The evidence of immortality

Front matter

JEROME cM. ANDERSON

Chap. Copyright No,.___.

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Introduction

This essay is an examination from a scientific viewpoint into the probability of the continued existence of human life after the death of the body. Of course, by scientific is meant the light of reason applied to the phenomena of life — not a demonstration by means of the microscope or balances. Perhaps philosophical would be a better word to use in describing its method, but as all true science is philosophical, and all true philosophy scientific, the writer is not disposed to insist too strongly upon the term used. It is believed that a careful analysis of undisputed phenomena of existence, which have been perhaps overlooked, or which have not been assigned their proper importance, will establish the truth of the persistence of life beyond the grave as certainly as any other fact of existence. It will assuredly place it upon a much firmer basis than that enjoyed by many of the accepted scientific hypotheses, such as those which attempt to prove the existence and functions of the ether, atoms, matter itself, etc.

Certainly, there can be no topic of greater or more profound interest to the human mind than that of its own survival after death. But, as is so often the case, the proof has been sought for afar when it lay immediately at hand ; has been accredited to divine revelation in books, instead of to divine revelations in nature. The writer is willing to go so far as to assert that if the proof of the exviii THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY

istence of the soul after death be not demonstrable from the phenomena of this present life by cold-blooded, scientific reasoning from the known to the unknown, then it is a chimera, and we may as well relegate it to the dogmatist and fanatic, and have done with it forever. In this assertion he is in perfect sympathy with the thought in Hegel's mind when he wrote, " All that God is he imparts and reveals, and He does so at first in and through nature." All mysteries stand revealed first, last, and all the time, in nature, had we but eyes to see and hearts to comprehend. So, let us seek in nature for the answer to this problem, Do we live after death ?

Chapter I The Exaggerated Importance Of Thought

"y^^OGITO, ergo sum," wrote Des Cartes after y ^ realizing the great truth that the source and meaning of life must be sought within. It was a terse, startling statement, and was at once seized upon by the large class who take their thinking at second-hand. But never was a philosophical truth more perverted. Translated as "I think, therefore I exist," it has been made a shibboleth by those who sail in shallow philosophical seas. A better translation would have been, "I think, therefore I am," thus linking life with the idea of eternal being, rather than with an "out-from," transitory existence. Neither Des Cartes nor his best interpreters limited it to thought alone, but included with it other phases of consciousness. The original meaning of Des Cartes has thus been quite lost sight of, and attention directed wholly to thought as the sole phenomenon of existence, the one proof of life, the single and distinguishing attribute of the human soul. The error has grown and widened until 'it taints the entire philosophy of the West and is the direct cause of much of the uncertainty which surrounds existence after death. Thought, as most men conceive of it, is certainly destroyed by death, and having been taught to look upon man as a thinker only, and upon existence as depending upon thought, men have been driven either to deny existence after death altogether, as do modern materialists, or to set up a future life incongruous to, and ethically disconnected with, that of the present, as do modern Christians. The latter, indeed, have put forward many theories to bridge the ethical chasm between this life and the heaven or hell of the next, such as vicarious atonement, predestination, forgiveness, and other unjust and unjustifiable hypotheses, but all have signally failed when ethically examined.

The error, originated in part, at least, in the manner indicated, has been perpetuated because of the exaggerated importance given to this earth-life as counterbalancing eternity. Thought is of paramount importance to this life, but plays a minor part, indeed, in the drama of eternal life. It ceases to be the dominant faculty, for reasons which we shall examine hereafter, when man passes beyond the threshold of death. To one engaged in blasting a drill is essential; to a farmer, some variant of the plow. So to the soul, while investigating the phenomena of an unexplored universe, the power to reason from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the group of phenomena to the underlying law of

EXAGGERATED IMPORTANCE OF THOUGHT 3

which they are the apparently diverse expression, is absolutely essential. But just as the miner who turns his attention to extracting the gold from the quartz which he has blasted needs and uses other tools, so man, when he passes from this life of struggle and active comparison to one of rest and recuperation, lays aside his faithful servant, reason, to use other equally divine, and now more important, faculties of his soul.

