has found
living organisms to be generated in sealed flasks from which all
living germs had been excluded, we demand the evidence for his
assertion. The testimony of facts is in this case hard to elicit,
and only skilful reasoners can properly estimate its worth. But
still it is all accessible. With more or less labour it can be
got at; and if we find that Dr. Bastian has produced no evidence
save such as may equally well receive a different interpretation
from that which he has given it, we rightly feel that a strong
presumption has been raised against his hypothesis. It is a case
in which we are entitled to expect to find the favouring facts if
there are any, and so long as we do not find such, we are
justified in doubting their existence. So when our authors
propound the hypothesis of an unseen universe consisting of
phenomena which occur in the interstellar ether, or even in some
primordial fluid with which the ether has physical relations, we
are entitled to demand their proofs. It is not enough to tell us
that we cannot disprove such a theory. The burden of proof lies
with them. The interstellar ether is something concerning the
physical properties of which we have some knowledge; and surely,
if all the things are going on which they suppose in a medium so
closely related to ordinary matter, there ought to be some
traceable indications of the fact. At least, until the contrary
can be shown, we must refuse to believe that all the testimony in
a case like this is utterly inaccessible; and accordingly, so
long as none is found, especially so long as none is even
alleged, we feel that a presumption is raised against their
theory.

These illustrations will show, by sheer contrast, how different
it is with the hypothesis of an unseen world that is purely
spiritual. The testimony in such a case must, under the
conditions of the present life, be forever inaccessible. It lies
wholly outside the range of experience. However abundant it may
be, we cannot expect to meet with it. And accordingly our failure
to produce it does not raise even the slightest presumption
against our theory. When conceived in this way, the belief in a
future life is without scientific support; but at the same time
it is placed beyond the need of scientific support and beyond the
range of scientific criticism. It is a belief which no imaginable
future advance in physical discovery can in any way impugn. It is
a belief which is in no sense irrational, and which may be
logically entertained without in the least affecting our
scientific habit of mind or influencing our scientific
conclusions.

To take a brief illustration: we have alluded to the fact that in
the history of our present world the development of mental
phenomena has gone on hand in hand with the development of
organic life, while at the same time we have found it impossible
to explain mental phenomena as in any sense the product of
material phenomena. Now there is another side to all this. The
great lesson which Berkeley taught mankind was that what we call
material phenomena are really the products of consciousness
co-operating with some Unknown Power (not material) existing
beyond consciousness. We do very well to speak of "matter" in
common parlance, but all that the word really means is a group of
qualities which have no existence apart from our minds. Modern
philosophers have quite generally accepted this conclusion, and
every attempt to overturn Berkeley's reasoning has hitherto
resulted in complete and disastrous failure. In admitting this,
we do not admit the conclusion of Absolute Idealism, that nothing
exists outside of consciousness. What we admit as existing
independently of our own consciousness is the Power that causes
in us those conscious states which we call the perception of
material qualities. We have no reason for regarding this Power as
in itself material: indeed, we cannot do so, since by the theory
material qualities have no existence apart from our minds. I have
elsewhere sought to show that less difficulty is involved in
regarding this Power outside of us as quasi-psychical, or in some
measure similar to the mental part of ourselves; and I have gone
on to conclude that this Power may be identical with what men
have, in all times and by the aid of various imperfect symbols,
endeavoured to apprehend as Deity.[12] We are thus led to a view
of things not very unlike the views entertained by Spinoza and
Berkeley. We are led to the inference that what we call the
material universe is but the manifestation of infinite Deity to
our finite minds. Obviously, on this view, Matter--the only thing
to which materialists concede real existence--is simply an
orderly phantasmagoria; and God and the Soul--which materialists
regard as mere fictions of the imagination--are the only
conceptions that answer to real existences.

[12] See my Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, Part I. Chap. IV.;
Part III. Chaps. III., IV.


