CAN WE BE SURE

OF MORTALITY?

WM. A. CHENEY

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CAN WE BE SURE OF MORTALITY?
CAN WE BE SURE OF
MORTALITY?
A LAWYER'S BRIEF

BY
WM. A. CHENEY
EX-JUDGB OP THE 8UPEEIOB COUET OP THE
STATE OF CALIFOBNIA IN AND FOB
LOS ANGELES COUNTY

NEW YORK
ROGER BROTHERS, Publishers
1910

LONDON: L. N. FOWLEE & CO.

 COPTRIGHT, 1910, B¥

WILLIAM ATWELL CHENEY

TH« TBOW PRESS, NEW TORK

 CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAQK
Preface vii

I. Introduction 1
11. Some Things Which Science Does Not Know 18
III. The Living Environment 33
IV. Relationship 66
V. The Witnesses 80
VI. Consciousness and Pain 98
VII. Memory 117
VIII. Monism 134
IX. The Will 145
X. The Eternity of Individuality 151
XI. Conclusion 194
 PREFACE
If it be true that "you are not all included be-
tween your hat and your boots," then possibly the
residue or individual is not mortal after all. One
surmises many things about this selfsame indi-
vidual irrespective of biology, anatomy, or phys-
ics in general, and while a surmise is not a
datum, it often evolves an experience which re-
sults in the acquisition of a fact.Good guessing
is second cousin to an hypothesis, especially if
based on a fair amount of actuality. Are we sure
then that we are mortal? Furthermore, are the
professors of exact science quite certain that the
individual is annihilated when the body dies as
such and goes back to the elements whence it
came? The amount that we know is absurdly
small compared with that yet unexplained, and
the Riddle of the Universe is not so easy of solv-
ing as some of our professors may suppose. To
be sure, a key is a good thing, and we have one
already that unlocks many doors; but on ahead
are more and still more closed avenues not yet
explored.
The word science means to know, this term by
its very nature implying the unknown; and the
scientist is simply a human being conscientiously
vii
Vlll PBEFACE

dealing with the negatives and positives of pos-

sible knowledge. He gropes about in the dark
with his torch of a fact, getting glimmers here and
there of new data or a law, like the pay streak in
—
ore-bearing rock that which is seen is but an in-
dication of that which is hid, and only the indi-
vidual who admits this is worthy the term of sci-
entist. Should we discover the secret of secrets,
—
the final or first principle the hidden mainspring
that once understood would reveal the Universe
—
with all its facts even then, man, being but hu-
man and a victim of time and space, must needs
keep busy through eternity, adjusting and relating
these infinite data one to the other. There is no
danger of a slump in the business of science or
the scientific man, for that in which he lives,
moves, and has his being is so much bigger than
himself that he can never retire from business
while time lasts. The living environment in which
each individual finds himself submerged forms a
sargasso of specialization that compels him to des-
perately flounder until a grasp on unity is at-
tained. In physics, with its hypothetical atom,
he is lost and well-nigh drowned. Not until he
discovers a dominant unit guiding and directing
its subjects of lesser units does the cosmic bal-
ance of things present itself. The word relation-
ship is a misnomer unless it really expresses its
true meaning. Things chaotically bumping to-
gether without let or hindrance, sympathy or
mutual understanding, are not in a true sense re-
lated. A universe of accidents like this would be
without coordination, without harmony, without
 ;

PREFACE IX

inherent unifying law. We know of no snch uni-

verse. Relationsliip is an established fact; cos-
mos and balance are everywhere in evidence.
Living things environ and are environed, estab-
lishing a true relativity, physically, mentally, and
spiritually. Dominant units control lesser units
and are in turn controlled by those above them.
There is a hierarchy, an ascending scale. All
things then are good in their initiative and final-
ity. The Alpha and Omega are absolute and true
only that which goes between presents itself to
the partial understanding as Evil; the Ultimates
are beyond cavil.
Which is the myth, then, considering our en-
—
vironment and relationships mortality or im-
mortality? Professor Haeckel claims that immor-
tality is a fable, an old man's dream; but many
another scientific witness argues against the myth
of mortality, and much of this argument hinges
—
on the fact of consciousness a problem which
staggers the materialistic monist and which he
certainly does not solve. An assumption of one
infinite eternal substance with innate property
of movement, minus eternal differentiation, is no
adequate explanation of consciousness. This
power of mind being beyond solution, by science
either heterodox or orthodox, is also beyond the
reach of judgment as to its mortality or other-
wise. Therefore, any scientist who would sum-
marily dispose of it is hardly worthy of serious
consideration. The miracles which we are asked
by orthodox Christianity to believe are simple
and childlike compared with the stupendous de-
X PREFACE

mand on our credulity made by biology when we

are requested to accept the memory of the germ
cell, along with its storing capacity for holding
intact the complexities of the race memories and
impulses, as well as the innumerable physical
forms of motion ready to spring into multiform
life with the past in consciousness stretching
backward to simple plasm. And this cell a divis-
ible cell at that
!
—
It may all be truth ^no doubt is,
but if so, the miracle of immortality or eternity of
being is not a hard one to swallow; for such ca-
pacity in an invisible cell would stamp it with the
hall-mark of continuity. Sterling and indestruc-
tible, what else could it be but individual? All men

—
are "as grass" yes. He "cometh up as a flower"
— ^yes, yes. He is bound to walk over the spot
—
sometime in his life where he will be buried ^yes,
yes, yes. We have had this dinged into our ears
from childhood; funerals have been our night-
mares, coflfins, lugubrious voices, crape !If there
is anything in outer and auto suggestion, we
ought to die. Not a shred of the human or di-
vine would be left if mortality in toto were an as-
sumed fact. And there is an immense deal in
auto and outer suggestion. A sick man can be-
come sicker and sicker by constantly reminding
himself in so many words that he is ill a well man
;

can even make himself sick by the same method.

To be sure, we have been informed by priests and
philosophers of a possible immortality, but with
such long faces, solenm airs, and so many condi-
tions, that the prospect held out is abnormal and
unalluring.
 PREFACE XI

If the human world would face about and look

at life instead of death; if it would aflSrm health
instead of sickness, the mortality of man would
dwindle to insignificance compared with the im-
mortality or eternity of being which is undoubt-
edly his. Mortality would then resolve itself into
a change of environment for the real man as re-
gards his physical structure. As a matter of fact,
that change is continually going on, even when he
is said to live, death being but a stronger pro-
nouncement in the same direction. We make but
little ado about moving from one house to an-
other; why then are we so doleful about this flu-
idic house of flesh, these colonies of individuals
amidst which we dwell ? They are a shifting com-
modity at best, and that stable thing which we call
the individual is not necessarily tied to any spe-
cial order of vitalized being. Besides, this same
organized habitat is far more readily maintained
in approximate equilibrium when we cease to af-
firm that it is sick and dying. If one wants to
set up a revolution in that thing called his body,
creating chaos in the very central system itself,
let him suggest continually that order is impos-
sible, and sickness and death have already in-
truded. Of course we are mortal in so far as we
make ourselves so. Were it possible, we would
be utterly and irrevocably annihilated, and the
very philosophers that teach immortality help
—
man on to this doleful condition even more so
than the "rank materialist" who challenges the
immortal with an energy worthy of better things.
"Are we sure of Mortality ?" According to the
Xll PEEFACE

priest —
and logician ^yes. "All men are mortal."
But what is a man? As before said, "you are not
all included between your liat and your boots."
Therefore, in face of the dominant assertions of
the ages past, the author of this book has the au-
dacity to ask, Are you sure?

A. E. C.
 Chapter I

INTRODUCTION
The assurance with which some writers dealing
with biological and kindred topics have asserted
the scientifically demonstrated mortality of the
individual is a matter of profound astonishment;
and being a lawyer by profession, I undertook
for my own satisfaction and that of some of my
friends the task of writing a brief for the other
side. It appeared clearly to me that if any theory
or any number of theories could be presented
which were consistent with what Science knows,
and also with the idea of immortality, then the
claimed demonstration of man's mortality must
necessarily fail. While I was engaged in the
preparation of this brief, my attention was called
to the recently published opinions of leading sci-
entists upon the question, causing me to adapt
my argument to the position taken by them, par-
ticularly to that assumed by Professor Haeckel.
My reason for selecting the great Zoologist for
the purpose is because he presents the argument
for that side of the question with all the force of
which it is capable, and he marshals the evidence
to its minutest detail. He therefore represents
the scientific nonimmortalists.
I am not desirous of assuming an attitude criti-
1
2 INTRODUCTION

cal of his scientific attainments in a chosen and

—
special field of thought far from it. I have found
his labors a source of great satisfaction when my
mind turned wearily from the sheep-bound books
containing the condensed wisdom of jurists; but
Professor Haeckel has written a book for the
world at large, one which is not a text-book, nor a
treatise on his special science.
I have read the work and am one of those for
whose benefit it may be presumed it was written.
I am one of the human beings whom he would
turn adrift on the sea of profound despondency,
with the cables of their vessels slipped, and the
sails idly slapping the yards and masts.
I therefore have a right to know why he has
assumed judicial functions and pronounced the
judgment of mortality upon man, what proofs he
possesses, why he has loaded down with an extra
weight of woe my fellowman who already found
life in this world discouraging, disappointing, but
who nevertheless kept a smiling face, because it
was hopefully turned toward either heaven or
some compensating change of environment in the
eternities.
The bearer of bad news is never welcome,
though that should not prevent a straightforward
presentation of science, provided it be science, on
the part of those men who seem to be set apart for
that especial work, neither should we be afraid to
face the truth, provided it be the truth, though
destructive of our ideals.
Who and what are scientists? They are men
who at the sacrifice of a generalized life special-
 INTRODUCTION 6

ize the operations of their minds in some chosen

field for the purpose of gathering data, facts;
these they report to the general world of mankind,
which constructs therefrom its conclusions. A
man may be great as a specialist, as Darwin, Hux-
ley, Haeckel, or he may be great as a generalist,
as Herbert Spencer, but he is never great as both,
or so rarely that it is difficult to recall the name of
one to mind.
Witnesses, even experts, never occupy the
bench or the jury box on the trial of an issue of
fact they are respectfully requested to step down
;

if they are to bear witness, and leave the judicial

functions to be exercised by others. So Professor
Haeckel is a great witness to such data as he has
collected in his chosen field, but as judge or jury
his conclusions from them, when applied to an-
other and entirely different field, are of no more
value than are the reader's or mine.
The absolute negative can be proven never and ;

if any theory or theories, any hypothesis or hy-

potheses, any belief or beliefs, can start the pro-
jection of their lines of thought where the proof
ends, it is sufficient.
The cool nonchalance with which German sci-
entists of a certain school announce as a final con-
clusion the falsity of the doctrine of the immortal-
ity of man would be amusing if it were not for
the danger that the mass of busy men may accept
their assertion as truth. Judging from the en-
thusiasm with which they embrace the opportuni-
ties to attack it, it would seem almost as if the
destruction of this hopeful doctrine was the ob-
4 INTEOi)UCTION

jective point towhich they were aiming all their

researches. There are evidences of this to be
found in the fact that by his own admission, an
admission upon which he prides himself, Profes-
sor Haeckel holds the same opinion now that he
did thirty years ago, before the recent progress
had been made in biology. Are we to conclude
from this that he was a wonderful prophet thirty
years ago, or rather that his preconceived notions
concerning immortality have caused his conclu-
sions from data to be biased? The vehemence
with which the doctrine of immortality is as-
saulted but emphasizes the importance of the be-
lief to humanity. Either it is exceedingly dan-
gerous to the best interests of humankind, or else
those who assail it are. The opinions of special-
ists are of peculiar value, when expressed con-
cerning matters clearly within the limits of their
fields of observation and investigation. Outside
of those realms their opinions are but dicta and
possess no particular worth, and this for the rea-
son that the very concentration along the especial
lines of their work causes them to be peculiarly
weak in other directions. Darwin said of himself
that as he grew older while the capacity for ob-
servation in his chosen field of labor increased in
power, he completely lost the appreciation of tune,
harmony, and all that gives to music its soul-in-
spiring qualities. All of his marvelous scientific
attainment would not therefore qualify him as a
judge of music.
A study of the growth, development, complex-
ity, and functions of the brain and nervous system
 INTRODUCTION 5

emphasizes this position. Lines of least resist-

ance are established, facile connections made, and
others blocked and frequently inhibited. It is not
to be wondered at, then, that a man who spends all
his time over the microscope in the study of the
egg with its nucleus, polar bodies, and centrosome,
or whose energies are altogether given to the
chemical analysis of the living machine and its
operations, should by such concentration to a per-
ceptible degree incapacitate himself for generali-
zation. Just as difficult is it for a man who is
bound by a creed to find truth anywhere outside of
his particular form of religion. This is because
of the establishment of preferred paths, which
become lines of least resistance; the mind oper-
ates only along these lines, the other channels are
clogged, paralyzed, atrophied, or undeveloped;
therefore, anything poured into the brain through
the senses seeks these lines and these only. The
opinion of the microscopist or the occult chemist
concerning the divinity of Christ has no added
value from his eminence in his special field of la-
bor, and the opinion of the creed-bound priest as
to the office of the centrosome of the cell receives
no strength from his clerical calling.
The scientist may consistently demand that you,
in opposing him, furnish him with data incon-
sistent with his apparent science, but he may not
with propriety say that science declares your
facts untrue, for either his position is not scien-
tific or your declarations are not of facts.
The specialist is not the emperor of the world
of thought, he is merely king of his limited mon-
6 INTRODUCTION

archy. His duty is performed when he has un-

loaded the things he has discovered and the prin-
ciples evolved. His only value to the mental
world is measured by what he has added to the
sum of knowledge; where his contributions fit,
how they adapt, and what ethical or religious con-
clusions are to be drawn from them, are questions
better answered by the general constructor than
by the specialist himself.
The mountains of wisdom are honeycombed
with the old holes once with the surveying
filled
flag poles of scientists. They, the scientists, are
sleepless surveyors; they never fold their hands
and cry, "It is finished"; they assume positions,
they abandon them, and enable the world of
thought to rear new structures upon the ruins of
the old. This positive assertion on the part of
materialistic or monistic specialists that the world
must part with its dream of immortality has a
familiar sound. We are all accustomed to the im-
perious verdict of some scientists; their "cannot
be" confronted with the "may be" of ordinary
mankind has more than once resulted in an aban-
donment of position and the acknowledgment "it
is." The solar system, aye, the universe, has been
constructed on various plans and reconstructed to
meet the demands of increasing knowledge; heat
and light have abandoned some of the various
methods of proceeding from the Sun to Earth
provided for them by physicists from time to
time many dog-eared leaves in the Geologic book
;

have been torn out; combating biologists have

found more hidden wheels in the machinery of
 INTBODUCTION 7

the ovum, and constructed man with his load of

inheritances upon several new theoretical plans
based thereon, but there does not walk upon the
earth one solitary scientist who is justified by the
joint investigations of them all in asserting, as
has been done, that the opening days of the Twen-
tieth Century confront us with demonstrative
proof that the idea of immortality is a dream.
One of the wisest and most persevering investi-
gators, George Romanes, the man who first sought
systematically for and found in the medusa what
is probably the primitive nervous system of living
creatures, says in "Mind, Motion, and Monism":
"Because within the limits of human experience
mind is only known as associated with brain, it
clearly does not follow that mind cannot exist in
any other mode." "There is no being without know-
ing. ... If there is no motion without mind, no
being without knowledge, may we not rather infer,
with Bruno, that it is in the medium of mind and in
the medium of knowledge we live and move and
have our being ? . .Yet even here, if it be true that
.

the voice of science must thus of necessity speak

the language of agnosticism, at least let us see to
it that the language is pure, let us not tolerate any

barbarisms introduced from the side of aggres-

sive dogma, so shall we find that this new gram-
mar of thought does not admit of any construction
radically opposed to more venerable ways of
thinking —that if a little knowledge of physiology
and a little knowledge of psychology dispose men
to atheism, a deeper knowledge of both, and still
more, a deeper thought upon their relations to one
8 INTRODUCTION

another will lead men back to some form of re-

ligion which, if it be more vague, may also be more
worthy than that of earlier days."
The claim of thoughtful and hopeful humanity
has been that individuals may be immortal. He
would not be a rash man who should add to his
hope the expectation that sometime the certainty
of immortality should be scientifically manifest,
but he certainly goes to the verge of rashness who
asserts that it is now or ever will be demonstrated
by human science that individual life is not im-
mortal. We measure mortality by and in a dying
environment, we witness the protean changes of
form and expression, and the columns of mortal
figures which we add but result in mortal totals.
The very conception of immortality, indeed any
conception of it, must be, and is, always of an-
other and different environment.
All that science has measured, weighed, gauged,
or analyzed, to this day has been that which ap-
peals to our five senses, and even that has not as
yet found its limits. We do not know what energy
is, and the least in size and latest in discovery of

physical organisms reveals it operating with such

marvelous precision and selectivity that the last
words of science uttered with bated breath are:
"Energy may be conscious!" Possibly we may
yet shout in the positiveness of conviction, "En-
ergy is conscious, energy is consciousness, energy
is mind!"
Whether we may not reasonably postulate units
of energy as a substitute for the hypothetical hard
atoms and find in ether and motion the key to the
 INTRODUCTION

kaleidoscopic phenomena of nature, is a question

which I hardly think can be at present answered
in the negative.
Much of the intellectual fogginess surrounding
the idea of immortality may arise out of the fact
that we are prone to limit our conception of it to
the immortality of man qua man, whereas the true
question should be: Is the individual immortal?
A man is but a form of energy as presenting its
necessary phenomena in the existing environment.
He is an essential adaptation to changing sur-
roundings.
The transformation of energy is supplemented
by the reversibility of energy. When I speak into
the transmitter of the telephone, the energy forms
of my voice succeed one another in the various
vibrations of the tympanum and unseen and un-
heard traverse the long wire, the environing me-
dium is different, the energy forms are different
likewise, but upon reaching the enveloping atmos-
phere beyond the receiver they are again what
they were before in the same medium, contain the
qualities of my voice, and all along the line are in
changing forms, but retaining individuality of
energy.
We are what we are because of where we are.
The permissive suggestion of Socrates to his
mourning friends that they might bury him "if
they could catch him," savors of a profound in-
sight into the real nature of life.
With our microscopes and in our chemical labo-
ratories we are analyzing what we are with what
we are and in the where we are.
10 INTEODUCTION

We are what we are in form and expression be-

cause of our relationship to the environment in
which we form and express we could not be other
;

than we are in that environment. If evolution has

not taught us that lesson, then we are remarkably
blind to its leadings.
Our forms, senses, arms, legs, chemical proc-
esses, methods of analysis, and expression of
ideas, all are but so many inevitable results of the
movement of the individual in this environment.
What would it operating in another and dif-
be if
ferent one? Who
can say! Certainly the scien-
tist, whose very science is measured in terms of
the environment, cannot be permitted to assert
that he has demonstrated that it could not exist
at all. As the expression of a unit of force in this
environment, man, undoubtedly he may demon-
strate the impossibility of its similar appearance
in a foreign environment, but that is as far as
reason permits him to go in condemning the hope
and expectancy of humanity that its life has no
death, but does have inherent power of adapta-
tion to any environment in which it may find it-
self. Until Biology is able to give some more lucid
explanation for the phenomena of thought and
memory than the hazy one of chemical action, or
phosphorescent gleams, it is not in a position to
declare an ultimate conclusion that the individual
is merely a machiae and its mortality demon-
strated.
If mind but the functioning of matter, if
is
thought but the secretion of the brain, then mem-
ory is utterly inexplicable, and consciousness is but
 INTBODUCTION 11

the immediate moment and unable to declare it-

self, for in functioning, a state or condition be-
comes another state or condition and the process
is already past. Indeed, upon such a foundation
I do not see how we may rationally speak of a
"state." Nothing would be static, it would be an
ever-becoming. The process is not like that of
the kinetoscope, where the pictures succeed each
other as independent forms, separate, distinct, but
producing the appearance of movement only by
the rapidity of successive presentation not so at
;

all. The progressive change in man is one move-

ment of a constantly evolving figure of one chang-
ing form. As a matter of common experience we
know that, whatever the unit of force may be
which is thus adapting itself to its environment,
we are not only aware of the moment's process,
but memory means that we compare each wave of
the flux with the wave which preceded it and, in-
deed, even anticipate the wave which will follow;
otherwise we could only be conscious of being,
not of having been, nor of becoming.
These may be old problems, but they ever re-
main unsolved to rebuke the effrontery of men
who think they have surveyed the universe of
mind by measuring along the straight line of spe-
cialty.
If we be logical in our analysis of the proposi-
tion that biological science demonstrates that mind
is but the functioning of organized matter and
therefore there is nothing to survive, we shall add
to the conclusion, "therefore there was nothing to
commence."
12 INTRODUCTION

To limit the evidence for or against the im-

mortality of the individual to either physical or
psychical phenomena, or to biology or psychology,
is to reach a conclusion based upon one side of the
case alone.
I believe that every thoughtful man will recog-
nize the fact that it is to the failure to harmonize
the data of these parallel sciences that we must
look for the reason for the unjustified conclusions
reached by our great physicists and biologists.
Awork upon biology is a text-book or a treatise
upon a special subject so is one upon psychology,
;

but in the attempt to reach a conclusion concern-

ing the meaning of life or its continuity, one
surely betrays an unconscious prejudice if he re-
fuses to consider the bearing of the data of both
these sciences upon the matter.
Professor Haeckel frankly says that it is impos-
sible for any man to be master of all the sciences,
and that his own command of them is "uneven and
defective," though, of course, this is compara-
tively so only. So that when we read his latest
book we are not studying the well-digested data
presented in a text-book or a scientific treatise,
but rather the opinions of a scientist who, adding
to the legitimate products of a personal research
on his own part the declarations and opinions of
others, which he has exercised his own judgment
in selecting, has constructed a scheme of existence
which satisfies himself. This should be borne in
mind in reading his book, because otherwise we
may grievous error of supposing our-
fall into the
selves compelled to accept his conclusions be-
 INTBODUCTION 13

cause of his great prominence in his chosen field

of research.
The latter part of his work consists of chapters
which deal with questions entirely outside of his
special sciences, as, for instance, those on "God
and the World," "Knowledge and Belief," "Sci-
ence and Christianity," "Our Monistic Religion,"
"Our Monistic Ethics," and the "Immortality of
the Soul."
That Professor Haeckel, as any other scholarly,
influential man, has a right to form and express
his views upon these subjects, no one for a mo-
ment can doubt but that his religious, philosophi-
;

cal, and ethical opinions should be received and

given the same value as his theses on zoology or
evolution is open to grave doubts for the reasons
which I have suggested.
It is not my purpose to undertake the foolish
task of criticising Professor Haeckel in the line
of thought and research where he stands preemi-
nent, nor to review the caustic strictures placed by
him upon religion and the ordinarily accepted
articles of faith. I do, however, hope to be able
to give some reasons for not following him into
the marshes of absolute negation of individual im-
mortality. I cannot hope, nor shall I attempt, to
present any explanation of the Universe, nor ar-
rogate to myself the ability to understand it, but
merely to suggest that some avenues of escape
from despair are yet scientifically open to the im-
agination which will even bear the test of the ap-
plication of "pure reason." The great question
presented by Professor Haeckel's book is whether
14 INTRODUCTION

the individual can survive the wreck of its physi-

cal body, and, of course, that involves the other
questions. What is an individual, and did it have
a beginning'?
It is true that the immortality discussed by
Haeckel is the immortality of the soul, but as he de-
fines the soul to be a collective title for the sum of
cerebral functions, these to be determined by phys-
ical and chemical processes, it is apparent that he
treats the whole man, physical and psychical, as
the individual therefore, soul and individual are
;

for the purposes of his chapter on immortality

one and the same thing. The gist of his argument
is that soul being but the sum total of these cere-
bral functions, when they cease there is nothing
in the nature of an individual to survive. Much
of the discussion is directed to the annihilation of
the doctrine of immortality as presented by
Christianity and other dualistic religions. It has
seemed to me that a larger view of what an in-
dividual is, than that which narrows him to the
mere manifestation in the material body, is sci-
entifically possible and I have endeavored in the
;

pages which follow to outline the reasons why I

think so. Not that I claim that the particidar
theories which I advance are exclusive, but that
they are subject to fewer serious scientific objec-
tions than the negative conclusions presented by
Professor Haeckel. They are possibly true, even
in the light of recent science, and if possibly so,
then the argument for the negative is invalid and
;

if the possibility trends toward probability, then

the negation disappears entirely.
 INTEODUCTION 15

Unless some such idea of what an individual is

as is presented in these pages is a true one, I
really do not see that science recognizes any in-
dividual at all. Professor HaeckePs definition of
an individual is that of a unity which cannot be
divided without destroying its nature, an indi-
visible entity; and as we know that the germ cell
of animal life does divide many times in segmen-
tation before birth and continues to do so after
birth in generation, it really would appear diffi-
cult to locate individuality, although he says that
there (in the cell) the individual begins his ex-
istence. Its production of the other generative
cells sexually can no more be "overgrowth" and
compatible with the preservation of the individ-
ual than is the segmentation of protists, which
Haeckel says destroys the individual.
I cannot resist the feeling that there is reason
to believe that there is meaning in the individual
life, a meaning which holds such a relation to the
Universe that its value must not be measured in
time and space, but in the time of times and space
—
of spaces Eternity. The existence of ether we
probably admit from necessity growing out of evi-
dent phenomena demanding it, but when Pro-
fessor Haeckel claims it to be "thinking substance"
which would appear to possess the essence of
thought, but does not think, that is his opinion,
demanded by his own preconceived notions and
which he supplies in his scheme to meet the de-
mand.
When he postulates an eternal, infinite ether,
which has a tendency to condense and otherwise
16 INTRODUCTION

differentiate, that is his opinion again, and we are

left to ask, What is a "tendency?" not a will,
Is it

and if it tends to differentiation, is it not a dif-

ferentiated will, and are we not again at a point
where we may just as scientifically as we postu-
lated all this, also postulate individual forces
units of force?
Before I surrender that which I have always
considered my great and overshadowing motive in
life, namely, my individual, eternal value in the
Universe, I must have something more than the
opinions of any man, however great. When Pro-
fessor Haeckel asserts that when the cerebral
functions cease, thought and consciousness do
likewise, that again is an opinion, it is a mere as-
sertion concerning the very question at issue. He
does not know that they cease, and from the very
premises upon which he constructs his conclu-
sions, it is evident that he cannot know. How can
he expect to measure the thought and conscious-
ness expressed in something which is not cere-
brum by cerebral activity in his own brain?
I will conclude this introduction by asking the
reader to consider, as he reads the succeeding
pages of this book, that the statement of Professor
Haeckel that this "ether," this "spirit" (force),
this "thinking substance," these "fundamental
postulates" are to be viewed as eternally produc-
ing the differentiated aspect of the Universe, so
that we are not to "hark back" to a point where
the two were equated in a homogeneous infinite
sea. That being so, of course it follows that the
present characteristic differentiation of the Uni-
 INTRODUCTION 17

verse has been eternally in existence —^now here,

now there, now this, now that —and that, therefore,
a grand organization sufficient to eternally have
been the manifestation of one great organized
mind has never been wanting, and much that I
suggest in the following pages is, therefore, ra-
tionally conceivable; and being so, constitutes so
much of possibility to offset the dogmatic con-
clusions of Professor Haeckel.
 Chapter II

SOME THINGS WHICH SCIENCE DOES

NOT KNOW
A fair examination of the "demonstration" by
Haeckel and others of the mortality of man, when
examined critically by the application to it of the
rules of evidence as adopted and prevailing in
our courts of law, will result in the conclusion
that it does not meet the requirements of the rule
of circumstantial evidence.
If the evidence is of separate facts, they must
be so connected together in an unbroken chain of
continuity as that only one conclusion can flow
therefrom. There must be no missing links in
the chain, no unknown quantities which must be
supplied by hypotheses, unless they are them-
selves the conclusions sought for, and are irre-
sistible deductions. A chain of evidence, like one
of iron, is no stronger than its weakest link.
I fancy it will be admitted that when Science
undertakes the task of destroying the belief of
ages of nearly all men, one which arises without
external stimulation, which springs up within the
mind as a very part of its constitution, namely,
the belief that the individual is immortal, the bur-
den of proof is on Science to establish the fact of
mortality.
18
SOME THINGS WHICH SCIENCE DOES NOT KNOW 19

This, I think, will be manifest when we remem-

ber that the idea of immortality finds its place in
the mind itself and appears to be as innate as any-
thing else; hence, to destroy it, to demonstrate
that it is false, requires a prior demonstration as
to what mind is in itself. Science asserts that we
know nothing except through* the senses; there-
fore, as the idea of immortality is of a life where
knowledge exists without the use of the senses as
we know them, and of an activity in a medium now
immeasurable by these senses, Science can know
nothing of immortality and can demonstrate noth-
ing concerning it pro or con.
Science asserts (Haeckel) that the atoms prob-
ably are endowed with will and feeling. I do not
dispute the fact, but Science has never seen, felt,
heard, smelled, or tasted an atom, or received any
knowledge of it through the senses except by in-
ference therefore, it knows nothing about the ex-
;

istence of atoms, and hence cannot endow them

with qualities of will and feeling, on his hypothe-
sis.
Scientists are disagreed as to whether the hy-
pothetical atoms are hard or soft, are matter or
force, are spirals or vortex rings, are eternal or
appear and disappear; hence, the hypothesis of
the existence of atoms includes a guess (a rational
one) at what they are if they exist. Therefore,
Science cannot tell us anything about atoms that
is not open to readjustment as to its truth.
Science relegates consciousness to the activities
of the cerebral cells, but it cannot construct a syn-
thesis of those activities which will result in a
20 SOME THINGS WHICH SCIENCE DOES NOT KNOW

syntlietic consciousness competent to explain what

we feel as to the unity of our consciousness.
Science begins its analysis of man in media res,
at the intricately organized, fertilized ovum cell,
smaller than the point of a needle; therefore, it
does not know the origin of his physical or mental
capacities.
It finds apparent, inherited traits, and is forced
to crowd them into this cell.
It is confrontedwith genius, and is compelled
to crowd the "race memory" into this cell.
It is aware that a man's wonderfully com-
pounded body comes from it, and perforce of ne-
cessity packs this cell with additional memories of
the human form, organs, central system, etc.
All of this is usually admitted to be a rational
theory, but Science does not know and cannot tell
what memory is, that it can be thus potential in a
microscopic speck; hence, the fertilized ovum cell
is a convenient closet in which to store any biolog-
ical problem.
Science asserts memory and consciousness to
be products, but starts with such a cell (fertilized
ovum) already loaded with memories, which do
not appear except as after products of the activi-
ties of changing syntheses growing out of the mul-
tiplication of the cell by division therefore, there
;

is as much reason for believing the memory to be

something aliunde the physical cell and which is
the activity behind the syntheses as to believe the
cell to be itself a bundle of potential memories.
Science claims (Haeckel) that the noblest love
of human hearts is precisely the same thing, on a
SOME THINGS WHICH SCIENCE DOES NOT KNOW 21

larger scale, as the chemical afl&nities of atoms;

but Science cannot find in the whole universe an
atom which by reason of its affinity for another
will by the deliberate exercise of the will with
which it is endowed lay down its life and go out
of existence for another. Such an analysis of
love as that given by Haeckel is reductio ad db-
surdum.
Science (Haeckel) denies anything to soul,
mind, or spirit except as the result of chemical
activities of the cerebrum.
Everywhere atoms of specific character, asso-
ciated in similar ways and subjected to the same
stimuli chemically, act uniformly in an identical
manner. Science can differentiate brain cells by
localities, but it has not as yet been able to show
that the substance is not identical in all of them.
These cells are in the different localities subjected
to different stimuli, but Science cannot give a
known reason why the associative cells of the
cerebrum are enabled anywhere to land a unity
of consciousness. Science does not know what
either memory or consciousness is in itself.
Science knows nothing about the qualities,
forces, or organic potentialities of the ether one
single step beyond the point where it has wit-
nessed its supposed phenomena. If it did, it would
not be on the outlook for more discoveries every
year; hence, the increasing discoveries of the qual-
ities of ether may lead toward, instead of away
from, even an organized immortality.
Ignoring the theory that individuality may be
at last a form of energy and its various bodies but
22 SOME THINGS WHICH SCIENCE DOES NOT KNOW

presentations ofit, Haeckel makes light of a pos-

siblegaseous body to the soul and says that if it

were possessed of such a body, "we could then
catch the soul as it 'breathed out' at the moment
of death, condense it, and exhibit it in a bottle as
'immortal fluid.' By a further lowering of
. . .

temperature and increase of pressure it might be

possible to solidify it to produce 'soul snow.'
He then naively suggests that "the experiment has
not yet succeeded." Just so, it has not, and there-
fore we may not assume that it can be done.
Here Science betrays the weakness of its one-
sided method of reasoning, in that it is guilty of
the folly of seeking for the immortal in the vehicle
instead of in what it carries. Souls may have a
gaseous body for aught we know, and yet such
embodiment may be temporary.
It is just possible that even if such aeri-
form beings credited with "being," possessed of
the *'physiological functions of an organism"
(Haeckel), existed, such a process might call forth
a comment from the individual soul of which it
was an "organism," similar to that of Socrates,
"You may bottle me, if you can catch me."
But Haeckel goes further and says that an
"etheric soul . . cannot possibly account for the
.

individual life of the soul." Perhaps not, but

might it not be that Science does not know
whether the "individual life of the soul" can or
cannot account for an etheric body of the soul?
I perceive the radiant energy of ether as white
light, but if I pass its pencils through the prism, I
cause the phenomenon of white light to break up
SOME THINGS WHICH SCIENCE DOES NOT KNOW 23

into its varying wave lengths and its combination

becomes apparent to me as rays of different
colors, and each will perform its different func-
tions and produce its different phenomena; so
with the Roentgen and N rays, and otherwise in
physics a few rather startling results reveal them-
selves as the days go on. Science knows only that
which it knows about the ether.
A theorist who will postulate an ether "not
atomistic, not made up of separate particles
(atoms), but continuous," but which can in some
manner be condensed into a structure (matter)
which is "atomistic," made up of infinitesimal,
distinct particles (atoms), discontinuous, should
not treat with dogmatic contempt any theory
which supposes an ether in which organisms may
exist. Ether is yet a mystery, and its unknown ca-
pabilities and potentialities will not support an
absolute denial of any rational theory.
Some Scientists believe experimentally in telep-
athy, or communication of mind impulses at a
distance, but they know nothing about its modus
operandi; others deny its existence without ex-
amination or experiment hence, Science is at war
;

here with itself.

