Death and its mystery : before death, proofs of the existence of the soul

Table Of Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I The Greatest of Problems — Can It Actually Be

Solved? 3

II Materialism — ^an Erroneous, Incomplete, And Insufficient Doctrine

St appearances.

COPEENICUS.

EVERY one is familiar with the Positlve^[?kil^sophy of Auguste Comte and his judicious classification o1 the sciences, descending gradually from the universe of man to astronomy and biology. Every one is also familiar with Littre, the follower of Auguste Comte ; his dictionary is in all the libraries and his works are scattered broadcast. I used to know him personally. He was an eminent savant, an encyclopedia, a profound thinker ; in addition, a convinced materialist and atheist. The beauty of his face did not correspond to the beauty of his soul. It was difficult to look at him without thinking of our simian origin, and yet he had the greatest nobility of mind and a rare generosity of heart. He lived not very far from the Observatoire. His wife was very pious, and on Sunday he used to escort her to mass at Saint-Sulpice, out of pure and simple goodness, without ever entering the church himself. Le Dantec, atheist and materialist, who succeeded him, let himself be buried with the rites of the church, though this is to be regretted, in order not to pain his wife, who also was very pious, — we should like to see these lifelong companions of the same minds as their husbands. This professor, of atheism also was very good. All this is rather paradoxical./ The same was true of Jules Soury, that ' * devourer of cures, ' ^ who was buried by them with their

) 28 liturgies. There is no real logic in this world. But one's doctrines do not always direct one's deeds. One can be a professing Catholic and yet a liar, or one who takes advantage of others. .Qnecan be amaterialist andan^Rntirelv honpst m^n- — — I also knew the "excellent Ernest Renan, who, out of deep sincerity and in order to absolve himself from all hypocrisy, had refused the priesthood to which his theological studies had led him.

These eminent minds are much to be respected in their sincere opinions, which we should respect as they respected the opinions of others; but we may take exception to their ideas, and moreover they never made any pretense to infallibility.

Littre worked over the psychological questions that we are proposing to study here. We may take his arguments, as well as those of Taine, his emulator, as a basis for the modem materialistic assertions. Do not let us fear to meet them directly and to take the bull by the horns.

In his work entitled ''La science au point de vue philosophique, ' ' a chapter on psychic physiology contains the following statements:

Perhaps the expression psychic 'physiology may appear anomalous. I could have made use of the term psychology, which is used to designate the study of the intellectual and moral faculties. I myself have used this word many times in my writings, and because of its common usage and when the text leaves no room for obscurity in my thought, I shall use it again. It is true that the word xl/vxq which is its root, is suited to metaphysics and theology, but it can also be applied to physiology by giving it the meaning of the totality of the intellectual and moral faculties, — a phrase much too long and complex not to be replaced, on most occasions, by some simpler expression.

Nevertheless, as psychology was undoubtedly at its beginning, and still is, the study of the mind, considered independently of the nervous substance, I neither wish to nor ought to use an expression which is peculiar to a philosophy quite different from that which lends its name to the exact sciences. Among the positive sciences one recognizes no quality without matter, not at all because a priori one has the preconceived idea that there exists no independent spiritual substance, but because, a posteriori, we have never met with gravitation except in a body possessing weight, nor with heat except in a warm body, nor with chemical affinities without substances that may be combined, nor with life, feeling, or thought? except in a living, feeling, thinking being.

It has seemed necessary to me for the word physiology to appear in the title of this work. I could, indeed, have used the expression cerebral physiology. But cerebral physiology implies more than I expect to include.

The brain is engaged in all sorts of operations which I do not pretend to consider, for I shall limit myself to the part it plays in producing those impressions which result in the idea of the exterior world and of myself.

It is for this reason that I have determined to choose the expression, "psychic physiology," or, more briefly, psychophysiology. Psychic, that is to say relating to feelings and ideas; physiology, that is to say the formation and combination of these feelings and ideas in relation to the construction and function of the brain. This is not because I wish to be so pretentious as to introduce a new expression into science; all that I wish to do here is, on one hand, to outline my subject clearly, and on the other to impress on my readers that the description of psychic phenomena with their connections and relations, belongs to pure psychology and the study of a function and its effects. The more progress psychology has made in breaking away from the theory of innate ideas, especially the psychology that springs from the school of Locke, the more closely it has approached to physiology. And the more physiology has examined the extent of its province the less it has been frightened by the anathemas of psychology, which forbade it to indulge in lofty speculations. And to-day there is no longer any doubt that intellectual and moral phenomena are phenomena of the nervous tissue, that humanity is only a link, though without doubt the most considerable link, in a chain that stretches, without any clearly defined breaks, down to the least of the animals; and that, under whatever name we may act, so long as we employ the methods of description, observation, and experience, we are physiologists. I can no longer conceive of a physiology in which all that is best in the theory of feelings and in ideas should not occupy a great place. ^

Such is the basis of the materialistic philosophy of the soul.

