THE PROBLEM OF A FUTURE LIFE

 MOST unsophisticated people have no difficulty in believing in a life after death, especially if they have been taught this belief in infancy. In that period of simple trust in their superiors, children will accept what they are taught, and in most instances, the beliefs adopted at that time remain stable. In many people the beliefs formed in childhood cannot be shaken; in others, if the old beliefs are destroyed, the change proves disastrous. The effect of the change, however, depends on the importance which the belief holds in the economy of the personal life. If it be the one belief that has organized all a man's hopes and ideals, any rude shock given it will demolish the whole fabric of character. The immortality of the soul is so central to the hopes of many people, especially of the uneducated, that they will cling to it against all odds and resist all argument to give it up. Taken in with the mother's milk, so to speak, and organizing about it all the fundamental interests of life, it will either resist argument of any kind or yield to it only with the surrender of human ideals.

 There are many, of course, who can shift the pivot of interest to ideals of the present life. But they have some ability to think, and have sufficiently strong will to shake off the sense of dependence which characterizes the child. Many people remain children all their lives; it is they who suffer most from the shock of change of belief. But those who grow to independence of judgment may readily stand the shock of skepticism and do so whenever they can substitute another interest for the one that was lost. This class, however, represents the minority of the human race, and usually comprises its leaders. Some of them boldly adopt skepticism and its consequences. Others attempt to justify their primitive beliefs in the name of philosophy. The unsophisticated classes will follow one or another of these leaders according to their temperaments.

If they cling to the interests which have centered about immortality, they accept that belief on faith, or authority. But if they are rebellious or conscious of the real difficulties in believing it, they doubt it or give it up.

 'The one consideration which determines the attitude of mind towards this and all other beliefs is the criterion of reality. To the unsophisticated mind this criterion is sense-perception; even when it believes in what transcends sensation, it tries to conceive this assumed reality as still like that of sense in all but constant accessibility to perception. This conception, of course, goes to show that the unsophisticated easily abandon their most natural standard of reality. But they cannot give a consistent account of their procedure; and are at the mercy of those who rigidly insist on sense-perception as the test of reality. It is characteristic of the scientific mind to accept this same criterion of truth; in this respect it is like the unsophisticated mind. But they differ in the greater tenacity with which the scientific mind consciously clings to the standard. It is true that scientific men also readily abandon this standard for one which acknowledges realities transcending sense-perception—for example, atoms, ions, electrons, ether; but these men differ from the unsophisticated in adopting the maxim that all provable truth rests upon sense-perception. To them provable truth is what they can make another person believe by reproducing in him sensations which compel belief. The unsophisticated mind has no such rigid standard of evidence. It accepts as subjectively true much that does not appeal to sense. If the mind can see the truth for itself it will not require proof in sensory processes; but if it cannot see the truth without external proof, such objective evidence requires sense-perception. Herein lies the whole difference between the unsophisticated and the scientific mind. For uncertainty, according to the scientific mind, attaches to every belief or statement which cannot vouch for itself in terms of sense-perception. It may be true, but it is not provable, unless represented in sense-pictures or experiences. Science may accept facts not directly represented in sensation, but they must be logically involved in what sensation attests. The final test for science is some sensation constant or easily produced, under proper conditions, which will enforce the conclusion. The unsophisticated mind, however, does not consciously abandon sense-perception as its standard of truth. It simply has not analyzed the processes which determine conviction.

 There are many degrees between these two extremes. The half scientific and half unsophisticated mind will combine the standards of belief in all sorts of ways; and it is in this intermediate class that all the perplexities arise. The scientific mind that does not care for consequences, moral or otherwise, can accept without compunction or remorse the limits which sense-perception prescribes to belief. But ethical minds, less pugnacious and more sensitive, halt before accepting the guidance of skepticism, and struggle with might and main to save their ideals and beliefs from the corrosion of doubt.

 I have stated the case with some care, allowing for the criticism always made against wide generalizations. It would be easier and perhaps would satisfy certain skeptical minds, if I asserted that the test of all truth is sense-perception as that is naively understood. Those who wish to perplex the naive mind may make this contention feeling secure that unsophisticated persons will not contest it. But while it is true that the test of reality is always sense-perception, it is true with a qualification. This qualification is, that sensation is not so simple a matter as the skeptic would like us to believe. Besides simple or pure sensations there are other mental states, which we usually represent by the term judgment. This term was rendered necessary by the existence of illusions. While an illusion is in fact an error of judgment or inference, it is so closely connected with sense-perception that our normal habit is to represent sense-perception as needing correction by judgment. The meaning of sensation is therefore limited to the simple occurrence of reaction upon external stimulus through one of the sensory end-organs; so defined it is not a complete standard of truth at all, but the elemental datum which gives rise to knowledge. Processes of judgment on constant and variable sensory experiences enable us to ascertain the meaning of things much more accurately than do the separate sensations. The naive, uncritical mind does not go beyond the most elementary use of judgment. It discovers few illusions and ignores those which it does discover. The critical scientific mind endeavors to find unity in a variable experience, as better evidence of truth than that found in unorganized experience.