Science denies any value to the transcendental.
It is transcendental that the germ cell can con-
tain all that we believe it does. Such "imcon-
scious memories" are transcendental.
It is transcendentalism to postulate eternal, in-
finite, thinking substance; the infinite itself is
transcendental.
It is transcendentalism to bestow will and feel-
24 SOME THINGS WHICH SCIENCE DOES NOT KNOW

ing upon tmknown atoms; will itself is transcen-

dental we only know it by what it does.
;

It is transcendentalism to postulate movement

as an "innate property" of substance innate prop-
;

erties are transcendental, so is substance itself.

It is transcendentalism to think of a commence-
ment, and we do not escape it by thinking "eter-
nity," for the thought of eternity is transcen-
dental.
Anything is transcendental which is absolutely
beyond our sense capacity, even though we find
reasons for postulating it. If there lives a Sci-
entist or lay thinker who can honestly say that
Yds senses give him proof demonstrative o? these
things which I have mentioned, he has not as yet
had the temerity to say so in print. We believe
these things to be so, because we have no better
explanation of the phenomena witnessed by us
daily.
Science makes use of words as names of recog-
nized conditions and experiences, such as con-
sciousness, thought, memory, dreams, halluci-
nations, imaginations, etc., all of which are
absolutely essential for the purpose of distinguish-
ing one condition of mind from another but by giv-
;

ing names to conditions we do not at all analyze

or explain the conditions themselves.
The word "imagination" is a common word
enough, and so is the condition for which the word
stands. And we understand by it that it refers to
that experience of the human mind in which it
calls up to consciousness images or pictures in
the mind. When we have followed the process
SOME THINGS WHICH SCIENCE DOES NOT KNOW 25

just as far as our knowledge of the action of the

cerebral cells permits U3, we remain with these
questions unanswered, viz. What do we mean by
:

"images" ? What is the medium in which they ap-

pear? Is it a substance? If so, what is a sub-
stance? Why do they possess the power of mo-
tion, change, and activity in themselves? Con-
sider, for instance, the dream state. Dreams are
of such common experience that the atmosphere
of mystery surrounding them is lost sight of in the
commonplace occurrence of the dreams them-
selves.
Here is a dream as an example in which I have
found an abundance of mystery, which even the
voluminous treatises on psychology do not enable
me to penetrate. I dreamed that upon the elec-
tion of certain officers to fill a number of public
positions a banquet was given, to which all the
fortunate individuals were invited, including my-
self and a friend, Judge B . Upon assembling
at the table we found had been placed
that there
before each guest a soup tureen full of soup. Con-
sidering this to be a novel and rather ridiculous
innovation, I was guilty of making a most atro-
cious pun. Turning to my friend, Judge B I ,

suggested that such a supply of soup was "su-

perabundant." Now this, so far, was not much
beyond ordinary experiences in a dream many —
have made puns undoubtedly when enjoying good
—
company in dreamland but Judge B- laid his
fijiger waggishly against his nose and responded,
"No, Judge, this is superficial," which consider-
ing that the banquet was an official affair, was not
26 SOME THINGS WHICH SCIENCE DOES NOT KNOW

bad for Judge B . Right here, however, comes

that which I find explaining to my sat-
difficulty in
isfaction. In the I was conscious, self-
first place,
conscious, conscious of my dream surroundings,
conscious of the fragrant soup, and, so far as I am
concerned, I can perceive no distinction between
the character of the consciousness then and now
in wakefulness.
Next, I had the ordinary use of my faculty of
imagination. I evolved a pun, but I did not antici-
pate the pun which was hurled back at me by
Judge B Indeed, I was rather piqued in real-
.

izing that his was a better pun than mine. The

point of his witty saying revealed itself only after
the utterance of the language by him, and I en-
joyed it and laughed heartily.
it was "only
I realize that all this seems simple,
a dream," it can be analyzed by applying to it the
psychological methods, but I insist that the back-
ground of the whole experience lies in terra in-
cognita to Science.
If the "soul," the ego, is the "sum total" of the
activities of the cerebral cells, then, considering
that I was conscious of my individuality and en-
gaged in a punning duel with another "sum total,"
which was only present in my mind, the "soul,"
the ego, the individual, unloaded some of the units
which ordinarily go to make up the individual,
leaving the individual intact and supplying a suffi-
cient number to create another "sum total" as an
individual.
If it be an easy matter to explain how we per-
ceive moving, living, thinking forms in such a con-
SOME THINGS WHICH SCIENCE DOES NOT KNOW 27

dition of dreaming, suppose we ask ourselves

again, in what substance do these images appear?
If they are not real, what is the unreal? I K
create them, out of what, in what, do I do that?
Science relegates all these phenomena to the
it cannot and
activities of the cerebral cells, but
does not pretend to go further than to push the
mystery back.
Science declares subject and object to be one,
but somehow the subjectivity of the individual ap-
pears to succeed in keeping itself behind even the
objectivities of the imagination and recognizing
an objectivity correlated to a subjectivity which it
will not consent to acknowledge as itself.
If chemical analysis of the substance of which
cerebral cells are composed revealed the fact that
they are, in different localities of the cerebrum,
differently composed of varying elements, so that
a center of cells in one part should be of a differ-
ent chemical construction from another, we might
find some reason to declare individual conscious-
ness, mind, etc., to be the sum total of their activi-
ties, because we should have a basis for such a
differentiation as might account for the tremen-
dous variations in the substance of our thoughts
and consciousness; but the cells have not been
shown to be so differently composed of different
elements.
Great as has been the advancement of cytology,
we really know little about the substance proto-
plasm. As is said by J. A. Thompson in "The Sci-
ence of Life" "We have no knowledge of the real
:

nature of living matter we cannot define any sub-

;
28 SOME THINGS WHICH SCIENCE DOES NOT KNOW

stance physically or cliemically and say this is

pure protoplasm. According to one view, proto-
plasm is a mixture of complex substances accord-
;

ing to another view, it is a single substance allied

—
to proteids; according to a third perhaps the
—
most probable view, there is no such thing as
living matter. The meaning of the last view,
which may appear paradoxical, is simply that,
vital functions may depend uponthe interactions
or interrelations of a number of complex sub-
stances, none of which by itself could be called
alive."
It is for that reason that Science cannot au-
thoritatively declare this wonderful individuality
to be the product of the chemical activities. It is
emphatically an open and undecided question.
No doubt the form of motion of these elements
differs in the various cells.
Again, although it be admitted that the stimuli
reaching these various cell centers are different,
and hence the different forms of activity, we do
not escape the dilemma. As I suggested before, it
leaves no room for the apex of an ultimate synthe-
sis, the individual, for we must at least reach a
cell substance where there certainly could be no
"sum total" of movements which could recognize
detail.
Science does not know but that the following
is the real truth, neither do I, neither is it to be
demonstrated that it is not.
Suppose it to be true that there is a substance
in which individual centers of consciousness func-
tion as forms of motion of it (surely, while we are
SOME THINGS WHICH SCIENCE DOES NOT KNOW 29

accepting ideas as forms of chemical activity, this

is not a violent assumption). Suppose this sub-
stance to be capable of a great variety of forms
(and here again, in view of the recent discoveries
in the realm of ether, this is not a foolish suppo-
sition) and suppose again that in order that such
;

an individual center of consciousness, never itself

departing from its eternal habitat, might be con-
scious of objects in a more dense medium, ponder-
able matter, it should be essential that the sensa-
tions produced by such objects should be refined,
should be accented, should be sifted through sub-
stance, which approaches by gradations up to the
imponderable substance in which it functions. It
would follow that only by such means could such
an individual be conscious of such objects and it
would likewise follow that any disturbance at any
point in the process of accentuation would result
in a distortion of the object in consciousness and
any destruction of the means of such a process
would cut off all consciousness of the objects as
such as surely as the removal of the prism from
the field of light puts an end to the spectrum.
Such a destruction of the means would not nec-
essarily result in the death of the individual, but
would merely remove the opportunity for further
consciousness of such objects as such.
The natural inquiry to succeed these supposi-
tions is whether we possibly have any such nexus,
any such mediator between ponderable matter
and such an individual center as I have postu-
lated.
I think we have, in the body, in the organs of it,
30 SOME THINGS WHICH SCIENCE DOES NOT KNOW"

in the central system and culminating in the cere-

brum.
Certainly a science which can find sufficient in-
stability and delicate irritability in the cerebral
cells to establish a field for a "sum-total" soul
should admit that their substance is about as close
an approach to one end of such a bridge as can
well be imagined, and really the external termini
of organs of sensation reach the other extremity.
Such a theory is at least consistent with all the
theses of evolution. It accounts for consciousness
and unconsciousness of objects; it provides an
arena for the display of dreams; parallels in its
process what we know of the march of evolution
to and from established stations of automatism it ;

suggests a meaning to pain; it has a meaning in

itself; leaves the individual possessed of a soul;
and is even monistic, if properly comprehended.
Now, Science does not know this not to be the
truth, and, therefore, it may be approximately
true, notwithstanding the pseudo-demonstrations
of scientific men that man is necessarily mortal.
All I claim for it as a theory is its possibility.
What Science knows is of great value, because
its knowledge makes the ladder upon which we
climb for wider views, but what it does not know
is valuable, because it is worthy of our search for
it; our instinct protests against an abandonment
of it as a probable, or even possible, truth, merely
because it is not demonstrated and known.
Assuming such a theory as I have suggested to
be a rational one, it would then follow that the
"sum total" of the chemical activities of the cere-
SOME THINGS WHICH SCIENCE DOES NOT KNOW 31

bral cells would be not the soul but the activity of

the soul at that point in its line of continuity from
objects in ponderable matter to their perception
by its activity in imponderable matter. Auto-
matic centers would then be in the nature of relay
stations. In this connection it may be said that
the unit cells of which the human body is com-
posed are themselves open to an application of
the scheme outlined, for what are they but masses
of protoplasm in which is situated a less-equi-
librated substance (the nucleus), which, for aught
Science knows, performs a function akin to the
cerebrum of the whole man.
Science does not know, and cannot therefore af-
firm, that mind and matter are not opposite poles
of the same thing, nor that mind may not be as
complex at its pole as is ponderable matter at the
opposite pole. The processes of evolution lend as
much color to that proposition as to any other, for
it may well be that for the appearance of complex
mind in ponderable matter as a mere phase, it must
proceed from the simplest and nearest form of
ponderable substance by the evolution of synthe-
ses, which in turn become automatic, to the pres-
entation in matter commensurate to itself and its
will, and that this process of evolution may be as
various in its applications as the known and un-
known properties of substance, ponderable and
imponderable, may demand. The smallest form
of ponderable matter is complex enough to allow
us to be true to even Monism.
Science does not yet know the real distinction,
if any exists, between living and so-called non-
32 SOME THINGS WHICH SCIENCE DOES NOT KNOW

living matter. True, Haeckel declares the differ-

ence to be in the presence or absence of the power
of reproduction but, as Professor Shaler in "The
;

Individual" says "In some unknown way the mole-

:

cule and the crystal alike tend to increase their

kind."
Verworn, in "General Physiology," asserts the
distinction to consist in the capability of living mat-
ter for the "metabolism of proteids" but while it
;

perhaps may
not be properly called the "metabo-
lism of proteids," yet a similar action is noted in
crystals, and even may exist in molecular aggre-
gates. (Shaler, "The Individual.")
For these reasons and many more which will
all
suggest themselves, a thoughtful man is still en-
titled, without losing his common sense, without
sullying the whiteness of "pure reason," to de-
clare that Science may have failed to discover the
great life, the eternal being, of the universe to be
that very unity of units, one and the many, whose
eternal processes of life it undertakes to measure
by a specialized evolution which begins and ends.
 Chapter III

THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT

I liave for some years pushed the search of the
microscopic into the substance of living things, ex-
pecting possibly somewhere and sometime to ob-
tain some light upon the organic ultimate unit,
and thereby justify such conclusions as have been
reached and promulgated by a class of mate-
rialistic scientists who, instead of standing in awe
at the sight of the ever-retreating mystery of life,
declare that they have demonstrated the hope of
man's immortality to be a delusion. I am frank
to say that, owing either to stupidity or lack of some
knowledge attained by them and unpublished to
the world for which they labor, I have found
neither the ultimate unit of life nor the evidence
of the delusion.
It is an easy matter to dismiss the whole mys-
tery of physical and psychical existence by the
assertion that the microscope or chemical analy-
sis has revealed the fact that all life is resolved
in its finality to the cell —
that there it begins,
there it operates in community, and there it ends.
If it were true that the so-called cell is the unit
of life, this might well discourage the further
search for light upon the subject, for we should
be compelled to admit that if life commences with
33
34 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT

the cell it will end with the cell. But it is not true
the unit cell is but the adopted unit of physiology.
It is the unit of its analysis in theory, and the
unknown sea of activities is thus far quite beyond
its reach.
Much depends upon what we mean by "cell" and
what we understand by "life." If by "cell" we
mean any primary physical appearance which
evidences life, then the cell might be the unit of
living matter, but in that case I should ask if we
have discovered the cell, and the answer would
have to be, no; because, aside from the "cell" as
understood physiologically, there are evidences of
life in portions when separated from it. If by
"life" we mean capacity for adaptive movements
responsive to stimulus, then, again, what is or-
dinarily understood as the cell is not the unit of
living substance. That which in itself is complex
is not a unit, except as it is considered relatively
to a unity in which it is embraced. There are va-
rious intricate movements in the cell, particularly
the segmenting cell, which are responsive to stim-
uli from within the cell. Life appears only where
there are two or more of something, unity and
units.
The accepted cell is for physiological pur-
poses the unit, but this is only so when consider-
ing the life processes of the whole body. Behind
all this is the "thing itself," that which manifests
in the cell, but which is not necessarily limited to
it, that which demands the process; there is ef-

fort, is will, is self.

Not that physiology or biology demonstrates
 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT 35

their existence, but that they do not demonstrate

their absence. The data of these sciences are not
only consistent with but compel the presence of
something akin to them, and the fact that this is
so arms the cohorts on the spiritual side of the
question and disarms the materialists,unless it be
finally conceded that mind and matter are but op-
posite poles of the same substance, in which case
we have the true basis for a monistic conception
of the universe.
Man, and for that matter any animal, is ap-
parently a simple machine enough in his last
analysis as physical animal. He is but a congre-
gation of cells operating in essential harmony, or
many cells operating as one cell but all this falls
;

far short of solving the mystery or putting an end

to serious inquiry into the origin and destination
of man.
The cell itself is not simple; it is as far from
being so as is that vast congregation of its kind
in man; it is tantalizingly complicated, exceed-
ingly intricate in its activities, wonderfully sur-
prising in its potentialities, either as a whole or
when separated into pieces, and it is infinitely
small in its ever-receding units. Nothing has yet
been found in the cell so little that there have not
been undeniable evidences of something yet more
minute behind or within it. Without the nucleus
the protoplasm exists for a while; without the
protoplasm the nucleus survives; with a bit of
protoplasm and a bit of nucleus you may have
continued life capable of repair and growth. The
nucleus is but a minute speck in the substance of
36 THE LIVING ENVIKONMENT

the cell, and when it is examined under powerful

lenses is itself exceedingly complex and puzzling;
it has within its substance, small as it is, other

bodies, known as chromosomes, and these in turn

may be perceived to be constituted of yet smaller
bodies, and by parity of reasoning they probably
would, if we were able to see them, lead us down
a long line of changing forms within forms long
before we reached that elusive thing, the unit of
life.

Wemight as well expect a man to perform the

notoriously impossible feat of lifting himself by
his own boot straps as to expect the remarkable
activities of the cell to present themselves to our
observations in that body if it were the unit of
organized life. Nor am I here ignoring the prob-
able chemical factors which should be considered.
We know as little about occult chemistry as we do
about the mechanism of the cell, but we do know
that the tendency of chemical and physical ener-
gies is to an inevitable equilibrium, and that ia
protoplasm quite the contrary is the fact. Its
growth and its activities all depend upon its lack
of equilibrium.
As the modem study of the germ cell pro-
ceeds, it results in a curious but not surprising
grouping of the biologists about different centers
of opinion. Of course the great puzzle which all
are seeking to solve is the cause of the develop-
ment of the fertilized ovum into the particular in-
dividual who appears to come from it, and this
mystery includes the inner ones of heredity and
its bearers.
 THE tilVING ENVIKONMENT .37

It need not be said, for everybody knows it,

that the mystery has not been solved. No sooner
do the groping fingers of the scientist lay hold
upon a new discovery in the elements or activities
of the cell, and cause him to imagine that the goal
is at hand, than some other investigator in Eng-
land, Germany, or France, or here at home, lo-
cates with his microscope, or reveals by chemi-
cal experiments, some new factor which entirely
upsets the beautiful and apparently satisfactory
theory which has nearly been adopted. When it
was ascertained that the nucleus of the sperma-
tozoon and that of the ovum fused and became one
nucleus in which appeared certain bodies which
always were of a definite number in a given spe-
cies, and which were called chromosomes, it was a
natural conception that these bodies were the
bearers of heredity. They may be, probably are,
but many biologists do not think so. However,
upon this discovery Weismann reduced the opera-
tions of the cell to a system with an elaborate
division of the substance into "ids," "idants,"
"biophors," etc., in which certain potentialities ap-
peared. Spencer indulged in the idea that there
were "physiological units" in the sperm and germ
cells Kyder advanced the dynamical hypothesis
;

others, unable to reach any satisfactory explana-

tion, rehabilitated the discarded idea of a vital
force under the somewhat apologetic title of "neo-
vitalism." We find by some experiments that the
substance of the cell is not differentiated so that
one part will not have all the potentiality of defi-
nite development which every other part has and;
38 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT

by others that it is so differentiated. We are con-

fronted with these "physiological nnits" on the
one hand, as determining the outcome of the proc-
ess of development, and on the other by the state-
ment that the substance of the sperm cell and the
ovum cell coalesces.
As the substance of each cell is like the other,
it would almost seem that by such a fusion all
special inheritance from the parents would be lost,
particularly as we are asked to consider the cell so
produced by fusion to be a machine and all its op-
erations mechanical.
Indeed, it is difficult to perceive how there can be
any heredity except such as is the result of the char-
acteristic structure of the plasm belonging to the
particular form of animal life from which the egg
came. If we supply the chromosomes with a per-
sistent differentiation, then we have some pos-
sible bearer of heredity, or if we admit the "ids"
and "idants," etc., of Weismann but if these are
;

themselves but products of the mechanical opera-

tions of the cells, the mystery of heredity is as
dense as ever.
Now I do not know what the truth is as to he-
redity, whether it is a myth or not whether it is
;

the result of association and suggestion or not;

whether the chromosomes are its bearers or not
or whether at the fusion of the plasm of the nuclei
any definite, special bodies remain with undis-
turbed potentialities or not; these are problems
for the biologists, and so long as they range
themselves persistently upon opposite sides of
the question involved, plain men must be con-
 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT 39

'tent to select such views as appeal to their

reason.
Certainly if a biologist commences a search for
the factors which control heredity and takes it for
granted that Ryder is correct when he says that
'Tendencies' and 'Proclivities' are words that
have no legitimate place in the discussion of the
data of biology any more than they have in natu-
ral philosophy or physics," he must of necessity
end in mere mechanics without a mind or soul.
If he predetermines with Haeckel that there is no
individual soul, he will find abundant reason in the
data of biology for reducing everything to con-
densing points of ether.
Biological data are very accommodating; they
will give an ample supply of arguments on any
side of the question; they only require that you
name your desired conclusion in advance.
The reason for this is that the ultimate springs
of life are hidden in the rock of Being itself.
Aside from its importance as an isolated sci-
ence for its own sake. Biology has a value not to
be properly measured by the special investigators
in that field, but as I have suggested before, by
the constructors in the work of generalization. If
it has any value to the average thinking man be-

yond the mere gratification of curiosity, it is be-

cause of what it adds to his general knowledge of
life. No man in making a survey of any object
contents himself with a measurement in one di-
rection only; he must ascertain not only length
but breadth, not only length and breadth but thick-
ness. In arriving at some rational conclusion con-
40 THE LIVING ENVIEONMENT

ceming the probable duration of individuality, we

must consider not only the physical aspect but
the psychical, if we do not assume the extraordi-
nary attitude of considering the individual as a
being whose external dimensions are a full
measure of his contents. Either we have an irre-
pressible conflict between the two sciences of psy-
chology and biology, or they compensate each
other. Considered biologically and accepting the
cell as the unit of life, man and all animals have
their beginning in time, and, consequently, their
ending in time. But supposing, as is the fact, that
Science utterly fails to reach far enough back to
locate the dynamic force behind physical life
pushing it into manifestation, what then! Why,
we are justified in refusing to accept its one-sided
assertion that immortality is a delusion, and that
Science demonstrates that fact.
Weappeal for an equation from the investiga-
tors of the outward manifestation to the students
of the manifesting and manifested, to the psy-
chologists. It is true that they cannot reveal to us
the unit, and we find ourselves merely reducing
the size of objectivities and segregating the or-
ganic centers of perceiving subjectivity.
Wherever we find psychological phenomena,
there we find running parallel with it physiologi-
cal phenomena, not occupying the relationship of
cause and effect, but as presenting evidently two
phases of the same activity. No intellect gigantic
enough to solve the problem of the distinction be-
tween mind and matter, if such distinction exists,
has as yet made its appearance. The profound
 THE LIVING ENVIKONMENT 41

researches of our great specialists in the field of

cytology have and should have commanded our
respect and admiration, but the weight of a great
name in such labors should not crush our rational
hopes. To be able to demonstrate how the cells
work, to portray the machinery set up by them,
is not to make apparent why they work or why
they need the machinery. That the heart is the
force pump of the arterial system, that the liver se-
cretes bile, that the stomach and intestines digest
food, that the human body is in those respects a
machine, have been facts so familiarly known for
centuries as to no longer cause comment. Cer-
tainly this knowledge has not been sufficient in
the past to seriously disturb the thoughtful man
in his confidence in immortality. All, in addition
to these, that has been demonstrated in recent
years in the marvelous progress made by biolo-
gists is that this larger physical machine incloses,
or rather is resolvable into, smaller and smaller
machines until we arrive at the germ cell. True,
the battle now wages there, to ascertain if pos-
sible how, from this inconceivably intricate "ma-
chine," microscopically small, the wonderful,
thinking, acting, loving "machine" called man is
evolved. This battle, for battle it is, is being
waged not over the germ cell of man directly, but
the egg cell of the worm, the sea urchin, and others
whose eggs, by reason of their availability and
transparency, afford opportunities for research
without undue disturbance of the contents. In the
light of the deductions drawn by a few of the
great investigators in the field of cytology, an or-
42 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT

dinary man approaches the microscopic examina-

tion of such cells with fear and trembling, his
brave hopes of immortality are about to be de-
stroyed, and he is to find that, after all, the "for-
tuitous concourse of atoms" is before him, and he
will stand at the edge of an abyss beyond which
is no life.
If he be thoughtful, however, his approach is
the end of that fear, for he will find beneath his
eye such a wonderful complication full of startling
potentialities as will push that cumbersome,
gross, and tangibly apparent machiue called man
far into the background as an evidence of prece-
dent will and consciousness.
Lest it be thought that a layman should not take
upon himself the liberty to draw his own infer-
ences from what he sees and from what others
have reported, it will not be out of place to sug-
gest that here, as in many other matters scientific,
the masters of specialty disagree most emphati-
cally among themselves as to even how this "ma-
chine" does its work. Many questions remain un-
answered and many problems unsolved and if the
;

study of the physical egg alone be relied upon for

explanation, will remain unanswered and un-
solved. The germ is a mighty small affair, yet
it contains within its invisible self problems which
will be the sphinxes of science for all time to
come.
That many of the questions which now puzzle
the scientists will sometime be answered, there
can be little doubt, but that there will ever remain
an unlifted veil is equally certain. If there be
 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT 43

heredity, what elements of the cell are the bearers

of it? Does the centrosome exist at all! If so, is it
an element of the egg, or is it an appearance only,
an effect, produced by the constriction of the
plasmic substance? Does it enter with the sperm
cell or is it there already? Does it pull or push?
What is the unit of material life? Is there any?
Is the substance of the egg differentiated or not?
Do certain portions have specialized potentialities
or not? Is the unequilibrated condition of proto-
plasm the cause of consciousness or the effect?
What is the preforming principle involved in this
microscopic particle which produces such inevit-
able, such unfailing results?
All these questions, with many others that I
will not mention, have engaged the attention
of earnest students and untiring investigators.
Some have been,some will be, and many never
can answered. And there are many rea-
be, fully
sons why they cannot be satisfactorily settled with
demonstrations of the truthfulness of the answer.
The powers of the microscope are limited beyond;

a certain point we shall never be able to go with

the use of the lenses, and it must be said in that
connection that at the point where we must stop
we shall yet find complications, intricacy, and
marvelous evidences of organization. Even as-
suming that we should instead discover an ap-
parently undifferentiated substance as protoplasm
was once supposed to be, we should be no nearer
the demonstrative solution of life, but should
be compelled to resort to occult chemistry for
further investigation ; unless, indeed, the hitherto
44 THE LIVING ENVIEONMENT

unaccomplished feat of producing spontaneous

generation should be performed. When con-
sciousness shall be produced in artificially manu-
factured living substance, and the unequilibrated
condition of such substance preserved thereby,
chemistry will have gone far toward disturbing
the serenity of our hopes concerning continuity
of individual life, but will not even then have de-
stroyed them utterly. Even in the artificial pro-
duction of such living substance we might yet be
able to assert that the successful chemist has but
produced an essential environment for a living
unit to find opportunity, as has probably been
done by Loeb in chemically assisting the segmen-
tation of the unfertilized ovum of the Sea Urchin.
Even Loeb's famous experiments begin with a liv-
ing organized cell. The mystery of life is elusive
and it slips away from the profoundest inquir-
ing savant as from the hungry minds of those who
are prone to accept the greatness of a name as a
guarantee of the incontestable certainty of deduc-
tions and conclusions presented under its author-
ity.
We should, however, not forget that theconten-
tion made in this work
not that the immortality
is
of the individual is a demonstrable fact in the
light of recent science, but that the contrary has
not been, as asserted, demonstrated. I have so
far failed to find in the forward movements made
in the biological and psychological fields any rea-
son to abandon my convictions in that regard, and
that there is no necessity for the uneasiness which
is apt to be engendered by the discoveries of the
 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT 45

biologists is admitted by C. 0. Wbitman in Ms

prefatory note to "Biological Lectures," 1894, in
these words "While Biology is certainly indebted
:

to physics for some of its metaphysics, it is to the

credit of physics to have made it clear that mech-
anism, indisputable as are its methods, affords no
fundamental explanation of anything. As Karl
Pearson has so well said, the mystery of life is
no less nor no greater because a dance of organic
corpuscles is at bottom a dance of inorganic
atoms. What dances and why it dances is not ex-
plained by reducing size to the lowest limit of di-
visibility and just as little by the assumption of
ultraphysical causes. The ultimate mystery
. . .

is beyond the reach of both mechanism and vital-

ism. . Some place the secret of life in the cell,
. .