In the foregoing paragraph I have been setting down opinions with
which I am prepared to agree, and which are not in conflict with
anything that our study of the development of the objective world
has taught us. In so far as that study may be supposed to bear on
the question of a future life, two conclusions are open to us.
First we may say that since the phenomena of mind appear and run
their course along with certain specialized groups of material
phenomena, so, too, they must disappear when these specialized
groups are broken up. Or, in other words, we may say that every
living person is an organized whole; consciousness is something
which pertains to this organized whole, as music belongs to the
harp that is entire; but when the harp is broken it is silent,
and when the organized whole of personality falls to pieces
consciousness ceases forever. To many well-disciplined minds this
conclusion seems irresistible; and doubtless it would be a sound
one--a good Baconian conclusion--if we were to admit, with the
materialists, that the possibilities of existence are limited by
our tiny and ephemeral experience.

But now, supposing some Platonic speculator were to come along
and insist upon our leaving room for an alternative conclusion;
suppose he were to urge upon us that all this process of material
development, with the discovery of which our patient study has
been rewarded, may be but the temporary manifestation of
relations otherwise unknown between ourselves and the infinite
Deity; suppose he were to argue that psychical qualities may be
inherent in a spiritual substance which under certain conditions
becomes incarnated in matter, to wear it as a perishable garment
for a brief season, but presently to cast it off and enter upon
the freedom of a larger existence;--what reply should we be bound
to make, bearing in mind that the possibilities of existence are
in no wise limited by our experience? Obviously we should be
bound to admit that in sound philosophy this conclusion is just
as likely to be true as the other. We should, indeed, warn him
not to call on us to help him to establish it by scientific
arguments; and we should remind him that he must not make illicit
use of his extra-experiential hypotheses by bringing them into
the treatment of scientific questions that lie within the range
of experience. In science, for example, we make no use of the
conception of a "spiritual substance" (or of a "material
substance" either), because we can get along sufficiently well by
dealing solely with qualities. But with this general
understanding we should feel bound to concede the impregnableness
of his main position.

I have supposed this theory only as an illustration, not as a
theory which I am prepared to adopt. My present purpose is not to
treat as an advocate the question of a future life, but to
endeavour to point out what conditions should be observed in
treating the question philosophically. It seems to me that a
great deal is gained when we have distinctly set before us what
are the peculiar conditions of proof in the case of such
transcendental questions. We have gained a great deal when we
have learned how thoroughly impotent, how truly irrelevant, is
physical investigation in the presence of such a question. If we
get not much positive satisfaction for our unquiet yearnings, we
occupy at any rate a sounder philosophic position when we
recognize the limits within which our conclusions, whether
positive or negative, are valid.

It seems not improbable that Mr. Mill may have had in mind
something like the foregoing considerations when he suggested
that there is no reason why one should not entertain the belief
in a future life if the belief be necessary to one's spiritual
comfort. Perhaps no suggestion in Mr. Mill's richly suggestive
posthumous work has been more generally condemned as
unphilosophical, on the ground that in matters of belief we must
be guided, not by our likes and dislikes, but by the evidence
that is accessible. The objection is certainly a sound one so far
as it relates to scientific questions where evidence is
accessible. To hesitate to adopt a well-supported theory because
of some vague preference for a different view is in scientific
matters the one unpardonable sin,--a sin which has been only too
often committed. Even in matters which lie beyond the range of
experience, where evidence is inaccessible, desire is not to be
regarded as by itself an adequate basis for belief. But it seems
to me that Mr. Mill showed a deeper knowledge of the limitations
of scientific method than his critics, when he thus hinted at the
possibility of entertaining a belief not amenable to scientific
tests. The hypothesis of a purely spiritual unseen world, as
above described, is entirely removed from the jurisdiction of
physical inquiry, and can only be judged on general
considerations of what has been called "moral probability"; and
considerations of this sort are likely, in the future as in the
past, to possess different values for different minds. He who, on
such considerations, entertains a belief in a future life may not
demand that his sceptical neighbour shall be convinced by the
same considerations; but his neighbour is at the same time
estopped from stigmatizing his belief as unphilosophical.