 In studying the question of a future life, the unsophisticated mind follows authority or its wishes, or, if it relies on experience at all, accepts what the more critical mind resolves into illusions and hallucinations. The primitive savage accepted dreams and apparitions as satisfactory proof of another life, thus relying on real or apparent sensory data. But when the critical or philosophical mind approached the problem, difficulties arose, which obliged the belief in a future life to seek refuge in some transcendental philosophy or be abandoned. In all countries where philosophic habits of mind arose, one of the first dogmas questioned was that of the immortality of the soul; with the growth of materialism the doubt thus raised was strengthened. Previous teaching had maintained that matter and spirit are two independent realities, and that spirit survives death. But philosophy distrusted the idea of two independent substances or realities, especially if one of them seemed to interfere with the fixed order of nature. There is no doubt that primitive believers in spirits thought them capricious and as mischievous as any power over nature might be. Those who observed certain regularities in the world, certain fixed laws, either had to deny any interference with them or to assign to spirit a place in the world which would make it seem ineffectual and unrelated to the causal series of events. With sense-perception as the criterion of truth, the critical mind had a tendency to accept matter as the fundamental reality of the world; if it conceded the existence of spirit at all, it did so, not in response to the evidence, but in order to avoid trouble. In accordance with its standard of belief, it usually denied the evidence or dogmatically asserted the non-existence of spirit; this is the position of both materialism and agnosticism. Agnosticism means that we have no basis for either a positive or a negative conclusion; it admits that we cannot know that spirit does not exist. This, in fact, is the only tenable position for any intelligent skeptic. It follows from his maintenance of sense-perception as the test of reality. The absence of sense-perception of spirit does not prove that spirit does not exist, if we define spirit as transcending sense-perception. Such absence merely shows that the belief lacks satisfactory evidence. But materialism denies the reality of spirit, on what it supposes to be satisfactory evidence that mental phenomena are but products of the brain. It is this theory, firmly rooted in many minds, that disturbs the belief in a future life.

 Materialism has a long history and stands for two rather distinct conceptions. In the present age, it is the result of several sets of facts, which we can only briefly state. Materialism has two forms: sensational materialism and philosophical materialism. The first of these is opposed to idealism and the second to spiritualism. If spiritualism and idealism were identical there would be but one form of materialism; but they are far from identical, as every philosopher well knows. Most materialistic philosophers evade the real issue by contrasting materialism with idealism, and allow the layman to think that they are quite orthodox on the doctrine of immortality, though they are careful to leave their teaching on this point indefinite. This sensational materialism is founded on the naive view of the world as presented to sense-perception. The idealist has become convinced that knowledge and reality are not adequately expressed in sense­experience; and as the material world is supposed to be represented by sense-perception (though the scientific view of the material world is not so expressed) the idealist calls that view of the world materialism which is more or less interchangeable with naive realism: namely, the view that sensation rightly represents the nature world of matter and hence of reality. The idealist denies materialism thus conceived, by asserting that some sort of transcendental reality exists behind sensation.

 But a man may be at the same time an idealist and a philosophical materialist. Philosophical materialism is based upon as supersensible a conception of matter as that maintained by any spiritualism or theism. Like idealism, it does not rely upon sense-perception as the test of truth. It regards the real nature of things as hidden from the senses. It bases the whole sensible world upon supersensible realities as its elements or cause. This philosophic materialism began at the time of Empedocles and Democritus and was developed by the Epicureans. The atoms which constitute the basis of the whole sensory world were regarded as supersensible: it was their combination in the various forms of things that affects the senses and explains the world as we know it in sense perception. These earlier materialists, however, admitted the existence of souls, as fine material or "ethereal" organism. But some of them denied the survival of this ethereal organism, which corresponded to the astral body of the theosophists and the "spiritual body" of St. Paul. Christianity tried to prove by the story of the resurrection that this soul did not perish, though its theory of the bodily resurrection made the belief only more difficult and required a most elaborate philosophy to sustain it. The real conception of the resurrection at the time, at least among most intelligent people, as indicated in the New Testament, was that of apparitions, the visible appearance of the "spiritual body" after death. Christianity thus directly denied the materialist's view of death as the end of all. It did not deny the existence of atoms; it simply affirmed the survival and reappearance of the "spiritual body," which, for all practical purposes, was synonymous with the soul. The materialist was challenged either to abandon or to modify his theory.