others in smaller units, but no one, so far as I

know, has looked upon the unit as anything more
than the seat of the mystery."
If the memory of the gill clefts, those ghostly
reminiscences of our aquatic ancestors, appears
at a certain point in the progress of segmentation
of the cell and formation of the embryo, by what
conceivable process can it be said that thereafter
in the embryo arising from the same egg a "mem-
ory" of the characteristics of the parents make its
appearance, unless we recognize many units in the
one?
The gill-cleft "memory" does not appear until a
certain point in the synthesis is reached hence,
it ;

is the memory (if it be a memory) of that particu-

lar synthetic organism as it stands at that point
of time constructed out of the daughter cells of
46 THE LIVING ENVIEONMENT

one cell. The subsequent presentationof parental

characteristics is the memory of another synthe-
sis and the ultimate personality of still another.
We are dealing with the functions of cells, we
must bear in mind, which were set apart in the
living bodies of the parents as specialized genera-
tive cells. It would be fully consonant with bi-
ological data, not opinions, for the inference to be
made that the individual preceded and made pos-
sible the ultimate synthesis. Now, I do not at all
say that these changes are produced by memory,
for the "unknown factors" are unknown whether
;

a "dynamical theory of inheritance" is true;

whether there are units bearing specific motions,
or whether the very nature of the protoplasm com-
pels in some mysterious way the formation of the
body, I do not know, neither does anybody else,
but I do know that the field is yet open for reason-
able theories of any kind, not barring even that of
a dominant unit of force unifying as its own the
activities of the many.
If I indulge in a legitimate exercise of scien-
tific imagination, until some clearer explanation
has been given than has as yet appeared, of the
movements and functions of the centrosome, I can
even suppose that body to be in turn a congeries
of vast numbers of its kind of varying values,
units of infinitely small proportions, but as
capable of having ascribed to them will and sensi-
tiveness as is the atom, and of being laden with a
weight of memories as great as that ascribed to
the microscopically small ovum and sperm cells.
From such investigations as have been made
 THE LIVING ENVIBONMENT 47

with the eggs of such lower forms of life as the

sea urchin and thread worm, the segmentation of
the egg is attended with the most marvelous activ-
ity of that exceedingly minute body, the centro-
some, which seems in some inexplicable maimer to
preside over the separation of the cells and the
partition of the chromosomes. Whether we are
unable to see other bodies within it or not is not
so material inability is but a limitation measured
;

by our capacity of sight as increased by the use of

lenses.
Upon the entrance of the heretofore invisible
(to the unaided eye) spermatozoon into the minute
ovum egg, there appears accompanying it as a
section thereof, or at least contained in a section
thereof, an exceedingly minute body or point
which, when the nuclei of the ovum and sperm cell
coalesce into one nucleus, which they do speedily,
takes up a position on one side of the nucleus.
It divides, or appears to be divided, into two,
one of which goes to the other side of the nucleus,
and then a figure is formed, the Karyokynetic fig-
ure, in which rays reach from the cytoplasm to the
center of the nucleus proceeding from the centro-
some on either side. From that the division of
the cell commences, and the process is repeated
on and on through the segmentation of the cells.
It has the appearance of dividing itself at each
fission and supplying each daughter cell with a
like centrosome, unless, indeed, we may suppose
this remarkable body to be in reality a unity of
units, and that what to a certain point appears to
be the division of the centrosome is in fact a sep-
48 THE LIVING ENVIEONMENT

aration into numbers of existing units, which ap-

pear to view upon separation from the other by
reason of rapidity of growth and expansion.
Of course I know the question of what the cen-
trosome is has been discussed by the ablest biolo-
gists in this country and Europe, but while the
question remains open, as I fancy it will for
a while, as to whether it is an ultimate organ of
the cell or, on the other hand, a derivative struc-
ture, I am at liberty to be true to my own thesis,
that wherever life is there are many in the One.
The astounding supposition that in it may be
many units of forces organic is no more a burden
for the intelligence to carry than is the supposi-
tion that the germ cell itself recapitulates from its
"unconscious memory" the history of evolution
from unicell to vertebrate, recalls in synthetic or-
der the fish gills, is burdened with "race memory,"
and finally stands forth' with the recollections of
parental characteristics, both physical and mental.
Scripture advises the sluggard to "go to the ant,"
and I ask consideration for a moment of what
George Eomanes says about its brain (p. 46,
"Mental Evolution in Animals") "Knowing in a
:

general way that mass plus structure of brain is

necessary for intelligence, we do not know how
far the second of these two factors may he in-
creased at the expense of the first. (Italics
mine.) And as a mere matter of complexity, I
am not sure that even the brain of an ant is to be
considered more wonderful than the ovum of a hu-
man being. . While in the case of ants, Du-
. .

jardin says that the degree of intelligence stands

 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT 49

in an inverse proportion to the amount of pedun-

cular bodies and tubercules."
Now, when we consider that with the highest
powers of the microscope this remarkable center,
the centrosome, is yet barely visible and recog-
nized as a factor in segmentation of the cell more
by what it does and by its attendant characteristic
figure than by its size, we may well pause be-
fore pronouncing finally upon its nature and
origin.
The cerebral activities of the brain are com-
paratively easy to map as to location, but when
we approach the most potential and mysterious of
all organized substance, the germ cell, we reach
limitations, owing to the infinitesimal smallness
of what we are studying. The results are big, the
seat of the causes recedes even from the micro-
scope's eye.
Is there any absurdity in the thought, then, that
in this body, the centrosome, may be more than
one potential unit of force, the manifestation
therein of more than one individual?
As I have stated in another place, up to a cer-
tain number of cell divisions of the sea urchin's
egg they may
be separated and two or more
smaller urchins produced; beyond that point se-
lective synthesis has proceeded so far that the
specialization of the units prevents any such re-
sults. The dominance of the one has prevailed;
the unity is its the living environment belongs to
;

it it remains the conscious unit of energy it pre-

; ;

sides ; it experiences ; it is the individual in activ-

ity.
50 THE LIVING ENVIKONMENT

Shall such a supposition be shown to be an ab-

surdity? Certainly not by the mere urging of a
contrary opinion, but only by the reduction of our
present working units to yet smaller ones, and
even then they will appear as many in one. The
old distinction between soul and body can in my
view only be modified by modern science to the
extent of analyzing the units of a living environ-
ment and leaving unexplained the underlying
activity by reason of which it assumes the form it
has. Either this, or there is no individual, and
such a conclusion our consciousness contradicts.
The old saying that "the body is not the man" may
then well be paraphrased by "the environment is
not the individual."
Prof. Alfred H. Lloyd has called the individual
a "relationship." Professor Miinsterburg, of
Harvard, designates it as an "attitude," and be-
cause the word "relationship" appears to embrace
more of the idea which I wish to convey of the in-
dividual, I have adopted the word in preference to
the other.
Perhaps I am wrong in thinking that an attitude
may be taken and never repeated of necessity,
while a relationship is eternally self -existent, but
if am, I shall make no mistake in adopting the,
I
to me, very pregnant word used by Professor
Lloyd. From the nature of individuality every
individual is apt egotistically to consider himself
as something separate and apart from the rest of
the universe of life. In a restricted sense this is
true, but in a wider and it seems to me more grat-
ifying one it is not true. Both from the revel a-
 THE LIVING ENVIBONMENT 51

tions of the microscope and the remarkable phe-

nomena presented during a rather extensive study
of experimental psychology I have become con-
vinced that we have not given suflScient recogni-
tion to the position in media res which the individ-
ual occupies. In fact, it now appears difficult for
me to understand what an individual is without at
the same time embracing in the term the idea of
many individuals.
Considered physically from the body of the ma-
ture man back to the last known analysis of the
cell, he is a mass of millions of living units intri-
cately associated together, to no one of which has
it as yet been possible to ascribe the dominant
ascendency, and if we were to attempt to look for
the conscious individual in the midst of this vast
concourse of physical units we should find our-
selves confronting the necessity of finding some
physical center of control which must be a unit to
which all stimuli must report and from which all
motive force must issue. The moment we en-
deavor to avoid this by the creation of a hypo-
thetical synthesis, or by contemplating man as a
syncytium, we have abandoned the physical side
of the question so far as "physical" goes in biolog-
ical terminology, as we are looking for unity of
consciousness or self -consciousness.
Physically it is not difficult to construct a syn-
thesis. We may conceive of the various centers
as forming a community in which, while each is
laboring for its self-preservation, its situation
necessarily compels it at the same time to perform
its functions for the benefit of others. There is
52 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT

thus an exchange of force, an interplay of func-

tional activity which makes it easy to build the
synthesis.
When we undertake, however, the task of con-
structing a mental synthesis or rather a synthetic
consciousness, we are confronted with insur-
mountable diflSculties from the start. The psychi-
cal activities of the cell centers of the brain are
not a common product, a sum total, unless, in-
deed, we are prepared as suggested before to ad-
mit of some one center in which all discharges or
their psychical products are added together syn-
thesized and recognized.
The same stimulus applied to the optic nerve
and the auditory nerve results in entirely differ-
—
ent products one is light, the other sound. I do
not know of any manner in which the cognizing
center which receives the impression of light can
report its sensation as light to the center which re-
ceived the sensation as sound, nor vice versa. As
I view a beautiful landscape, the sweet smell of
the wild flowers salutes my olfactory nerves, the
waving of the yellow com, the mist of the distant
mountain side, the sparkling spring pour their
light into my eyes with a multitude of color effects
to be recognized; the humming of the bees, the
song of birds, and a dozen other sounds call for
recognition. Different centers are reached; dif-
ferent effects produced. It may seem easy to say
that the whole man perceives the whole picture,
but what is the whole man physically or psychi-
cally? To lodge these various sensations in cen-
ters foreign to each other, though connected, each
 THE LIVING ENVIBONMENT 53

speaking a different language, does not and can-

not make one inclusive sensation.
This difficulty of constructing a synthetic con-
sciousness has been recognized and conceded by
no less a psychologist than Professor James, of
Harvard University.^
Because of the comparatively unequilibrated
condition of the cortical cells of the cerebrum and,
therefore, their probable capacity to receive any
and all forms of motion set up by sensation and to
return again to their former condition as tabla
raza, so far as sensation is concerned, they prob-
ably are the seat of the arranging and analyzing
of this multiplicity of stimuli products.
This does not remove the difficulty, however,
for there are millions of these cells that, while
adapted to intricate connections, are yet separate
and individual. If there is at last some one cell in
which a final unification of consciousness resides,
we may fall back upon even the physical perse-
verance of the cell microscopic, dried, and the
sport of the winds, as is the case with some of the
tardigrada. This, of course, is but the improbable
but possible result if we seek for the individual
consciousness as a unit in the material cells. The
whole physical life is a living environment, a rela-
tionship of numbers. Where there are two, there
is an invisible third uniting them; where three,
the fourth and so on from the physical unit to the

* Since writing this book I have read Professor James's Pluralistic

Universe, and I refer the reader to it for consideration of his present

attitude on this matter, and also for information as to how this
master views Ufe from the psychological data.
54 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT

vast concourse of atoms in the living man thence ;

on to the Unity for aught that all the deductions

so far drawn from the data accumulated under
the microscope and in the chemical laboratory
may rightfully say to the contrary. The indi-
vidual from this standpoint is never born, he is
there when the unified living environment is there,
and he is what he is physically because of where
he is.

as contended by Cope, all development is

If,
preceded by effort, and effort imports energy, and
energy is conscious, then the individual may be
an energy form, a unit in that unity which so mys-
teriously energizes the ether or substance with a
force unknown to our mundane physics.
The organic is not a result, an effect, but that
by reason of which the organism is produced, it
is inherent determinate force. So with the syn-
thetic it is not the result but a determinate caus-
;

ing force the synthesis is a process and a result.

;

Neither the organic nor the synthetic are in ap-

pearance at any time; they are above, beneath,
within, and always unseen and untouched. The
individual is and must be the same. He is never
visible or tangible except in the forms of his ac-
tivity; he is never born, he can never die. The
synthesis of the two or any number of units is the
product of the synthetic activity behind them, and
it is immaterial whether that activity is mechani-

cal or chemical, for, after all, chemistry is the me-

chanics of nature. .The indisposition of materialis-
tic scientists to in any manner recognize or acknowl-
edge the reality of anything in the nature of spirit
 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT 55

or soul or mind transcending the known forms of

matter and their action and interactions is, it
appears to me, far more irrational than even the
old-fashioned orthodox conception of a specially
created soul. If the individual mind is the mere re-
sult of the "fortuitous concourse of atoms," then
something has been produced which is different
from atoms, greater than them, and, as an effect,
greater than its cause, and which cannot be ac-
counted for by the individual activities of atoms.
To merely call it phenomenon gives us nothing but
a word in place of explanation.
Even if we were able theoretically to resolve
consciousness into units of sentience. Science has
no formula which, without destroying the unit as
such, can organize consciousness out of units of
sentience, unless, as I have intimated elsewhere,
we drive the sentience of the units finally into
some one cell center which is no longer a unit but
by reason of its unified consentience is a unity.
But this results from prejudiced attempts to ac-
count for the individual only by physics. Hydro-
gen and oxygen H^O is water. Hydrogen is not
water neither is oxygen but the product is a third
; ;

—
something which is neither it is water. That is
—
tangible, visible third and if by reason of the ad-
dition thereto of another proportion of oxygen
the formula reads H^O^, we have no longer water,
but another which is neither hydrogen, oxygen,
nor water, but peroxide of hydrogen.
It is evident enough in physics that the con-
struction of synthetic visible forms of motion is
the measure of utility in many machines, but it is
56 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT

because the forms of motion are compensated and

modified and climaxed in an ultimate unit of mo-
tion which is localized and visible.
But this is precisely what we cannot do with the
conscious cells as units. Each is more or less spe-
cialized, and by reason of its position and limita-
tions is responsive to stimuli in a given manner
and only so. If consciousness of light follows in
one center of cells from a physical vibration of a
wire, and a musical sound is the result of the
same impulse in another, there must be either a
third center which from them receives both and
recognizes one cause with a variety of sensations,
or we must abandon the attempt to measure the
individual consciousness by physics and admit
that the third is always beyond and transcenden-
tal to the two.
All this is metaphysical, to be sure, but then all
that I desire is to record the conviction that not-
withstanding our remarkable advance in science,
there are yet fields unexplored and grounds for
belief yet rational and undisturbed.
That the method by which a physical synthesis
is constructed which mechanically operates as
one will not result in the production of a soul is
evident from Haeckel's own data.
Referring to the psychological phenomena ob-
served in the formation of the blastula, he says:
"The sensations also fall into groups: (1) The
sensation of the individual cells, which reveal
themselves in the assertion of their individual in-
dependence and their relation to neighboring cells
(with which they are in contact, and partly in
 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT 57

direct combination, by means of protoplasmic

fibers) (2) the common sensation of the entire
;

community of cells, which is seen in the individual

formation of the blastula as a hollow vesicle."
Again, commenting upon some "modem repre-
sentatives" of the earliest "cell communities," he
says: "In all these coenobia we can easily distin-
guish two different grades of psychic activity (1) :

the cell soul of the individual cells (the 'elemen-

tary organisms') and (2) the communal soul of
the entire colony."
It is easy to put into simple language and say,
that, given a number of cells bound together by
protoplasmic fibers and in contact with each other,
we have each cell limited as to how, where, and
when it shall move, by its position relative to
those in contact with it and by the character and
direction of the stimulus which causes the sensa-
tion.
Let one cellbe stimulated, it will respond by its
own specific form of motion only limited by its
neighbors; it will forward the stimulation along
the "protoplasmic fiber" connecting it to its next
neighbors, each of whom will respond by its own
specific form of motion limited only by its neigh-
bors, and when all the cells receive the impulse,
which they do practically simultaneously, the
whole mass must move in one direction with a spe-
cific movement which is the synthesis of all these
motions. This is mechanics, and all we have done
is to bind together by "protoplasmic fibers" a
number of cells which individually may move spe-
cifically and have created one general movement
58 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT

which may have originated with any one of the in-

dividual cells.
No doubt the living environment of man does
physically something similar, but how does that
help us to create a soul? By increasing the com-
plexity of the community by the introduction of
cell centers and the ganglionic function we cer-
tainly never get away from the law which governs
this primitive type, for we have simply multi-
plied the communities and increased the connec-
tions.
Let us suppose, then, that one cell in the com-
munity when touching a curved, smooth, hard ob-
ject should be by its primitive simplicity able to
be sensitive only to smoothness; let us imagine
its neighbor gifted similarly with the faculty of
sensitiveness to hardness, and yet another, the
curved surface, and so on throughout the com-
munity.
The first one touches the object if it thinks, its
;

only thought is "smoothness"; it passes the im-

pulse along to the next cell; this one then, if it
could speak, would say "hardness" the stimula-
;

tion goes to the next and it will respond with

"curvature." Now here we have three separate
cells with their individual sensations, but by what
process will the whole community rise up and say
"It is a smooth, curved, hard object"?
It may move away from it by reason of the
hard impact or it may glide over it as the result
of the curved smooth surface, but it will not be
able to give any reason for it. No such process as
this, however intricate the combination of factors
 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT 59

engaged in it may be, can account for the unity of

consciousness or memory.
Haeckel himself clearly draws the line betvs^een
facts and theories, between demonstration and
"provisional hypothesis," and properly declares
that "the man who renounces theory altogether,
and seeks to construct a pure science with certain
facts [italics mine] alone, as often happens with
wrong-headed representatives of our 'exact sci-
ences,^ must give up the hope of any knowledge
of causes, and, consequently, of the satisfaction
of reason's demand for causality."
Yet notwithstanding his full recognition of this
broad distinction between what is tentatively as-
sumed and clearly demonstrated facts, he sur-
mounts his structure, which is almost entirely
founded upon tentative assumptions, with such
capstones as these "The belief in the immortality
:

of the human soul is a dogma which is in hope-

less contradiction with the most solid empirical
truths of modem science," and "it was the gigan-
tic progress of biology in the present century, and
especially in the latter half of the century, that
finallydestroyed the myth."
I have prefaced what I wish to say further
concerning the profound mystery of conscious-
ness and its unity with this reference to Pro-
fessor Haeckel's admitted position concerning the
method by which a pure science should be con-
structed, because I think it will be apparent that
he has been guilty of a violation of his own rule.
To a mind which with a normal phys-
is satisfied
ical synthesis resulting from evolution and which
60 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT

is capable of producing an effect astoundingly

greater than any known cause, the chemical activi-
ties of the cerebral cells and the organs of sense
may produce a "sum total" equivalent to all we
recognize as soul.
In referring to the senses of man, Haeckel says
"In harmony with the great law of 'division of
labor' the originally indifferent 'sense cells' of the
skin undertook different tasks, one group of them
taking over the stimulus of the light rays, another
the impress of the sound waves, another the chem-
ical impulse of odorous substance, and so on. In
the course of a very long period these external
stimuli effected a gradual change in the physio-
logical and later in the morphological properties
of these parts of the epidermis, and there was a
correlative modification of the sensitive nerves
which conduct the impressions they receive to the
brain. Selection improved, step by step, such
particular modifications as proved to be useful,
and thus eventually, in the course of many million
years, created those wonderful instruments the
eye and the ear, which we prize so highly; their
structure is so remarkable that they might well
lead to the erroneous assumption of a 'creation on
a preconceived design.' The peculiar character of
each sense organ and its specific nerve has thus
—
been gradually evolved by use and exercise that
is by adaptation — and has thus been transmitted
by heredity from generation to generation. . . .

Without the senses there is no knowledge."

Thus, then, without the evolution during mil-
lions of years, resulting in those modifications of
 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT 61

the conducting nerves and the development of the

appropriate senses, there could be no knowledge.
Possibly this would be true if the assumption that
the individual, as well as his knowledge, con-
sciousness and mind, was the product of such an
evolution were true also.
Each individual is then a specific machine, and
these products, consciousness and knowledge, can
only come because of this intricate, inherited,
evolved machinery.
I am somewhat puzzled, however, to know why
knowledge, self -consciousness, and memory put in
their appearance in abnormal cases where this es-
sential machinery has been seriously injured, de-
stroyed, and its coordination rendered impossible
where these inherited "correlative modifications
of the sensitive nerves which conduct the impres-
sions they receive to the brain" no longer remain,
and where the final and most essential links in the
chain of evolution are wanting.
One of the brightest scholars in the college
which she has honored with her attendance is the
well-known Helen Keller. Owing to serious ill-
ness when an infant of about nineteen months, she
lost the use of all her sense organs except those of
smell, taste, and touch; yet in spite of this fact
she is a learned young woman, who is familiar
with three languages, at least, and who in every
study which she has undertaken has demonstrated
that knowledge may be acquired on a large plan
without all the senses, and, indeed, with only those
which are usually considered the lower ones.
Music reaches her soul, not through the ears, but
62 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT

by means of the tactile sense only. The simple

"sense cells" of the skin are sufficient to convey to
her mind not only the mere physical vibrations of
the musical instrument, but sufficient characteris-
tic stimulation to arouse all the feelings, create all
the enthusiasm, and produce all the evidences of
similar emotion felt by the more fortunate mortal
who is in possession of all the "soul cells" of a
normal human being.
It is not my purpose to enter into any elaborate
discussion of the phenomena in her case; I must
refer anybody interested in the further study of
the matter to Dr. Walderstein's work on "The
Subconscious Self," and to her own story of her
life. It serves my purpose to illustrate the con-
tention that we by no means reveal the mystery
of consciousness and memory by dissecting the
organs by which they seem to work, and that we no
more readily construct a synthetic consciousness
which will account for it as we know it by build-
ing a physical synthesis of its ordinary phenome-
nal activities in the cells of the central system.
There seems to be something in the nature of
the human individual which enables it to do in a
few years that which it took the associating proto-
zoa millions of years to accomplish. This indi-
vidual appears to be able to get along, when nec-
essary to do so, without the tools which evolu-
tion labored for ages to supply him with and to
adapt, when essential, by substituting others for
them.
It is conceivable that our senses are limitations
rather than extensions, for the reason that spe-
 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT 63

cialization is limitation,and all use of the senses

a specialization upon objectivities in ponderable
matter. As we know little about the qualities of
imponderable matter, our knowledge is equally
small of our capacities therein.
It is this conscious unity in us all, and as I think
in the universe, which appeals to me as giving
form always to the unification which it transcends.
Without such an individual there i^ no explana-
tion for that internal universe which has been con-
structed within the living environment, the grand
multitude which awaits the command of the indi-
vidual to paint the conscious dreams and to con-
struct the syllogisms of individual life.
Whatever may be the method of storage of this
vast congregation of experience and thoughts, it
is evident that its character receives whatever
value it has by reason of passing through the
portals of the living environment of the individ-
ual. It is he who weighed, gauged, analyzed, and
catalogued them, and he alone who can rationally
utilize them. That a multitude of impulses are re-
ceived and not perceived at the time of their en-
trance is an undoubted fact, but it is also a fact
that their value does not appear until they are
lifted to the level of the consciousness of the in-
dividual.
As the individual may select and cull from the
multitude of objects in the environment without,
rejecting from his attention the repulsive and dis-
agreeable, so is he able to exercise the same de-
liberation and choice from those within. Both are
—
environment the great universe without which
64 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT

bombards his senses incessantly with its colors,

sounds, and odors its never-ceasing, heaving, and
;

surging impulses, its shadows and lights indeed,

;

all that goes to make up the visible, tangible uni-

verse and the counterpart within which is the po-
;

tential recapitulation of all through which he has

passed. It is the history in full of his life every-
;

thing which he has encountered is builded into it

it is the living environment grown, developed,

filled out, but it is not the individual. It, the in-

ternal, like the external, environment, bombards
him constantly with its unnumbered impulses; as
the external may not be avoided but insists upon
making its impressions, whether in the light of
consciousness or not, so do these from within.
From without we see and hear and feel innumer-
able things of which consciousness knows nothing,
and they are buried in the teeming abyss of the
interior environment, to again steal past the
portals of consciousness to the external as in-
voluntary acts. The individual acts when from
this lake filled by the sea he empties forth where
and what he wills and selects, or when from the
swelling sea without he invites to the waiting lake
within some particular crested wave. Neither the
sea nor the lake is the individual.
Whether these experiences and thoughts are of
permanent value to the individual, whether they
persist after the dissolution of the community of
the living environment, is a subject which I may
not discuss at this point, but will content myself
with suggesting that perhaps thoughts themselves
are attended with forms of motion. We may be
 THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT 65

able to find them capable of rendering themselves

potential in more than one place, and that at the
same time. If so, we may say that at the disso-
lution of the community of units each takes its de-
parture with what is its own.
 Chapter IV

EELATIONSHIP
There is a host of reasons for holding stead-
fastly to the belief in the immortality of the indi-
vidual to those who can recognize the force of
George J. Romanes's suggestion that because we
are only familiar with mind in association with
brain it does not necessarily follow that that is the
only form of substance with which mind is con-
nected. We may postulate one universal mind, and,
from the wondrous beauty, the play of forces, the
unfailing regularity of rhythmic movements, the
everywhere-present life, and the ethical advances
of the world, hug the conviction that the world it-
self lives, "the world thinks"; yet we shall find
from the very nature of mind itself, even from its
kaleidoscopic combinations, strong grounds for
asserting that the individual cannot be lost. When
I say that the individual cannot be lost, I do not
mean to hide behind a veil of transcendental mys-
ticism and fail, as is too often done, to clothe this
individual with consciousness, self -consciousness.
Self-conscious individuality does not necessarily
demand an attendant memory of the experiences
of the past; it does include the past in the con-
scious present, however, and the capacity of re-
calling by association and relationship of ideas
66
 EELATIONSHIP 67

the train of experiences which as prior causes

have built up the effect of the present. Mind is a
good forgetter as well as a good rememberer; a
good specializer, as well as a good generalizer.
The past may be drawn into consciousness by an
effort of the will and by attention, but it presents
itself always by association and relationship with
the present whether we will or not.
All that I know of mind, its operations and its
qualities, is measured by what I know of myself.
I knownothing, but as I stand in the halls of my-
self and watch the play of lights and shadows
cast there by objectivities about me, I can con-
ceive of no qualities of mind which I have not;
my definition of mind is given in terms of self-
experience. All the learned and exhaustive works
upon psychology are the results of self -analysis.
No man knows what is going on in the mind of an-
other except as he witnesses the phenomena of
that mind and translates it into the reflection of
his own. The qualities of mind are the same
wherever we find them; if this were not so, there
could be and would be no understanding of the
motives of our fellow-men, no such thing as justice
or practical government. "We study and attempt
to analyze the phenomenal activities of animals
by reason of our recognition of this fact that the
qualities of mind are the same everywhere. This
force which animates us, which glistens in the eye,
moves the muscular arm, springs in the tiger, and
demonstrates its presence in all living things, is
what we understand as mind, and its peculiar
qualities are known to us only as our own meas-
68 RELATIONSHIP

lire of it is filled. Whatever may be the effect pro-

duced by the exercise of these qualities in diverse
environments, they remain the same.
Mind may be, and there is much reason to be-
lieve it is, one great force-pervading substance.
Abstruse and profoundly metaphysical as the
thought seems, it does not appear to me to be ex-
ceedingly difficult to grasp that the consciousness
of the one is absolutely dependent upon its paral-
lel manifestation as the many.
Potentiality is but a word to cover the great fact
that nothing can be added to or taken from the
universe, and all individuals are therefore the
output of what is and must be in potentiality
eternally in the one mind. The life of the indi-
vidual is therefore not to be measured in its mere
objectivity in this environment, but in that which
it really is.

Its individuality is necessarily an experience of

the universal mind, its consciousness a part of
that experience, and, being in the life of the one,
is not and cannot be lost.
"The fortuitous concourse of atoms" is an ex-
planation of phenomenal activities which our ig-
norance uses only when we have exhausted our-
selves in scientific research along one avenue of
investigation to the exclusion of others. To the
man who allows the particles to blind his eyes to
the force behind the flying dust, there probably is
absurdity in the suggestion that the lives of the
many are in the life of the One. To him, however,
who can find in natural science, in biology, and in
psychology evidences strong and convincing that
 BELATIONSHIP 69

the mystery of life is redolent with mind, comes

the assurance that the relationship, which makes
his consciousness, his individuality, can, from the
very law of relationship and association, never be
lost from the mind of the one, but is an essential
to its existence.
It has not appeared impossible to me to stand
squarely upon the theses presented by Haeckel in
his chapter on The Evolution of the World,
and reach an opinion diametrically opposed to his
concerning the value and immortality of the in-
dividual. Indeed, to my mind, he has presented
hypotheses which result in strengthening the con-
viction long existent that the true monistic philos-
ophy demands the indestructibility of the individ-
ual in its relation as such to the universe and
the process of evolution itself. I shall try to give
my reasons in this chapter as based upon the the-
ses in question offered by Haeckel. Abbreviated,
these theses are as follows
"I. The extent of the universe is infinite and
unbounded; it is empty in no part, and every-
where filled with substance.
"II. The duration of the world is equally in-
finite, etc.
"III. Substance is everywhere and always, in
uninterrupted movement and transformation no- ;

where is there perfect repose and rigidity, yet the

infinite quantity of matter and of eternal chang-
ing force remains constant.
"IV. This universal movement of substance in
space takes the form of an eternal cycle or of a
periodical process of evolution.
70 RELATIONSHIP

"V. The phases of this evolution consist in a

periodic change of consistency, of which the first
outcome is the primary division into mass and
—
ether the ergonomy of ponderable and impon-
derable matter.
"VI. This division is effected by a progressive
condensation of matter as the formation of count-
less infinitesimal centers of condensation in which
the inherent primitive properties of substance
—
feeling and inclination are the active causes.
"VII. While minute and then larger bodies are
being formed by this pyknotic process in one part
of space, and the intermediate ether increases its
strain, the opposite process — the destruction of
—
cosmic bodies by collision is taking place in an-
other quarter."
The eighth lays down the proposition that the
heat generated by the collision of these bodies
"represents the new kinetic energy which effects
the movements of the resultant nebulae and the
constitution of new rotating bodies."
Of course this is a theory, a scientific theory,
based upon observation within the limitations of
the senses, but for the purposes of this chapter I
accept it.
Weare not to think of a time when these two,
ether and thinking substance (force), were spread
out in infinity as quiescent or homogenous sub-
stances, but as set forth in III and VII, the proc-
ess of transformation and organization (for the
word organization applies here as much as to the
concourse of atoms in my body) as going on eter-
nally.
 BELATIONSHIP 71

This eternal differentiation has to be assumed

an extra force, a
in order to get rid of the idea of
creative Divinity. I do not think it accomplishes
the purpose except as far as it may subtract the
word "creative." These theses supply the very
eternal conditions essential to the conception of
an eternal thinking One and supply all the requi-
site qualities and quantities for eternal individ-
uals whose number may not be increased or di-
minished.
In the first place, we have an eternal complica-
tion, an intricate combination of thinking sub-
stance and condensing ether. Such an eternal
activity may well be an eternal mind, forever pre-
senting itself as an eternal body; indeed, as it
embraces all there is of mind, it could not well be
anything else. The mere fact that the vast bodies
of ether break up in other parts of the infinity is
not an insurmountable barrier to the thought, for
as we see in the theses, the heat generated thereby
represents new kinetic energy for the construction
of rotating bodies.
While we are called upon to try to think in the
regions of eternal space and conceive the eternal
conditions, we need not hesitate to suggest that for
aught we know the vast infinity of ether crackling
as "thinking substance" may be (and I think it is)
—
the cerebrum of the One all may be there, the
history of the clash of spheres, the "collision of
swiftly moving bodies," all of the changing pic-
tures, may, as the epitomized history of my life
repeats itself in memory, roll its majestic circle
in this infinite abyss of "thinking substance" and
72 BELATIONSHIP

ether. What isthe character of its subjectivity

and objectivities Who am I that I should go so
?