The consideration which must influence most minds in their
attitude toward this question, is the craving, almost universally
felt, for some teleological solution to the problem of existence.
Why we are here now is a question of even profounder interest
than whether we are to live hereafter. Unfortunately its solution
carries us no less completely beyond the range of experience! The
belief that all things are working together for some good end is
the most essential expression of religious faith: of all
intellectual propositions it is the one most closely related to
that emotional yearning for a higher and better life which is the
sum and substance of religion. Yet all the treatises on natural
theology that have ever been written have barely succeeded in
establishing a low degree of scientific probability for this
belief. In spite of the eight Bridgewater Treatises, and the
"Ninth" beside, dysteleology still holds full half the field as
against teleology. Most of this difficulty, however, results from
the crude anthropomorphic views which theologians have held
concerning God. Once admitting that the Divine attributes may be
(as they must be) incommensurably greater than human attributes,
our faith that all things are working together for good may
remain unimpugned.

To many minds such a faith will seem incompatible with belief in
the ultimate destruction of sentiency amid the general doom of
the material universe. A good end can have no meaning to us save
in relation to consciousness that distinguishes and knows the
good from the evil. There could be no better illustration of how
we are hemmed in than the very inadequacy of the words with which
we try to discuss this subject. Such words have all gained their
meanings from human experience, and hence of necessity carry
anthropomorphic implications. But we cannot help this. We must
think with the symbols with which experience has furnished us;
and when we so think, there does seem to be little that is even
intellectually satisfying in the awful picture which science
shows us, of giant worlds concentrating out of nebulous vapour,
developing with prodigious waste of energy into theatres of all
that is grand and sacred in spiritual endeavour, clashing and
exploding again into dead vapour-balls, only to renew the same
toilful process without end,--a senseless bubble-play of Titan
forces, with life, love, and aspiration brought forth only to be
extinguished. The human mind, however "scientific" its training,
must often recoil from the conclusion that this is all; and there
are moments when one passionately feels that this cannot be all.
On warm June mornings in green country lanes, with sweet
pine-odours wafted in the breeze which sighs through the
branches, and cloud-shadows flitting over far-off blue mountains,
while little birds sing their love-songs, and golden-haired
children weave garlands of wild roses; or when in the solemn
twilight we listen to wondrous harmonies of Beethoven and Chopin
that stir the heart like voices from an unseen world; at such
times one feels that the profoundest answer which science can
give to our questionings is but a superficial answer after all.
At these moments, when the world seems fullest of beauty, one
feels most strongly that it is but the harbinger of something
else,--that the ceaseless play of phenomena is no mere sport of
Titans, but an orderly scene, with its reason for existing, its

          "One divine far-off event
      To which the whole creation moves."


Difficult as it is to disentangle the elements of reasoning that
enter into these complex groups of feeling, one may still see, I
think, that it is speculative interest in the world, rather than
anxious interest in self, that predominates. The desire for
immortality in its lowest phase is merely the outcome of the
repugnance we feel toward thinking of the final cessation of
vigorous vital activity. Such a feeling is naturally strong with
healthy people. But in the mood which I have above tried to
depict, this feeling, or any other which is merely
self-regarding, is lost sight of in the feeling which associates
a future life with some solution of the burdensome problem of
existence. Had we but faith enough to lighten the burden of this
problem, the inferior question would perhaps be less absorbing.
Could we but know that our present lives are working together
toward some good end, even an end in no wise anthropomorphic, it
would be of less consequence whether we were individually to
endure. To the dog under the knife of the experimenter, the world
is a world of pure evil; yet could the poor beast but understand
the alleviation of human suffering to which he is contributing,
he would be forced to own that this is not quite true; and if he
were also a heroic or Christian dog, the thought would perhaps
take away from death its sting. The analogy may be a crude one;
but the reasonableness of the universe is at least as far above
our comprehension as the purposes of man surpass the
understanding of the dog. Believing, however, though as a simple
act of trust, that the end will crown the work, we may rise
superior to the question which has here concerned us, and
exclaim, in the supreme language of faith, "Though He slay me,
yet will I trust in Him!"