I invite the reader to consider scrupulously this manner of reasoning. We may not admit the existence of the soul, * ' because we know of no quality without matter, because we have never met with gravitation in a body without weight, heat without a warm body, electricity without an electrical body, affinity without substances in combination, life, feeling, thought without a living being, feeling and thinking."

But this sort of reasoning, starting with the use of the word quality f simply begs the question.

To compare thought to gravitation, to heat, to the mechanical, physical, and chemical reactions of material bodies is to compare two very different things, precisely those things which we are debating, — mind and matter.

The will of a human being, even of a child, is personal and. conscious, while gravity, heat, light, and electricity are impersonal and unconscious, the results of certain material conditions, inevitable, blind, essentially material in themselves. The difference between the two subjects I have mentioned is great ; it is all the difference between night and day.

Scientific reasoning itself sometimes errs fundamentally. Heat, for example, does not always come from a warm body; motion, which has no temperature, can produce heat. Heat is a form of motion. Light also is a form of motion. The nature of electricity remains unknown.

I confess that I cannot understand how a man of the merit of Littre, the head of the Positivist school, could have been satisfied with such reasoning and not have perceived that this was merely begging the question, almost a play on words;

1 Littr^, La Science au point de vue philosophique (Paris, 1873), p. 306; La Philosophie positive, March 23, 1860.

for this argument plays with the word ' * qualitj^ ' ' What we ought first to prove positively is that thought is a property of the nervous substance, that the unconscious can create the conscious, which is contradictory in principle.

We should hardly dare to compare a piece of wood to a piece of marble or a fragment of metal, and yet we carefully compare the mind and thought, the sentiment of liberty, justice, goodness, the will, to a function of the organic substance. Taine assures us that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. Does it not seem, with such intellects as his, as if the trend of the argument had been determined in advance, and no less blindly than with the theologians? Is not that a case of preconceived ideas, of systematic convictions ?

It is important, from the very beginning of this discussion, for us not to be easily satisfied with words. What is matter ? According to general opinion, it is what is perceived by our senses, what can be seen, touched, weighed. Very well! the following pages are to prove that there is in man something besides what can be seen, touched, and weighed; that there exists in the human being an element independent of the material senses, a personal mental principle, which thinks, wills, acts, which manifests itself at a distance, which sees without eyes, hears without ears, discovers the future before it exists, and reveals unknown facts. To suppose that this psychic element — invisible, intangible, and imponderable — is an essential faculty of the brain, is to make a declaration without proof; and it is a self-contradictory form of reasoning, as if one said that salt could produce sugar or that fish could become inhabitants of terra firma. What we wish to show here is that actual observation itself, the observation of the facts of experience, prove that the human being is not only a material body endowed with various essential faculties, but also a psychic body endowed with different faculties from those of the animal organism. And by ' ' actual observation ' ' we mean that we shall use no other method than that of

Littre, Taine, Le Dantec, and other professors of materialism, and that we shall repudiate the grotesque doctrines of oral arguments, mere wanderings from the subject.

How was it possible that eminent thinkers such as Comte, Littre, Berthelot were able to imagine that reality is bounded by the circle of our sense impressions, which are so limited and so imperfect? A fish might well believe that nothing existed outside of water; a dog which made a classification of canine sense impressions would classify them according to odor and not according to sight, as a man would do; a carrier-pigeon would be especially aware of the sense of direction, an ant of the sense of touch in his antenna?, etc.

The spirit overrules the body; the atoms do not govern, they are governed. The same reasoning can be applied to the entire universe, to the worlds that gravitate in space, to vegetables and animals. The leaf of the tree is formed, an e^g that hatches is formed. This formation, itself, is of the intellect in its nature.

The universal spirit is in everything, it fills the world, and that without the intervention of a brain. It is impossible to analyze the mechanism of the eye and of vision, of the ear and of hearing, without concluding that the organs of sight and hearing have been intelligently constructed. This same conclusion can be drawn, with even more supporting evidence, from the analysis of the fecundation of a plant, an animal, or a human being. The progressive evolution of the fertilized human egg, the role of the placenta, the life of the embryo and the fetus, the creation of the little creature in the womb of the mother, the organic transformation of the woman, the formation of the milk, the birth of the child, its nourishment, the physical and psychical development of the child, are so many irrefutable manifestations of an intelligent, directing force that organizes everything and directs the tiniest molecules with as perfect an order as it does the planets and stars in the immensity of the heavens. And this spirit does not come from a brain. It has been truly said that if God has created man in his own image, man has returned the compliment. If the cockchafers imagined a creator they would make him a great cockchafer. The anthropomorphic God of the Hebrews, the Christians, the Mussulmans, the Buddhists has never existed. God the Father, Jehovah, Jupiter are only symbolic words.