far as to measure the infinite 1 I can no more "by

searching find out God" than Haeckel by a word
can give the "Lord God his conge." But I can see
in Haeckel's provisional eternal substances just
that which I have suggested, and more. As sug-
gested in the Introduction, when I am told that
there is a "tendency" in anything to move, even
my comparatively feeble knowledge of physics
compels me to understand by that that a force
resides in that which feels the tendency and that
what the tendency results in is the measure of the
exercise of the force. Even if it were possible to
conceive of the ether as undifferentiated, having
a "tendency" to move, and about to be for the first
time differentiated by countless infinitesimal cen-
ters of condensation, then, by virtue of the very
law of force, it would condense in a determinate
manner and a definite differentiation, and that
would mean that the "thinking substance" in the
ether which has a "tendency" to condense is dif-
ferentiated and not homogenous.
Professor Haeckel dismisses Du Bois Rey-
mond's second "world enigma," viz., the first
"origin of movement," in these words: "In our
opinion, this second 'world enigma' is solved by
the recognition that movement is as innate and
original a property of substance as is sensation."
(P. 241, "The Eiddle of the Universe.") Now
the trouble is in getting my mind to the stick-
ing point of the "recognition." "Innate and
original" properties are as enigmatic as the
 RELATIONSHIP 73

enigma which he tells us is so easily "solved" by

them.
"Movement" is not demonstrated as an "innate
property" of anything within our experience, but
as the result of something else, and that is force,
or, if it serves a better purpose to call it so, "think-
ing substance," and we know that any first move-
ment is likewise definite as the product of definite
forces.
If we are to consider "movement" as an "innate
property" of substance, it appears to me that we
must abandon the thesis that "forces are not com-
municated from one thing to another, but move-
ments are."
If we are to think of "feeling and inclination"
as the "active causes" of this differentiation of
substance into countless "infinitesimal centers of
condensation," we shall not, I apprehend, escape
-that enigma of Du Bois Reymond, What caused
the first movement?
A substance, infinite, saturated with sensitive-
ness, in the absence of something to arouse its
sensitiveness by stimulation of some sort, unless
it remain quiescent, immovable, is unthinkable.
The moment we supply that "something," force,
it may respond exactly in commensuration to that
force, and we have a commencement of differen-
tiation with a tendency to return to equation.
But when, as is the case with the thesis pre-
sented by Haeckel, this differentiation never com-
mences, but is eternal (this being his only reply
to Du Bois Reymond), then we have no longer the
reason for assuming this "force," this "thinking
74 EELATIOKSHIP

substance" as being a imit, merely a^ force, but

rather unity of units of force, the force of forces,
eternally. The "infinitesimal centers of condensa-
tion" of substance would then be eternal, inde-
structible motion forms in the ether.
A
universe constructed on these theses without
this recognition of units of force would in the
course of eons run down and equate itself.
Unless what Professor Haeckel means by the
—
"division into mass and ether the ergonomy of
ponderable and imponderable matter," is covered
by the expression "motion forms in the ether," in-
cluding continuity of the ether into every part of
the mass, it will be difficult to see how the "inter-
mediate ether increases its strain," or how there
could be any strain at all.
Assuming these "infinitesimal centers of con-
densation of the ether," these units of force, these
individual forms of motion in the ether to be thus
in the substance, a continuity of the substance,
and not detached from it, and there is a strain, an
eternal strain, and the basis for a belief that the
relationship is eternal.
What an immense complexity of relations is
thereby established, what immeasurable capacity
for thought, consciousness, and memory, and a
means of intercommunication as far transcending
the human nerves as the traverse of light tran-
scends the rapidity of sound waves, we do not know
and cannot know. Eef erring again to Eomanes's
declaration that it is a non sequitur, that because
we only know mind as associated with brain,
therefore there is no other form of mind, we find
 RELATIONSHIP 75

mind associated in us with ganglionic centers, but

Romanes in an experiment made upon the Naked-
eyed Medusas found that the manubrium or tongue
of the bell-shaped animal would deflect toward
the exact spot which he irritated on the edge of
the bell or body. Thus far the existence of gangli-
onic centers was assuredly known, but he cut out
the manubrium or tongue and to his astonishment
found (as he says on pp. 110-111, "Jelly Fish, Star
Fish, and Sea Urchins") that "no matter how,
small a portion of this organ I used, and no matter
from what part of the organ I cut it, this portion
would do its best to bend over to the side which I
irritated. .. .We have here, then, a curious fact,
and one which it will be well to bear in mind dur-
ing our subsequent endeavors to frame some sort
of a conception regarding the nature of these
primitive nervous tissues.
"The localizing function, which is so very effi-
ciently performed by the manubrium of the Me-
dusa, and which if anything resembling it oc-
curred in the higher animals would certainly have
definite ganglionic centers for its structural co-
relative (italics mine), is here shared equally by
every part of the exceedingly tenuous contrac-
tile tissue that forms the outer surface of the
organ."
Now this is a diffusion of ganglionic function,
not a mere sensitiveness such as in the lowest or-
ders of life withdraws its substance away from
the irritation.
That may or may not be suggestive of a little
consideration of the thought that, because we are
76 EELATIONSHIP

accustomed to perceiving the exercise of the gan-

glionic functions as associated with definite gan-
glionic centers, it does not necessarily follow that
ganglionic function may not be exercised without
such centers, and hence, to go further, that be-
cause we are accustomed to find mind so associ-
ated, it does not necessarily follow but that it may
exist not so associated.
Possibly Haeckel does not consider that this
opinion of Eomanes's bears upon an "important"
point in the monistic philosophy, and therefore
may not wish to be taken as "at one" with him in
that matter; but when Romanes tells us that be-
cause we are only familiar with mind in associa^
tion with brain it does not necessarily follow that
that is the only form of substance with which mind
is connected, he does not have in view Haeckel's
idea of incipient mind or mere "mind stuff." This
is evident when we recall that Romanes suggests
that such a mind may so transcend the human as
to be a form of mind beyond our analysis. This
is a difference from Haeckel upon a very "impor-
tant" matter; indeed, it involves the very soul of
Haeckel's work.
Consciousness of abstract things requires life in
abstract things; we actually build them into our-
selves and they are our living environment. As
I have gone at length into the subject in the chap-
ter on The Living Environment, I will not mul-
tiply words by discussing it at this point. Stand-
ing squarely upon the idea of the One as being the
foundation of true Monism, I insist that as we also
find the many, and as we likewise are aware that
 KELATIONSHIP 77

mind as we know it is one in character, notwith-

standing that we find it expressing in many, we
are justified in assuming the one mind to be in its
operations similar to that mind with which we are
familiar in the many.
When we consider the Universal Mind we find
reasons to believe that just that character of as-
sociated objectivities existing in the human mind
in unbroken association and relationship makes
the living environment of it, and just that char-
acter of associated ideas found to constitute the
conscious memory of the human mind is in un-
broken association and relationship in it.
I think it is evident that in the case of the indi-
vidual human mind the consciousness of the One,
the individual, is dependent upon the parallel con-
sciousness of the many. We are in the world of
vast differentiation, active in millions of cortical
cells, each of which, as we have endeavored to
show elsewhere, is a unit in itself, and our con-
sciousness of the world is dependent upon the uni-
fication of these. This is not equivalent to admit-
ting what is asserted by Haeckel, that the sum of
their activities constitutes consciousness, but quite
the contrary, that the unification of their activities
provides us with the object of consciousness.
Sleep comes with its apparent loss of conscious-
ness when the senses cease to receive impressions
from without, and the connections of the cortical
cells are withdrawn from each other within.
In sleep the many prevail; in wakefulness to
the world the one. That this is comparative and
not absolute is within the experience of us all.
78 BELATIONSHIP

So far as we know, for untold eons of time in-

finite space has been filled with the evidences of
the many our knowledge of the vast systems upon
;

systems which fill it is, great as it is, exceedingly

limited. Certainly all we know is based upon the
uniformity of law, the loyalty of force, and the
evidences of unity. Here on this little world, our
environment of to-day, we fimd mind, and it is one
thing, one force, loyal to its law, and it does not re-
quire undue effort of scientific faith to grasp the
conception that it is the same coextensive with all
its manifestation in the universe.
The one and the many may be rationally con-
ceived as ever in existence. Time and Eternity
may keep the one and the many in eternal balance
of unification so far as our present scientific inves-
tigations can inform us.
What we know as the association of ideas is,
otherwise expressed, the law of relationship. We
are also all tolerably familiar with the phenomena
of associated memories. The odor of the carna-
tion will, with the passing of a second of time,
bring into the present the dim and misty past all ;

that went with the fragrance of the pink, however

small a part it may have itself played in the expe-
—
rience, comes trooping to the memory ^houses,
rooms, familiar faces of the past, long-forgotten
voices, feelings, griefs, pleasures, all are so linked
together that they form one picture in the now.
Such associative links will even thrust before the
memory facts to the nonexistence of which, with-
out the suggestive link, we would take our solemn
oath.
 BELATIONSHIP 79

This law of relationship, it is not irrational to

assert, is thelaw of mind, and if such be perceived
to be its action in your mind, there are no scien-
tific data which demand of you that you deny it to
the One Mind.
"In Him we live and move and have our being"
is more than a religious assertion it is a scientific
;

declaration.
The One Mind is infinite, true, but it is because
of this that I insist that we cannot be taken out
of it. Its infinity is ours; it surely has not less
than my mind, and while we must acknowledge
that its intellect is so transcendentally beyond our
conception as to be a mystery, yet its hold upon all
its relationships must likewise transcend our ex-
perience.
 Chapter V
THE WITNESSES
The weight of a great name usually lends force
to an expression of opinion on any subject of
general interest, and we are sometimes given to
unreasonably yielding our own views on that ac-
count. Anything Mr. Gladstone might have to
say concerning the inspiration of the Scriptures,
the divinity of Christ, or the ethical value of the
phonograph was hailed with approving nods a
few years ago, notwithstanding the fact that his
transcendent greatness consisted in qualities of
mind bearing in an entirely different direction.
We do not think sufficiently for ourselves and lean
too confidingly upon others merely because of
their prominence in the world of thought, no mat-
ter how that prominence was obtained or in what
field of labor. For instance, the views of ex-
President Harrison concerning the relations
which should exist between the United States
and her possessions in the Atlantic and Pacific
oceans have profound value, and ought to have,
expressed as they were by a man whose whole
life training had qualified him to form rational
conclusions on the subject, but his opinion as to
the probability of communicating with the pos-
sible inhabitants of Mars might or might not be
as valuable as yours or mine.
80
 THE WITNESSES 81

When such a grave question as the one upon the

answer to which hang the hopes of all humanity
is propounded, any opinion adverse to the inbred
expectancy of the human mind should be expressed
at least tentatively and with hesitating modesty.
It should never be clothed in the brazen armor
of dogmatic assurance, nor confidently asserted
even, until all probabilities as to individual im-
mortality are exhausted.
Even if the whole faculty of physicists and psy-
chologists should assure us that there was no
other alternative, we would yet have the feeling
that, after all, they are but men like ourselves,
confessedly by their own theories but expressing
the evanescent products of machines, and have not
reached any further into the mystery of being
than you or I in our own consciousness.
It is quite a cheering thought, nevertheless, that
the scientific thinkers do not agree in such a
conclusion as Professor Haeckel has reached;
quite the contrary; and, strange to say, as he
frankly admits in his own book, the older they
grow in their work the wider the field of their
mental vision, the more voluminous the data which
they gather, usually the more convinced are they
that the conclusions to which they leaped eagerly
in the freshness of youth were prematurely
reached and rested on an insecure foundation.
Nearly every man of great scientific attainments
in biological, physiological, and psychological re-
searches has found it convenient and sometimes
necessary to write something about the immortal-
ity of man. It is a subject which suggests itself
82 THE WITNESSES

frequently in the study of the origin, development,

and life of mankind, and I have, like many others,
interested myself deeply in the task, a pleasurable
one, of discovering how these great thinkers
viewed that question, and have been contented
in finding that just as there are always conflicts
of opinion upon scientific constructive theories,
so there are in relation to this. If you are prone
to believe that our biologists are a harmonious
family in relation to the conclusions to be reached
from the facts ascertained, or even as to the mean-
ing of the phenomena themselves, you have but to
read the theses of the various writers upon the
subject, or the lectures delivered from time to
time at the laboratories, to find out for yourselves
that while great strides have been made, the mean-
ing of the wonderful egg and its characteristic
activities is largely a subject of discussion by
learned men with divergent views. This is
likewise the case in the field of psychology,
although we certainly have approached nearer
to the time when it may properly be called a
science.
The scientific world is really in too much of a
hurry; just as it has for the first time in a few
thousand years of man's history begun to open
the cases of Nature's sealed mysteries, the first
few cans have so swelled its dignity that it is
too much inclined to assume the attitude of know-
ing all about it. The world has but commenced
itsera of science; it yet rocks the cradle of ex-
perimental knowledge it has but outlined the tre-
;

mendous future, and many of the pioneers in this

 THE WITNESSES 83

wonderful work, as they cool down in their de-

clining years, fully realize these facts and have
the courage of their greatness to come forth and
say so before the great doors of the Hereafter
clang behind them. They admit their ignorance
of some things and ask the world to wait.
The idea of another life, immortal, freed from
the distresses, crosses, and suffering of this, with
the associated idea of a God, is an old one. It
has inspired the poefs song; has been the theme
from which all the grandeur, sublimity, and power
of harmony in modem music drew their vitality.
Mozart, Handel, Haydn, all voiced their great
hope and ideal of mankind. It gave to the world
its first impulse in painting. Michelangelo and
Eaphael threw this expectation of humanity upon
the screen in living colors; it has fired the soul
of eloquence; it has been the warp and woof of
human government, and has been enlarged, be-
littled, distorted, modeled and remodeled, diluted
—
and crystallized in creeds by theologians it is old.
It has no longer the charm of novelty. Science
has. Its new light has for a time, and will for a
greater time, outshine the old, and it is not strange
that in the freshness and vigor of youth, with
the prizes of fame and preferment alluringly held
up before them, the students of science should
find in its newness, its fresh impulses, its novel
revelations, its doorways opening into strange
paths, a substitute for the old. They seem to
forget that even the doctrine of Monism is in-
clusive, and that the universe is still sparkling
with many facets.
84 THE WITNESSES

The results of this newness of modem science

are not novel in the world's history, for every
new departure, whether in literature, art, music,
poetry, government, economics, or education, has
commenced in just the same all-absorbing, exclu-
sive, repudiating, self-assertive manner. Such
changes in the direction of the world's thought
push everything else out of the way for a time,
but this cannot and does not last.
The world has its rhythm; it is much like the
man; its progress is in the attaining of the new,
but it always retains the old, and eventually builds
it into its life.
The new is almost always exclusive in its ef-
fects upon its possessor, and it is difficult to find
a human being who is not compelled, because of
his greater tendency to specialize than to gener-
alize, to subscribe to some ism.
Isms are always
exclusive, and by compel
their formulated rules
a repudiation of anything which appears to be
antagonistic.
Now, when we come to the constructive work
of modern science, we find that it is of necessity
first destructive. It cannot easily build upon the
old foundations; biology abandons Bonnet, and
psychology has little use for the works on mental
science of the early part of the nineteenth century.
But this abandonment is for science and for scien-
tificpurposes only; it is not because there was no
truth in the old masters, but because it is easier
and perhaps more conducive to the attainment of
harmony to put the wine in "new bottles." In
this work of construction, among the useless ma-
 THE WITNESSES 85

terial is seemingly found the idea of God and

immortality, but that is only because modem sci-
ence has not builded up to its capstone quite yet.
The sound of contesting languages is not yet over
there are indications of Babelistic confusion of
tongues even now. This will not last, but possibly
it will be found finally that the "stone which the

builders rejected" is the "chief stone of the cor-

ner."
The greatest achievement of modem civilization
has been in the development of the spirit of tol-
eration, and, as Professor Haeckel justly claims,
the marvelous progress of Science owes its im-
petus to the full untrammeled liberty conceded to
thinkers to express themselves without fear of
the rack or the stake. It is certainly true that
enlightened people do not any longer hurry such
men as Giordano Bruno and John Huss out of
the world in a blaze of glory, nor does the holy
among
inquisition seek its victims the unbelievers
and heterodox. The days when to express an
opinion adverse to the ruling of the ecclesiastics
was equivalent to signing one's own death war-
rant have departed, probably forever. Such eru-
dite and intellectual giants as Haeckel, Spencer,
Huxley, Darwin, Wallace, Lodge, Crookes, James,
and many more who tower above all others in
their special fields of labor, have found the nine-
teenth century a most fortunate and advantageous
era in which to live. Their privilege to speak,
their opportunity to be heard, the respect with
which their utterances are treated, are all owing
to the spirit of toleration and the fact that the
86 THE WITNESSES

general level of intelligence has slowly but surely

risen. Yet I am very certain that there are strong
indications that the same spirit which, when in its
unbounded and unlicensed cruelty, found an op-
portunity to glorify God by burning at the stake
such as refused to wear the yoke of orthodoxy,
prevails to a great extent to-day. I mean to say
that persecution is a weapon as freely used in this
day and generation as ever it was in the history
of the world, but its wielders are no longer the
Church and the priests alone, but the scientists
themselves. Not all, but some. It is remarkable,
too, that the victims of their wrath and intolerance
are of their own number. Broadest of all men
should the true scientists be, and broadest of all
men the true scientist is. Yet we are to-day face
to face with the fact that if a thinker thinks too
far, so far that he is unfortunate enough to get
a trifle away from the beaten path of a cult or a
theory or a school, he must make up his mind that
his worst enemies and most uncompromising an-
tagonists will be those of his own school of sci-
ence.
"Orthodox" and "heterodox" are rather curi-
ous words to apply to science, yet they have crept
into our vernacular in that association.
Science is knowledge, knowledge acquired by
and through the use of the senses it should fling
;

wide open the doors which give ingress to data;

there should be no such thing as forbidden fruit,
and no fences across rights of way. Merely be-
cause we have accepted a theory as in all probabil-
ity a rational one because based upon facts which
 THE WITNESSES 87

appear to demand it, we should not shut out eyes

to other pressing data which seem not to fit into
the theory neither should an investigator be com-
;

pelled to go into Coventry because he happens to

be the one who sincerely believes that he has evi-
dence of the existence of such facts.
Evolution and Monism are widely accepted to-
day as rational hypotheses; indeed, they almost
approach demonstration; but the fact that they
just fail of absolute demonstration leaves always
open the possibility that, after all, they may be
entirely unfounded and erroneous. But even con-
ceding that they have all the force of demonstra-
tion, yet they are very inclusive, and have not as
yet entirely explained the workings of the Uni-
verse, and presumably never will.
It is a matter of profound regret that the mys-
terious realm of psychic phenomena, telepathy,
and what is commonly known as spiritualism,
should be not only unknown territory to Science,
but unrecognized and forbidden.
In common with most other men who feel that
nothing is so vulgar that it will not bear investi-
gation, I had hailed with delight the advent into
the field of the occult of men of such standing in
the scientific world as Wallace, Crookes, James,
Lodge, Myers, Hodgson, and Hyslop, because I
felt that they would be able to make such thorough
and unflinching investigations as would reveal
either its absolute worthlessness or its profound
value.
How have the results of the efforts of some
of them been received by the scientists? With
88 THE WITNESSES

contumely and contempt. Haeckel voices the opin-

ions of many scientific men when he considers
that they have been led astray by "excess of im-
agination and defect of critical faculty."
Now the modern theory of evolution owes fully
as much to Wallace as to Darwin, yet nobody ever
considered it necessary to charge him with "ex-
cess of imagination or defect of critical faculty"
in connection with that matter. It required a keen
observer and one possessed of critical faculty of
a high order. If this is not so, of what value is
all his labor in gathering data tending to sustain
the evolutionary doctrine!
Crookes and Lodge certainly appear to tran-
scend most of their contemporaries in physics, yet
the same faculties which gave them their position
in the scientific world become "excess of imag-
ination" the moment that they apply them to the
study of anything which is impopular and hetero-
dox to Science.
These abnormal phenomena demand explana-
tion, and so long as they remain unexplained by
Science they are standing obstructions to the
demonstration of anything by Science concern-
ing the psychic side of life. If they are un-
certain and spasmodic, then those elements are
to be read into the scheme of evolution and
Monism, and it no longer remains true that
Science is positive and definite in its analysis of
life.
It is a simple matter of a few words for a sci-
entist declare that telepathy has "no more
to
existence than the groans of spirits," but what do
 THE WITNESSES 89

words amount to in the solution of such a ques-

tion? Many men of no mean attainments say
that it does exist, and that they have proved it.
If it does exist, it very materially affects the atti-
tude taken not only by Haeckel but others as to
the properties of the etheric substance and the
modification of the forms of motion in the cere-
bral cells by stimuli reaching them by channels
other than via the senses. Unsolved, it remains
a possible contradiction even to the monistic con-
ception of brain and soul as presented by Haeckel.
Probably that is why it seems to have no more
existence than "the groans of spirits," for it
might require a rather serious alteration of the
whole schematic framework of mechanical life.
Personally, I regard such men as James, Lodge,
Crookes, Hyslop, Wallace, and the others whom
I have mentioned with profound admiration, for I
think that the consideration of such matters be-
longs preeminently to Science. It is not strange
when we recall how some of them have been treat-
ed by the "orthodox" among the scientists that
these men hold a warm comer in the hearts of
the people. They are bringing their precise and
logical methods to bear upon questions of vital
importance to humanity, and whatever their ulti-
mate decision may be, it will be received with
respect.
Why have I indulged in this strain of philoso-
phy? Because I have in mind a much more ra-
tional explanation than Professor Haeckel for the
recantation on the part of so many of the masters
in science who have enjoyed (?) the felicity of
90 !tHE WITNESSES

standing with him in his, to me, hopeless views

of life and its meaning.
I quote first from Haeckel himself (p. 93, "The
Eiddle of the Universe")
"Rudolph Virchow, the eminent founder of cel-
lular pathology, was a pure Monist in the best
days of his scientific activity.
. . Virchow pub-
.

lished his general biology views on the processes

of man, which he takes to be purely mechanical
natural phenomena." I have abbreviated the quo-
tation, for it speaks for itself in the chapter on
the Nature of the Soul. It is sufficient to say
that twenty-eight years afterwards Virchow "rep-
resented the diametrically opposite view."
E. Du Bois Reymond, whom Haeckel calls one
of the "most famous living scientists," after hav-
ing done his great part in the destruction of
transcendentalism and vitalism, recanted, and
declared that consciousness was an insoluble
problem.
Haeckel cites a similar change from the mere
mechanical theory to the spiritualistic on the part
of the great Wilhelm Wundt, whom he calls the
"ablest living psychologist." To them he adds
Kant and Baer, and suggests even others who
after having found all the truth, found some
more.
I am at this point constrained to say that even
George John Romanes, whose opinion seems to
Professor Haeckel to coincide with his own (per-
haps he does not mean concerning immortality),
gave strong evidences of an approaching change
in his views, if indeed any change was necessary,
 THE WITNESSES 91

shortly before his death, if the preface to the

posthumous volume "Mind, Motion, and Monism"
is of any value as evidence. I quote the words
of C. Lloyd Morgan, principal of University Col-
lege, Bristol: "The subjects here discussed fre-
quently occupied Mr. Romanes's keen and versa-
tile mind. Had not the hand of Death fallen upon
him while so much of the ripening grain of his
thought remained to be finally garnered, some
still

modifications and extensions (italics mine) of the

views set forth in the 'Essay on Monism' would
probably have been introduced. Attention may
be drawn for example to the sentence on page
139, italicized by the author himself, in which it
is contended that the will as agent must be iden-
tified with the principle of causality.
"I have reason to believe that the chapter on
the World as an Eject would, in a final revision
of the essay as a whole, have been modified so as
to lay stress on this identification of the human
will with the principle of causality in the world
at large, a doctrine the relation of which to the
teaching of Schopenhauer will be evident to the
students of philosophy."
It is with a considerable degree of confidence in
the correctness of my understanding of the testi-
mony of Professor Romanes that I quote also
from the volume of his "Essays" edited by Prof.
C. Lloyd Morgan, and particularly from the pa-
per entitled "Mind in Men and Animals": "On
the side of its philosophy I am in complete agree-
ment with the most advanced idealist, and hold
that in the doctrine of self -consciousness we each
92 THE WITNESSES

of US possess not alone our only ultimate knowl-

edge, or that alone which is 'real in its own right,'
but likewise the only mode of existence that the
human mind is capable of conceiving as existence,
and therefore the conditio sine qua non to the
possibility of an external world. With this as-
pect of the matter, however, I am not here con-
cerned. Just as the functions of an embryologist
are confined to tracing the mere history of devel-
opmental changes, and just as he is thus as far
as ever from throwing any light upon the deeper
questions of the how and the why of life, so in
seeking to indicate the steps whereby self-con-
sciousness has arisen from the lower stages of
physical development, I am as far as anyone can
be from throwing any light upon the intrinsic na-
ture of that the probable genesis of which I am
endeavoring to trace. It is as true to-day as it
was in the days of Solomon, that "As thou know-
est not how the bones do grow in the womb of
her that is with child, thou knowest not what is
the way of the Spirit."
What the particular individual views were which
these great men finally held does not concern us
in the discussion, because the object of this book
is not to present a new or an old special theory,
but merely emphatically to combat the assertion
that the individual has been proved to be scien-
tifically mortal, or the imagination that any proof
exists which is at all of a character to disturb our
spiritual equanimity. I only desire to show that
these masters of science when the fire for making
bricks had burned down found that they had good
 THE WITNESSES 93

bricks, but that the plans of the building which

some of them had in mind showed bad archi-
tectural designs.
My reading of physiology has taught me that it
for some of the very reasons set forth
is difficult,
by Professor Haeckel in his general analysis of
the cellular brain, for men past the prime of life
to change their habits of thought; hence, they
rarely are able to acquire a new art or learn an
unfamiliar language, but adhere to the ideas
formed in earlier life. Most old men live much in
the past, the sensitivity of the cells is not as keen,
new sensations fail to arouse them, and the cur-
rent events are not so interesting.
"The power of visualization is lost, pleasure in
music disappears, memory becomes weak save in
narrow lines (italics mine) a new language, a
;

new science, or a new handicraft appears as a

very serious undertaking, and, as a rule, is only
indifferently acquired." (Donaldson, "The Growth
of the Brain.")
How often, may I ask, do we find a politician
changing his party lines in old age? Or a church-
man his creed?
I may be permitted to suggest also that these
men so criticised by Haeckel were of unusually
strong intellects, concededly so, and if they did
achieve the new, recast the old, cease to think on
former lines, it was because they were giants and
exceptions to the general rule and hence ex-
ceptions to HaeckePs rule of senility.
It is hardly consistent to suggest that these sci-
entists changed from their early positions, pos-
94 THE WITNESSES

sibly because of tlie approach of old age, and, in

addition, to advance as a reason for the spiritual-
istic tendencies of such men as Zollner, Fechner,
Wallace, and Crookes the suggestion that they
have been led astray by the "powerful influence of
dogmas which a religious education printed on the
brain in early youth." The rule ought to work
—
either one way or the other either early impres-
sions should prevail in old age or should not.
If "purified monism" has returned "after a
lapse of two hundred years" to the "profound
thought of Spinoza," I question whether we may
not be compelled to look elsewhere than to "The
Riddle of the Universe" to find the evidences of
the return. Not that I doubt the fact, but fail
there to find the evidences. The solution of "The
Riddle of the Universe" as presented by Haeckel
strikes me as a far reach away from the majestic
thesis of Spinoza. Contrast the absolute denial of
any individual immortality presented by Haeckel
in his statement that the "Godless world system"
of Atheism "substantially agrees with the monism
or pantheism of the modem scientists" and his
express limitation of his conception of immortal-
ity in these words, "When we take the idea of im-
mortality in the widest sense and extend it to the
totality of the knowable universe, it has a scien-
tific significance
; it is then not merely acceptable
but self-evident to the monistic philosopher," with
the propositions of Spinoza. Prop. XXI (Part V,
The Ethics) "Nevertheless, in God there is nec-
:

essarily an idea which expresses the essence of

this or that human body under the form of eter-
 THE WITNESSES 95

nity." Prop. XXIII "The human mind cannot

^ :

be absolutely destroyed with the body, but there

remains something of it which is eternal."
A
portion of Spinoza's note under the last prop-
osition reads as follows: "But notwithstanding,
we feel and know that we are eternal. For the
mind feels those things which it conceives by
understanding no less than those things which it
remembers. For the eyes of the mind whereby
it sees and observes things are none other than

proofs. Thus, although we do not remember that

we existed before the body, yet we feel that our
mind, in so far as it involves the essence of the
body, under the form of eternity, is eternal, and
that thus its existence cannot be defined in terms
of time or explained through duration." Prop.
XXXIX: "He who possesses a body capable of
the greatest number of activities possesses a
mind whereof the greatest part is eternal."
I quote also from a letter of Spinoza to Olden-
berg (Letter XV) for fear that these propositions
may be considered as standing by themselves not
s satisfactory expression of Spinoza's monistic
idea of immortality of the individual mind: "As
regards the human mind, I believe that it is also
a part of nature for I maintain that there exists
;

in nature an infinite power of thinking, which, in

so far as it is infinite, contains subjectively the
whole of nature, and its thoughts proceed in the
—
same manner as nature that is, in the sphere of
'
AH the quotations from Spinoza in this book are from the trans-
lation by R. H. M. Elwes in Bohn's edition of the " Chief Works of
Benedict de Spinoza."
96 THE WITNESSES

ideas. Further, I take the human mind to be iden-

tical with this said power, not in so far as it is in-
finite and perceives the whole of nature, but in so
far as it is finite and perceives only the human
body. In this manner I maintain that the human
mind is a part of an infinite understanding."
The spiritual feeling which pervades the works
of Spinoza, notwithstanding the cold, formulated
propositions in which his philosophy is set forth,
bears a striking contrast to the pessimism which
colors the ethics of Haeckel. However little we
may agree with Spinoza, his work makes upon
us a profound impression we feel the earnestness
;

and human sympathy which warms it, while, on

the other hand, one leaves "The Riddle of the Uni-
verse" depressed and filled with wonder that even
if the doleful conclusions of the whole matter were
true, and Haeckel a final judge of the case, he
should have felt it necessary to write it. In any
event, Spinoza, it seems to me, was a poor wit-
ness to summon.
I take the liberty here to quote a few lines from
Professor Shaler's recent work ("The Individual,"
p. 304) "The point is that we know properties of
:

matter are so complex and our ignorance as to

the range of these properties so great, that the
facts of death cannot be made a safe basis for a
conclusion as to the survival of the intelligence."
These words and many more are cheering and
hopeful coupled with the true scientific mental at-
titude of expectant waiting.
I shall not multiply the pages of this chapter
by further quotations, but content myself with the
 THE WITNESSES 97

suggestion that advanced scientists, with hardly

an exception, find in their widening field of knowl-
edge great and cogent reasons for waiting before
springing the trap which executes final judgment
upon the hope of the world.
In the note to a lecture upon Immortality de-
livered by Professor James, of Harvard, he ex-
presses surprise that, contrary to his expecta-
tions, he could not find in recent scientific books a
single positive denial of man's possible immortal-
ity. He had not at that time the opportunity of
reading "The Riddle of the Universe."
 Chapter VI

CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN

As an introduction to what I wish to say re-
garding consciousness, I shall put and try to re-
ply, to some extent at least, to a question which
has often been asked and remained unanswered to
our satisfaction: What is pain?
Probably, like many other queries, this will re-
main unsettled just to the degree that we are
unable to explain what consciousness is, but I
think it will yet be evident that just so far as we
are able to understand what consciousness is, we
shall have a comprehension of the nature of pain.
I believe there is reason to consider pain as a
phase rather than an object of consciousness it-
self. I might define consciousness as the sense of
effort, and pain as the consciousness aroused by
the disturbance of automatic action. Professor
Cope, in "Primary Factors of Organic Evolution,"
says: "Whatever be its nature, the preliminary
to any animal movement which is not automatic
is an effort. And as no adaptive movement is
automatic the first time it is performed, we may
regard effort as an immediate source of all move-
ment. Now, effort is a conscious state, and is a
sense of resistance to be overcome. When an act
is performed without effort, resistance has been
98
 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN 99

overcome, and the mechanism necessary for the

performance of the act has been completed. The
stage of automatism has been reached."
As the same author has in another place sug-
gested, that energy become automatic is uncon-
scious, we are able to conceive the effort to have
been conscious in the long stages of evolution in
building up the complex machines within machines
which constitute what I have called the living en-
vironment desire producing effort, effort leading
;

to adaptation, and the resulting adaptation becom-

ing automatic, and, therefore, unconscious. We
can readily comprehend, as he suggests, that the
heart, the lungs, the stomach, and all the organs
were brought into existence as such consciously,
and thereafter performed their functions auto-
matically.
If this be a reasonable theory, and it seems to
me to be such, then any disturbance of the auto-
matic movements of these organs or any organs
of the body results in an awakening of conscious-
ness in the repair of the injury causing the dis-
turbance. Such repair is a revival of effort, the
same in kind as the original effort which created
the organ, and not being effort directed rhythmic-
ally in response to repeated stimulations, is ef-
fort demanded suddenly and out of the regular
procession of evolution. All such effort is a state
of consciousness, and as consciousness may be
said to have abandoned the processes of the organ
in its automatic condition and to have been di-
rected regularly in order to efforts in response to
stimuli upon the periphery of the living environ-
100 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN

ment coming from the external and assailing it

from many points, its sudden and unwonted direc-
tion to the demands of repair in the hitherto auto-
matic center results in a centralization, or rather
a specialization and intensification of conscious-
ness in one direction. To all efforts of energy
which demand specialization of consciousness just
to the degree of expenditure of energy, we give
the name of pain, or its opposite, pleasure. If
the specialization is in the direction of the at-
tainment of the new, we call the consciousness
pleasure; if directed to the rehabilitation of a
disturbed automatism, we call it pain.
Such a unit of force as we have conceived the in-
dividual to be is limited, limited to what it is in
itself, and it is only by virtue of the successive
layers of automatic centers in its living environ-
ment that it may be said to always be able to
utilize practically its entire consciousness in the
acquiring rather than the retaining. The with-
drawal of it in any degree from this creative, or-
ganizing field of eif ort and its specialization upon
the reorganizing is pain.
Perhaps I may make the idea clearer by saying
that in this view, ecstasy, pleasure, and pain are
but so many gauging marks upon the thermometer
of consciousness. The touch of the point of a pin
may be pleasurable, a slight prick by it annoying,
because consciousness is to a degree withdrawn
from its generalization and more or less special-
ized, while the deep penetration by the instrument
would be pain. This is all, however, the ex-
pression of the degree to which consciousness
 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN 101

is withdrawn from generalization to specializa-

tion by effort on the part of the particular cen-
ter in doing over again what it has done in or-
ganizing the automatic action of the epithelial
cells.
Pain and pleasure are but names for direction
and degrees of consciousness. They are one and
—
the same thing consciousness. The beating of
my heart is an automatic movement, and I am
unconscious ordinarily of it, but if I direct my
attention fixedly to it, the rhythmic pulsations be-
come disturbed and there is more or less pain as
a result. The act of swallowing is automatically
performed by the muscles of the esophagus, and I
am unconscious of their movements under ordi-
nary circumstances, yet if I pay attention to the
aet of swallowing and attempt to analyze the proc-
ess, I shall find it exceedingly difficult to resist the
desire to expel the food or liquid which I am at-
tempting to swallow there is pain.
;

Pain is only possible when there is a degree of

generalization on the part of consciousness.
If the disturbance of the automatic process is
sufficient to centralize the entire consciousness of
the unit of force, unconsciousness results, and we
find an evidence of this in the fact that the indi-
vidual succumbs at a certain point and syncope or
fainting results. If the consciousness be with-
drawn by artificial helps, from generalization, as
in the administration of anaesthetics, there is no
pain, and in true sleep, however induced, whether
naturally or by hypnotic suggestion, there is no
pain. From this position we should not say "con-
102 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN

sciousness of pain," but "consciousness is pain."

