Sources of faith and hope; a study of the soul

Foreword

"The most effective and certain deliverance of men from their self inflicted calamities, and from the most dreadful of all calamities, war, is attainable not by any external general measures, but by that simple appeal to the consciousness of each separate individual, proposed by Jesus nineteen hundred years ago, that every man bethink himself , and ask himself who he is, why he lives, and what he should and should not do."

Tolstoy.

Contents

Chapter Page

1. The Soul 1

4. The Power behind the Soul and the World 23

CHAPTER I * The Soul

A Brahmin, seated by the sacred waters of the Ganges, called to his disciple. " Bring me fruit from yonder tree." The disciple obeyed.

"Cut it in two, what do you find?"

"Some small seeds, O Master."

"Break open one of them, what is there?"

"Nothing," replied the youth.

"Where you see nothing," said the Brahmin, "there dwells a mighty tree."

As within the seed dwells the tree, so, within my body dwells a consciousness, a self, an "I". This is no delusion, no fancy. While I keep my reason, I am unable, even if I would, to doubt this feeling of selfhood. Of its actuality there is no question. Every one is aware of it.

Here then, is something that cannot be otherwise, a fragment of reality, of truth, on which we may plant firmly our feet. This selfhood, this "I", is what we mean by the soul.

Since it is neither to be seen, touched, weighed, nor measured, how can we know anything about the soul? I know of it whatsoever I know of myself, for my soul is myself. About myself, there are some things which I know at first hand. The knowledge is not of my seeking, but is given to me, and is confirmed, corroborated, and made clearer, by experience.

I know of myself, and therefore of my soul, that I am alive. "What shall we do with you when you are dead?" asked the friends of Socrates just before the hemlock was handed to him. His answer was, "Anything you like, provided you can catch me."

When a man dies, something escapes. The body lies inert and motionless. Speak to it, there is no answer. Touch it, there is no response. That which was alive, is gone. Never in the history of the race has a human body been known to retain its life after it had lost its soul. The soul is a principal and power of life.

I know of myself, and therefore of my soul, that I think, feel, act. The body which loses its soul, loses, together with its life, its power to think, feel, act.

Through nave and transept, and along the vaulted roof of the cathedral, the organ music rolls. Pipes, keys, stops, pedals, are all at work, yet they are no musicians. They are mute and dead. By themselves, they can do nothing. They are merely machinery. It is the organist who makes the music, it is he who thinks, feels, acts, and by means of the mechanism of his organ conveys his thoughts, feelings, acts, to the listening congregation.

What the organist is to the organ, the soul is to the body. Of itself, the body can do nothing. It is no more than a beautiful piece of mechanism. The thinker, feeler, doer, is the mind, the living person, the soul.

I know of myself, and therefore of my soul, that

THE SOUL 3

through all bodily changes I continue, and remain at heart unchanged.

I feel as if I existed continuously. As far back as memory goes I had this feeling. I cannot recollect all the way back. I existed before I remember that I existed. Of this unremembered existence I learn through the memory of other people.

At the beginning of infancy, my soul lay in its envelope of flesh, as a seed lies in the soil. Then at some moment in the infant's career, a point was reached when memory awoke. The soul-embryo, germinated, and put forth, so to speak, the first green shoots of consciousness.

Since that fateful moment I have possessed always, the sense of continuousness. Periods of unconsciousness have intervened, but never have such periods broken the thread of my being. I awake from a night's sleep, or from the effects of an anesthetic, the same identical individual I was before.

Now, if there were no soul, if there were nothing more within than a succession of separate states of consciousness, a series of mental moods, each mood divided from the one going before and from the one coming after, how could a sense of continuousness ever arise? Is it not absurd to suppose that a continuous state could be obtained out of states that were not continuous?

This feeling of retained identity, is itself the best of evidence that behind our separate sensations is a feeler, a thinker, feeling and thinking continuously, a continuously existing soul.

We are not left merely to infer this from the weight of evidence. In addition to feeling as if I existed continuously, I know it, with a knowledge I cannot even if I would deny, for it is a knowledge impressed upon me by my sense of moral responsibility.

Twenty years ago I did a mean thing. Today when I think of it I feel ashamed. I should like to be able to believe I am not the one who did that mean thing, but however hard I try I cannot get rid of the consciousness that I am today actually the same person I was then. Since then I have learned much, experienced much, my outward appearance has changed much, but I am inwardly the same person I was then. My sense of moral responsibility will not let me off.