If generation has been admirably arranged from the point of view of physiology, it has been far from perfect from the point of view of maternity. Why so much suffering? Why the frightful final pains ? The church sees in them a punishment of Eve^s sin. What nonsense! Did Adam and Eve ever exist 1 Do not the female animals suffer ? Nature takes no heed of the woman's periods of suffering or of the brutality of the actual birth ; it is undoubtedly lacking in sensibility: the ''good God" is not tender toward his creatures. He is not even humane, and the Sisters of Charity are kinder than he. What a problem ! We do not understand God : all the evidence shows this. What does it prove? Our own spiritual inferiority.

It is undeniable that spirit, intelligence, and mental order exist in everything. Experimental science stops short when it teaches that all the phenomena of the universe reduce themselves, in the last instance, to the dualism of matter and movement, or even to the monism of matter and its properties. In natural history, botany, animal physiology, anthropology, an element may be observed that is distinct from matter and movement: that is Life, Has not the physiologist Claude Bernard shown us that life is not a product of material molecules? Moreover, the universe reveals itself to us as a dynamism, for movement is inherent in the atoms themselves, and this djmamism is not confined to the material order, since it organizes everything, things and persons.^

1 Some years ago I knew a modest naturalist and skilful observer, of the highest personal worth, who studied directly, with his own eyes.

We may say with the psychologist Bergson that the doctrine which makes thouglit a function of the brain, or which sees a parallel, an equivalent, between the labor of the brain and that of thought, is entirely insufficient. They tell us that the memories are there, accumulated in the brain under the form of a modification that has been impressed on such or such a group of anatomical elements: if they vanish from our memory it is because the anatomical elements in which they lie have been impaired or destroyed. The impressions made by external objects would exist in the brain as on a sensitized plate or a photographic film. These comparisons are really most superficial; for example, if the visual image of an object were an impression left by this object upon the brain, there would not be the memory of an object, there would be thousands, there would be millions of them; for the most simple and stable object changes its form, its dimensions, its shade of coloring according to the spot from which it is perceived; unless I condemn myself to absolute stability while watching it, unless my eye remains absolutely immovable in its orbit, innumerable images, which cannot be imposed upon one another, will be traced, one after another,

the life of the insects and discovered marvels concerning it. He was called Henri Fabre, and lived at S^rignan (Vaucluse). It was not until after fifty or sixty years of uninterrupted labors that he saw his reputation pass beyond his own department. Every one has read, especially since his death, the ten volumes of his Souvenirs entomologiques, and it seems to me that no reader can refuse to see there the constant manifestation of mind in nature, in each insect, even in each living molecule. Let us recall, as an example, the Sphex, a hymen-opteral insect which digs several holes in the sandy earth and lays an egg in each after it has first deposited there a victim that has been paralyzed but not killed, to serve as fresh food for the larva after its hatching. The victim must remain living but inert as long as the feast of the larva lasts: the little larvcB would not relish spoiled meat. Everything for their cherished existence is foreseen by the mother, which will never know them and understands nothing about it. The whole of insect life is full of these instincts of foresight. See also in my Conies philosophiques, the chapter entitled "L'oreille," and in Contemplations scientifiques (p. 18), "L'lntelligence des plantea."

on my retina and transmitted to my brain. What would happen if it were a question of the visual image of a person whose physiognomy changes and whose body moves, whose clothing and surroundings are different every time you see him? And yet it cannot be denied that our consciousness holds in reserve a unique image — or one almost unique — an invariable image of the object or the person, which is evident proof that something quite different has taken place here from a mere mechanical registration. The same things can be said about auditory memories. The same word spoken by different persons, or by the same person at different moments, in different sentences, gives sound images that are by no means exactly the same. How can the memory be compared to a phonograph? This consideration alone would be enough to make us suspect the theory which attributes a weakness in the memory for words to the impairment or destruction of the memories themselves, automatically recorded by the surface of the brain.

But let us see, according to the same author, what happens in these maladies.