To attempt to explain the absence of pain in such
a state by merely saying the individual is uncon-
scious is to give but half an explanation. It ap-
pears more probable that the individual cannot
carry the weight of such a centralization of con-
sciousness, and hence there is an inhibition of the
connectivities between the sense organs and the
cerebrum.
A man
suffering severe pain, and who at the
same time is in the condition which we usually call
conscious, has but a feeble power to generalize.
He exhibits a disposition to avoid conversation;
he cannot read with profit he is unfitted for busi-
;

ness, and there is a general incapacity for

thought ; consciousness is otherwise engaged it is
;

specializing upon a work which is a return to the

organization of automatic processes.
I have said that conscious effort in acquiring
the new is pleasure, and it may be objected to this
that there is also pleasure in repeating the old,
and likewise pain sometimes in acquiring the new.
To this I shall suggest that if by repeating the
old is meant the reviving of past sensations, we
do so by building them upon the basis of the pres-
ent they are never the same as they were before
;

they are added to the horizon of our environ-

ment as new factors. In acquiring the new there
can be no pain unless in the acquisition there is a
disturbance of the automatism and therefore the
necessary readjustment. There is no pain except
where consciousness is comparatively withdrawn
from the external world environment of objects
 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN 103

and an unwonted consciousness of the living en-

vironment of the body aroused.
The peace and pleasure of the individual de-
pends upon the harmonious, undisturbed action
and interaction of his living environment.
Such a theory as I have outlined to explain the
nature of pain would more rationally lend sup-
port to the conception of the unit of consciousness
as the synthesizing force rather than the synthetic
product of the activities of the cells. The prog-
ress made by physiological and biological investi-
gation in the vast complexity of cells in the physi-
cal animal, the division and subdivision into spe-
cialized centers, the inability to frame any scheme
that will construct such a synthesis out of them as
will account for the unity of consciousness only
adds force to the suggestion that the unit of con-
sciousness is the unifying and synthesizing force
as a cause of organization.
The abandonment by biologists of the idea of a
vital force does not necessarily include an abridg-
ment of belief in a vital unit, and if it did, it would
not be the first time in the history of Science when
it has abandoned a truth to again return to it as
clad in different garments and called by a differ-
ent name.
I again suggest that consciousness demands two
or more, and cannot reside in the one nor in any
number of units, but is the quality of a force al-
ways found in the unit of unification and that is
the individual; it is always above, beyond, and
something organic rather than the sum total. It
is never bom and consequently can never die, and
104 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN

as units and unity are conceived of as always as-

sociated, it is indestructible.
It would seem apparent that if consciousness
was the result of the synthetic activities of the
sentient cells, that where any disturbance of their
automatic action occurs, as in the case of injury,
there should be an abbreviation of consciousness
during the interference, but this is not so. There
is rather an increase of intensity of it, a distinc-
tive specialization which we call pain up to the
point of comparatively complete focusing of it,
where, as I have before suggested, syncope and
unconsciousness supervene. Here, I should say
that the word unconsciousness is really a mis-
nomer, for it is in reality the cessation of general-
ization on the part of consciousness. We have
various names for such centralization of con-
sciousness in the ordinary affairs of life we call
;

it concentration, absorption of mind, and absent-

mindedness, and any such intensity of conscious-

ness in one direction really results in comparative
unconsciousness. This may seem paradoxical, but
it is clearly true. When one concentrates his at-
tention upon a single object for the purpose of the
attainment of the new, if it be only to study the
microscopical cell, he is oblivious to his surround-
ings he is unconscious relatively to them just to
;

the degree that he is conscious of the object which

he is examining. This is elemental, of course, and
withbi the experience of everybody, but it often
happens that the commonplace is very suggestive
and frequently offers the basis of solution for
problems which have long puzzled the world.
 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN 105

Such a concentration of consciousness as I have

just referred to is, of course, pleasurable, but if
we reverse the conditions and conceive of such
concentration as directed to the theretofore auto-
matic centers we have but consciousness again
shading into unconsciousness in the same manner,
and up to a point where generalization ceases we
call it "pain."
Consciousness of environment in the unifying,
organizing unit is dependent upon the sentience
of interacting, automatic organs, and its compara-
tive specialization in utilization of the organism is
pleasure, while the same specialization upon the
reorganizing of automatic centers is pain.
The consciousness aroused by the stimuli of new
sensations up to the point of disturbance of auto-
matic centers is pleasure; the consciousness im-
puted to the individual by aroused consciousness
in automatic centers is pain.
It would not be out of place to ask, if when we
speak of consciousness of the individual, we have
in mind the idea that he is supposed to be con-
scious of everything, that nothing may be sup-
posed to take place around him or within his en-
vironment of which he has no knowledge? If we
accept the definition given by Professor Haeckel,
that it is best conceived as "internal perception,"
then the measure of consciousness is not what it
perceives but its capacity for perception.
The vast number of occurrences in the environ-
ment of an individual are not, by any means, all
counted in the area of consciousness, but while
producing their physical effects are salted down,
106 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN

if I may
be permitted to use such an apt illustra-
tion, tobe possibly at some future time freshened
in the area of consciousness. For instance, the
events occurring immediately about me as I walk
the streets of a large crowded city appear to have
made no intimate acquaintance with my conscious-
ness, yet if some demand, say growing out of a
necessity for my testimony in a lawsuit, is made
upon me, I find myself able to lift into conscious
memory the details of events which otherwise
would have remained buried in the abyss of my
central system.
Now my consciousness does not in such a case
depend upon conscious impressions made at the
time of the occurrence, but rather upon its own
capacity to recover from the environment within
(the preserved experiences, the epitomized events
which make up the chain of my life, the living
environment), a necessary and valuable incident,
and build it into the selected life of self. In other
words, I mean to accept without cavil the truth
of the statement (p. 184, "The Riddle of the Uni-
verse") that "the momentous announcement of
modern physiology that the cerebrum is the or-
gan of consciousness and mental action in men
and the higher mammals, is illustrated and con-
firmed by the pathological study of its diseases."
Thus, there is a great difference between de-
claring the cerebrum to be the cause of conscious-
ness and asserting that it is, on the contrary, the
organ of consciousness. Consciousness is not the
contents which it holds, but the holder itself, and
therefore, in discussing what we are conscious of,
 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN 107

we are not discoursing upon consciousness itself,

but the objects of consciousness. This is precisely
the distinction which exists between subject and
object and the one which Du Bois Reymond and
others have found to involve a problem which is
insoluble.
George John Romanes, in his essay "Origin
of Human Faculty," as presented in the volume
of essays edited by Professor Morgan, says "For
:

it is the faculty of self -consciousness which thus

enables a mind to set one idea before another
as an object of its own thought by means of this
;

faculty the mind is able, as it were, to stand out-

side of itself (italics mine) "and so to perceive
objectively the ideas which are passing subjec-
tively, and this just as independently as if it were
regarding an external series of dissolving views.
How is it that such a state of matters is possible
whereby a mind can thus, as it were, get outside
of its own existence" (italics mine) "and so re-
gard its own ideas as objective to itself? This is
the mystery of all mysteries, the bottomless abyss
of personality" (italics mine).
Professor Haeckel freely admits that the physi-
ological theory of the nature and origin of con-
sciousness is by no means generally adopted, so
that the question whether the individual is im-
mortal would rather, so far as consciousness is
concerned, resolve itself into a query whether the
contents of individual consciousness are depend-
ent for continuity upon the organs which mediated
them and which will ultimately disappear.
Inasmuch as we know nothing about the nature
108 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN

of consciousness in its last analysis, and appar-

ently cannot, it is evident that while a scientist
undoubtedly has the right to his own opinion as
to its continuity after death of the organs, he
should hesitate to declare any other opinion im-
possible in the light of modern science.
We know little about the qualities of conscious-
ness, whether it is rhythmic in its character or
not, whether it rests or not, whether it shines with
diffusive light which reaches everything at once or
rather focuses its rays in successive directions.
Here I am speaking of consciousness itself, not
of its activity through its organs in the cerebrum
there we find that it is rhythmic, that it does rest,
that it focuses its perceptive rays of light; it is
in an environment of objects, and therefore de-
mands successive objects to perceive. It is not
omniscient and general; certainly not when op-
erating in these organs, but limited, special.
That it should therefore find difficulty in per-
ceiving objects in its environment by reason of
breaks in the connection with it, such as injury
to the cerebrum, is not strange, nor is it a con-
clusive evidence that it itself is caused by the
organs so injured. I am not conscious of being
in my office when I am at home, yet my conscious-
ness has not died; my consciousness of that par-
ticular office is inactive, I admit.
This is elementary, but has no less force for that
reason.
The fallacious argument from cerebral injury,
stimulation of the organs, multiplicity of appar-
ent personalities, appears to me to merely amount
 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN 109

to this consciousness does not know everything,

:

and it not omniscient, does not perceive objects

is
which it does not perceive; therefore, it is the
effect of its own incompetent organs a-s the cause
of its existence.
This mysterious consciousness again seems to
have the power to select for its own perception
and to choose from the physical centers such as
it desires to lift into its own area, nor will the
mere physical explanation of association of ideas
completely satisfy the call for a cause. Such an
explanation as the physical association of received
impressions is founded upon the idea of the estab-
lishment of paths of least resistance, established
as perceived impressions and associations of them,
and presumably such a physical phenomenon oc-
curs simultaneously with the psychological one of
recalling an experience forming a unit in the chain
of associated events which have made their previ-
ous impression, however slight, upon the organs
of consciousness. What, however, are we to do
with the events that have not at the time of their
occurrence made any impression upon the organs
of consciousness, when we find them coming up
out of the depths of unconsciousness to conscious-
ness ? The conclusion readily reached, of course, is
that they made their impression upon the subcon-
sciousness, and, from the view which I take tenta-
tively, of the one and the many both physically
and psychically, I am prepared to admit that these
stimulations did produce effects in subconscious-
ness. That is not the difficulty which at present
confronts us, but that other which calls for some
110 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN

physical explanation of how and why conscious-

ness afterwards deliberately selects these particu-
lar sensations and perceives them.
As an illustration of what I think to be a com-
mon experience enough to be practically beyond
denial, I refer to the phenomena witnessed in hyp-
notic experiments. I have seen a person hypno-
tized and such liberties taken with his person and
apparel as would have been indignantly resented
in the normal condition, injuries inflicted which
would have caused instant and excruciating pain,
but which were submitted to without a word of
protest or a sign of objection. Just prior to
arousing him the operator informed him that
upon awakening he would remember all that had
taken place needless to say, he did. He, for the
;

first time, berated the operator for permitting

such acts and taking such liberties with him, and
declared that he had suffered pain.
I am aware that we have been inundated with
accounts of such performances until they are com-
monplace and tiresome, but that does not remove
the fact out of the way, that such a subject brings
up at suggestion a "familiar spirit" from the
region of subconsciousness and introduces him to
consciousness. The point upon which I wish to
lay stress is that the "organs" of consciousness at
command of the will select out of unconnected im-
pressions one which it wants, and find in it an
object of present consciousness with the element
of pastness in it.
I have linked together pain and consciousness
in this chapter, not because the suggested theory
 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN 111

proves anything, but because it has appeared to

me to present more clearly and to my mind most
forcibly the insolubility of the problem of con-
sciousness. It is our experience that the auto-
matic is always the result of the conscious, and as
I have before stated. Professor Cope considers all
adaptive movements as effort, and effort as at-
tended with consciousness, the consciousness
merging intoautomatism when effort ceases. If
this is so, my
consciousness is an effort of energy
toward adaptation and is not now and cannot have
been automatic, but considering that the move-
ments of unicells are "impulsive and automatic"
(Haeckel), the question arises, how did conscious-
ness arise out of any combination of such cells
with nothing but automatism as a precedent
cause ?
Of course if we follow Haeckel far enough to
coincide with his "conviction that even the atom
is not without a rudimentary form of sensation
and will" (p. 225, "The Riddle of the Universe"),
then we are at liberty to conceive of units of force
in substance which are as true to the law of their
being as are atoms, unless we admit what he calls
the extreme probability that "they (the atoms)
are not absolute species of ponderable matter
that is, not eternally unchangeable particles";
only in that case I must ask what brought these
differentiated atoms into existence? Professor
HaeckePs reply undoubtedly is found in these
words: "We adhere firmly to the pure, unequiv-
ocal monism of Spinoza; matter or infinitely ex-
tended substance, and spirit (or energy), or sensi-
112 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN

tive and thmking substance, are the two funda-

mental attributes or principal properties of the
all-embracing divine essence of the world, the uni-
versal substance" (p. 21, "The Kiddle of the Uni-
verse").
Does this in the last analysis explain differenti-
ation? I find myself here just where I do at the
close of another chapter in this book, unable to
understand how infinite substance and infinite
spirit (energy) can produce variety and individu-
ality. It strikes me that without another and ad-
ditional force, aliunde, we should have eternally
an immovable sea of substance. The very moment
that we conceive it as condensing, or breaking up,
or differentiating, we have imported a foreign
force, one unknown to science and not recognized
by Monistic philosophy.
If Monism demands, as is claimed by some, that
all manifestation should come from one thing,
then the assumj^tion of One Infinite Eternal Sub-
stance and "Spirit," or force, does not and can-
not account for the diif erentiation in the Universe
on such a monistic theory. We do not know what
force is, neither have we any real knowledge of
the nature of "Spirit" they are words, and words
;

only, used by Professor Haeckel, as by all, to oc-

cupy a relation problem similar to the X in
to the
algebra. Movement summarily disposed of by
is
Haeckel by calling it an "innate property" of sub-
stance. These again are only words; what is an
innate property? It is something, and if Monism
demands that all things shall come from one thing,
then such a state of substance does not consti-
 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN 113

tute it, but is clearly a dualism, or I should rather

suggest, a trinity. We have infinite eternal ex-
tended substance, which, according to the defini-
tion, cannot exist without force or spirit, and then
we have the "innate property" of substance or
"movement."
If weare to rely upon mere words, it seems to
me that it will require but a substitution of names
for these words and we shall have all the requi-
sites of even the orthodox trinity. Father (sub-
stance). Holy Ghost (spirit or force), and Son
(innate property of movement). I do not, of
course, say that this is the Trinity, but that it
could be, and further, that such an hypothesis as
Haeckel presents is no more Monism than is such
a conception of the Trinity. It has always been
claimed that "In Him we live [Force] and move
[innate property of movement] and have our
being [substance]," so that even trinitarianism is
Monism.
It is not at all necessary in order to escape
dualism (if it be essential that we escape it) that
we postulate the inconsistent hypothesis of un-
differentiated eternal substance, undifferentiated
eternal force, and innate property of movement,
for by assuming "innate property of movement"
as eternally in manifestation, we have either dif-
ferentiated substance or force, and I can see no
reason why we should be compelled to encumber
ourselves with the conception of "innate property
of movement," when we may as reasonably con-
ceive of eternal units of "force" or "spirit" as a
differentiation amply sufficient to account for all
114 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN

the phenomena of the Universe. "Movement"

would follow such a differentiation of force, but
with undifferentiated substance and force it might
be innate in some transcendental manner, but
would hardly manifest itself.
Perhaps I am wrong, but my reading of Spi-
noza has not resulted in the same construction of
his meaning as that given by Professor Haeckel.
The "thinking substance" of Haeckel which can
think by being organized is, it seems to me, vastly
different from the "thinking thing" which Spinoza
says God is. Spinoza's "thinking thing" thinks.
Its modes of thought are the individualizations
which fill the universe.
Haeckel's "thinking substance" is like the
"mind stuff" of Professor Clifford, a substance
which does not think as a whole, but breaks up or
rather condenses and by reason of such conden-
sation bestows upon variety a faculty of thinking.
I have presented a few of Spinoza's propositions
in the chapter on The Witnesses.
That the modes of thinking are in eternal, in-
cessant process of change there is no doubt; that
nothing remains as it is is equally free from
doubt; that the panorama of the universe is
change, I freely admit, but may it not be that the
act of changing itself constitutes consciousnessf
A fair summing up of this suggestion would be
this change implies effort, effort is consciousness.
:

"We should then look for consciousness, not in the

operation of complexities, that is, in the "chemical
activities" of the cerebrum, but in the act of the
buildiQg of the complexities themselves. The very
 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN 115

fact that, when accomplished and the complexity

established, consciousness subsides into automa-
tism is a strong indication that consciousness is
associated with effort and may be, therefore, said
to be the sense of effort. Death of the body is the
result of consciousness, and, therefore, death is
necessary to life.
Again I may
conclude that as consciousness is
not the complexity, but the changing attitude of
that selective synthesis whose activity produces it,
and as, therefore, that which possesses it cannot
be born or come into existence, but ever is, we
have no reason to say that because its complexity
of environment has ceased as such, that it likewise
has done so.
This activity, this unit of force, is the individ-
ual, and because he walks past the windows of our
eyes in the very apparent complexity of body, and
recedes into the complexity of the cell under the
microscope, shall we, in the light of our un-
bounded ignorance of the nature of ether and its
capabilities, say that the consciousness which was
is not? The very cells in which its last activity
presented itself, the cerebral cells, have finally
become automatic, and the old man finds his brain
a machine which grinds out that, and that only,
which consciousness brought there by effort. He
is senile his brain produces the past it is not the
; ;

field of effort what is ? With no longer a use for

;

the now automatic machine, what scientific rea-

son is there to say that the individual is not as
before making effort! The field of his conscious-
ness has been all the time pushing up with the
116 CONSCIOUSNESS AND PAIN

least stable and least fixed portion of his living

environment, and as we shade ponderable matter
off into ether, let us not yet hesitate to conjecture
that the organic efforts of the individual during
what we call life have shaded off likewise into a
field of acquisition, of complexities of which we
know nothing.
Evolution carries too many potentialities, selec-
tivities, memories, tendencies, inherent capacities,
and adaptations, and biology too many ids and
idants, chromosomes, centrosomes, plasms, and
mysterious powerful invisibilities to induce a ra-
tional man to haul down his flag of immortality
just because some sciences do not go any further
than they can.
 Chapter VII

MEMORY
If there is any one attribute of mind which is
the foundation of all the others it is memory, for
without it there is and can be no consciousness,
and its absence would render the wonderful germ
cell from which each individual body came as im-
potent to evolve the physical structure which
comes from it as is the amoeba.
For these reasons some consideration of the
nature and phenomena of memory is of impor-
tance.
That there can be no consciousness without
memory is, I think, clearly apparent when we

realize that it is only by the contrast of the suc-

ceeding moment's sensations with those preceding
it that we have any conceivable basis for compari-
son or appreciation of differences, and this is true
whether we are engaged in processes of thought or
receiving impressions through the senses from
without. Consciousness has been frequently
called a stream, but it must be a stream in which
the departing wave does not recede from sight
until the incoming raises its crest to the eyes. It
is the change and the knowledge of the change and
its character which constitutes consciousness and
that necessitates memory.
117
118 MEMORY

That there may be memory without conscious-

ness will as clearly make itself apparent when we
consider the automatic processes of the various
organs of the human system. So long have they
performed their functions that the work is done,
as far as we are concerned, unconsciously.
Memory may then be said to be the vehicle of
consciousness, and we may be certain that wher-
ever we find consciousness there will memory be
likewise, and that just in the proportion that mem-
ory is deficient will consciousness be dim and un-
certain, but it does not necessarily follow that
where consciousness is not present memory is ab-
sent.
What, then, is memory? If we are to confine
ourselves to the physical phenomena, as I have
already said in a previous chapter, it is possible
to conceive of an actual preservation of distinc-
tive forms of motion caused by the sensations pro-
duced by objects whether we resort to the indi-
vidual cerebral cells or to combinations of such
cells. Such a possibility I find to be admitted by
Professor Bain. He estimates the number of cells
in the gray covering of the hemispheres of the
brain to amount to 1,200,000,000, and "hence there
is no improbability in supposing an independent
nervous track for each separate acquisition." Of
course, this would only amount to the establish-
ment of an inner environment constructed of
forms of motion, probably correspondences of the
objects causing the sensations or stimulations.
Incoming impulses or those aroused by intro-
spection may cause discharges of energy along
 MEMORY 119

tracks and among cells holding an associative re-

lationship to them and bring before the mind
recollections. But, as I have suggested before,
there is no physical explanation for the sense of
pastness, nor, indeed, I may add, for the sense of
forgetfulness so often felt by us.
Not infrequently we hunt for an idea, one which
we feel to be an old friend; we can almost catch
it, but it eludes us, and it is only after persistent

effort that we succeed in making it stand and

deliver.
Now, in such an instance it is apparent that
somehow we travel in avenues close by the elusive
idea; we can almost see it "around the comer,"
but I candidly confess myself as yet unable to
find a physical cause for our knowledge of its
absence. Physical and psychical phenomena are
cooperative, and yet there are occasions when one
or the other appears to precede the coordinate
phenomena as the immediate cause of the opera-
tion of both. Possibly there may be an unknown
and unmeasured physical attendant upon psychi-
cal phenomena.
Keturning to the sense of forgetfulness, we shall
find, I believe, that the operation of the law of
association of ideas fails to be an adequate ex-
planation. The existence of the elusive idea is
suggested, of course, by other thoughts with which
our attention is engaged and ought to respond at
once, if the associated ideas are aroused to the
field of active memory by relationship physically.
Conceding that for some reason there is a phys-
ical blocking of the nerve track, and the cell or
120 MEMORY

cell center in which the lost idea is closeted can-

not be aroused, yet the mind knows that it is
blocked, knows that it has the idea, has an in-
distinct conception of what it is, realizes the ne-
cessity of recalling it, and willfully goes about the
work of finding it. This would appear to be a
"sum total," which as a product realizes that it
is not the product which it ought to be, and that
if it could only add another force as a unit it
would be a different "sum total."
Possibly a satisfactory explanation of this can
be given, but it remains, so far as I am concerned,
one of the mysteries of memory, one of the things
which Science does not know, but at which it may
make more or less rational guesses.
There is another rather curious habit which
memory seems to have, and one which again leaves
a mystery unsolved if, as Professor Haeckel says,
the soul is the "sum total" of the chemical activi-
ties of the cells of the cerebrum, and that an
individual cannot be divided and retain its indi-
viduality.
I have found frequently, as I presume every-
body else has, that when a name or a number, or
even a quotation, has escaped my memory, I can
recall it by directing the attention mechanically
or automatically to something else temporarily,
as, for instance, by adding a column of figures or
engaging in light conversation. When I do this,
usually the lost name comes up from the depths
like a submerged cork which has been suddenly
loosened from anchorage below. Now, in the
common experience the "sum total" is either en-
 MEMORY 121

gaged in the exercise or the conversation referred

to, or the "sum total" is not one, but is divided,
and one of them engaged as suggested, while
is
the other is searching the nerve tracks and cere-
bral cells for the lost name. Either the individ-
ual is not a "sum total," but the master of vari-
ous units and combinations which simultaneously
do the bidding of the will, or there is no indi-
vidual, he being divided into two separate "cere-
bral activities," even though one of them is un-
conscious or subconscious. Lest it be supposed
that I do not fairly quote the definition of a soul
and individual as given by Professor Haeckel, I
will here say that I understand fully that his defi-
nition of a soul is that it is "a collective title for
the sum total of the cerebral functions." But as
a sum total is a definite factor and the adjective
"collective" appears to be superfluous, I feel jus-
tified in considering his definition to mean that
there is no true unity of mind function, but merely
a changing, vacillating multiplicity of function-
ing cells which seem in some unaccountable, tran-
scendental way to make up a "sum total" akin
to the N function in mathematics.
As one purpose of this chapter is to endeavor
to present some features of the action of memory
which remain unsolved mysteries, and which seem
to demand something more as a cause than the
cerebral cells which appear to be the organs of
its functioning, I will again refer to the memory
of the germ cell. To account for the organized
human body which arises from its activities with-
out admitting the truth of the ancient doctrine
122 MEMORY

of preformation, biologists, including Professor

Haeckel, ascribe to the fertilized ovum cell certain
wonderful unconscious memories memories which
;

result in presentations of evolving forms from

the cell through the line of species from which
man has finally emerged to the full stature of
humanity.
This, of course, necessitates a memory some-
where and somehow in the one cell, of the vari-
ous changes through which it must thereafter
evolve. Consider what this demands of us in the
way of mental gymnastics. First, the physical
memory must have its physical counterpart, and
every existent potential memory must be stored
as a form of motion of matter in that one cell if
we adhere to the theory that memory is always
attended with cerebral or cell or material activ-
ity. We have seen that we can conceive of a de-
pository for all the elements of memory up to a
certain point if we provide cells or cell centers
enough to contain them in some forms of motion
or chemical activities, and that we have even some
comprehension of how these become consciously
active and form a basis for intelligence.
In the case of the germ cell, however, it divides,
first into two cells, presumably each like the other
certainly we know of no chemical process by which
the memory of these two has become in any way
changed, unless something has been added to
them, hence they are so far the same they then
;

divide into four, again alike, and so on until we

reach a certain point in the process of division
where a series of lower animal embryonic forms
 MEMOBY 123

appear one after another, evolving out of each

other in a determinate order. If we are to con-
cede that a memory must always be associated
with, as its necessary correlative, a physical or-
ganism, then that physical organism must be equal
in complexity and coordination to the complexity
and coordination of the memory. It is useless in
such a position to talk of potential memory, for
even the atoms which are hypothetically gifted
with "will and feeling" can evolve no memory
which will be capacious and complex without, by
association with other atoms, building a complex
brain substance capable of functioning such a
memory, in which case the memory is not con-
ceded by Haeckel's theory to be the result of the
potential memory of a single atom, but the "sum
total of the cerebral activities."
Long before the embryo of the coming animal
appears, the cells which have by division been
born of the original one cell begin to divide the
work among themselves; in other words, to dif-
ferentiate as to function. Is this the memory of
these cells? No, for they have never performed
the process nor witnessed the process of the per-
formance before; they are new cells. Is it the
memory of the original cell? No, for it has dis-
appeared in the many. It is the memory at best,
under that theory, of the morphological unity.We
can conceive of separate cells receiving impres-
sions and setting up forms of specific motion and
in a unity producing a synthetic result, but here
we are confronted with the opposite proposition
of one cell producing many with separate func-
124 MEMOKY

tions which, by a mutual a syn-

activity, construct
thetic product. If memory physically consid-
is,

ered, a form of motion, is it within the bounds of

human knowledge, or even within the limits of
human understanding, to comprehend how there
can be in the one original cell a unification of a
multiplicity of memories which may be transmit-
ted to many cells as differentiated, varying mem-
ories ?
Memory is here a word to which Science flees
for refuge; it is one of the explanations of the
activities of the cell given in order that effects
may be matched with sufficient causes. I believe,
notwithstanding its wide acceptance as a theory,
that it is utterly beyond anybody's capacity to
demonstrate its correctness. It serves its purpose
and yet remains only a hypothesis.
That such a form of motion in the germ cell is
not quantitative but is qualitative, if it exists at
all as the correlative of the "unconscious mem-
ory," is made fairly clear, as I have shown in the
previous part of this book, by the experiments of
Pfluger with clamped ovum cells of the frog,
which experiments together with those which I
have mentioned as made by Professor Loeb with
the eggs of the sea urchin, seem to indicate that
the substance of the egg is undifferentiated as to
its power of producing the embryo. Every part
has, then, the same "unconscious memory" and
its form of motion, not a synthetic one of the mass
but evidently molecular. Such a conclusion ren-
ders the mystery of the memory of the cell more
dense, because it requires that these wonderful
 MEMOEY 125

memories shall be looked for in infinitely smaller

bodies than the cell itself. Scientists have recog-
nized the profound mystery attending the activ-
ities of the cell and the diflficulty of providing the
machinery essential to do such marvelous work.
That is the reason why Weismann proposed the
theory of his ids, idants, and biopheres, and why
there is such earnestness in the field of cytology
just at this time. Science has given its various
theories based upon the data which it has in its
possession, and that is right; but it is far from
being conclusive, and it always has an unknown
region beyond its last footstep.
Recalling the theory of the possibility of even
an etheric body suggested in the chapter on "Some
Things Which Science Does Not Know," a theory,
of course, presented as merely a tentative one, we
shall see that while memory is essential to con-
sciousness of objects, yet consciousness after all
constitutes but a very small part of our lives. Be-
tween the outer environment and the inner one
which we have conserved, and which constitutes
the deep from which the forms of memory are
brought up, is the very small circumscribed posi-
tion which we occupy in our waking consciousness.
I say waking to distinguish it from the conscious-
ness with which we are familiar in dreams.
Of the vast number of impressions which we
have received and which are conserved within us,
we are from moment to moment conscious of only
a remarkably small number. We can remember,
but habitually we do not, and when we do it is
only a comparatively insignificant number at a
126 MEMORY