The soundness of this self-knowledge of mine is borne out by what is called "character." In a man of character we have an irrefutable witness to the truth that through every fluctuation of mental mood and outward condition, the soul remains at heart the same. A man of character stands steadfast, unswerving from high principle, whatever be the changes of outward circumstance through which he passes.

Here is an example. About the year 1891 a well known New York business man failed, owing his creditors a million dollars.

6i Gentlemen," he said to them, "I will pay you with interest when I get on my feet again.' '

Such was their confidence in his character that they gave him a full release then and there, asking for no written acknowledgment, and he was immediately reelected a member of the Stock Exchange.

No shrewder set of people exists than the merchants and brokers doing business on Wall Street, New York, yet they were willing to risk a million dollars on the security of character.

We may be quite sure they would not have done so, had they not been convinced of their debtor's ability to remain firm and true to honorable principles; that

THE SOUL 5

is, to maintain an identical attitude of mind toward those principles no matter what changes of fortune he might experience. It is evident that a man cannot maintain an identical attitude of mind unless he himself, as a soul, remains identical, at heart the same, through all fluctuations of mental moods and outward conditions.

I know then, that I am alive, think, feel, act, and remain through all bodily changes, and through the changes of my own growth, essentially the same. These things I know also of my soul, for my soul is my inward self.

Further knowledge of my soul I may acquire by observation and comparison, by reason and experience, but this first hand knowledge I do not gain by my own efforts. It is bestowed upon me, more even than that, it is imposed. It is a gift I am not permitted to decline, I cannot continue to exist without becoming aware of these things. Experience arouses in me a consciousness of their truth. That I am alive, think, feel, act, and retain through all changes, my personal identity, are for me inexpugnable realities, and they are realities of the soul.

Chapter II

As the tree dwells in the seed, so the inward self, the soul, dwells in the outward self, the body. Nevertheless, while inhabiting a tenement of clay the Thinker, the Feeler, does not consist of clay. Inner and outer are of distinct orders. Soul and body are made of different stuff.

This corresponds with my personal sensations. As a result of these I find myself assuming that soul and body are in their respective natures poles assunder.

Often my soul has desired to achieve some hard task, but my muscles have proved unequal to the strain. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.

It is with difficulty that my limbs move at more than four or five miles an hour, while my soul has no difficulty at all in sending its thoughts to the ends of the earth in the fraction of a second.

My body loses a leg, but my soul loses nothing. After a period of years my corporeal frame ceases to grow. Not so with the soul, the mind, the growth of that, continues as steadily as ever.

If judgment is to depend on the conclusion drawn from my own sensations, undoubtedly, the verdict will be, soul and body possess natures radically at variance.

Soul and body are made of different stuff, because while the latter appeals to the senses, the former is inaccessible to sense.

All things composed of material substance affect us through our five senses. The body affects us in this way. We see, hear, touch, taste, or smell it. If the soul were made of material substance, we should be able, in like manner, either to see, hear, touch, taste, or smell it. We can do neither the one nor the other. Our knowledge of it comes through no avenue of sense, but from within.

Between the soul and the body there is thus a fundamental contrast. The chasm which yawns between mental and physical is less easily bridged by the mind than any interval we know.

Soul and body are made of different stuff for the reason that the soul does not possess the qualities characteristic of bodily substance.

Men of science agree that the materials of which our bodies are formed are at bottom alike. These materials, solids, liquids, gases, are all constructed after a common pattern to which has been given the name Molecular. This means that when solids, liquids, gases, are analysed, they are found to consist of minute clusters of atoms called molecules.

All these molecular substances, of which our bodies are composed, are distinguished by two peculiarities, weight, and volume. They are all more or less heavy, and take up more or less room. Each particle of flesh, nerve, muscle and bone, even a particle so small as to be detected only by a microscope, is stamped with these two essential marks of bodily substance, weight and volume.

Now a dead body, a body from which the soul has departed, weighs as much as a living body. Since the presence or absence of the soul makes no difference to the body's weight, evidently the soul does not possess the quality of weight. Nor does its presence or absence make any difference in the size of the body. Consequently the soul does not possess the quality of size or volume. It takes up no room, it occupies no space.

Did the soul possess these attributes they would be likely to make themselves felt during the various changes through which the soul passes.

