HOPE OF A HEREAFTER.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LVII, Issue 17651, 11 December 1920, Page 1 (Supplement)

HOPE OF A HEREAFTER.

AN INVINCIBLE INSTINCT. BY MA.TAXGA. The hope of a hereafter is a human instinct that will .not down. It has do-ed man , footsteps through all the way of his ageless progress. Along with the development of his self-consciousness this wonder•Hß wish that he might persist, superior | to the change and decay of matter— an i actor whose exit should not be forced by | the removal of the stage properties-has 1 grown. Job put the universal ouestion. " If a | man die. shall he live again?" The old : reeks debated whether the relationship j Ot man's spirit to his body was merely .mat of the harmony to the harp, ceasing ; "hen the strings were snapped, or that of he rower to the boat, capable of surviving ! .he wreck of his craft. And we are all j interested, more or less intensely, in the •• question. However we may busy ourselves in business or in the social whirl we never get quite beyond the reach of it. touc§ n we are safest, t}lelO ' s a sunset tone <J. A death' fr ° m * flowerbell - someone's A chorus-ending from Euripedcs— fea = 8t 3 enougk for fi "y h °P« B »nd Socrates, after his condemnation to death, was asked bv Crito—" How shall we bury you?" "Just as vou please," replied the old philosopher, " if only vou can catch me, and I do not escape from you. . . . Do not say at my interment that ' Socrates' is laid out, or is carried out, or is buried. . . . You must have a good courage, and say that you bury my body." All the world has been in the group of listening friends gathered round that old hero of manv a fight with sword and soul, and bowed to 'the wisdom of his reply. The Attitude of Science.

There was a day, it is true, when it was held that the life of the spirit was a product of the life of the body The brain is the organ of mind— the old formula; therefore, it is the brain that thinks, and there can be no consciousness without the body; therefore, further, the dissolution of the body is the end of all. But the flaw in the reasoning has been mercilessly exposed. The brain is the organ of the mind, but it does not theretore follow that the brain does the thinking William James, Harvard's brilliant professor of philosophy, slew the unscientific assumption with'the keen reasoning of his famous Ingersoll lecture on " Human Immortality." "When the physiologist who thinks that his science cuts off all hope of immortality pronounces the phrase, ' Thought is a function of the brain.' he thinks of the matter just as he thinks when he says, ( Steam is a function of the tea kettle,' ' Light is a function of the electric circuit.' ' Power is a. function of the moving waterfall.' In these latter cases the several material objects have the function of inwardly creating or engendering their effects, and their function must be called productive function. Just so, he thinks, it must be with the brain." James showed that such productive function is, however, not the only kind of function with which, we are familiar, even in physical things; we have experience of releasing and transmitting function, in which .the effect is allowed or facilitated by the mechanism, not created by it. So the brain makes possible the particular manifestation »of consciousness known to earthly experience, "and when finally a brain stops acting altogether, ordecays, that special stream of consciousness which it subserved will vanish entirely from the natural world ; :1 but ■« the sphere of being that supplied the consciousness would still be intact, and in that more.real world with which, even whilst here, it was continuous, the consciousness might, in ways unknown to us, continue still." So William James drew (as he phrased it) the fangs of cerebralistic materialism. Mind's Superiority' to" Matter. m A realisation of the great gap between mind and matter makes a materialistic view of the mind impossble, and proves how unreasonable is the' belief that the brain produces thought. How immense that gap is! Tyndall 'acknowledged it in his epoch-making address to representative scientists assembled at Belfast: " The continuity between molecular processes and the phenomena of consciousness is the rock upon which materialism must inevitably split whenever it pretends to be acomplete philosophy of the human mind." A recent book by the Emeritus Professor of Physiology in the University of Glasgow emphasises the fact of the great gulf. "As a matter of fact, we are met everywhere with phenomena which cannot be explained by our present knowledge of physical, and chemical science. . . . We need not proclaim what we do not know, and assert that all of these phenomena are in reality physical, because this is simply begging the question. There are phenomena, however, which we may feel assured can never be so explained. Those of a mental kind can never*be thus accounted for, and no metaphysical subtleties, either from a materialistic or an idealistic standpoint, will ever satisfy the mind. How are we to give a physiological explanation of human personality?" Common sense and candour compel the admission that personal survival and continuity, despite changes the body can provoke no valid scientific objection ; indeed, the accepted dictum of physiologists of to-day, that practically a new body is possessed by us every year as a result of a continuous death of the body's tissues, is in itself an argument for personality's survival of physiological death. Men cling tenaciously to the hope of that survival. Some few may be without it, some -feign indifference to it; but the average sane man holds it very definitely and frankly. And he holds 'it "however slender may be the positive evidence for its reasonableness. Two United States —Emerson vouches for the story —studiously investigated the matter together for a long time. They reached no satisfactory solution. One retired from public life and went to live at a distance. They met again twenty-five vears later in a crowded reception at White House When they had shaken hands there was a moment of silence. Then, "Any light. ' Albert?" asked one. "None," was "the reply. " Any light, Lewis?" " None." The" parted that evening for the last time. Emerson urges that their persistent search, though resultless, was itself the strongest of proofs. Intimations of Immortality. For the life we know is characterised by the fitting of opportunies to capacities. Nature makes no half-hinges. The motion in the ether meets the eye's capacity for light. Sound waves abound for the ear. The lamb's bleat and : the baby's clutch are met by a maternal care. Is this normal longing for an after-life a cry with no possible answer? Is it the one yearning in all the wide universe for which there is no provision, the Ishmael of the instincts? Or does the Creator keep His word with us, as Emerson believed? Do not the broken arches ' of this life demand "the perfect round" of heaven, if there be justice as a cardinal principle of the universe? There are lives imprisoned, stunted, twisted by the unseeing circumstances of earth ; are these to find no compensation anywhere? Or, take the great sweep of life's programme, the whole range of creation leading up to man's mental and moral capacities; are these things to lack justification because a short human life fails to give opportunity for fulfilment? Pietro, the tyrant of Florence, in a capricious mood, ordered Michael. Angelo to mould a statue in snow—in snow, that an Italian sun would melt in a day. As a senseless waste of genius, that was a trifle compared with th& destruction that. death's ending of all would involve. All life is an unsolvable riddle if the crowning product of earth is to be destroyed as one blows out a candle.