In those cases where the injury to the brain is serious and the memory of words has been greatly impaired, it sometimes happens that a more or less great excitement, for example some deep emotion, will suddenly bring back the memory that had seemed lost forever. Would this be possible if the memory had been lodged in the brain matter, now impaired or destroyed? Far more often things happen as if the brain served to recall the memory but not to preserve it. The sufferer from aphasia becomes incapable of finding the word he needs: he seems to go round and round it, and to lack the necessary strength to put his finger on the desired sound; and in fact, in the realm of psychology the outward sign of strength is always precision. But the memory still seems to be there, and at times, when he has replaced by paraphrases the word believed to have disappeared, the sufferer from aphasia will manage to slip into one of them the word itself.

Let us now consider what takes place in progressive aphasia, that is to say, when the difficulty in remembering words grows steadily greater. In such eases, the words generally disappear in regular order, as if the malady were well acquainted with grammar. Proper names disappear first of all, then common names, next adjectives and finally verbs, as if they were in layers, placed one above another, and the injury reached these layers successively. Yes, but this malady can spring from the most diverse causes, take the most varied forms, appear at some point in the affected region of the brain and progress in no matter what direction. The order in which the various memories disappear remains the same. Would this be possible if the malady were attacking the memories themselves ?

If the memory has not been stored in the brain, then where has it been preserved? For that matter, has the question of "where" any significance when we speak of something else than a body"? Photographic plates are preserved in a box, phonographic records in racks, but why should memories, which are not visible, tangible things, have need of a container, and how could they have one? Are these memories anywhere but in the mind? But the human mind is consciousness itself, and consciousness means first of all memory.^

We can say here, with the eminent thinker, that all things happen as if the body were simply made use of by the spirit. In this case we have no reason to suppose that the body and the spirit are inseparably bound together.

Here is a brain that labors, there is a consciousness that feels, thinks, and desires. If the labor of the brain corresponded to the totality of consciousness, if there were some equivalence between the cerebral and the mental, consciousness might share the fate of the brain and death be the end of everything: at least experience could show nothing to the contrary and the philosophy which affirms our survival would be reduced to basing its thesis on some structure of metaphysics, a basis generally fragile! But if the mental life

1 See the lectures "Foi," and "Vie," in Le MaUrialisme actuel (Paris), 1913.

surpasses the physical life, if the brain is limited to translating into movement a small part of what takes place in our consciousness, then life after death becomes so probable that the burden of proof rests upon him who denies rather than on him who affirms ; for the only reason we can possibly have to admit the extinction of consciousness after death is that we see the body disintegrate, and this reason is no longer valid if it is a fact, established by experience, that the consciousness is at least partially independent of the body.

Bergson, metaphysician that he is, appears more '* positive'' than the physicist Littre. Spirit is not matter. It has never been proved that the soul is a function of the brain, a property of the cerebral substance that is destined to die with it.

We even ask how it is possible that a thinker of Taine's breadth of mind, for example, who appreciates at its full value the conception and composition of a work, its plan and execution ^nd who hsis even written a special book on the intelligence ("L 'Intelligence"), should be able to attribute the creation of a philosophical work to the secretion of a combination of molecules of the materials that constitute a brain. The action of personal intelligence is so evident in a matter like this, so irrefutable, that it needs a veritable and systematic autosuggestion to eclipse it.

The brain is, without any doubt, the organ of thought, and no one would attempt to deny it. But in contradiction to what was formerly believed, the whole brain is not necessary to thought or to life.

To the examples drawn from the disorders of memory which we have just cited, we can add many others leading to the same conclusion.

My learned friend Edmond Perrier presented to the Academy of Sciences, in his lecture of December 22, 1913, an observation of Dr. Robinson's concerning a man who had lived for nearly a year with almost no suffering and with no apparent mental trouble, with a brain that was nearly reduced to a pulp, and was no longer anything but a vast purulent abscess. In July, 1914, Dr. Hallopeau brought to the Society of Surgery the account of an operation that had been performed at the Necker Hospital upon a young girl who had fallen from the Metropolitan Railway: at the trepanning it was ascertained that a large proportion of the brain matter was reduced literally to pulp. They cleaned, drained, and reclosed the wound; the patient recovered. On March 24, 1917, at the Academy of Sciences, Dr. Guepin showed, through an operation on a wounded soldier, that the partial ablation of the brain does not prevent manifestations of intelligence. Other examples could be cited. At times there remain only very slight portions: the mind makes ingenious use of what it can.

If the students of anatomy do not find the soul at the points of their scalpels, when they dissect a body, it is because it is not there. When the doctors and physiologists see nothing in our psychic faculties but the peculiar qualities of the brain, they are grossly deceiving themselves. There is something else in the human being besides the gray or white substance of the brain.