time. Of all these experiences which we have

had, of all the faces seen, of the great and over-
whelming number of events which have crowded
upon us during life, of all the conversations,
books which we have read, of that great unnum-
bered multitude, how many are at the present
moment present to consciousness?
This moment's consciousness is comparatively
an insignificant thing to contemplate, and yet it
is in the now that we live, and consciousness is
seemingly its value, but is it? As I read the
pages of a book, my eye sweeps rapidly along the
lines taking note of every word, of necessity of
every letter, and if I make the seeing of every
letter an act of consciousness, it is a painful op-
eration. It is the thought embodied on that page
that I am after, not the road to it, hence those
former halting efforts at spelling, which in boy-
hood I made, have resulted in an approximately
automatic servitude on the part of my eyes, cen-
ters of letter memory, word memory, sentence
memory, and indeed of nearly the whole cerebrum.
I am conscious only of the thought in its succes-
—
sive changes in presentation. The real self the
—
center of consciousness the soul is that very
unifying force which once in consciousness laid
the foundations of all those new unconscious au-
tomatic processes of memory and which is the
One using the many in acquisition of the new.
Again, an analysis of the experience of the
mind in extemporaneous speaking reveals a pro-
cess of the creation of new compilations of thought
in a definite direction, in which memory without
 MEMOBY 127

consciousness opens its many doors and pours

forth its treasures, figures, words and ideas which
are simultaneously organized into new structures,
and symmetrically builded into a continuous chain
of reasoning and possibly a pyrotechnic display
of the imagination. Here apparently conscious-
ness dwindles to an imperceptible point, but in
fact it is itself a never-changing unit perceiver
of an incessantly varying organization of burning
feeling.
In both cases, we have the comparative auto-
matic action of memory serving the dominant will,
the something which unifies and which while the
unifications vary immensely in their intricate
combinations from second to second, yet feels and
knows itself to be the same unity unchanged in
self -consciousness and perfectly well aware that
it was by determination that those wonderful
its
kaleidoscopic changes occurred.
The so-called subconsciousness therefore of our
environment and the memory of all our experi-
ences seem to me to be but in themselves environ-
ments, activities which but serve to conserve their
product in turn for a larger and more compre-
hensive consciousness and memory.
It would be a mere matter of opinion on my part
to say that I believed the individual to be some-
thing somewhat larger and more inclusive than
the memory and consciousness which are evi-
dently not the ultimate conserved memory or the
true and full consciousness.
It is not necessary that we imagine a separate
body for the soul, or indeed a separate body at
128 MEMORY

all, if we find ourselves able to conceive of the

continuity of etheric substance into ponderable
matter. Body then is perceived to be cells, many
and small, cells are viewed as structures of mol-
ecules, molecules as atomic combinations, atoms
as forms of motion, vortices in ether, and at no
place is left a break in the continuity in any form
of ponderable matter back to the substance it-
self. If such be the fact , and there are many
reasons to think so, and many scientists who be-
lieve so, then we shall not look for the individual
in the mere functioning of his contact with pon-
derable matter, but trace his life back completely
to an organic force in ether.
If the individual then extends, as he would if
ether is continuous, into the ether, there is no
reason made apparent by Science why the chemi-
cal activities of the evolving body do not start
there, nor why the chemical activities of the
organs of memory and consciousness may not
report there, nor why there may not be the true
conservation of memory and the real conscious-
ness. Complexity and organization may well be
a condition antecedent as well as a result, as each
would be but an activity conditioned by its en-
vironment.
The natural and pertinent questions here are
whether memory can be conceived as continuing
upon the loss of the ponderable body, also why
we do not have memory of any past beyond the
body.
Attempting to give a conceivably truthful re-
ply to the last question, first in order
; I suggest
 MEMORY 129

that even the science of biology concedes that in

a very large sense we do have memory of past
existence for as we have seen it has been com-
pelled to conserve those memories in the germ
cell in order to account for heredity and provide a
substitute for preformation. A little considera-
tion of the law of specialization and generaliza-
tion will lead us to conclude that it is possible
that in the fertilized ovum cell the individual finds
that very point of commencing evolution essential
to its presentation as ponderable matter or "con-
densing ether." It is possible that heredity is of
the cell alone, and the memories additional which
present their products in the forming embryo,
those of the individual. There are mysterious
changes enough to be perceived in the cell as it
begins its work of division and synthesis to de-
mand just such an organic activity to be present.
Does this suggest too forcibly a deus ex
machina, an entering spirit? Not one bit more
so than does the theory of biology. When the
germ cell begins to become many and divide and
redivide, from whence comes the material of which
the products are composed? From outside of
course, nobody denies that external environment
is absolutely essential to enable a germ cell to
become an animal; its substance is added to by
growth, and growth demands molecules and atoms,
and molecules and atoms are the presentations of
"condensed ether," and we have conceived the
individual to be existence in the ether as a unity
of force. Now it is immaterial whether we call
this chemical affinity or the activity of an able
130 MEMOBY

unity, we know that the results are life, changing

life,form, changing form, and such a conception
comes nearer to accounting for the epitomized
evolutionary proceeding from cell to embryo than
does the theory of unconscious memories which
come into activity by platoons only when one has
ceased to be the one and has become the many.
This is a vastly different proposition than that
of the creation of a special soul which enters the
body. It is not dualistic, it is rather polyistic
and certainly as Monistic as Haeckel's "Collec-
tive title for the sum total of cerebral activities."
It is the column of units and the process of addi-
tion, rather than the "sum total."
Now as to the second question which is, as to
whether memory can be conceived as continuing
upon the loss of the ponderable body. It has been
said that the etheric body is impossible because
it is not consonant with the "laws of substance."

That may be so, but when were the "laws of sub-

stance" discovered, and by whom? Substance it-
self, our reason demands, but it is only hypothet-
ical, its laws only guessed at. I say guessed at
because the practice of Science, and a very proper
and necessary one, is to formulate a theory based
upon data and then push into the unknown and
relate everything in the way of phenomena to
that theory. The theory may be wrong, it fre-
quently is so there may be many different theo-
;

ries, there often are; and hence the "laws of sub-

stance" are laws only to those who accept that
particular theory to which they apply them. So-
called "laws" have more than once been repealed
 MEMOBY 131

by enactment of the college of physicists. I fancy

HaeckePs conception of gravitation is somewhat
different from that of Newton, and possibly in a
short time the "laws of substance" may be differ-
ently formultaed and convey a vastly different
idea than does HaeckePs as presented in "The
Eiddle of the Universe."
But, considering that the ponderable matter of
the composite body only represents a specialized
phase of the life of the individual, and that we do
not rightfully mark his boundaries when we walk
around him in the flesh, we may well conceive that
the very continuity of etheric substance affords
us a sufficient basis for a belief that the actual
memory is no more finally located in its organs,
the cerebral cells, than the final activity of the
whirlwind is to be looked for in the atoms of dust
which spin in it, and take form from it, or is to
be located even in the air in which they float.
Naturally, as we contemplate the body of a man
five or six feet in height and with a rotundity
proportionate, we incline to imagine that any
structure in ether or any substance which shall
be commensurate with the substantial memories
of the individual must be comparatively large
and proportionately capacious.
But when we recall the fact that even the won-
derful memories of the germ cell must be looked
for in bodies much smaller than the cell itself,
indeed in such as are beyond our microscopic view,
we should not make size a stumbling block to the
conception of a unit of force, an individual center
capable of the conservation of memory. We can-
132 MEMORY

not place a limit to the series of vanishing ele-

ments in the cell (Wilson, in the International
Monthly, July 1910) and the capacity of any por-
;

tion to reproduce in presentation these memories,

if the cell be artificially divided, is evidence that
the forms of motion as I have said before, are not
of the mass but of much smaller bodies not yet
identified by Science.
Possibly we shall yet reach the atom as the in-
dividual laden with memories. The atom, what-
ever it is, is a profound mystery, it has been sup-
posed to consist of a hard, round body; to be a
differentiation of hydrogen; a vortex ring or a
vortex of some other character; possibly an elec-
tron, etc. It has assumed so many protean shapes
in the scientific imagination that probably it is
individual and variable as to size, capacity and
potential characteristics.
Therefore, if memories many are to be found
at the commencement of the physical man in bod-
ies so small as to be beyond our possible vision,
I see no reason for conceiving of memories as
confined and limited in fact to the cells of the
cerebrum, but on the contrary as reaching back
and back to similar elements of which these cells
like the germ cell, are composed. Neither do I
see any known reason why they may not, as I
have suggested, finally even be landed in one.
Again it may be, and it is conceivable that,
the activity in the etheric substance may in turn
rhythmically subside to unconscious memory in
the lapse of time, and there may be a form of
energy in the ether comparable to that wonderful
 MEMOBY 133

burdened germ cell, in which shall be preserved

the potentiality of that larger memory, the es-
sence of individuality, that which after all needs
not to carry the petty details of time's experience
any more than we now find it essential to do so in
order to preserve our individuality.
Knowledge may be a word which covers them
more than consciousness and memory. And this
rhythmic movement may proceed from etemifty
to eternity and waking and sleeping, conscious-
ness and unconsciousness, memory and forgetful-
ness follow in order just as they do now with us in
the flesh. Who knows? Do I? No, neither do
those who measure the individual by his organs.
 Chapter VIII

MONISM
In reading "The Eiddle of the Universe," we find
reference made frequently to "pure monism," and
naturally the inference drawn from the use of
those words is that Monism as a thesis is suscep-
tible to adulteration, and that in some manner
not easily discovered in Prof. HaeckePs work he
has presented it in its unadulterated, pristine
purity. Whether this is so or not depends entirely
upon what we understand as Monism. It is not
at all an unusual occurence for an advocate of a
particular theory to insist that his presentation
of it is the only one which should be recognized,
indeed such an arrogation constitutes the strength
of the individuality of the especial thesis for which
it is claimed. Each sect of Christendom broadly
asserts its creed to be the formulated expression
of pure Christianity, if it did not it would have
no reason for existence as a separate body.
Undoubtedly the Monism presented by Prof.
Haeckel is to him "pure monism," but others
who lay claim rightly to the title of "monists"
may with equal propriety assert their system to
be "pure." They may consider that Haeckel, be-
cause of the "organization of the individual," the
"momentary condition of his environment" and
134
 MONISM 135

the determinations of "heredity," has burdened

unalloyed Monism with a host of suppositions,
assumptions, and unnecessary conclusions. It is
simply a question of opinion again and by no
means one capable of absolute solution as to what
is "pure monism."
Personally, I have for a long time considered
myself to be a Monist, not a "pure monist," if by
that we are to understand one who because he is
a Monist must of necessity accept as truth, as
scientific, as demonstrated, and as Monism what-
ever other Monists, however distinguished, choose
to gather under their wing.
I think we have a fair idea of what Monism is
by contrasting it with the two Isms which it com-
bats, viz materialism and spiritualism. By mate-
:

rialism we understand a hypothesis which claims

that material changes cause mental changes, and
by spiritualism just the contrary, that mental
changes are the causes of material changes.
Monism does not recognize either as the cause
of the other, but claims that physical and psy-
chical phenomena, although seemingly occupying
the relationship of cause and effect, are in reality
different aspects of one and the same activity.
So far we have a clear definition of what Monism
is, and if there is any such thing as "pure
monism," that is it. Here on this statement all
Monists stand, or the burden of proof is upon
them to show that they are entitled to call them-
selves Monists. The moment, however, that they
step one foot off this single corner-stone and be-
gin to theorize and speculate they become, if any-
136 MONISM

thing, less "pure" as Monists. Monism is not a

quart pot in which to measure the universe, it is
a theory, and a strong one indeed, under the aegis
of which one may build many speculative uni-
verses. There is nothing so all-commanding, all-
demanding, so overwhelmingly rejective about it,
that a man, having come to the conclusion that
what he has mistaken for dual is in fact single,
should perforce of his adherence to that thesis
never be able to find any truth which does not
wear the label of Monism. It is not nearly so im-
portant that we be loyal to the Monistic theory
as that we find truth.
In this connection I cannot refrain from again
calling attention to the emphatic statement of
Prof. Haeckel that he is at one with George John
Eomanes except in unimportant particulars, be-
cause it will enable me to make clear the fact that
Monists, and among them Haeckel and Eomanes,
differ widely upon very important particulars.
At the risk of being criticised for repetition, I
will recall to your minds the assertion of Schop-
enhauer quoted approvingly by Haeckel that the
Monistic philosophy to which he adheres as "pure
monism" has given the "Lord God his conge."
He undoubtedly has the right to form such an
opinion, and my purpose is not to enter into a
dispute religious as to the existence of an Infinite
Being, but merely to show that as with Spinoza,
he materially differed on this question, so with his
co-Monist, Eomanes, he has nothing in common on
this point.
It is certainly a vitally important difference
 MONISM 137

as I shall try to demonstrate. Nobody will deny

that there is a broad distinction between a
"thinking substance" which, as such as a whole
is mindless, but endowed with innate properties
of movement, etc., which evolve in the atoms
will and sensitiveness, and ultimately mind
and soul in the complexities of the cerebral cells,
— and, a "thinking substance" which thinks as
much.
One is HaeckePs, the other Spinoza's and
George John Eomanes'. I have quoted at large
from Spinoza on the point in a preceding chapter,
but I wish here to remark upon the wide gulf be-
tween Haeckel and Romanes.
In "Mind, Motion and Monism," Romanes in re-
ferring to the views of Prof. Clifford, which I may
suggest are similar on this subject to those of
Haeckel, says "Assuming the theory of Monism,
:

I desire to ascertain the result to which it will

lead when applied to the question whether we
ought to regard the external world as of a char-
acter mental or non-mental. As observed in my
Rede lecture, this question has already been con-
sidered by the late Prof. Clifford, who decided
on the Monistic theory the probability pointed to-
wards the external world being of a character non-
mental that, although the whole universe is com-
;

posed of 'mind stuff/ the universe as a whole is

mindless. This decision I then briefly criticised,
it is now myobject to contemplate the matter
somewhat more in detail." His concluding words
upon the matter are these: "As a matter of
methodical reasoning, it appears to me that
138 MONISM

Monism alone can only lead to Agnosticism." (In

a note, he says: "It may be explained that by
Agnosticism I understand a theory of things
which abstains from either affirming or denying
the existence of God.") "That is to say, it leaves
a clear field of choice as between Theism and
Atheism; and therefore to a carefully reasoning
Monist, there are three alternatives open. He
may remain a Monist and nothing more in which
;

case he is an Agnostic. He may entertain what

appears to him independent evidence in favor of
Theism, and thus he may become a Theist or he ;

may entertain what appears to him independent

evidence in favor of Atheism, and thus he be-
comes an Atheist."
A similar view seems to be taken by Spencer in
his last edition of "First Principles," and pos-
sibly it may be suggested of that gigantic philo-
sophic intellect, as it has concerning Virchow and
others, that his views have been modified by ap-
proaching age. Of course, any close student of
Spencer will at once resent any such suggestion,
being well aware that the great generalizer never
took any other position, but has merely, out of an
abundance of caution, declared his views in rather
plainer terms, and this is what he says "But an
:

account of the transformation of things ... is

simply an orderly presentation of facts; and the
interpretation of the facts is nothing more than
a statement of the ultimate uniformities as they
present the laws to which they conform. Is the
reader an Atheist? The exposition of these facts
will neither yield support to his belief nor destroy
 MONISM 139

it. Is he a Pantheist? The phenomena and the

inferences as now to be set forth will not force
on him any incongruous implication. Does he
think that God is immanent throughout all things,
from concentrating nebulae to the thoughts of
poets ? Then the theory to be put before him con-
tains no disproof of that view. Does he believe
in a Deity who has given unchanging laws to the
universe? Then he will find nothing at variance
with his belief in an exposition of those laws and
an account of the results."
Mr. Spencer dissents from Haeckel and the
school of Monists to which he belongs in that he
claims that evolution does not require any aban-
donment of Theism.
In precisely the same arbitrary manner as
Haeckel disposes of the soul of man by the decla-
ration that it is "a collective title for the sum
total" of the activities of the cerebral cells, he,
Haeckel, gets rid of the idea of God, with the
exception that he fails to be true to his own logic.
In other words, he admits that the "sum total"
in man yields something akin to soul, but fails to
find the same to he true as to the sum total of
universal activities.
Whatever we define the soul to be, it neverthe-
less remains true that it feels, thinks, acts, and
is conscious, and this is evident even though we
should admit that it is a "collective title," etc.
Yet Haeckel scornfully denies the possibility that
there may be a Being whose name is "a collective
title for the sum total" of the activities of the
universe, whose "modes of thought may be differ-
140 MONISM

entiations attending the eternal modifications of

substance." It is just here that Spinoza in his
Pantheism differs widely from Haeckel. Haeckel
finds a substantial agreement between Atheism
and Pantheism, although it is fair to state that
he limits his definition of God to a personal extra-
mundane entity. His use, however, of these
words which follow leaves no doubt as to his
attitude on the question: "This 'Godless world
system' substantially agrees with the Monism or
Pantheism of the Modern scientist it is only an-
;

other expression for it, emphasizing its negative

aspect, the non-existence of any supernatural
Deity" No doubt, if his destructive attack had
been confined to an "extra-mundane, supernatural
deity," it would have found ample support in the
light of true Monism, but it is clear that from
his whole discussion of " God and the World," the
"Moral Order," etc., that his Monistic idea is, be-
yond question. Atheistic and a denial of any mind
or being "In whom we live and move and have
our being." I repeat, Haeckel's thinking infinite
substance does not think, as such.
The Pantheism of Spinoza, which Haeckel im-
agines finds a scientific reflection in the "Riddle
of the Universe," was quite a different conception,
or else Spinoza was guilty of disguised and covert
arguments, and this he expressly denies in Letter
XLIX to Isaac Orobio, as follows:
"Thus, you see, my friend, how far this man
has strayed from the truth nevertheless, I grant
;

that he has inflicted the greatest injury not on me,

but on himself, inasmuch as he has not been
 MONISM 141

ashamed to declare that, 'under disguised and

covert arguments, I teach Atheism.^ "
Even Spinoza did not see absurdity in consid-
ering the Universe as one individual physically,
for in Part II of the "Ethics," he says "We thus
:

see how a composite individual may be affected

in many different ways, and preserve its nature
notwithstanding. Thus, we have conceived an
individual as composed of bodies only distin-
guished one from the other in respect to motion
and rest, speed and slowness, that is, of bodies of
the most simple character. If, however, we now
conceive another individual composed of several
individuals of diverse natures, we shall find that
the number of ways in which it can be affected,
without losing its nature, will be greatly multi-
plied. Each of its parts would consist of several
bodies, and, therefore (by Lemma VI), each part
would admit, without change of its nature, of
quicker or slower motion, and would consequently
be able to transmit its motions more quickly or
more slowly to the remaining parts. If we fur-
ther conceive a third kind of individuals com-
posed of individuals of this second kind, we shall
find that they may be affected in a still greater
number of ways without changing their actuality.
We may proceed thus to infinity, and conceive
the whole of nature as one individual, whose
parts, that is, all bodies, vary in infinite ways,
without any change in the individual as a whole."
We shall find room for the rational application of
the law of relationship, and the theory of the liv-
ing environment, inasmuch as his definition of an
142 MONISM

individual is found in these words: "That which

constitutes the actuality of an individual consists
in a union of bodies; but this union, although
there is a continual change of bodies, will be
maintained; the individual, therefore, will retain
its nature as before, both in respect of substance
and in respect of mode^
Neither did Romanes, in "Mind, Motion and
Monism," consider it beneath his Monistic dig-
nity to contemplate the possibility of such a con-
ception being true, for we find him indulging in
such language as this: "For aught that we can
know to the contrary, not merely the highly spe-
cialized structure of the human brain, but even
that of nervous matter in general may only be
one of the thousand possible ways in which the
material and dynamical conditions required for
the apparition of self-consciousness can be se-
cured. To imagine that the human brain of neces-
sity exhausts these possibilities is in the last de-
gree absurd. ... It may well be that elsewhere
(or apart from the conditions imposed by nervous
tissue) subjectivity is possible, irrespective both
of circumscription and of complexity. . .Now,
.

if we fix our attention merely on this matter of

complexity, and refuse to be led astray by obvi-
ously false analogies of a more special kind, I
think there can be no question that the macro-
cosm does furnish amply sufficient opportunity, as
it were, for the presence of subjectivity, even if it
be assumed that subjectivity can only be yielded
by an order of complexity analogous to that of a
nervous system. For, considering the material
 MONISM 143

and dynamical system of the universe as a whole,

it is obvious that the complexity presented is
greater than that of any of its parts. . . .

"If we imagine the visible sidereal system com-

pressed within the limits of the human skull, so
that all its movements which we now recognize
as molar should become molecular, the complexity
of such movement would probably be as great as
that which takes place in a human brain. Yet to
this must be added all the molecular movements
which are now going on in the sidereal system,
visible and invisible." He might well have added
the statement that such a compressed sidereal
system would of necessity also include all of these
very human brains, with all their complexities.
Nobody admitted more frankly than Professor
Romanes the impossibility of forming a compre-
hensive conception of a universal mind, not, how-
ever, because it did not and could not exist, but
because of its very transcendency. He refused to
admit the force of Professor Clifford's argument,
negativing the existence of mind in any other
form than that which we find in brain, and found
no sufficient reason for ruling a Universal Being
out of the Monistic system. He was an Agnostic
Spinoza, a Pantheist; Haeckel is an Atheist.
Thus, we find that Monism has really but one
common theory upon which all Monists agree,
and that is that mental and physical phenomena
are but aspects of one and the same thing, neither
being the cause of the other. It by no means fol-
lows that, because we, being possessed of brains,
have associated with them the phenomena of
144 MONISM

thought, there no other association of thought

is
and organized substance. All that Monism can
demand as essential to consistency with its thesis
is that we shall not designate either thought or
matter as cause wherever the phenomena appear
simultaneously and associated. If we are loyal
to thisfundamental rule of Monism, then the
whole question of mental existence after the death
of the composite body will depend upon the pos-
sibility, or otherwise, of any structural properties
in matter or substance more attenuated than that
of the cells of the cerebrum, and considering our
profound ignorance at present on that subject,
we are at liberty to exercise either our religious
or scientific faith without being justly charged
with an abandonment of the Monistic theory. It
may well be that, instead of consciousness and
thought fading into mere dessicated sentience
with the shading of ponderable matter into in-
visible substance, we shall rather find that, with
this process on the part of matter, mind becomes
more and more emphasized and gifted with a
much wider range of knowledge.
Eational scientists may take either view of that
matter and await further evidences, if any be
forthcoming, and it is precisely at this point that
Haeckel, standing upon the fundamental rule of
Monism with Spinoza and Romanes, finds reason
to face West while they face East. Which way
you and I shall look, will depend largely upon our
experience, our data, our independence, and our
desires.
 Chapter IX

THE WILL
From whatever standpoint we begin the analy-
sis of ourselves, we one thing which appears
find
to stand out as the present cause of all our activi-
ties, namely, the will.
We seem to be fully aware that it is by our voli-
tion we live, for conversely, somehow, we are un-
able to escape the conclusion that it would but
require an effort on the part of will to cease from
activity and stop living. We feel moving behind
the shifting scenes of our daily lives all the time
this shadow, desire or will.
Nothing appears able to restrain or control it
save such interferences as come from the limita-
tions of our physical environment, and even those,
while they frequently build impossible barriers
between will and physical activity, seem to seduce
the desire into a wilderness of longings which
transcend the possibilities of our bodily achieve-
ment.
It is the one thing which within ourselves ac-
knowledges no king, no ruler and no limitations
in its exercise as itself. It has an absolutely un-
qualifiedfreedom as its inherent quality. What-
ever the limitations and conditions may be which
on the part of the external world serve to prevent
145
146 THE WILL

itfrom untrammelled activity objectively, they do

not and cannot in the least prevent it from creat-
ing its own environment of subjectivity, from de-
siring that which it will, and from even out of
these desires building its own subjective universe.
The will and the imagination are the shoulders of
the Atlas who holds the true life poised as the
individual.
I have called attention in another place to the
emphatic statement of Eomanes in "Mind, Motion
and Monism" that in his opinion, one for which he
gives logical reasons, "The will itself is here the
ultimate agent, and therefore an agent, which
must be identified with the principle of causality."
Turning now to Haeckel, we find that in the
firstplace he imbues the atoms with will and sen-
sitiveness will and sensitiveness, however, which
;

is very slight, merely a suggestion of them, if I

understand his position. From these atoms by
the process of evolution comes the individual as a
product, his will of necessity then a composite
will, its action synthetic; if such a thing be pos-
sible, a sum of wills, which as a total produces the
individual will. Such a will is, of course, not free,
freedom is impossible, it must of necessity be ab-
solutely the servant of its masters, the atomic
wills.
Viewing the human body from a psychological
standpoint, I confess myself unable to find any
possibility of the establishment of any individual
will in such a manner.
The physical system is one composed of innum-
erable cells, the brain itself, the seat of physical
 THE WILL 147

activities, isa vast multitude of them. They in

turn are made up of an uncountable number of
molecules and atoms. The atoms as such are as
definite and individual in structure in the central
system as they ever were when out of it. They
have been drawn into the dance of atoms and un-
doubtedly must have retained their wills, so that
we have a composite of an enormous number of
independent wills in the human body.
We are certainly conscious that a dominant in-
dividual will is the coordinating power behind the
wills of particular ganglionic cells, and the com-
mander of the multitude of wills in the living en-
vironment. We know it because we are able to
move the output of these wills in a given direction,
say of the attainment of some ideal. Ideals as such
are always beyond our experience and we could
have none if it were not for desire, one desire, one
which will even sacrifice the contending wills for
it. Indeed any conception of a condition of har-
mony sufficient to hold together the vast concourse
of units of will in the human body, is impossi-
ble, without the assumption of an individual will,
again the unity, the unifier, the unit of force.
The very assertions of Haeckel that will is a
"universal property of living psychoplasm" and
that the atoms are gifted with will and feeling,
demand that before we can reconcile the knowl-
edge which we have of the physical and mental
man, with them, that there should be one force,
one will which holds them in union as one appar-
ent body with one activity of units. It is this
which is the will of which we are conscious.
148 THE WILL

I cannot refrain from referring to the fact that

Professor Komanes is again at this point dia-
metrically opposed to Professor Haeckel in that
he emphatically declares the will to be free. Free
as such, and only limited in its ability to act. In-
dividual wills, he tells us, are not conditioned by
the Universal or God will, but that the Universal
Will acquiesces in their volitions, also that indi-
vidual wills may influence other individual wills
by reason of the fact that they are separate and
apart from each other. He asserts unequivocally
the absolute freedom of will. Now, this subject
of the freedom of will is not an "unimportant
matter," for Haeckel himself states that "the im-
portance of the question is also seen in the fact
that Kant put it in the same category with the
questions of the immortality of the soul and be-
lief inGod."
Indeed it seems apparent that the philosophi-
cal and ethical conclusions reached by these two
great Zoologists scarcely touch at that point.
It seems to me that Haeckel confuses the desires
with the activities of the will. While I may de-
sire to fly, my physical limitations prevent me. I
may will to spread my wings and nothing can pre-
vent me from so willing, but I am not able to fly.
I can certainly will to hail the man in the moon,
but I shall never make my voice reach him. The
will qua will, says Eomanes, is free. It is just
here that Haeckel, it appears to me, makes the
mistake of considering the hindrances to action,
to be hindrances to the will.
There is a strange and to me striking incon-
 THE WILL 149

sistency in "The Eiddle of the Universe" in that

Professor Haeckel assures us that "Each act of
the will is fatally determined by the organization
of the individual and is dependent upon the
momentary condition of his environment as
every other psychic activity. The character of the
inclination was determined long ago by heredity
from parents and ancestors. The determination
to each particular act is an instance of adaptation
to the circumstances of the moment wherein the
strongest motive prevails, according to the laws
which govern the statics of motion."
Now I cannot understand why Professor
Haeckel should take the pains to write a great
many pages in which he strives to promote the
Ethics and Keligion of Monism. What is the use
of telling us that the Golden Kule, as given by
Aristotle: "We must act towards others as we
wish others to act towards us," is in complete
harmony with Monistic Ethics? Having, in the
language which I quoted, negatived the freedom
of will, we cannot help ourselves as to how we
shall act toward others, nor can we control our
desire as to how others should act toward us.
The Golden Eule must take care of itself, for
we shall act just as our "inclinations" are deter-
mined by heredity, and we shall wish just as the
"strongest motive" directs.
There can be no religion in such a view, for
whether we feel "astonishment" when we gaze
at the heavens or not, whether we shall feel "awe"
when we trace the "marvellous workings of ener-
gy in the motion of matter," or not, will depend
150 THE WILL

absolutely upon whether we are, in our particu-

lar individual machines, producing these commod-
ities of astonishment and awe. Furthermore, the
very religion which he assails, the superstitions,
the cruelties and wars which he decries, the rev-
elations which he ridicules, are all as much en-
titled to their place among the determined actions
and inclinations of human beings as anything
which he can mention.
It may even follow that although the inherent
inclinations of Professor Haeckel may have made
it his fate to write and urge this so-called Monis-

tic Eeligion and Ethics, it will be the fate of

others to reject them. It may well be that all the
various religions and ethical views of the world
and the antagonizing philosophies and sciences
are necessary and inevitable, and life and effort
therefore reduced to absurdity because fate plays
such pranks with its very self that persuasiveness
and effort are its most ridiculous expressions.
To what line of heredity, to what moment of
circumstances shall we look for the truth f In
the light of such a philosphy, what is truth?
 Chapter X
THE ETEENITY OF INDIVIDUALITY
In a former chapter I have adopted the word
"relationship" as being the most felicitous ex-
pression of the meaning of individuality, and I
have again spoken of the individual as a unit
of force, a unity and a form of motion. This is
the result of a habit of always considering every-
thing as having polarity and more than one
aspect. The Monistic idea is that what ordinarily
appears to be two separate things, the opera-
tion of mind and the functioning of brain sub-
stance, is really but one thing with parallel activ-
ities in both aspects.
If we disabuse our minds of the idea that all
things had a beginning at the same time, and
rather conceive of Eternity as an everlasting
Now, we shall perhaps perceive that it is possible
that subjectivity and objectivity are ever in ex-
istence and that to limit their parallel phenomena
is unnecessary and responsive to no imperative
demand of Science.
I have stated that all I know of mind or con-
sciousness is gathered from within myself. I
cannot possibly have or analyze the consciousness
of another ; objectivities we may have in common,
151
152 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY

but as I retire toward myself, I of course of

necessity draw the curtains between myself and
others. Hence, when I may happen to apply the
words "relationship," "unit of force," "a unity,"
"form of motion," to something other than my-
self, I must ask to be excused from asserting
whether they are conscious or not. It would be
presumptuous to say that they are not, and yet I
should be unable to prove that they are. From the
position of the living environment which I have
postulated my own belief is that we should hesi-
tate at fixing boundaries to sentience and
consciousness.
That physically it is comparatively easy to con-
struct a working synthesis we have already seen,
and even concerning that unsolved problem of
memory I think that the physical operation of it
may be tentatively accounted for. Not that I am
able to say that it is so, but that for aught I know
it is scientifically possible for it to be something
like what I shall try to describe. The scheme,
however, as we shall see, will fail to account for
the sense of pastness felt in the present, which is
an unsurmountable barrier to any satisfactory
materialistic solution of the mystery of memory.
It has been estimated that in the cortex of the
cerebrum alone there are over 1,600,000,000 cells.
These are presumably less and less specialized as
we approach the periphery and more and more
limited and specialized as we sink deeper into the
mass. As there is an environment about and out-
side of us which incessantly bombards us through
our senses with unnumbered impulses, so there
 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 153

may be said to be a constructed environment

within us to be filled out with the product of these
sensations. Not all these which assail us are the
subjects of conscious attention, though a vast
number make their impression notwithstanding.
There are sixty seconds in a minute, thirty-six
hundred in an hour, and approximately fourteen
hours in the day during which we may be said to
receive an average of such sensations as are re-
ceived and retained within the field of memory.
There are three hundred and sixty-five days in a
year, and a man may be fairly considered to carry
the capacity for receiving the average of sensa-
tions for about sixty years. If every second of
such time a new and distinct sensation were to be
experienced it is easy to perceive that there is an
ample number of cells to allow to each a record
of the experience, for we should then receive but
about 1,103,760,000 such distinct sensations. If
the distinction between the results is a distinctive
form of motion among the molecules of the cell
thereby causing a change which is fixed and there-
after characteristic, then we shall have an envi-
ronment within from which to draw at will in a
manner similar to that in which we first received
them at will, or as is ordinarily the case, against
our will.
Such a cell so changed and modified as to its
form of motion would when stimulated to a dis-
charge of energy send forth along the nerve track
just that form of energy which it was modified by,
and no other. It needs only the comparatively
undifferentiated, unequilibrated cells which lie
154 THE ETERNITY OF INDmDUALITY

near the periphery of the cortex, to be what they

apparently are, the receivers, analyzers, sifters,
synthesizers and impermanent reflexes of such
sensation from within or without, to partially ac-
count for the phenomena of memory from the
physical view of it; and I do not see why it is
not fully as rational as the theory of phospho-
rescent gleams by Luys and far more within the
bounds of scientific probability.
All this however goes, even if it be reasonable,
but a little way toward explaining memory. It
utterly fails as do all such schematic explanations,
to account for the sense of pastness. It provides
and can provide no place for consciousness or per-
ception, and leaves the questions of value and
quality of ideas unanswered. And it is this sense
of pastness that lends the element of conscious
continuity to the individual. Whatever the phys-
ical character of the memory, these thoughts and
collections of the past come forth from their clois-
ters hoary with age, and with a mustiness and
pathos which belong only to that which is past.
What physical explanation can be given for the
presence of this quality of pastness, indeed what
physical explanation may be given for any quality
of thought or recollection, from the materialistic
position ?
This storehouse of experienced sensations is
the universe reflected within as we have seen it,
felt, heard, understood and lived it, and from it
and within it we construct other lives for ourselves
and fill them out with combinations of reflected
sensations.
 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 155