Thought is truly a divine faculty, but an exceedingly imperfect one at the present stage of man's evolution. Most of the wars and woes under which mankind suffer today are the direct result of faulty thinking; of drawing differing conclusions from the same or similar data. Nor is this fault found wholly among the ignorant. It invades the very highest philosophic reasoning and has led to such widely varying schools as Idealists, Materialists, Theists, and Pantheists, and so on, each of which supports its claims by the most searching appeal to reason of which it is capable. " Holy wars " mark the pathways of blind belief attempting to force its own convictions upon others; philosophy has also its anathemas, while no two scientists are at one on any of the fundamentals of their respective departments.*

This lack of agreement ought to have warned man that thought was a somewhat frail reed upon which

* See J. B. Stallo's "Some Modern Concepts" if one desires the exact proof of this.

to lean, and to have led him to search for something more stable. But so ingrained is the idea of thought as the sine qua non of existence that with many, and, indeed, with most, Western thinkers cessation of thought is synonymous with the cessation of life. Existence without thought is to them absurd and even unthinkable. " I think, therefore I exist," is the reading which they now give their shibboleth.

This is not so strange when we consider that every phenomenon of life is intended to and does provoke thought — else we would be but as cattle upon the hills. For this reason the very form of man is constructed so as to afford the largest cerebral development possible, as well as to ensure it the most complete protection from injury. Thought is compelled into activity by the incessant bombardment of the senses; its dormant powers evoked, nolens volens, by the environment in which the body is placed. So intentionally hostile is this environment that man would speedily be swept from the earth but for thought. He must rely upon it at all times. It is his sword, of which he has thrown away the scabbard; the one gift which enables him to have "dominion over all the creatures of the earth." But its activity ceases at death. The magnificent cerebral development is destroyed; the bombardment of the senses ceases, thought no longer is king, and we have to look to the energies of other faculties for evidence of the permanence of life.

Even a superficial analysis of man's conscious-

EXAGGERATED IMPORTANCE OF THOUGHT 5

ness reveals its compound nature and shows conclusively that thought is only one of many faculties of the soul. Just as the prism breaks up the seeming unity and purity of the white light into seven startlingly dissimilar, and even opposite, constituents, so analysis shows that which seemed but the one consciousness to be composed of similarly diversified, and also apparently opposing, faculties.

As a fundamental faculty we have the consciousness of life itself; the recognition of existence. There is no doubt that man shares this consciousness with all the lower kingdoms of nature. With Des Cartes he may go to thought to prove that he exists, but he need not do so to peel that he does. Reason is entirely unnecessary to this recognition. Indeed, in the animal kingdom, it has been termed an instinct, because of the careful protection of their lives by animals devoid of reason. Even the sensitive plant shrinks from the touch lest its existence be endangered, and all nature cries out with one voice, " Let me live ! let me live ! "

It is the undifferentiated consciousness of the great ocean of Being, in which all that is exists. It vibrates through the rock; it is quivering in the massive oak. " Out of nothing nothing can come ; " and the recognition of this first divine thrill of existence did not arise with man, nor even with the kingdoms immediately beneath him. It is universal; it arose in and with the first faint flutter which attracted the atoms of star dust — if, indeed, it does not long antedate this. Its first expression may be one great cosmic, hierarchial note, which, perhaps, voices an ecstacy that each succeeding differentiation in form may lessen rather than increase. The bliss of being is certainly not so perfect in man at present as in the lower, unthinking kingdoms, for it is tainted with doubt and uncertainty, its joys are recognized as fleeting, its course saddened by the knowledge of the gulf of apparent extinction, from which there is no possible escape, which awaits its seeming close. The animal takes no thought; it eats, drinks, and is contented; for it tomorrow contains no hint of ceasing to be. Only when life is endangered does it seek to save it; while life flows its natural course the animal simply is. With the animal it is "I am," not "I exist."

It must be evident to the dullest comprehension that the consciousness of life, of being, pervades all nature, and that man holds no monopoly of it. It is also evident that he does not depend upon his fleeting, constantly changing body for its manifestation. He may do so, to be sure, for its manifestation in that body, but to remove this by death only causes the indestructible principle to change its vehicle for manifestation. For no manifested, and therefore limited, life can be except it have a material form to focus and limit that manifestation. Even illimitable Space itself is but the body of God; its formlessness the silent testimony of a Divinity above and beyond all form limitations.

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So that man, unless by some unthinkable process we suppose him either inside, or outside of space, must always have a body, even though in the last differentiation this be but the body of God — with whom he would then be at one. Compelled by death to abandon the gross physical body, he would still feel the same certainty of existence in inner and more ethereal bodies, until, if all matter we can comprehend be stripped off, his consciousness would exist in space and possess a body of which not even infinite power could deprive him.