We may object that generally the faculty of thinking seems to depend on the condition of the brain and that, like the brain itself, it grows feeble with age. But is it not the instrument that grows weaker, the body and not the spirit? Very often, among great brain-workers, the mind remains sound up to the very last day of life. All my contemporaries have known in Paris writers like Victor Hugo, Lamartiue, Legouve, historians like Thiers, Mignet, Henri Martin, scholars like Barthelemy-Saint-Hilaire (1805-95), savants like Chevreul (1786-1889), who have shown up to a very advanced age the strength and youth of their souls.

Homo sapiem, thinking man : it is under this title that certain physiologists have long defined the human race. Is it possible that a chemical association of the molecules of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc., should be able to think ?

Biology is a very recent science. Deterministic biology is a philosophy. The field of this philosophy is to consider mental and psychic phenomena as the effects of physiological reactions. But physiological explanations in the form of figurative expressions are only a confession of weakness. People look on the invention of a word as a great discovery and the hypothetical statement of a fact as an explanation.

Despite modern discoveries in the purely physico-chemical origin of muscular movements, sensation and the vital principle have remained almost as mysterious as in past ages. We cannot refuse to recognize in each one of us, side by side with, or rather above, physiological phenomena, an intellectual principle, active and autonomous, without which nothing can be explained, with which everything is easily understood.

As for this, let us say at once that the normal and well-known manifestations of the soul, of which we have just spoken, are eclipsed beside those which will be represented in the following chapters.

Medicine would find it of great advantage to take these things into consideration, and to work not only with the physical organism but also with the intellectual dynamism. A certain number of diseases which do not yield to pharmaceutical treatment, may be cured by means of the mind. As evidence that this is so, we have the cures effected by hypnotism and suggestion, and the so-called miracles of the religious faiths, from the time of the temple of Epidaurus and the cult of j3^sculapius up to Lourdes and its rivals. Do not the homeopathetic globules of the twentieth solution act a little through persuasion? Faith moves mountains.

The mind is not the body; it does not emanate from it and proclaims itself as entirely distinct from it The will of man is recognized by every one. The good or evil perseverance in this will, the spirit of sacrifice, heroism, contempt for pain, the organic insensibility of the martyrs when they defied the most atrocious tortures, renunciation, devotion, the virtues and the vices, friendship as well as hatred, charity as well as envy — are they not all proofs of the soul's independence of the brain?

There are some human beings who do not think about anything. We meet a few of them in this world. But in general, even the most primitive man knows that there is something greater than eating, drinking, and love-making, that this ephemeral world of the senses is not an end in itself, — is indeed, only the manifestation of a superior principle, of which we can perceive nothing here but the confused shadow. This is the feeling which the religions have tried to satisfy.

If we analyze the human body and its natural functions we cannot fail to recognize that despite all the charms it can offer to our senses, it is, on the whole, when we consider only its substance, a rather vulgar object. Its true nobility lies in its spirit, its feeling, its intelligence, in its veneration for art and science; and the value of a man does not lie in his body, so short-lived, so changeable, so frail, but in his soul, which reveals itself, even in this life, as blessed with the faculty of enduring eternally.

Moreover, this body is not an inert mass, an automaton; it is a living organism. But the construction of a being, a man, an animal, or a plant, is the witness of the existence of a constructive force, of a mind in nature, of an intellectual principle that governs the atoms and is not of them. If there were only material molecules, devoid of direction, the world would not go on, some sort of chaos would have existed indefinitely, without mathematical laws, and the Cosmos would not have been ruled by order.

According to the mechanical theory of the universe, the totality of things is the inevitable effect of unconscious combinations; creation is an intellectual nothingness which becomes something and ends by thinking. Could we imagine a hypothesis more absurd in itself and more contrary to all our observations ?

Mysterious nature has filled everything with spirit and she even shows herself endowed with a malignity that is generally unsuspected. What is the coquetry of the young girl which leads her to become a wife, to suffer in her beautiful body, to be happy in the pains of motherhood in order to perpetuate the human race? What is love, that delightful snare? What is mental suffering? What is feeling? Does not the silent language of nature make itself clearly heard? What is the building of a nest by two birds? the brooding mother fed by the future father ? the beakful of food brought by the father and mother to the hungry nestlings? What are the hen and her chickens? Have you ever thought about the fi/rst beat of a heart in an egg, in a child ? Have you ever analyzed the fertilization of flowers? Not to see in that a reasoned order, an intention, a plan, a general aim, a finality, a mind which governs us all; not to see in life itself the supreme aim of the organization of the worlds — that is to fail to see the sun at high noon.