For instance, there are times when it is empty and vacant of ideas; there are periods again when the soul expands and the mind is filled to overflowing. At such moments we should expect a decided decrease or increase in bulk and weight were the soul made of bodily material. As a matter of fact not the slightest shadow of decrease or increase is discernible. The orator requires no larger size of hat, nor does he weigh any more, when in the midst of a perfervid peroration than when asleep. Yet assuredly he would do so if the torrent of thoughts that crowd and jostle through his brain filled even the minutest section of space. The seething mass would be apt to swell and split his skull. Were thoughts even in the smallest degree subject to the influence of gravitation the sudden addition to the orator's weight at moments of rhetorical excitement would endanger the stability of the platform.

Thoughts occupy no space nor can they be measured in a balance. They do not possess, nor does the mind or soul, of which they are the manifestations, possess, either volume or weight.

Since neither of the qualities characteristic of bodily substance is found in the soul, therefore, it does not consist of bodily substance, but of something else.

Soul and body are made of different stuff because the soul possesses special attributes not found in bodily substance.

All organic material, the kind of which our bodies are composed, is constantly changing so that there is nothing permanent about it.

Not only do changes take place in the substance of the brain, this substance is passing away continually and to such an extent that the brain of the man of twenty is not the same as that of the boy of twelve, and that of the man of thirty, is not the same as that of the man of twenty. By the time he reaches forty, his brain has been again renewed, and so on periodically until the end. Each of us is furnished not with one brain lasting a life time, but with a series of brains.

Yet a man of sixty, although every particle of his previous brain has been destroyed, is able to think over again the thoughts he had when he was forty or even when he was twenty. He has only to make a mental effort and the past stands up ghost-like before him. The brain material of thirty or forty years ago has long since passed away, ceased to exist. How then could the thoughts of this extinct brain have survived?

The brain of the man of sixty with which he is supposed to think about the past, is a new one, composed of wholly new material. It is inconceivable that this new organ can think thoughts produced by another organ that ceased to exist thirty or forty years previously.

Perhaps it may be said that the act of memory by the man of sixty is not really a thinking of old thoughts over again but merely the shadow or reflection of those old thoughts cast by the dying brain onto the surface of its successor, and again recast by this successor, and so on through the series down to the present.

But in order that a dying brain should cast a reflection on its successor that successor must be already in existence, and this would imply the presence within the skull of two brains at the same time, which is clearly absurd. Evidently the thinking is done not by the substance, not by the gray tnatter of the brain but by something else, something made of quite different elements, of elements that do not change as the brain changes, but possess a quality of permanence enabling identity to be retained through all changes.

It is equally evident that the something else possessing the quality of permanent identity, which the bodily substance of the brain does not possess, is what is meant when we speak of the soul. By reason of this extraordinary attribute of retained identity, the soul is able to think over again now, the thoughts which it thought in the far past of its youth.

It recognizes between itself thinking now, and itself thinking in the years gone by, a real connection.

In this there is no self deception. The matter is not left for us to settle. We cannot help being sure that the thinker thinking now, is the same thinker who thought in the long vanished days.

When right and wrong are in question, I may desire, perhaps passionately desire, to avoid the recognition, but it cannot be avoided. I know in my heart of hearts that the connection is real, and that although my head is hoary and my back bent with the burden of years, I am essentially the same person as the guilty or innocent individual of thirty years ago.

The soul has other qualities not possessed by bodily substance, but this one attribute of permanent identity, alone suffices to demonstrate that however closely associated, the materials of which soul and body are respectively composed are of distinct and widely divergent kinds.

Because the soul is inaccessible to sense, because it is destitute of the characteristic qualities of material substance, because it possesses other attributes not possessed by material substance, therefore, soul and body belong to different orders.

Thus, whatever their relationship be, it cannot be a relationship of cause and effect. The one is not a product of the other.

From time to time various writers have insisted that mind is a secretion of the brain in the sense for instance, that milk is a secretion of the lacteal glands of the cow, or tears of the lachrymal glands of the eye.

To this motion there are two fatal objections.

1. A secretion is a product of that by which it is secreted. Milk and tears are products respectively, of the lacteal and lachrymal glands, and being products, milk and tears are composed essentially of the same materials as the glands by which they are produced. But it has been shown that mind, thought, soul, is not a product of brain substance, and is not made of the same material, consequently, it cannot be a secretion of brain substance.