Chapter II Sense-consciousness

ANOTHER faculty of the soul, or mode of consciousness, is that of sense-perception. Man's body is composed of numerous organs; some sensory, some for locomotion, some for thought, others for desire, and still others for vital or for purely assimilative purposes, and all intended to enable him to contact this plane of being, maintain his foothold here, and to assimilate the wisdom accruing out of his manifold experiences. The sensory organs are so constructed as to intercept, and enable him to take conscious note of, vibrations covering a vast, but very incomplete, arc of the infinite cycle of life. From smell or touch up to the almost infinitely rapid vibrations of color, his differing organs record the impressions or sensations produced by vibrations reaching him from without. There is, however, such a great hiatus between the higher and the lower of these as to more than suggest the possibility of his evolving other sense organs to enable him to contact still wider areas of sensuous existence hereafter. Putting this aside for the present, we find the range of his sense-consciousness to be so great, and its recep-

SENSE-CONSCIOUSNESSS 9

tion of impressions by constant contact with material things so multitudinous, that he has all his attention fully occupied if he segregates, analyzes, and gathers the ethical meaning of the phenomena with which they bring him into relation. So again we see the necessity of thought as the dominant faculty during embodiment upon earth.

Like other animals, man's response to sense-impressions must always have been, and still is, largely mechanical. But as evolutionary ages rolled by, there was accomplished the conscious segregation or differentiation of these stimuli into great classes and the consequent specialization of organs therefor, and so gradually and imperceptibly was built up man's present sense-organs. Just how these sense-impressions reach the soul, the transient tenant of the body, is not within the province of our present inquiry; suffice it to say that the unity of source of all consciousness constitutes a common bond between the most highly dedeveloped and the most lowly, which enables each to touch a base where consciousness is common to both, so that the soul can be, and is, conscious of the lowly vibrations of its sensuous body because of there being, from their common origin, something in its higher development which recognizes this, for it is a portion of the consciousness of the lower. Were it not for this common basis in which all forms and differentiations of consciousness must root, entities at differing stages of their evolution would be absolutely cut off from all consciousness of other portions of trie universe. Indeed, man is now conscious of but that small portion which he has actually experienced, and by experience evolved the latent potentiality of so doing into an active potency. For no manifesting entity possesses any state of consciousness which it has not evolved by actual experience in the Cycle of Necessity, or arena of evolution. Man knows and recognizes his material universe because, and only because, he has been that universe in all its myriad details. He has buried himself in its rocks, pulsated with and in its rythmic oceans, felt the peace and strength of its mighty oaks, or he could not now be conscious that such things exist.

While thought takes cognizance of these sense-impressions, it is not necessary to their existence, nor even to their recognition. The pure ecstasy arising out of the highest sense-consciousness excludes thought entirely. Indeed, thought would only mar its perfectness. Who that has ever had his soul enwrapped in the tones of a perfect harmony thought about, or tried to analyse, what was taking place? While it lasted time was not; thought had ceased its querulous interrogations, and the soul was content. It had no questionings, no doubts; it did not even "exist;" it was.

Similarly, beautiful landscapes, the low, ceaseless murmur of the restless waves breaking upon the shore, the roar of the storm, the stillness after it

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has passed — all these things reach not the soul through the avenue of thought. They may evoke thought, but they are really a memory, a reminiscense, of the soul, and penetrate it by means of the avenues of feeling. And, if perfect, they do not even evoke thought. Man does not have to reason with himself to know that he is happy; he does not even think of it until after the wave of perfect bliss has passed.

The vibrations of seeing, hearing, tasting, and so on, roll in upon the soul and man becomes conscious of them entirely independent of any thinking process. He usually does connect them with thought, but the connection is not essential to their existence or recognition. It is largely due to the association of ideas. At the awakening of sensuous life in man at each birth his world is new and wonderful, and he is little else than an animated interrogation point — as all who have the care of children will recognize. The habit so engendered becomes despotic in its sway, and, indeed, nature intended this, so that, automatically and by the association of ideas, his questioning analysis goes on long after perfect familiarity with any phenomenon has rendered this unnecessary.

But the crowning proof that sense-consciousness is distinct from, and not dependent upon, thought is to be found in the animal kingdom. Here it is seen in all its purity and perfectness, although here it is already at work upon its Herculean task of evoking the latent power of thinking in a soul which is revelling only in the senses. The higher animals unquestionably think, but the star-fish as unquestionably does not — its slow, laborious response to sense stimuli has not yet reached this plane of consciousness. But, natura non saltet, and we must not confound sense -consciousness with thought -coi> sciousness because the two glide imperceptibly into each other. And they are but two differentiations of the one great Primal Consciousness, just as the senses themselves are but lower differentiations of the one sense-consciousness.