     July, 1875.



II. "THE TO-MORROW OF DEATH."

Few of those who find pleasure in frequenting bookstores can have
failed to come across one or more of the profusely illustrated
volumes in which M. Louis Figuier has sought to render dry
science entertaining to the multitude. And of those who may have
casually turned over their pages, there are probably none,
competent to form an opinion, who have not speedily perceived
that these pretentious books belong to the class of pests and
unmitigated nuisances in literature. Antiquated views, utter lack
of comprehension of the subjects treated, and shameless
unscrupulousness as to accuracy of statement, are faults but ill
atoned for by sensational pictures of the "dragons of the prime
that tare each other in their slime," or of the Newton-like brow
and silken curls of that primitive man in contrast with whom the
said dragons have been likened to "mellow music."

Nevertheless, the sort of scientific reputation which these
discreditable performances have gained for M. Figuier among an
uncritical public is such as to justify us in devoting a few
paragraphs to a book[13] which, on its own merits, is unworthy of
any notice whatever. "The To-morrow of Death"--if one were to put
his trust in the translator's prefatory note--discusses a grave
question upon "purely scientific methods." We are glad to see
this remark, because it shows what notions may be entertained by
persons of average intelligence with reference to "scientific
methods." Those--and they are many--who vaguely think that
science is something different from common-sense, and that any
book is scientific which talks about perihelia and asymptotes and
cetacea, will find their vague notions here well corroborated.
Quite different will be the impression made upon those--and they
are yet too few--who have learned that the method of science is
the common-sense method of cautiously weighing evidence and
withholding judgment where evidence is not forthcoming. If
talking about remote and difficult subjects suffice to make one
scientific, then is M. Figuier scientific to a quite terrible
degree. He writes about the starry heavens as if he had been
present at the hour of creation, or had at least accompanied the
Arabian prophet on his famous night-journey. Nor is his knowledge
of physiology and other abstruse sciences at all less remarkable.
But these things will cease to surprise us when we learn the
sources, hitherto suspected only in mythology, from which
favoured mortals can obtain a knowledge of what is going on
outside of our planet.

[13] The To-morrow of Death; or, The Future Life according to
Science. By Louis Figuier. Translated from the French by S. R.
Crocker. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1872.


The four inner planets being nearly alike in size (?) and in
length of day, M. Figuier infers, by strictly scientific methods,
that whatever is true of one of them, as our earth, will be true
of the others (p. 34). Hence, they are all inhabited by human
beings. It is true that human beings must find Venus rather warm,
and are not unlikely to be seriously incommoded by the tropical
climate of Mercury. But we must remember that "the men of Venus
and Mercury are made by nature to resist heat, as those of
Jupiter and Saturn are made to endure cold, and those of the
Earth and Mars to live in a mean temperature: OTHERWISE THEY
COULD NOT EXIST" (p. 72). In view of this charming specimen of a
truly scientific inference, it is almost too bad to call
attention to the fact that M. Figuier is quite behind the age in
his statement of facts. So far from Jupiter and Saturn being
cold, observation plainly indicates that they are prodigiously
hot, if not even incandescent and partly self-luminous; the
explanation being that, by reason of their huge bulk, they still
retain much of the primitive heat which smaller planets have more
quickly radiated away. As for M. Figuier's statement, that polar
snows have been witnessed on these planets, it is simply untrue;
no such thing has ever been seen there. Mars, on the other hand,
has been observed to resemble in many important respects its near
neighbour, the Earth; whence our author declares that if an
aeronaut were to shoot clear of terrestrial gravitation and land
upon Mars, he would unquestionably suppose himself to be still
upon the earth. For aerolites, it seems, are somehow fired down
upon our planet both from Mars and from Venus; and aerolites
sometimes contain vegetable matter (?). Therefore, Mars has a
vegetation, and very likely its red colour is caused by its
luxuriant autumnal foliage! (p. 47.) To return to Jupiter: this
planet, indeed, has inconveniently short days. "In his 'Picture
of the Heavens,' the German astronomer, Littrow (these Germans
think of nothing but gormandizing), asks how the people of
Jupiter order their meals in the short interval of five hours."
Nevertheless, says our author, the great planet is compensated
for this inconvenience by its equable and delicious climate.