I have prefaced what I wish to say upon the

subject which heads this chapter with this specu-
lation, merely to prepare the way for the asser-
tion that there is ample reason to consider the
physical counterpart of all thoughts and memories
to be the set figures produced in specific forms of
motion, or rather the capacity of such forms of
motion to produce set figures. I think there can
be no quarrel over the statement upon the part of
the biologists, for without some such assumption
biology will be at a loss to account in any manner
for heredity. While it must be apparent that from
the theory of the living environment which I have
tried to present, heredity is only to be considered
as finding its place in the composite of that en-
vironment and not in the individual; yet, unless
we are to stand squarely upon the preformation
theory, we must look for the bearers of heredity
among the elements of the germ cell and find its
potentiality in the modification of forms of mole-
cular motion. Such a form of motion is however
a synthesis, is itself a living environment, a unity,
and all attempts to find within its expression a
unit of life have failed in demonstrating anything
except as I have said before, that any portion of
it has life of more or less duration according as it

has or has not the union of protoplasm and nu-

cleus. To the vast possibilities within its com-
plexity, nobody, but one who is determined to ar-
bitrarily treat it as the unit of life, will close his
eyes.
To make my meaning clearer I should write up-
on the living universe: "Individuals within in-
156 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY

dividuals, ever the one in relation to the many,

from the Infinite one to the cell which we study,
and beyond."
That the multiplex individualities within any-
one may be separated and become in turn the
dominant force of a unity is evidenced in a great
variety of forms among the invertebrates, and
this is almost universally true where the units
of the congeries are but slightly specialized. That
composite forms appear simultaneously with the
evidences of individuality is not proof that the
individual is the result of the organization and
unification. The unification will not be there ex-
cept the individual is likewise.
The mere fact that the higher powers of the
microscope can get no separated individuality be-
yond the minute cell does not any longer cause my
mind anxiety, for the reason that I have been able
to perceive enough under such lenses as I can
command to teach me the lesson that size is
nothing, it is a word of comparison, it is but the
measure again of our capacity of seeing. The
natural incapacity of the eye to perceive largeness
in smallness is a condition akin to that existing,
when looking at an object at a distance. Distance
is a barrier to sight, and our inability to overcome
it except artificially, is an incapacity. It is be-
cause of this attitude of my mind that with the
stakes which actual Science has driven I allow
myself to establish a base of rational operations
in surveying the really unknown territory be-
yond.
As I have said before, this is my mental atti-
 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 157

tude, it satisfies me for the present because I must

live in that mind and not in another's.
I have indulged in this little excursion merely
to enforce the position I assumed that there is no
satisfactory reason for treating the unicell as a
unit of life, whatever it may be in relation to the
combinations which it forms with others in the
composite body. Therefore, any form of mo-
tion set up within it would be again the evi-
dence of the one and the many, the units and the
unity.
As I sift over the returns from the field of
modern physical science, it appears to me most
likely that the old theory of hard atoms will be
utterly abandoned and matter will be, in its last
analysis, the operation of forms of energy in ether
or substance ; and, as the originating force cannot
be known to physics, we must conceive of these as
eternal. In the vastness of the thought one bows
his head and says "It is as it is from eternity to
:

eternity"; and, in the field of psychology, I am

unable to discover units of consciousness or the
alleged reason to assume them; without at least
two and a third there is no consciousness, and, as
the complexity of the universal substance has been
conceived to always exist, this condition must at-
tend all units of force with the resulting relation-
ship; —
so we must say again "It is as it is from
:

eternity to eternity, there has ever been the one

and the many, dependent upon each other for con-
scious being."
To a Science which holds fast to the teaching,
"All life out of life," it ought not to be a difficult
158 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY

thing to accept the consistant idea that the forms

of force and the substance in which such energy
forms appear to be, are eternal. The use of the
word "potential," is as I have before suggested,
no escape from the mystery, for there is nothing
in potentiality which does not as a form of energy
in a medium subsist.
Any conception which we may have of an ulti-
mate eternally existing substance, such as ether,
in view of the axioms of Science concerning force
and life, cannot be of a motionless, absolutely calm
and equated homogeneity, but must be of such a
substance pulsating with forms of motion, units
of force, eternally. This must be, or there is noth-
ing potential in what fills, as variety, the universe.
The scientist,however renowned, who is icon-
oclastic enough to cut from under humanity its
hope and faith in immortality, must sharpen his
axe on the grindstone of Science and on that alone.
His conclusion that "it is not," is not the equiva-
lent of "cannot be," therefore as I have reiterated,
it remains only necessary to stand beneath the
shadow of scientific possibilities and suggest any
one of the possible avenues open to a rational be-
lief in the eternity of existence.
Let us suppose the individual to be one of those
units of force in ether, and therefore eternally an
energy form in ether. It is not inconceivable, it
certainly is not disproven, that the consciousness
of the Infinite One, as we have before suggested,
is dependent upon these units of force and form
in the substance, and they in their turn upon it
for theirs. Weneed not travel outside of our
 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 159

own brains and minds for a completely analogous

condition.
Without expressing any opinion as to the merit
of his work, I may with propriety at this moment
quote with approval the conclusions of a gentle-
man of recognized position in the world scientific,
Prof. Flourney. In his recent book, "From India
to the Planet Mars," he says : "How is it possible
to believe that the foci of chemical phenomena, as
complex as the nervous centers, can be in activity
without giving forth diverse undulations, X, Y, or
Z rays, traversing the cranium as the sun trav-
erses a pane of glass, and acting at a distance on
their homologues in other craniumsl It is a
simple matter of intensity and I confess I do not
understand those who reproach telepathy with
being strange, mystical, occult, supernormal, etc."
Now I can have no reasons for combatting such
a conclusion as this, for I have had some exceed-
ingly interesting experiences in telepathy myself,
as a result of a determination to take nothing for
granted in a field of phenomena which offered such
large chances for delusion, fraud, and supersti-
tion. But what is the medium which these pre-
sumably diverse undulations are supposed to
traverse? Is it the atmosphere? Hardly that,
for they seem not to be affected by the storms
and tempests, nor halted in their courses by heat
or cold. We can conceive of but one medium which
will serve for the transmission of such forms of
motion, and that is probably the same which con-
veys the electric undulations in wireless teleg-
raphy, the ether or substance. As a remark in
160 THE ETEKNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY

passing, I may say that this suggests a conceivable

cerebral activity to a World Mind; for, after all,
the cells of the human cerebrum are not altogether
actually connected by their nerve processes, there
is, on the contrary, an exceedingly minute space

between the plexus terminals to be accounted for

over which the varying impulses must travel and
;

as space is as nothing to the undulations of the

ether, one who is gifted with a fairly well
equipped imagination could construct without
committing scientific suicide, a world brain, of
the consciousness of which we could know no more
than do the cells and cell centers of our central
system of our individual consciousness. Locate
as we will the special centers of the brain and
specialize as we may the habitat of the specific
sensations and ideas, it yet remains a fact, that
what is the property of these specialized centers
is likewise the property of the individual. As
localized they have no value except to specially
center, as generalized they become profoundly
of value to the individual. They are the property
of both, and the relationship between them is one
of degree and mutual of course. If, then, these
"chemical phenomena" cannot be considered as
occurring without giving forth such undulations,
which undulations have the capacity, in a medium
like that in which they originated, of reproducing
as an effect, their cause in as much as the human
;

brain is incessantly producing such "chemical

phenomena," it must logically be presumed to be
always surrounded by a sphere of outgoing undu-
lations of ether, prominent among which should
 THE ETEBNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 161

be that produced by the idea of self for there is

;

nothing which lends so much force to the personal

activities as that it fills all thought with its color
;

and self-consciousness.
Aside from the value which all this must have
to the one sea of mind in which the individual is
forever a unit of energy, why should it be at all
inconceivable that at death, this unit of force, this
form of energy, this individual should find itself
still at home as the vortex center of the encircling
undulations? They, the created; it, the creator.
Why should it not adapt itself immediately to its
environment and yet live ? Indeed it is already in
its environment, undulations of ether the environ-
;

ment which it has itself drawn from the surround-

ing world. These surrounding undulations are its
own, the units which sent them forth, obedient to
the law of unity, have not been robbed, they
parted with nothing; and as the composite com-
munity falls gradually to pieces as such, each unit
of force, each form of energy, changes its outward
environment carrying with it its internal world.
These undulations of the substance presumably
are the equivalents of the energy forms which
sent them forth. They occupy a similar relation
to them as do the undulations on the telephone
wire en route from transmitter to receiver to the
energy form producing them.
It is a common saying that we have no experi-
mental knowledge of consciousness unassociated
with matter, the purpose being to emphasize the
assertion that there is no consciousness unassoci-
ated with matter; but it is equally true that we
162 THE ETEKNITy OF INDIVIDUALITY

have no experimental knowledge of energy except

as associated with matter, or as we perceive its
phenomena in matter but one would hardly assert
;

therefore that energy did not exist except in con-

nection with matter, unless indeed we make no
distinction between matter and ether. There are
a number of undulations in the ether which are
caused by, or evidence of, an energy unassociated
with ponderable matter light for instance.
;

What experimental knowledge have we of en-

ergy except as we have witnessed its action in the
phenomena of matter? Its existence is discover-
able in matter, and because we also experiment-
ally ascertain that it produces certain effects in
different media,and that as its movements are
transferred from one form of matter to another
they assume different forms, we formulate the
statement of the principle of transformation of
energy; and because, as is the case with light,
which we can only perceive when reflected from
some material substance, it may be brought into
appearance by the interposition and use of mat-
ter, we assume of necessity its existence as energy
unassociated with ponderable matter.
Again, because it is impossible for the human
mind to conceive of energy disassociated with
some medium of transmission, we assume the ex-
istence of the ether, or some substance akin to it,
call itwhat we will.
One reason why the scientific, physiological
psychologists have had no experimental knowl-
edge of the same character, of consciousness un-
associated with ponderable matter but associated
 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 163

with ether or substance, is because the field of

inquiry necessary to be investigated has been un-
til quite recently given over to minds untrained
in the weighing of evidence, and therefore what-
ever of phenomena there have been were labelled
"occult," "transcendental," "supernatural," etc.,
and the evidence of experiences from such direc-
tions has been unacceptable and ruled out of
court.
As a matter of fact there can be no such thing
as experimental knowledge of either energy or
consciousness unassociated with matter. The
very rules we apply are rules of physics, and the
experiments themselves are always made in
matter.
The knowledge we have of energy unassociated
with matter is inferential, and a fair application
of the same methods to the study of consciousness
will result in the same inferential knowledge of
it as unassociated with matter, meaning here,
ponderable matter as distinguished from its sub-
stance.
I need not repeat perhaps what has been so
often reiterated in this work concerning the en-
tire scheme, that I do not mean to be understood
as taking the position that this discussion is in-
tended to prove that consciousness ever exists un-
associated with ponderable matter, but that we
should not accept as absolute the statement of
scientists that it cannot. All we know of con-
sciousness is of our own and that which is re-
ported to us by others. Any report of conscious-
ness is of consciousness associated with matter,
164 THE ETEENITY OF INDIYIDUALITY

for when a man tells me lie is conscious, I know

that it is only as associated with him, and that is
likewise true of any consciousness which I may
infer is associated with animal or physical life of
any kind
What I do insist upon is that we know experi-
mentally nothing pro or con about the existence
of consciousness in the substance ether. The
suggestion that it is a legitimate hypothesis to
infer its existence there associated with ether
may cause a smile to spread over the face of the
truly orthodox scientist, but really that is be-
cause of his fixed habit of thought. Heterodoxy
is as unpopular and as unprofitable among the
members of that cult as among some divines.
There are a few men of scientific attainments
who have dared to advance the suggestion that
we have no right to limit the possibility of mind
to that in connection with which only we perceive
it; notably Professor Eomanes and Professors
Cope and Dolbear, unless I have misinterpreted
their writings. Eomanes, as I have elsewhere
stated, does so in clear, distinct, unmistakable
terms; Cope by his statements that, "effort is a
conscious state," that "the preliminary of any
animal movement is effort," that "life preceded
organization," that "consciousness was confident
with the dawn of life," and that "energy may be
conscious" and Dolbear when he suggests (and it
;

is fair to state that it is but a suggestion) certain

properties of his hypothetical rings in the ether,
of which he says "Now, it is either that theory
:

or nothing" that may "differ from each other not

 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 165

only in size but in their rate of motion; the ring

may be a thin one, may rotate relatively fast or
slow, may contain a greater or less amount of
ether."
Surely ifstructure, variety, heterogenity, po-
tentiality of association and synthesis be essen-
tial to consciousness, we have in such forms of
motion and their evident capabilities all that is
necessary as elements of functioning mind and
consciousness. True these forms of motion, to
the inferential existence of which physical science
is decidedly leaning, are assumed to be the ulti-
mate units of force upon which all matter rests
as a foundation ; but they are not matter, as mat-
ter is considered by physical science.
One fact is certain, and that is, that wherever
we find the most consciousness in the human
body, it is associated with the least equilibrated
and most unstable combination of atoms, and that
it is submerged and unappreciable as these atoms

are found in combination in centers of matter

more stable, more equilibrated and material. Is
it super naturalism to suggest that one may fol-
low logically the consciousness into the region of
their least stability of compact and ponderable
association? It is perhaps pertinent here to say
that the atoms of which I write are the energy
forms in ether to which I have referred as the
probable future substitutes for the hard atoms.
The concourse of such atoms bringing into ex-
istence by selective synthesis worlds and systems
and maintaining them in their specific synthetic
motions and forms for untold ages, may be
166 THE ETEKNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY

paralleled perhaps by the concourse of such

energy forms as I have conceived sensations, ex-
periences, thoughts, etc., to have set up around
and about and as the appearance of the unit of
force, the individual, in the ether. If so, the ex-
pression of the individual is as real in the ether
as in the matter, for matter would then be the
mediator between the world and the individual.
To admit even that the consciousness of the in-
dividual is produced by the chemical activities of
the cells of the central system would not force us
of necessity to the conclusion that consciousness
ends with the cessation of labor upon the part of
the cells, for it is not the molar motion of the cell
(that is, its motion as a body) which assists in
the accretion of material for consciousness, but
its molecular motion, the changes of form of mo-
tion, not form of cell. We know practically noth-
ing about the changes in energy forms which take
place within the cell, and with the fact staring
us in the face, that there must be most marvel-
lous variety in the forms of motion in the germ
cell in order to build up that wonderful com-
pound, the distinguishable, personal body of man
with such physical characteristics as mark him
as something different from every other man, we
should hesitate at attempting to measure the
mental activities, the facts of consciousness, with
our calorimeters.
This germ cell is the fusion of two, one the
sperm, and the other the ovum, both microscopic-
ally small. And yet in these the only sensible ex-
planation of their vast potentialities is, that re-
 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 167

markably complex forms of motion have been set

up, in some manner unknown to Science, in their
molecules, somewhat akin to those which must be
looked for in the cells of the cerebrum as the
physical seat of memory, and indeed these forms
of motion in the germ cells must be considered as
memory forms, else the whole scheme of biology
is based on an unsubstantial foundation. A very
important question, however, which remains a
profound mystery, is What causes these forms of
:

motion in the molecules of the cells?

Passing for awhile from the suggestion of an
etheric composite, if I may call it such, I wish
to consider the law of unity and units as applied
to this germ cell. I am perfectly conscious that
I am
about to enter a field of discussion which
has been the despair as well as the inspiration of
many very able men, but I again repeat that I
must think for myself if I am to derive any bene-
fit from and my own humbler
their investigations
efforts in the same and while I may not
direction,
hope to accomplish that which others far better
equipped for the purpose have failed to do, yet
I may be able to show cause for hesitation in
framing final conclusions inimical to our peace
of mind.
If we substitute for the confusing terms rather
simpler English and try to state the facts, we may
have some idea of the great puzzle of biology, and
how far we are bound by any actual knowledge to
retreat from the sunshine of our hopes into the
marshes of pessimistic and despairing material-
ism, or a soulless Monism.
168 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY

It will be conceded that men are not all alike,

that they differ onefrom another both in physical
appearance and mental qualities and tendencies.
It will probably also be admitted that from the
same parents, children with widely different
physical and mental qualities are brought into the
world.
Why is it so? If you could give answer you
would solve the problem which has caused many
shelves of my library to be filled with books,
books which present explanations as widely di-
vergent one from another as the persons whose
varying qualities they endeavor to explain.
Why is it that in one family there will be found
the presence of a marvelous genius for music in
one child, its total absence in another, and in lieu
of it a faculty for mathematics? Why is it that
in ourselves there come dripping from the depths
of the unknown sea within the flotsam and jetsam
of experiences which we never had; suggestions,
ideas, developed capacities, for which we never
practiced; accomplished results for which we
apparently never furnished the causes ? What is
the reason that some come to the task of life
already armed with the weapons of genius?
"Heredity," answers the ready scientist. But
what is heredity, and how does it come, in what
sort of a parcel is it done up in that invisible
speck of substance from which we came as to our
bodies? And more puzzling yet, how does it
happen that from the same microscopic speck so
many various divergent inheritances come? This
body of mine, that of my brothers and sisters, all
 THE ETEENITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 169

come from the same germ cell. We do not escape

that very plain fact by asserting that inasmuch
as we were born at different times, we therefore
had a different cell origin, for it is evident that
each parent was the result of the fusion of two
cells into one and its multiplication into the many
and that even by the fusion of two in one, we
never escape the one. Are the potentialities of
many individuals resident in some form within
the one cell? If so, then even without adopting
the somewhat ancient idea of preformation in the
cell, that is, that the form of man lies hid in actu-
ality in it, we are confronted with the proposition
that within that invisible speck of matter are the
various forms of motion which may determine
the product as one of many differing possibilities.
Not that there is any differentiation in the various
portions of the germ cell which might determine
the product as one of a different species, for in
the light of the experiments, referred to in an-
other chapter, made with the eggs of a frog, this
is not so but as to what the qualities, character-
;

istics and personal attributes shall be, within the

limits of the preformed animal, there certainly is
differentiation sufficient to produce marvelous
variety as the product of the progeny of the same
original cell.
My citizenship in the world entitled me to ap-
proach without undue awe a brief discussion of
the statements and conclusions of even so eminent
a scientist as Professor Haeckel, especially as he
has found it convenient to treat with scant cour-
tesy the opinions and beliefs of those who think
170 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVmUALITY

differently from himself. Taking him at his own

estimate of the value of man's intellect as ex-
pressed in "The Eiddle of the Universe," we must
consider his mental process as but the operation
of a machine, and his conclusions but the result
of the metabolism of proteids, and that in a ma-
chine which is, as he expresses it, approaching
the "gradual decay of the physical powers." Now,
I do not really believe this, because I cannot place
the estimate which he does upon the mental prod-
ucts of mankind, yet I fear that the law governing
auto-suggestion does, in the case of one who per-
sistently for years looks upon himself as the phe-
nomenon of chemical processes, ultimately result
in just such conclusions.
In his discussion on the subject of Psychic
Gradations he informs us that "unconscious mem-
ory is a universal and very important function
of all plastidules," and that these, "as individual
molecules of the active protoplasm, are repro-
ductive, and so gifted with memory, that is the
chief difference between the organic and the in-
organic worlds." With all but the last clause of
this declaration of course I can have no dispute,
because it is in accord with the theory of the liv-
ing environment which I have suggested, but
taken in connection with other propositions in
Haeckel's work it leads into a blind alley rather
than up to his ultimate conclusion. For instance,
in replying to Weismann's theory that the pro-
tists are immortal, he asserts (p. 190, "The Eid-
dle of the Universe") that in the process of mul-
tiplication of the protists by division, the unicel-
 THE ETEKNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 171

lular organism (cell) breaks up into a number of

equal parts, each of which leads its own life, and
that the very process has destroyed the individu-
ality of the cell, and its physiological and mor-
phological unity is gone.
It is appropriate to call attention to Professor
Haeckel's accepted definition of an individual. On
page 190, "The Riddle of the Universe," he says
an individual is "A unity which cannot be divided
without destroying its nature."
Again, on page 63 of the same work, the asser-
tion is made that "with the formation of this
cytula" (the united ovum and spermatozoon, which
is therefore one cell), "hence, in the process of
conception itself, the existence of the personality,
the independent individual, commences."
But this independent "individual," which then
"commences" its existence, is a single cell, and be-
gins to reproduce at once by fission, and soon
becomes not only two, but many more cells. Has
its individuality been "destroyed," as to its nat-
ure, and what has become of the individuality of
the molecules of the active protoplasm? It must
be remembered that the study of this process of
segmentation is not carried on with the human
cell, but with that of the thread worm found in
the excretions of the equine race, or in the equally
available and transparent ova of the sea urchin,
and that in those up to above the eight-cell con-
dition, the cells may by rocking gently be sep-
arated, and each department produce a normal
animal except possibly as to size. "Were there
two individuals or more in the stem cell from
172 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVroUALITY

which these came? Has the individual been "di-

vided" without destroying its nature? Which of
the two in such a case is the "independent indi-
vidual," or are both?
Before giving expression to the attitude of
mind which I am constrained to assume toward
Professor Haeckel's presentation of the "sound
scientific arguments" against immortality, I de-
sire to show to those who may have been some-
what depressed by the plausibility of his general
arguments, the force of which depends largely
upon his illy concealed contempt of the intelli-
gence of such as disagree with him, that he is
himself compelled to rely upon the mysterious,
the unproven, and the unknown in the last anal-
ysis of his reasoning. On page 220, "The Riddle
of the Universe," he lays down the following
theses as his "own opinion" "I. The two funda-
:

mental forms of substance, ponderable matter and

ether, are not dead and only moved by extrinsic
force, but they are endowed with sensation and
will (though, naturally, of a lower grade) they
;

experience an inclination for condensation" (ital-

ics mine), "dislike of strain; they strive after the
one and struggle after the other. II. There is no
such thing as empty space that part of space that
;

is not filled with ponderable atoms is filled with

ether. III. There is no such thing as an action
at a distance through perfectly empty space; all
action of bodies upon each other is either deter-
mined by immediate contact" (immediate contact
is puzzling if ether is not continuous in the
bodies), "or is effected by the mediation of
 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 173

ether." On page 228 we find the following: "The

etheric consistency may probably . pass into
. .

a gaseous state," and "Ether is boundless and

immeasurable."
These theses I have no disposition to dispute
as a whole, but I am compelled to imagine what
takes place when ether condenses into a gaseous
condition, for the results of condensation neces-
sitates the thesis that "Ether is boundless and
immeasurable." Is it any less of a strain upon
our common sense and reason to conceive of
"boundless and immeasurable ether" than bound-
less and immeasurable mind and consciousness?
The scientist who demands that we have the
known, evidenced by experimental knowledge, as
a basis of our belief in the eternity of individu-
ality, must, if he deliver his argument from the
mere physical pole, adhere to the same rule. We
have and can have no experimental knowledge of
the boundlessness of ether. It is purely hypothet-
ical, a necessary hypothesis I admit, but the hu-
man mind staggers with awe in contemplation of
the thought, just as it does in attempting to en-
tertain the conception of an Infinite Mind which
thinks. Yet to this great and learned Professor,
the one is rational science, the other puerile su-
perstition.
I insist that if one shall on the contrary com-
mence his solution of the "Riddle of the Uni-
verse" from the psychic pole, and inverting the
thesis of Professor Haeckel, insist that matter is
but the phenomenon of mind, the same character
of argument advanced by Haeckel may be made
174 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY

from that starting point and with equal force and

effectiveness. It all depends upon which pole of
the Monistic theory we plant our feet as a point
of departure. Why are we compelled to com-
mence with the material side? Because we have
material brains, ganglion cells and nerves ? Why,
we have also thoughts, ideas, affections, aspira-
tions, memory, and love; why not start with
them? But it is said that these only put in an
appearance with and disappear with the brain
and cells. Yes, but it is equally true that the
brain and cells only put in an appearance with
these and disappear with them.
The apparent fact is that while the scientist is
to be allowed to load down a speck of matter with
the most marvelous, intricate memories, includ-
ing not only those of preexisting vertebrates, ver-
miformed, fish-gilled and canine ancestors, but
the mental and physical qualities of our immediate
parents and grandparents, and that remarkable
epitome, the memory of the race the psychologist
;

is not to be permitted to see in all this the pos-

sible living environment of an individuality work-
^

ing its way up to an adaption to the world en-

vironment, using these as the only organs
possible, evolved through countless ages. He, the
biologist, is to be allowed to unchallenged demand
an acceptance of his limitless ether for which he
can offer no experimental proof, while the other
is to be ruled out of the arena of common sense,
if he find on the other side of Monism a limitless
and unbounded consciousness, in which "he lives
and moves and has his being."
 THE ETEENITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 175

While the word "Monism" ought not to alarm

us in the slightest degree, because there is no real
necessity why we should be Monists or that Mon-
ism should rule the universe, yet it seems to me
that there is an unnecessary abhorrence expressed
by Monistic philosophers for anything which ap-
pears to them to be dualistic. For instance, I
have no doubt but that the suggestion that the
,

individual is a unit of force and the unity of activ-

ity in the developing germ cell will be scorned as
dualistic. But is it any more so than Haeckel's
Monism? I do not insist that it is the truth, al-
though I believe it to be, but that it is true even
to the Monism presented in "The Eiddle of the
Universe." The memories of the cytula come
from both parents, says Haeckel "the ovum con-
:

tributes a portion of the maternal features, while

the nucleus of the spermatozoon brings a part of
the father's characteristics."
"We know that in it" (the process of impreg-
nation) "the nucleus of the spermatozoon con-
tributes the qualities of the male parent, and the
nucleus of the ovum gives the qualities of the
mother to the newly born stem cell." "Heredity
is the memory of the plastidule."
Now these inherited qualities are transmitted,
presumably, by the setting up of forms of motion
of some kind in the protoplasm, and, upon the
union of the nuclei of both parents, two outside
individuals have directly operated upon this
protoplasm by imparting forms of motion caused
by their own activities —
so far we will be admit-
tedly safely within the Monistic demands of
176 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY

Professor Haeckel, but how comes it, because we

suppose a third party to have a hand in setting
up the unifying forms of motion in that same
stem cell, we have become dualistic? To admit
the individual as the organizer of the unity which
evolves out of the cell and its division is no more
dualistic than Haeckel's heredity.
There is a wide margin in "infinite eternal"
force for a force unknown or unrecognized by
Science indeed, the very infinity of force, and its
;

reciprocal action, would be, perhaps I should say

could be, the force of forces, the law of laws, the
unity of forces, the Individual, the One, in which
allforces are held, and whose infinity, constancy,
and eternity depend upon these units and their
relationship! Such an Individual would be God,
and it would not be matter but force.
What is force? AYho knows? We see its pres-
ence in matter, but we believe it to be, and
Haeckel asserts that it is, eternal and infinite, so
we are agreed that it is not matter nor the phe-
nomenon of matter.
Force we know, consciousness we know, and
thought we know, but consciousness and thought
are no more mysterious and inexplicable in final
analysis than force. We believe in the constancy
of force, partly because we can trace it in its
transformations, yet sometimes it eludes us and
we cannot keep the column of figures on the
ledger balanced. For instance, I think, and my
thought is of "immortality." We may measure
the expenditure of energy made by my cells in
thinking the thought, but that thought may be
 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 177

loaded with magnificence, grandeur, devotion, all

of which qualities elude the calorimeter with
which the measurement was made. Indeed, the
thought "immortality" in the denying mind of
Professor Haeckel would probably mark the same
degree on the calorimeter. The quality of thought
has one characteristic in common with the indi-
vidual it eludes measurement in terms of matter.
;