Sense-consciousness is thus seen to be the servant who prepares the way for thought — the pioneer who blazes out the pathways by which thought may guide its following footsteps. By its aid life becomes a long panorama of nature-sights and sounds, every one of which thought must analyse and understand. We may sit idly and drink in the sensuous impressions, but in so doing we are only laggards on the way. We should understand the meaning, from its ethical aspect, of every one of these. It is not enough to classify and name, to seek for external differences and similarities; the inner meaning of it all must be sought out. Knowledge which does not broaden the human character and make it more humane or god-like is no knowledge — its acquirement is time thrown away. But nature is infinitely patient, and although we must get our lesson before this earth grows old and dies,

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to give place to newer and, let us hope, more perfect ones, still the interval is so long that there is ample opportunity, and none need fail because of lack of this.

Sense-consciousnes is probably one of the lowest and most humble of all the divine differentiations within the sea of conscious life, for it is certainly one of the most transient. Yet, nevertheless, it is an absolutely necessary accessory to other and higher states, so that it will not do to pass it by too quickly. Let us rather learn its lessons, assist it to perform its duties, lean not upon its transient pleasures or the glimpse of life which it affords, but use it as a door through which we may enter the real college of life — as a preparatory department in the University of Being.

DESIRE-CONSCIOUSNESS

The consciousness of Desire is the natural sequence of sensuous perception. When one sees a beautiful thing, for example, he desires to be like it — to be the same as it. This feeling his dimly awakened reason attempts to satisfy by the possession of the thing physically. It is the craving for unity; the groping of the soul painfully and blindly its backward way across the abyss of differentiation over which it has passed. Similarly those desires whose office is to perpetuate life are at first related solely to that center of universal life which the man feels within his own breast. He is conscious of no selfishness in desiring to live, so long as he has not separated his life from the infinite Whole. All desire is at its source pure and divine; it is differentiation and consequent further and further separation from its divine Source which permits of its becoming contaminated and tainted with selfishness. The purely divine desire to live thus becomes dulled, and for it is substituted the desire to live regardless of the rights of others, and, finally, the desire to live at the expense of others — the rast and most selfish stage.

Yet a man does not necessarily associate thought with any of his desires. Memory and anticipation play a far more important part. One does not say, "I think that I want this thing," but, "I want it." Associated with thought through memory and imagination, desire speedily falls under the sway of selfishness, thus acquiring a far higher potency; but it can not be said to be the offspring of thought. The desires are notoriously strongest where reason and its concomitant, will, are weakest. When we say that thought precedes desire, we often mean only that memory precedes desire, or that we desire a thing because memory, through the association of ideas, or in some other manner, has brought the thing before our minds.

Desire is the motive for action on the part of all manifested life. Like all divine forces it is entirely impersonal and may be perverted into evil. The

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devil is but God inverted, as the old saying tells us. In its highest aspect desire is but another name for compassion, for what is compassion but the desire to aid others? All the faculties of the lowliest, most fallen human soul have their roots in divinity — are but perversions through ignorance of the divinely beneficent forces of nature. Even the desires that seem — and are — most selfish are but the efforts of the soul to gain happiness through what seems to it the shortest method, and are due in the first instance entirely to ignorance. Ignorance of the meaning and purport of life; of the nature and essential divinity of the soul; of the universality of the law of cause and effect; of the fact of the repeated return of the soul to the earth, the arena of its evolution — all this makes a sad chaos of life. No wonder that men commit the most horrible of crimes in their endeavor to reach and permanently possess happiness. Men murder, steal, forge, enslave, form corporations and trusts, — commit all crimes — because their commission seems to bring happiness a step nearer. Truly, we need higher conceptions of both life and happiness!

Chapter III Thought And Imagination

OPPOSITION is the law of differentiation, or rather, the means by which differentiation is accomplished. No force can be exerted except it be opposed by a counter force. The two may be disparate, the one yield to and be replaced by the other, but opposition of some degree is absolutely essential to the exhibition of energy. This being so — and its truth is self-evident — it follows that the manifestation of the faculties of the soul will tend to duality; there will be in each enough differentiation to afford the necessary basis for its activity. It may undoubtedly happen that one faculty finds the necessary opposing force at times in other faculties, as when reason opposes desire. But this outer opposition is not essential. Each faculty will be found to fall naturally into two great divisions which oppose each other sufficiently to afford the necessary energies to enable both portions to manifest and develope. Thought is no exception. In the Kosmos itself Primordial Thought divides into Absolute Wisdom, or the knowledge of worlds to be, and Creative Imagination, or the power to clothe those Primal Ideas in