In view, however, of our author's more striking and original
disclosures, one would suppose that all this discussion of the
physical conditions of existence on the various planets might
have been passed over without detriment to the argument. After
these efforts at proving (for M. Figuier presumably regards this
rigmarole as proof) that all the members of our solar system are
habitable, the interplanetary ether is forthwith peopled thickly
with "souls," without any resort to argument. This, we suppose,
is one of those scientific truths which as M. Figuier tells us,
precede and underlie demonstration. Upon this impregnable basis
is reared the scientific theory of a future life. When we die our
soul passes into some other terrestrial body, unless we have been
very good, in which case we at once soar aloft and join the noble
fraternity of the ether-folk. Bad men and young children, on
dying, must undergo renewed probation here below, but ultimately
all pass away into the interplanetary ether. The dweller in ether
is chiefly distinguished from the mundane mortal by his acute
senses and his ability to subsist without food. He can see as if
through a telescope and microscope combined. His intelligence is
so great that in comparison an Aristotle would seem idiotic. It
should not be forgotten, too, that he possesses eighty-five per
cent of soul to fifteen per cent of body, whereas in terrestrial
man the two elements are mixed in equal proportions. There is no
sex among the ether-folk, their numbers being kept up by the
influx of souls from the various planets. "Alimentation, that
necessity which tyrannizes over men and animals, is not imposed
upon the inhabitants of ether. Their bodies must be repaired and
sustained by the simple respiration of the fluid in which they
are immersed, that is, of ether." Most likely, continues our
scientific author, the physiological functions of the ether-folk
are confined to respiration, and that it is possible to breathe
"without numerous organs is proved by the fact that in all of a
whole class of animals--the batrachians--the mere bare skin
constitutes the whole machinery of respiration" (p. 95). Allowing
for the unfortunate slip of the pen by which "batrachians" are
substituted for "fresh-water polyps," how can we fail to admire
the severity of the scientific method employed in reaching these
interesting conclusions?

But the King of Serendib must die, nor will the relentless scythe
of Time spare our Etherians, with all their exalted attributes.
They will die repeatedly; and after having through sundry periods
of probation attained spiritual perfection, they will all pour
into the sun. Since it is the sun which originates life and
feeling and thought upon the surface of our earth, "why may we
not declare that the rays transmitted by the sun to the earth and
the other planets are nothing more nor less than the emanations
of these souls?" And now we may begin to form an adequate
conception, of the rigorously scientific character of our
author's method. There have been many hypotheses by which to
account for the supply of solar radiance. One of the most
ingenious and probable of these hypotheses is that of Helmholtz,
according to which the solar radiance is due to the arrested
motion of the sun's constituent particles toward their common
centre of gravity. But this is too fanciful to satisfy M.
Figuier. The speculations of Helmholtz "have the disadvantage of
resting on the idea of the sun's nebulosity,--an hypothesis which
would need to be more closely examined before serving as a basis
for so important a deduction." Accordingly, M. Figuier propounds
an explanation which possesses the signal advantage that there is
nothing hypothetical in it. "In our opinion, the solar radiation
is sustained by the continual influx of souls into the sun."
This, as the reader will perceive, is the well-known theory of
Mayer, that the solar heat is due to a perennial bombardment of
the sun by meteors, save that, in place of gross materialistic
meteors, M. Figuier puts ethereal souls. The ether-folk are daily
raining into the solar orb in untold millions, and to the
unceasing concussion is due the radiation which maintains life in
the planets, and thus the circle is complete.

In spite of their exalted position, the ether-folk do not disdain
to mingle with the affairs of terrestrial mortals. They give us
counsel in dreams, and it is from this source, we presume, that
our author has derived his rigid notions as to scientific method.
In evidence of this dream-theory we have the usual array of
cases, "a celebrated journalist, M. R----," "M. L----, a lawyer,"
etc., etc., as in most books of this kind.