Any discussion of Professor Haeckel's chapter

on "The Immortality of the Soul" must, of course,
recognize the character of Immortality which he
is talking about. If he had had in mind only the
immortality of the individual when he wrote the
chapter, it would be a much more simple matter
to defend one's contrary convictions than it is.
The chapter discusses theological "immortality"
rather than the broad question of the eternity of
the individual.
It is not the attitude of a scientific mind to ad-
vance "insoluble diflSculty" in answering such
questions as "in what stage of their individual
development the disembodied souls will spend
their eternal life," as an argument against the
immortality of the individual. That and much
more in the many pages of the chapter referred
to is but the presentation of reasons for not ac-
cepting the theological immortality, reasons which
have been offered so many times that they are
ancient history. So serious a task as he set him-
self demanded the discussion of the greater ques-
tion of whether there is an individual, an ego, a
self, a subjectivity, to which this life in the en-
vironment of matter on this earth is but a phase,
178 THE ETEENITY OP INDIVIDUALITY

an event which has its beginning and ending, its

rhythmic rise and decline like everything else in
the world.
Such a question is large enough for so great a
and he owed it to the mass of strug-
scientist,
gling, writhing, suffering, starving, dying, but
hoping, humanity, for whom he assumed to be the
judge of their superstition or otherwise, to have
discussed it fully before offering them his charnel
house of despair.
To present, even in a masterly manner, the dis-
coveries of how the physical side of man was
evolved, a discourse upon the embryology of the
"soul" and the Phylogeny of the "soul" after hav-
ing first defined "soul" as follows (page 89, "The
Riddle of the Universe") "What we call soul is,
:

in my opinion, a natural phenomenon," is, I con-

sider, a begging of the question, for it is a declara-
tion that what he is writing about are the "psychic
activities" as they are evidenced in the cells of
the brain. As I have suggested elsewhere in this
book, there is no added argument in all the mod-
ern additions to the subdivisions of the body of
a man against immortality. We stand in that re-
spect just where our fathers did, when instead of
cells they recognized brain. The dissection of the
organs into their minutisB only adds to the mys-
tery it does not lessen it. That we do our think-
;

ing with millions of cells, instead of a mass of un-

differentiated gray substance, brain, lends no
added force to the ancient attacks upon immor-
tality.
The meat of the chapter in question, and it
 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 179

strikes methe only scientific meat to be found in

it is 204, and I shall make the same sug-
on page
gestion to the interested student of that page
that the author (Haeckel) makes in the same work
on page 107: "I recommend those of my readers
who are interested in these momentous questions
of psychology to study the profound work of
Romanes." It is true that the work of Romanes
to which he was referring was "Mental Evolu-
tion in the Animal World," but Romanes wrote
several great books, among them "Essays,"
"Jelly Fish, Star Fish, and Sea Urchins," and
"Mind, Motion, and Monism," and it is to this
last-named work that I refer. Inasmuch as Pro-
fessor Haeckel says he is completely at one with
Romanes and Darwin in almost all their views
and convictions, and that whenever they and he
seem to differ it is either because of "imperfect
expression" on his part, or the differences are
"unimportant," I feel at liberty to quote quite
freely from Romanes for the purpose of giving
expression to what Professor Haeckel means, sup-
posing the differences to be unimportant. Pro-
fessor Romanes on page 151 of "Mind, Motion,
and Monism" says "The statement of any causal
:

relation is merely a statement of the fact that

both the matter and the energy concerned in the
event were of a permanent nature and unalter-
able amount. Therefore if the ultimate Reality
is mental causation it must be ontologically iden-
tical with volition. And that the ultimate Reality
is either mental, or something greater, seemed to
be proved by the consideration that if it be sup-
180 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY

posed anything less, there must be an end of the

equivalency as between cause and effect, and so
of the conception of causality itself; for clearly
if my mind has been caused by anything less than
itself, there is an end of any possible equivalency
between the activity of that thing as a cause and
the occurrence of my mind as an effect."
I have quoted this freely because the great Zo-
ologist, whose book, unwarranted I believe as to
its claim that its philosophy is demanded by Sci-
ence, appears to convey the impression that the
lamented Romanes held the same views. That I
have not made a wrong application is evidenced
by the author's ( Romanes's) foot note on the same
page, as follows : "Whatsoever is first of all
things must necessarily contain it and actually
have, at least, all the perfections that can ever
after exist, nor can it ever give to another any
perfection that it hath not actually in itself or at
least in a higher degree" (Locke). To this argu-
ment Mill answers "How vastly nobler and more
:

precious, for instance, are the vegetables and ani-

mals than the soil and manure out of which, and
by the properties of which, they are raised up!"
To which Romanes "But this stricture is
replies :

not worthy of Mill. Theand manure do not

soil
constitute the whole cause of the plants and ani-
mals. "We must trace these and many other
causes (conditions) back and back until we come
to whatsoever is first of all things; it is merely
childish to choose some few conditions, and ar-
bitrarily to regard them as alone efficient causes."
I must also state that Romanes says that a
 THE ETEENITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 181

**hiiman mind is a part of the self-existing sub-

stance, although not on this account self-existing
as to its individual personality," but to grasp to
the full extent the unbiased elasticity of Ro-
manes's argument his whole work upon "Mind,
Motion, and Monism" should be read. He claims
that personality appears to be the result of cir-
cumscription, a limitation, but an integral part
of the whole, and there is a generous margin left
for God and even the necessary relational exist-
ence of the individual in these words: "There is
next the fact that throughout the universe of in-
finite objectivity, so far at least as human obser-
vation can extend, there is unquestionable evi-
dence of some one integrating principle whereby
all its many and complex parts are correlated
with one another in such wise that the result is
universal order. And if we take any part of
—
the whole system such as that of organic na-
—
ture on this planet to examine in more detail,
we find that it appears to be instinct with con-
trivance. So to speak, whenever we tap organic
nature, it seems to flow with purpose . . . the
world eject thus becomes invested with a psychi-
cal value as greatly transcending in magnitude
that of the human mind, as the material frame of
the universe transcends the material frame of
the human body." (" Mind, Motion and Monism,"
p. 109.)
Contrast these words with those of Schopen-
hauer quoted approvingly by Professor Haeckel
on page 231, "The Riddle of the Universe " "The
:

truth of pantheism lies in its destruction of the

182 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY

dualistic antithesis of God and the world, in its

recognition that the world exists in virtue of its
own inherent forces. The maxim of the Pan-
theist, 'God and the world are one' is merely a
polite way of giving this Lord God his conge"
Far be it from me to express an opinion as to
which of these great men is nearest to the truth,
but I am of the decided opinion that Haeckel
and Romanes are not "at one" on this subject.
As the human mind is an integral part of the
whole, then, in view of the "unquestionable evi-
dence" of the one integrating principle, a unity
psychism, a psychism so transcending that of the
human mind, while I may not be able to subject
my relationship in it to such an analysis as will
afford scientific proof of its inextinguishable
value, I yet have sufficient room in the china shop
of Science to exercise a reasonable degree of sci-
entific faith without breaking the valuable china.
Before calling attention to some thoughts
which to my mind have been sufficient to allevi-
ate the otherwise depressing influence of the
physiological, histological, experimental, and
pathological arguments of Haeckel, I desire to
refer briefly to the ontogenetic, that is the devel-
opment of the soul in the individual. Of course,
if we are to limit the soul to the mere chemical
activities of the cells of the brain, there is noth-
ing to be said, because our agreement to such a
meaning of the word would end in similar views
as to its development, rhythm, and end. I take
it, however, that most of us understand by the

soul, that substantial entity, the individual. "We

 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 183

see," says Professor Haeckel, "the cMld soul

gradually unfold its various powers, the youth
present them in full bloom, the mature man
shows their ripe fruit, in old age we see the grad-
ual decay of the physical powers, corresponding
to the senile degeneration of the brain." It is
undoubtedly true that the neuroblasts or unde-
veloped cells of the infant develop and reach
maturity and in old age the same cells become
frequently pigmented, shrunken and give other
signs of degeneration, and the connections be-
tween them are withdrawn, and we have the sad
picture of the "lean and slippered pantaloon"
condition of man. But because the composite
structure is falling, that which was the individual
amid the objectivities of the environing material
world no longer holds together, does it follow that
that for which the mediation existed has likewise
fallen into decay? The very fact that it no longer
communicates with us or we with it, is the reason
why we cannot say it does not yet live; it has
no bridge on which to cross to us. Not that I
mean to imply that it is something which was
apart from and came into the body, deus ex ma-
china, but the individual is not that; bounded by
bodies, existing as and in a living environment;
it is not that. I decline to accept this senseless,
shuffling, incompetent mass of cells, precious as it
is to memory and association, as the measure-
ment of the individual whose love shone out of
his eyes a few days ago; the unification in that
environment is destroyed, and what is left will
automatically continue its various specialized
184 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY

functions until the units are themselves sep-

arated. As Verworn says in "General Physiol-
ogy," the composite body is quite a long time in
dying, even after that moment when life is ordi-
narily pronounced to be at an end. If the Pan-
theistic scientist can find God in the universe of
many, and ascribe "purpose" and "contrivance,"
and not discover His death in the wreck of
changes going on in the phenomena of substance,
I see no reason why I may not continue to find
the individual surviving in the same manner. I
stand on the emphatic language, and the thought
conveyed by it, of Alfred H. Lloyd in "Dynamic
Idealism": "Individuals neither die nor come
into being."
The soul, says Professor Haeckel, is a collec-
tive title for the sum total of the psychic activ-
ities of the cells of the cerebrum, and these are
chemical from his standpoint. Somewhere I have
read, I think in "Mind, Motion and Monism," by
Romanes, that motion can only produce motion,
and I am perhaps stupidly puzzled in attempting
to understand how thought, affection, love, rea-
son, consciousness, etc., can be produced by the
chemical motions of the molecules in the cells in
any part of the central nervous system.
The sum total of motions is either equation, no
motion, or a synthetic motion, but it certainly is
never anything but a resulting motion. If these
various qualities of mind are motions, then I in-
sist again that such a Monistic conception fur-
nishes us with no possible individual or soul, if
an individual be what Professor Haeckel con-
 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 185

cedes it to be, a something which cannot be di-

vided without destroying its individuality. That
we are marginally conscious of more than one
sensation at a time, it appears to me we readily
perceive in our own experiences. I hear, see,
think, feel, love, etc., all at the same time. These
do not follow each other necessarily as successive
sensations or emotions, but are present in the
moment. Now if the "sum total" is one motion,
what motion is it? Notwithstanding the sugges-
tion that it is so plain that it is final and destruc-
tive to the idea of any individual soul other
What is it? The "sum total" of our cerebral
chemical activities; but is it one, or many; is it
a motion, or motions? If a motion and one, it is
a motion produced as a "sum total" and therefore
something additional to the unit motions, and
that is not the Monism of Professor Haeckel. If
motions, then we have yet a complexity, and in-
tricacy which in turn needs to be analyzed by the
same process.
And again, Haeckel says in reply to Weis-
mann^s claim that the protozoa are immortal ; the
fission of the unicell is by that very process de-
structive of individuality, because an individual
is that which cannot be divided without destroy-
ing its individuality. The human body, the brain,
the cerebrum thereof, are all composed of separate
individual cells, which as Haeckel himself sug-
gests in the argument against immortality are
associated in strongly specialized centers. We
must therefore reach the curious conclusion that
there is no individual to be immortal; in other
186 THE ETEENITY OF INDIVIDUALITY

words, his logic is destructive not only of immor-

tality but individuality itself.
It appears evident that if one cell divided is no
longer an individual because so divided, then an
ovum cell which has been so divided many million
times and specialized in sections, is no longer the
individual, which, as Haeckel says in "The Riddle
of the Universe," then and there, with the stem
cell, commenced. It must have commenced and
ended there speedily so that individuality is a
commencement of that which never proceeds.
It is no longer a unit but a unity, there are free
cells innumerable within it, white corpuscles, etc.,
which, while they make a community, do not con-
stitute a unit. The human body dies by piece-
meal and it is long after consciousness, that ab-
solute destruction of the mass follows. (Ver-
worn.)
I insist that there is no scientific evidence that
the force, which so holds together these divers
units, these specialized chemical activities, as that
there is an individual within our consciousness,
is a product of those motions ; but rather that it
is the principle of force, or unit of force, by and
through the means of which the union and main-
tenance of it is rendered possible and that, what-
;

ever it is, is the individual or there is none.

Where it came from, why it came at all, I do
not know, but I do know that while we are indulg-
ing in such mighty flights of the scientific imag-
ination into the region of the infinite as that we
can assert an ether, which is coeternal with an
equally infinite Spirit which can have a sum total,
 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 187

an ether boundless, undifferentiated, and infinite,

but which nevertheless can condense into gases;
while we are ascribing to atoms sensation and
will, and loading down the invisible spermatozoa
and ova with the burden of the race memory and
all the other memories necessary to evolve a
man; while witnessing such astounding products
of the metabolism of proteids as modern educa-
tion has given us; we need not yet, even at the
bidding of the world's greatest Zoologist, find it
impossible or even difficult to include a probable
unit of force, eternal, having its life, motion, and
being in that One, which transcends even our sci-
entific power of thought.
Let me return to the last discussion, and see
if I can make my difficulty in accepting the con-
clusion of Professor Haeckel a little more ex-
plicit.
As I have said, motion produces only motion;
and the chemical activities of the cerebral, or for
that matter of all the cells of the central system
are motions. I can conceive of these interacting
motions producing one synthetic motion and I
may add that that one motion may be a varying
synthesis, that is, it may be now one form of
motion and again another form of motion, de-
pending upon the change constantly going on in
the unit motions; but if that conception is to be
applied to the psychical phenomena, we find our-
selves, or at least I find myself in a dilemma.
The moment's consciousness, the moment's condi-
tion of mind, is not a simple, a single form of
motion, conceding it to be a motion. It is quite
188 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY

the contrary, it is complex, it is composite, it is

at once a structure with many details, and unless
we find that there is something which is the apex,
the perceiver, we have in this quasi Monistic ma-
chine no room for the individual at all. Of
course, if it be asserted that I am not an indi-
vidual and that there is no such thing, then the
consolation that I am but the Infinite experienc-
ing, is sufficient, because as I have endeavored to
show in another chapter, nothing can be lost in
the great One and I presume that the delusion of
myself will find its permanent place.
We know absolutely nothing about the energy
coeternal with ether, we know nothing about
whether it has units of force or not; we have no
scientific knowledge on the subject. We may
trace the laws of physics scientifically so far only
as our experiences go from there on we reason,
;

we infer, and seek to harmonize the possible with

the certain. Nobody is justified in saying that
we have in the closing years of the nineteenth
century demonstrated scientifically that individ-
uality either begins or ends with its phenomenal
appearance in the realm of "condensed ether."
The limitations placed upon human knowledge
are tremendous in their inhibitory results, and
as an instance of how little we know, and what
possibilities lie outside of our scientific knowl-
edge, I may be permitted to present an imaginary
scheme for eternity of individuality which I
frankly admit I cannot prove, but which I insist
cannot be shown to be fatally inconsistent with
what we know. Bear in mind that I do not say
 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVmUALITY . 189

it may not be inconsistent with the opinions and

conclusions of individual scientists, but only that
it is as firmly founded upon our absolute knowl-
edge as any opinions on their part.
Let us suppose the world to be an individual
endowed with consciousness, will, and thought.
Is this a violent presumption? Not at all. Many
of the great philosophers of the past and some of
the present time have expressed the opinion that
"the world lives, the world thinks." Nor need we
be swerved, necessarily, from the assumption, be-
cause we walk about and find space, activities
and objects, and are able to modify the appear-
ance of the world by our operations, for within
myself I can conceive of a phagocyte (white cor-
puscle) roaming in quest of food and performing
his duties as possibly a hunter in the veins and
tissues of my body, and refusing to admit that
what he lives in is a being endowed like himself
with will, thought, and consciousness. He finds
space, space as wide and extended in comparison
as do you and I in the world. Or to bring the
suggestion more closely home, let us consider one
of the cells of the cerebrum, one of those the
"sum total" of whose activities make up the
"soul." Such a cell is exceedingly, incompre-
hensibly intricate in its internal, molecular mo-
tions, so much so that the movements of a Hoe
printing press are as a sum in addition to a quad-
ratic equation in comparison — or one of the cells
and its associate cells constituting a congeries of
cells, a center, say the center of speech in one of
the lobes of the brain; there is space between
190 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY

these cells, they conununicate by some vibration,

undulation or other form of motion along the sub-
stance of the nerves and across space between
the plexuses. They have their admitted limita-
tions and specializations just as we have in the
world. If I could analyze the consciousness of
one of them (and of course I cannot), I might
find as much ignorance of the methods by which
it communicates with others, as I find among men
as to the ways and means of telepathy; or I
might go farther and say that it will deny that
it communicates at all except so far as it may

trace its own force impulses physically.

As we find stated in "Mind, Motion and Mo-
nism," by Eomanes (and the statement is borne
out by other writers equally as scientific), when
by injury or destruction the cells constituting
the center of speech on one side of the brain dis-
appear, the power of speech is lost. Ideas re-
main, there is no change or loss in them, but the
power to express them in words and sentences
is not there. But, in many instances (and one is
sufficient for proof), after a while the cells con-
stituting a similar center on the other side of
the brain begin to develop the function of speech
and eventually the individual regains the use of
the faculty. Professor Romanes considered this
remarkable, so do I, so I think will you. Ideas
usually, I believe, take their place in the stream
of consciousness in the form of language and —
here we have an individual with undisturbed
ideas which labor and struggle for utterance and
finally force their way into expression. The
 THE ETERNITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 191

physical expression has departed, but shall we

hesitate to say that the consciousness and knowl-
edge of speech was builded into the individual
and refinds expression?
What has become of the cells, of their indi-
vidualities? I do not know and it does not con-
cern me, it is sufficient that that other, the un-
born, the relationship, for which the center and
cells played their part is not gone; it is there.
With the units and unities which make the ex-
pression of the Unity possible, I have nothing
to do.
To return to my relationship to the world, I
*
have long ago, perhaps without reason, disabused
my mind of the idea that I stand alone ; the space
in which I move and which surrounds me no
longer appalls me because I find that it is all
relative.
Conceive my body, if you will, as a cell in the
multicellular world; the intricacy and complexity
of it need not deter you, for we have seen that
it is not a whit more so than a cortical cell. I
may serve physically just that purpose, I per-
form my function. If the body disintegrates,
who shall say that the function, the relationship,
that for which I stand, is not built into the world
and that my real life is my life in it?
That which I as an individual, not as a mass of
cells, not in the ponderous expres-
stand for, is
sion, not in the cumbersome, composite, living
environment, but in the relationship. I cannot be
lost ; its value is just what it is in that larger in-
dividuality, in which it lives and dwells.
192 THE ETEENITY OF INDIVIDUALITY

To fully comprehend what I mean, we should

not specialize but generalize the subject. The
law of relationship must be conceived of as ex-
tending completely down the line of physical as-
sociation until we shall have reached what has
been supposed to have been discovered, the unit
of living substance. With such a conception the
question of how the individual first appears, in
the germ cell with its wonderfully prepared en-
vironment, is no more mysterious to me than how
anything else in the world appears where and
when it does, for on this theory we are so inti-
mately woven together in the life, that to solve
that problem would indeed be to give a solution
of "The Riddle of the Universe."
Given the assumed ether and spirit of Profes-
sor Haeckel, and the conception of the units of
force to which I have referred is certainly not a
violent presumption, for I have the right to con-
tinue to ascribe eternal differentiation to the
"Spirit." It certainly is not homogenous and in-
finite with the inherent capacity to break up or
condense like the ether, if so we must look back
of even it to find that mysterious capacity or
force by virtue of which it condenses in sections
or breaks up or starts its various manifestations.
A homogenous ether, a homogenous Spirit per-
vading it even as its other pole would, it appears
to me, sleep a dreamless undisturbed sleep and
be eternally as immovable as adamant. Either
the One and the many were and are in being eter-
nally, or there is, as in fact there seems to be, a
point beyond which reason cannot reach. If
 THE ETEENITY OF INDIVIDUALITY 193

ether and units of force eternally, then there is

no scientific reason why we should not ascribe to
these units of force individuality and differentia-
tion multiplex enough to account for all the mani-
festation of the Universe. To ascribe to Spirit
diversity, differentiation, and individuality, is no
more dualism than to postulate eternal and in-
finite ether and eternal infinite spirit.
Why the fact that any conception of immortal-
ity must scientifically include the lower animals
should in any manner be considered an argument
against it, I do not understand. The Universe
does include animals, for we see them every day
and what the Universe includes I suppose be-
longs to it. While we are talking about "infinite"
force or spirit we may as well logically include
infinite variety of individualities, for that is what
makes up the universe. What value the units
of force, which appear as animals here and now,
may have in the economy of the universe, I do
not know, but they seem to have had great value
so far in preparing by evolution the opportunity
for the physical appearance of man.
Why any question of their value should even
be considered by Professor Haeckel, I do not un-
derstand, for he has given the "Lord God his
conge" and there is no need for values. The idea
that all individuals should be alike is an unnec-
essary one in my view, for infinity and eternity
are very large and include everything.
 Chapter XI

CONCLUSION
As I endeavored to make
clear at the com-
mencement of this book, my
purpose has not been
to present a scientific demonstration of immor-
tality which would be capable without personal
any such
evidence, for I fully realize the folly of
an attempt with our present knowledge, but
rather to set forth, as forcibly as my command
of language and limited familiarity with the gen-
eral field of Science would permit, the reasons
why I believe the attempt to demonstrate the
contrary position to be true to be chargeable
with greater folly. The great mystery of life
and individuality is as dense to-day under the
rays of the rising sun of Science as it has ever
been; the Sphinx sits as silent, as immovable, as
uncommunicative on the sands of the desert as
it has done for countless generations, and man
knows experimentally as little about the whence,
the why and the whither, as he did in the ages
when under Indian skies he reached the summit
of philosophic wisdom. It is unfortunate that we
are so constituted as that whenever an array of
facts presents itself to us in an unbroken line of
continuity, we are apt to take it as a rule of
measurement for everything else, forgetting the
194
 CONCLUSION 195

amazing complexity of nature and the startling

surprises which frequently assail us in the form
of apparent breaks in continuity. The hidden
links which bind together the phenomena are
many, are unknown, are only to be theoretically
considered and will forever recede from our
analysis.
The rational process of Science is to proceed
from the known to the unknown by inference the
;

theoretical process is to come back from the in-

ferred and construct upon it theses concerning
other phenomena. Thus, for reasons which I
need not give in detail, Science infers the exist-
ence of atoms and an infinite ether or substance.
Now this is rational. Atoms, we say, must be;
they may be hard, round bodies, or they may be
vortices. Ether must be, it may have any of the
consistent qualities assigned to it, but when we
have assumed necessarily the ether and the
atoms, our assumption has not become the basis
for a demonstration of any sort. If we return
with our atoms and our ether and, using them as
a foundation, rear thereon structures other than
those from whence (phenomenal existence) we
traveled into the region of the unknown by induc-
tion, we are theorizing, and theorizing only.
Hence I insist that the laws of substance, of
which so much has been said, and upon which so
much has been builded, are themselves yet to be
proven and demonstrated.
There is a sort of so-called logical destruction
of that which is of tremendous ethical value to
the world, which proceeds somewhat after this
196 CONCLUSION

fashion: "I find 77iind associated with brain;

brain is composed of elements to be found un-
associated with each other everywhere in the
universe; there ought to be a substance called
ether; these elements are reducible to simple
forms of condensed ether; as there seems to me
to be no other place from which consciousness
and will can come, these forms of condensed ether
must have them they cannot have much of them
;

because I conceive of these forms of condensed

ether as infinitesimally small points and not com-
plex; true, I have never seen these small points
or simple forms, but as I cannot account for mat-
ter in any other way, they must exist.
"I do not believe that there is anything in the
universe but this ether and these infinitesimal
points of condensation as a last analysis, there-
fore everything came from their association, all
bodies, all differentiation, all mind, even the soul
of man; therefore, it is absurd to think that
there is any immortality, and any man who thinks
so is either in his dotage, or is superstitious, or
lacks in the power of exercising sound judgment,
or owes it to his early religious training, or has
not the gift of pure reason."
Now all this may be true, but it is by no means
shown to be so. As we have seen, there is an
absurdly small degree of actual knowledge of the
properties of ether within the possession of any
one, the atoms are as elusive as ghosts and as
foreign to positive classification as the canals of
Mars. The attitude of Prof. Haeckel toward the
ignorance of the qualities and properties of ether
 CONCLUSION 197

and atoms, on the part of the rest of mankind

who yet have a lingering faith in the possibilities
which may fill the vastness of what they do not
know, is akin to that of St. Paul toward the men
of Athens when he covered their ignorance with
his wisdom by saying " Him whom you ig-
:

norantly worship, Him

declare I unto you."
It is not, that, in these days when Science is
the king of the realm of thought, such a learned
man as Haeckel should not, if he chose, instruct
the world with his opinion upon the subject which
he deemed of import enough to write about, but
that, because of his prominence, he should not
have presented it in such a manner as to amount
to a declaration that such an attitude as that
which he takes is the ultimatum of Science. As
we have seen, it is not so it is far from it ; it is
;

only the opinion of Professor Haeckel, based upon

his great attainments in the field of zoology and
manifestly highly colored and seasoned by his un-
deniable bias for the Monistic philosophy and
religion.
Such prematurely by Science,
attitude, if taken
is, I believe,dangerous to good government,
dangerous to character, dangerous to society,
dangerous to morals and dangerous to health and
peace of mind. Not dangerous because it pre-
sents the truth, for mankind can always adapt
itself to truth, but because it presents a guess as
though it were a truth, and a guess too which is
not calculated to result in uplifting, encourag-
ing or improving mankind, but quite on the con-
trary calculated to result in shrouding the weak
198 CONCLUSION

in hopelessness, and in crowning pessimism king

in place of optimism. All this because one great
man, who had created a wide avenue of hearing
for himself by his remarkable intelligence in cer-
tain fields of learning, uses that avenue to pre-
sent his opinion upon the subject most precious
to man, in a form which appears to bear the
stamp of approved and demonstrated fact.
Why do I take this attitude toward the book?
Why should I not f I have read it for a moment
;

it staggered me, it grieved me, it inexpressibly

saddened me, but not for long; its monument of
the known, of the seen, the felt, the measured, the
weighted and guaged, stood so insecurely upon
the uncertain quagmire of the absolutely unknown
that it toppled over of its own weight. I found
it soon enough to be a projection of lines into
the infinite horizon, lines which had but one end,
lines which reached to nowhere.
It is a profound presentation of the physical
appearance of life, life in ponderable matter but
;

in every direction, without exception, the known

shades off by degrees to the unknown, the im-
measurable and possibly the unknowable, leaving
the sensible man to rely yet upon his inner con-
sciousness and frame his faith upon the data as
he shall find them appealing to him as rational.
Of all the attempts of encouragement of man
as an ethical being, made by the materialistic and
some of the so-called Monistic moralists, that is
the saddest which suggests that the individual is
nothing, the race everything. That it is the duty
of each to so live that the race will advance in
 CONCLUSION 199

happiness, prosperity, culture, morality, etc., etc.

This sort of pabulum may feed the minds of
those who present it to others, but aside from the
actual compensating pleasure with which one re-
wards himself for virtue, there is no reason why
life under such a theory should not take its full
swing regardless of the future and those who are
to fill it. Why is the race everything? Why is
there a race at all? What particular advantage
is it to me that a race of any beings should sur-
vive my absolute disappearance? These ques-
tions cannot be answered to the satisfaction of
any except such as have been so environed as
that love, plenty, culture, education, music, art,
science and prosperity have come and come to
stay.
To such the maintenance of morality is a neces-
sity and the preservation of the race, inasmuch
as it necessitates the careful preservation of that
which fills their lives, is worthy of their effort
and fully rewards them. This is the reasoning
usually of the cloister, the library, the university,
but rarely, if ever, of the city, the field, the
crowded, sweating, foul, noisy, contentious, com-
petitive and suffering swarms of human life.
The struggle of life is for the individual! The
individual is everything; it is as much a race as
that vast concourse of men and women usually so
named. It is no less and no more an absolutely
essential factor in the life of the Universal One.
Is there any community more emphatic than I
—
find in myself any, where the struggles are more
—
frequent or more violent any, where the call for
200 CONCLUSION

equity, ethics, and culture are louder and more

imperative ?
To do my demanded duty to the race, and the
race of men, is to perform loyally and cheerfully
the function which as a comparative unit I must
perform from the necessities of my relationship
to it, just as I demand of those which stand be-
neath me as the units of my unity to perform
theirs to me.
Therefore I insist that the preservation, the
persistence of the individual has as much of value
in the economy of the universe as that of the so-
called race.
Socialism has no saving grace, except it be
always directed in purpose to the development
of the individual.
Either all this is true, or the whole race life
is purposeless and empty and should aim at
ultimate suicide of society rather than the
preservation of the meaningless holiday parade
of advancing civilization.
The acceptance of such an ultimate conclusion
as Professor Haeckel announces, as the product
and the only product of pure reason, as a fact, as
an undeniable, proven result of the century's prog-
ress in Science, would start a new era with the
undoing of all that has been accomplished in
centuries of ethical progress.
Human life has achieved a value which the
ancients rarely admitted, the shedding of blood
has become more abhorrent, the preservation of
the lives of the suffering, the amelioration of pov-
erty, the kindly care for the insane, the education
 CONCLUSION 201

of the deaf, dumb and blind, have all become

matters of great interest and more or less suc-
cessful achievement, and why? Because mankind
has come to recognize that there is something
more to a human individual than the "chemical
activities" of the cells of the cerebrum. There has
been developed an active sympathy for the suffer-
ing of dumb brutes, and laws for the prevention
of cruelty to them promulgated and enforced.
To abandon this conception of the value of the
individual, as something more than his mere
economic availability to society, would result in
an abandonment of the useless additions to the
burdens of government. The protection of human
beings from the dangers of contagion from dis-
eases would, under such a system of belief, justify
the wholesale extinction of populated centers, the
painless destruction of life, and the merciless ap-
plication of stringent laws for is'olation. Why
should the lame, blind, paralyzed, tuberculous
and witless be allowed to persist in living? Why
burden ourselves with the insane and criminal?
Why not weed the earth of the incompetent? The
natural operation of the law of the survival of
the fittest is far too slow, it can be materially
assisted. The aged and senile may be gently
passed out of life and the world move along much
more easily and untrammeled.
This isthe logical outcome of such a view of
life, and any attempts to relieve the situation by
soft language about the adoration of the beauti-
ful and sublime in nature is folly. If love is but
the chemical affinity which Haeckel asserts it to
202 CONCLUSION

an empty delusion and the beautiful and

be, it is
sublime resolve themselves into nothing but a
dance of atoms. We have for centuries been
building up as the essential vitality of our civ-
ilization elusive, lying, evanescent, fictitious
shadows and labeling them "heart" and "soul."
If we are to commence the work of uprooting
the spiritual, the "superstitious," the soulful, the
individual, and selfhood, we must make a clean
sweep and carry with them which has grown
all
in the soil of those gardens.They are illusions,
they are courtiers attendant upon the king of
delusions, the soul. Evolution was side-tracked
centuries ago, and the sooner we find the main
track the sooner we may take that desirable
plunge into the abyss of anarchy and confusion.
I have heard the charms of such a (Monistic?)
philosophy delightfully expressed by others than
Professor Haeckel, but to any but the contented
and prosperous, the healthful and happy, they
have the odor of the charnel house and the hope-
lessness of hell.
I am quite aware that these are strong words,
but I am searching for strong words, words
powerful enough to express my personal con-
demnation, not of an expression of the truth, but
of an expression of a theory upon such a vital
matter, in a manner which leaves the impression
upon the human mind, that the theory is scientific
fact. Such a negative theory, if it be a fact, can
never be shown to Science as such, for Science
never yet has found an ocean whose last wave it
has measured, never a form of substance which
 CONCLUSION" 203

did not inclose another, it never yet has laid

itshand upon the lever of the universe, and it
never will.
It is evident that with all his remarkable attain-
ments in scientific learning Professor Haeckel has
not mastered the first principles of mental science,
or he never would have permitted himself to sug-
gest that the abandonment of the belief in im-
mortality would be for the best interests of
human society, or that the world has anything to
gain by it. Under and by virtue of the very laws
of substance to which he appeals, the ideas of im-
mortality and duty, however false they may be,
are builded into the very being of human in-
dividuals.
Heredity has made them parts of the brains
which they have inherited from their ancestors
according to Professor Haeckel, and any sudden
change from such a belief must assuredly be of
such a character as to cause confusion and dis-
astrous results to the process of mental evolution.
Philosophers may have no trouble in adapting
themselves to such a change of views, if the neces-
sity arises, but the mass of mankind certainly will
find it opening before them like an impassable
gulf.
Whatever may be the mysterious secret behind
the fact, it is certainly true that happiness, health,
longevity, and good government depend largely
upon the belief and hope of mankind. What
punishment would be sufficient for that physician
who, in attendance upon his patients, bluntly con-
fided to them the exact condition of their physical
204 CONCLUSION

organs, the hopelessness of attempting to co-

ordinate the nei*vous system and the certainty of
an ultimate and speedy death ? Ignorance of even
the real condition, hope based upon lack of under-
standing of the threatening complications, and
the confidence resulting from it, have always been
considered curative agents of profound value.
It is not often that, when the apparent hope-
lessness of life is so emphatic as that one may
almost number the hours remaining, the attend-
ing physician is justified in destroying the last
chance by a destruction of hope. It may be
safely said that no justification exists for such a
removal of the supporting faith when dissolution
is a mere possibility. To whatever degree it may
be based upon superstition, desire, love, the un-
known or the unknowable, it is apparent to any
thoughtful and observant man, that the belief in
individual life surviving the wreck of the physical
body, in accountability in some manner, in an
existence where the disappointments and griefs
of this life are compensated, and where justice
dangles the other side of the balances, is builded
into the very body, indeed it is the central system,
of ethics, and as certainly it is the one last staff
upon which all may lean.
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