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form. In the microcosm, or man, there is an exact parallel. Thought naturally divides itself into two great faculties — Reason and Imagination. The latter has never been accorded its proper place in the estimate of the faculties of the soul. The Sensational school of philosophers deal with it, strange to say, with more fairness and a more acute perception of its importance than any other class. They assign it creative functions, but assert that it can only use materials which have reached the mind through the senses — whence, in truth, they also derive all the faculties of the soul. They admit that the forms produced by the imagination are new, but not the material. Still, they see that the power to take even old material and work it up into something quite new and unlike the old, is unique, and that, therefore, imagination, while employing memory as its agent in gathering material, is much more than mere memory.

It is, indeed. Few realize the tremendous power exercised in the idlest imaginings. Dream, for example, is a state where reason is notoriously in abeyance, often entirely absent, yet even the most foolish of dreams reproduce landscapes, persons, conversations, and so on, with a wealth of matter, and an accuracy of detail which is marvelous if philosophically examined. Memory may, and does, furnish much of the material for these idle visions, but this is simply because the soul is delighted with its sensuous existence, or with portions of it, at least, and deliberately reconstructs these by the magic power of its truly creative faculty. If it be discontented with its environments of any kind, physical, mental or moral, it will quietly discard or reject these, and construct for itself others brighter and better in which memory has little or no part.

This universe is but the Imagination of God. Whatever part be played by reason in its beginnings, imagination is the mighty agent which carves out every detail. And we can easily see that reason such as we know could well be absent from a process supervised by Absolute Wisdom. Imagination is the genii at whose touch form appears. It is the opposite pole of thought, for thought and imagination are but the positive and negative aspects of one and the same thing. Thought deals with externals; imagination with interior things. Of course, reason also deals with internal things, as does also imagination with externals, but this is not the method ordinarily employed. Imagination, in truth, is slowly changing the whole earth, and especially man himself, but molecular matter is unwieldy and needs a more powerful imagination than that of man to bring about speedy change.

But we have every reason for supposing that finer states of matter are more easily affected. Indeed, there is no other way of accounting for the forms we see in dreams except to suppose them to have actually leaped into being, "full panoplied,"

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in response to our imagination, and to be constructed out of matter in these rarer conditions. They persist only so long as our feeble wills hold them intact, even as the very universes will persist just so long as the mighty Creative Will of their Cosmocratores holds the idea of them clearly in its imagination, when they, too, will fade away like the vagaries of a departing dream. The " written upon the tablets of the brain " theory has long since been abandoned by thoughtful Sensationalists, or Materialists, for they recognize the insuperable mechanical difficulties which beset such an explanation. Idle dreams and equally idle fancies in waking are but the moods of a childish giant ; they presage the power which will be exerted when the giant realizes his strength and exerts it intelligently.

Another thing to be remembered, and which will have a most important bearing upon the course of our future argument, is that the imagination is the subjective faculty of the soul, par excellence. Reason is its objective faculty, for it is so universally exercised upon external phenomena that it can scarcely be said to act interiorily, in the true sense of the term. But with imagination it is different. Its first step is to retire within; it can not be exercised while the mind is occupied with externals. For it no exterior universe is required, except to furnish material for its inner activity. In sleeping or waking, in night-dreaming or day, the external universe is unnecessary ; it creates its own worlds, and peoples them with its own beloved, utterly indifferent as to whether external universes exist or not.

Reason represents the working phase of existence; imagination its opposite, or rest, and both are equally necessary to a happy existence. The law of cycles, of alternating activity and resting, is seen throughout all nature. Ever the night follows the day ; ever are the tired faculties of activity recuperated by the grateful cessation from toil. It is a law of life ; it is but another example of those "pairs of opposites" by which manifestation is accomplished, and through which existence wends its blissful way. There will never be that total cessation from toil which Western religions teach, nor is there warrant for this in all nature. "Work, then rest," is the command of nature, and it has been recognized, if but dimly, by every people who have set one day apart as sacred from toil.

Imagination is a most perfect means of resting (for rest in its true sense is but a change of occupation) inasmuch as it is above all limitations of time. When one retires into its recesses for pleassure, he cares not whether past, present or future be the subject-matter for its creations. Naturally, the young choose the future; equally naturally the old prefer to live in the past. When one sits down to rest in the fictions of today, does he not enter with an equal zest into the lives and loves of