2. Mind cannot be a secretion of brain substance as tears are a secretion of the substance of the lachrymal glands, because the brain is not a gland. It does not even resemble a gland. Cerebral tissue is not in the least like glandular tissue. The brain is no more a gland, than is a hand or foot, and never secretes anything.

There are some, however, who still cling to the opposite theory, and maintain that the soul must be produced by the body. The reason generally given is, that thought is a function of the brain substance, just as steam is a function of the boiling tea kettle, or light of the electric circuit, or power of the moving water fall. This functional relationship, it is argued, is causal, and implies production.

Our answer is, that the exercise of function is not necessarily causal. In the physical world, says William James, we have also permissive or releasing, and we have transmissive function.

The keys of an organ have transmissive function. They open successively the various pipes, and let the wind in the air chest escape in various ways. The voices of the pipes are constituted by the columns of air trembling as they emerge. But the air is not engendered in, or produced by, the organ. When therefore, we say thought is a function of brain substance, it does not follow that the brain substance produced the thought, the connection may have been one of transmitting, or releasing. The functional relation may be like that of the lens and the light as suggested by Huxley. [Life and Letters, vol. 2. p t 299. \

He writes " Consider a parallel sided piece of glass through which light passes. It forms no picture. Shape it so as to be bi-convex and a picture appears in its focus. Is not the formation of this picture a function of the piece of glass so shaped? Nevertheless the piece of glass produces neither the picture nor the picture making power. These reside in the light.

All the lens does is to modify the action of the light and so to cause its powers to be apparent to our senses. "

Suppose soul and brain are related roughly speaking as the light to the lens. If it be that only through the brain lens the soul can throw thought pictures onto the receiving network of the nervous system, and so cause the muscles to move and things to be done and said, then the thoughts of the soul would appear to be functions of the brain lens. Still the thoughts would not be produced by the brain lens any more than the light was produced by the lens of glass.

In some such way as this, the closest association might exist between thought and brain substance, without the one being the product of the other. A writer in the Contemporary Review [F.R.C.S.] states the position thus.

"To watch day by day a case of profound unconsciousness, the body a mere log fed through a tube, a physiological machine, a thing with no more thought in it than a dummy figure, and to see men and women brought to a like state in a few minutes by chloroform or ether, and kept there just as part of a day's work, and to see the process reversed, and the lost owner of a body spirited back into it by an operation to his brain, here are the arguments ready-made for materialism to use with effect. "

Impressive as such cases are, they do not prove that the mind or soul is a product of the body. The phenomena may be explained equally well by a different theory.

Theory number one, assumes that consciousness is related to the body much as the flame is related to the wick and oil of the lamp. An anesthetic turns down the wick and so extinguishes the flame.

Theory number two, supposes that consciousness is related to the body roughly speaking as the lamp to the room which it illuminates. Consciousness the lamp, the body the room. According to this second theory, what the anesthetic does, is not to turn down the wick and so extinguish the flame, but to lower an opaque shade over the lamp and so extinguish its illuminating power as regards the room.

On both theories darkness is produced, the darkness of unconsciousness, but according to the first, the result is achieved by destroying consciousness, (extinguishing the flame). According to the second by cutting off the connection of consciousness with its bodily surroundings, (by interposing an opaque barrier between the lamp and the room) .

Is there any evidence to show which of these two theories is the more nearly correct?

There is evidence at any rate to show that the first is not correct. If the effect of the anesthetic were to extinguish the flame, to destroy consciousness, then when consciousness is restored, on the withdrawal of the anesthetic, it would involve the creation of a new consciousness. Whereas in actual fact, what is restored is a consciousness recognizing its responsibility for obligations, (the doctor's fee, for instance,) incurred previous to the administration of the anesthetic. Consequently it is the same old consciousnessrthat illuminated its tenement of clay before the opaque shade of anesthesia was dropped over it.

The deathlike condition of the physical frame did not mean the extinction of consciousness, as would be the case were consciousness a product of the brain substance, as the flame of the wick and oil, but that connection with its environment was cut off temporarily. Probably then, the function of the gray matter of the brain is of the transmitting order. It is certainly not productive, and implies no causal connection between brain and mind.