M. Figuier is not a Darwinian: the derivation of our bodies from
the bodies of apes is a conception too grossly materialistic for
him. Our souls, however, he is quite willing to derive from the
souls of lower animals. Obviously we have pre-existed; how are we
to account for Mozart's precocity save by supposing his
pre-existence? He brought with him the musical skill acquired in
a previous life. In general, the souls of musical children come
from nightingales, while the souls of great architects have
passed into them from beavers (p. 247). We do not remember these
past existences, it is true; but when we become ether-folk, we
shall be able to look back in recollection over the whole series.

Amid these sublime inquiries, M. Figuier is sometimes notably
oblivious of humbler truths, as might indeed be expected. Thus he
repeatedly alludes to Locke as the author of the doctrine of
innate ideas (!!),[14] and he informs us that Kepler never
quitted Protestant England (p. 336), though we believe that the
nearest Kepler ever came to living in England was the refusing of
Sir Henry Wotton's request that he should move thither.

[14] Pages 251, 252, 287. So in the twenty-first century some
avatar of M. Figuier will perhaps describe the late professor
Agassiz as the author of the Darwinian theory.


And lastly, we are treated to a real dialogue, with quite a
dramatic mise en scene. The author's imaginary friend,
Theophilus, enters, "seats himself in a comfortable chair, places
an ottoman under his feet, a book under his elbow to support it,
and a cigarette of Turkish tobacco between his lips, and sets
himself to the task of listening with a grave air of
collectedness, relieved by a certain touch of suspicious
severity, as becomes the arbiter in a literary and philosophic
matter." "And so," begins our author, "you wish to know, my dear
Theophilus, WHERE I LOCATE GOD? I locate him in the centre of the
universe, or, in better phrase, at the central focus, which must
exist somewhere, of all the stars that make the universe, and
which, borne onward in a common movement, gravitate together
around this focus."

Much more, of an equally scientific character, follows; but in
fairness to the reader, who is already blaming us for wasting the
precious moments over such sorry trash, we may as well conclude
our sketch of this new line of speculation.

     May, 1872.



III. THE JESUS OF HISTORY.[15]

[15] The Jesus of History. Anonymous. 8vo. pp. 426. London:
Williams & Norgate, 1869.

Vie de Jesus, par Ernest Renan. Paris, 1867. (Thirteenth edition,
revised and partly rewritten.)

In republishing this and the following article on "The Christ of
Dogma," I am aware that they do but scanty justice to their very
interesting subjects. So much ground is covered that it would be
impossible to treat it satisfactorily in a pair of
review-articles; and in particular the views adopted with regard
to the New Testament literature are rather indicated than
justified. These defects I hope to remedy in a future work on
"Jesus of Nazareth, and the Founding of Christianity," for which
the present articles must be regarded as furnishing only a few
introductory hints. This work has been for several years on my
mind, but as it may still be long before I can find the leisure
needful for writing it out, it seemed best to republish these
preliminary sketches which have been some time out of print. The
projected work, however, while covering all the points here
treated, will have a much wider scope, dealing on the one hand
with the natural genesis of the complex aggregate of beliefs and
aspirations known as Christianity, and on the other hand with the
metamorphoses which are being wrought in this aggregate by modern
knowledge and modern theories of the world.

The views adopted in the present essay as to the date of the
Synoptic Gospels may seem over-conservative to those who accept
the ably-argued conclusions of "Supernatural Religion." Quite
possibly in a more detailed discussion these briefly-indicated
data may require revision; but for the present it seems best to
let the article stand as it was written. The author of
"Supernatural Religion" would no doubt admit that, even if the
synoptic gospels had not assumed their present form before the
end of the second century, nevertheless the body of tradition
contained in them had been committed to writing very early in
that century. So much appears to be proved by the very variations
of text upon which his argument relies. And if this be granted,
the value of the synoptics as HISTORICAL evidence is not
materially altered. With their value as testimony to so-called
SUPERNATURAL events, the present essay is in no way concerned.