If their connection is not causal, what is the relationship? Soul and body are very closely associated. The state of the body affects more or less the state of the soul, or at least the conditions of its intercourse with the material world. A state of bodily health promotes mental activity, a congested liver, mental torpor. The pressure of a splinter of bone may result in idiocy. There are records of persons who, while retaining their mental faculties to the full, were unable to communicate by sign or sound with those about them, because, in consequence of some sudden shock, their nervous system had been paralyzed. Conversely, the state of the soul affects the state of the body. Cheerful thoughts promote digestion, joyful anticipation quickens the pulse, anxiety depresses the nervous system, fear may produce death.

In such ways do soul and body act and react on one another. So far as this earthly career is concerned, the welfare of the one depends on the welfare of the other. , Intimate and profound as their mutual influence is, m&y it not be adequately explained on the assumption of a working partnership? Are not the facts accounted for on the hypothesis of cooperation?

Were this the relationship, we should expect that to happen which does happen. With the physical machinery thrown out of order by injury or disease, it would become difficult for the soul to exercise control. Under these circumstances the familiar phenomena of disease, weakness, peribds of unconsciousness, delirium, or the eccentricities of insanity, would be the natural results.

Not even a Paderewski can get music from a piano that is out of tune, so not even the most vigorous soul can get normal action from a diseased brain or body.

The operator may be there fully alive, but if the wires are down no message can be sent.

On the other hand, if soul and body be in cooperative association it is conceivable that the body may be carried triumphantly through the strain and stress of trying vicissitudes by the supporting energy of the soul, and that by this same soul energy, minor physical injuries and defects may be healed and overcome.

The question is often asked, in what part of the physical frame does the soul reside? There is no answer. It can be said only that when certain portions of the physical frame are destroyed, the brain for instance, the connection comes to an end. The tenant is turned out of doors.

Of the relations between the inward self or soul and the outward or bodily self, we learn then, that they are not those of product and producer, but of partner and partner.

Finally it may be added, the soul is the senior member of the firm, the more important element in us, the thing that counts and makes us what we are.

Chapter III

Within is the soul, without, is the world. Just as it is impossible to think of left apart from right, or right apart from left, so is it impossible to think of the soul apart from the world, or the world apart from the soul. The two are inseparable. Communication between them is carried on through sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. These sensations are, as it were, the fingers of the world playing upon the strings of the soul, and bringing therefrom chords and melodies. The world is the teacher of the soul.

About what it sees, hears, touches, tastes, smells, the soul thinks, reflects, reasons, compares, judges, and thus learns in a twofold way, by the world's action, and by its own action. In these two ways the soul acquires knowledge of the world without, and knowledge also concerning itself, its own capacities and powers.

One of the chief lessons learned about the world is that all things therein, are related.

Step by step, the knowledge is gathered, that even where to the ordinary observer there seems absolutely nothing in common, more careful examination shows always that relationships exist.

At first glance no one would suspect any connection between a thrush and a sprig of mistletoe, a song bird palpitating with energetic life, and a dull vegetable growth with scarcely a life of its own at all. In outward appearance very different, there is between these two nevertheless an intimate relationship. ' To secure the survival of the mistletoe its seeds must be planted in the bark of trees. The seeds are enclosed in berries which ripen in midwinter. At this season when the trees around are bare, the mistletoe is bright and fresh and can be seen through the leafless forest from a long way off. Now the berries, the presence of which is signalled so conspicuously, are especially suited to the taste of thrushes and by them are sought after witfy avidity. Having eaten the delicious pulp the bird finds the seeds adhering to its bill, for they are coated with a sticky gum. To get rid of the nuisance he rubs his bill against the bark and thus becomes the instrument by which the seeds are planted in the kind of soil, exactly suited to their needs.-

In a similar way all living creatures are linked together. The several hundred thousand species are grouped into two families, one with backbones and the other without, while countless intermediate forms link vertebrate with invertebrate, the elephant with the oyster, man with the amaeba.

Among vegetable products, unbroken lines of connection can be established between objects outwardly as different as the blue mold on an old boot, and the giant redwood trees of California, or the rose outside your window, and the microscopic seaweed flourishing miles deep in mid Atlantic.

Nor does any gulf divide plants from animals. "Theyare identical in internal structure and in the discharge of the mysterious processes of reproduction and nutrition."

In the mineral kingdom solids, liquids, gases, unlike as they are in appearance and in quality, are all made out of the same atomic material.

Furthermore the living is related to the non-living. Animal, vegetable, mineral, dovetail into one another as it were. They are but different forms of the same substance, variations of the same theme.