Of all the great founders of religions, Jesus is at once the best
known and the least known to the modern scholar. From the
dogmatic point of view he is the best known, from the historic
point of view he is the least known. The Christ of dogma is in
every lineament familiar to us from early childhood; but
concerning the Jesus of history we possess but few facts resting
upon trustworthy evidence, and in order to form a picture of him
at once consistent, probable, and distinct in its outlines, it is
necessary to enter upon a long and difficult investigation, in
the course of which some of the most delicate apparatus of modern
criticism is required. This circumstance is sufficiently singular
to require especial explanation. The case of Sakyamuni, the
founder of Buddhism, which may perhaps be cited as parallel, is
in reality wholly different. Not only did Sakyamuni live five
centuries earlier than Jesus, among a people that have at no time
possessed the art of insuring authenticity in their records of
events, and at an era which is at best but dimly discerned
through the mists of fable and legend, but the work which he
achieved lies wholly out of the course of European history, and
it is only in recent times that his career has presented itself
to us as a problem needing to be solved. Jesus, on the other
hand, appeared in an age which is familiarly and in many respects
minutely known to us, and among a people whose fortunes we can
trace with historic certainty for at least seven centuries
previous to his birth; while his life and achievements have
probably had a larger share in directing the entire subsequent
intellectual and moral development of Europe than those of any
other man who has ever lived. Nevertheless, the details of his
personal career are shrouded in an obscurity almost as dense as
that which envelops the life of the remote founder of Buddhism.

This phenomenon, however, appears less strange and paradoxical
when we come to examine it more closely. A little reflection will
disclose to us several good reasons why the historical records of
the life of Jesus should be so scanty as they are. In the first
place, the activity of Jesus was private rather than public.
Confined within exceedingly narrow limits, both of space and of
duration, it made no impression whatever upon the politics or the
literature of the time. His name does not occur in the pages of
any contemporary writer, Roman, Greek, or Jewish. Doubtless the
case would have been wholly different, had he, like Mohammed,
lived to a ripe age, and had the exigencies of his peculiar
position as the Messiah of the Jewish people brought him into
relations with the Empire; though whether, in such case, the
success of his grand undertaking would have been as complete as
it has actually been, may well be doubted.

Secondly, Jesus did not, like Mohammed and Paul, leave behind him
authentic writings which might serve to throw light upon his
mental development as well as upon the external facts of his
career. Without the Koran and the four genuine Epistles of Paul,
we should be nearly as much in the dark concerning these great
men as we now are concerning the historical Jesus. We should be
compelled to rely, in the one case, upon the untrustworthy gossip
of Mussulman chroniclers, and in the other case upon the garbled
statements of the "Acts of the Apostles," a book written with a
distinct dogmatic purpose, sixty or seventy years after the
occurrence of the events which it professes to record.

It is true, many of the words of Jesus, preserved by hearsay
tradition through the generation immediately succeeding his
death, have come down to us, probably with little alteration, in
the pages of the three earlier evangelists. These are priceless
data, since, as we shall see, they are almost the only materials
at our command for forming even a partial conception of the
character of Jesus' work. Nevertheless, even here the cautious
inquirer has only too often to pause in face of the difficulty of
distinguishing the authentic utterances of the great teacher from
the later interpolations suggested by the dogmatic necessities of
the narrators. Bitterly must the historian regret that Jesus had
no philosophic disciple, like Xenophon, to record his
Memorabilia. Of the various writings included in the New
Testament, the Apocalypse alone (and possibly the Epistle of
Jude) is from the pen of a personal acquaintance of Jesus; and
besides this, the four epistles of Paul, to the Galatians,
Corinthians, and Romans, make up the sum of the writings from
which we may expect contemporary testimony. Yet from these we
obtain absolutely nothing of that for which we are seeking. The
brief writings of Paul are occupied exclusively with the internal
significance of Jesus' work. The epistle of Jude--if it be really
written by Jesus' brother of that name, which is doubtful--is
solely a polemic directed against the innovations