 In the course of time the materialist chose the latter course. He gave up the hypothesis of an ethereal organism as the source of consciousness, and connected consciousness directly with the body or brain as a collection of atoms. Consciousness thus became a function of a complex organism rather than a function of a spirit or soul; and, as all functions of the physical body perish, the same fate was held to await consciousness. This view seems to be satisfactorily upheld by normal experience. Mental states are accompanied by physical structure; when this structure is dissolved by death there are no traces, at least in normal experience, of the independent existence of consciousness. It was quite natural to infer that it does not survive. It is true that the conclusion is not absolutely assured, but if there is no evidence whatever on the contrary side, we have at least to confess total ignorance; and the certainty that all other functions of the organism perish will establish a strong probability that consciousness is no exception to the rule. Its survival can be proved only by showing that it is not a function similar to those that manifestly perish, or by bringing forward actual instances of such survival.

 This outline of the situation created by modern materialism shows just how we have to attack the problem. We have to adduce evidence that consciousness is not a function of the physical body. We can no longer rely on the philosophical method, which was based on the theory that consciousness is a unique phenomenon, which cannot be reduced to mechanical equivalents, nor conceived as a by-product of the physical organism. It is true enough that consciousness has not been reduced to mechanical laws nor identified with any chain of physical events. But this failure is no proof that consciousness is not derived from physical phenomena. The burden of proof is thrown on the man who affirms that it is so derived, but the question is left open. Common sense could not believe that light and sound are vibrations, but science proved that they are, even though the senses do not directly reveal the fact. If, therefore, light and sound can be reduced to supersensible physical phenomena, may not consciousness be similarly explained? At any rate the philosopher could not dogmatize on the subject, and the nature of consciousness had to remain an open question; yet the philosophic proof for the existence of the soul depended on the assumption that we know enough of its nature to deny its physical character.

 The whole problem was shifted over to science, which is occupied primarily with facts and only secondarily with the nature of reality. Philosophy tried to explain consciousness and to infer its survival from a theory of its nature. Science let its nature alone and tried to study its behavior. It is concerned primarily with evidence and secondarily with explanation, while philosophy in the past has been too much occupied with explanations and too little with evidence. Science begs no questions as to the nature of anything. It first ascertains the facts and then expresses the nature of a thing in accordance with those facts as its effects or manifestations. When the philosophic method of proving immortality broke down, there was nothing left but to apply to science for the solution. Philosophy, in all its development, had depended on science for its premises, though it was disposed to admit this dependence only very grudgingly, if at all. The success of science, however, in overthrowing many philosophic beliefs, and especially religious beliefs, gave that method the highest authority in the determination of truth. As it pronounced in favor of materialism, it aroused the most determined opposition of all who were interested in preserving such a belief as survival after death, whether they undertook to defend it by religion and faith or by philosophy. But there is no escape from the verdict of science; on it depends the proof or disproof of survival. Theology and philosophy are now discredited authorities; if science cannot ascertain facts to prove immortality the belief is negligible. We may still insist on hoping for survival, but our hope will not have the credentials that the present age requires for all its beliefs. In ages when wishes and hopes are accepted as adequate reasons for belief, faith may survive; but when the demand for assured evidence is made, science must take up the task of making a negative or an affirmative decision.

 That task involves the question, whether individual consciousness can be isolated from its apparently fixed, but really temporary, connection with the body. The fact is, that science has never proved that we do not survive. It has but established a theory on which the doubt or denial seems natural. While it knows that, in normal experience, consciousness is associated with an organism and that, when the organism perishes, there seem to be no traces of this consciousness, it knows only that in normal experience it simply is without evidence for survival. It does not have proof of annihilation. Its theory is but a working hypothesis, one of great strength, it is true, and convincing in proportion to the neglect of phenomena which appear to suggest the survival of consciousness. Yet it has not demonstrated the destruction of consciousness. Nor is it easy to do so, while certain phenomena continue to throw doubt on the conclusions of materialism. The present strength of materialism is due entirely to its neglect of these phenomena. It has considered the facts which fit its theory and has disregarded all that are inconsistent with it; and now psychic research, employing the same scientific method, has become the Nemesis of materialism.

Psychic research endeavors to isolate an individual consciousness, or to ascertain facts which prove that isolation, by the same method that a chemist uses when he proves the existence of a new element.

 The facts purporting to attest survival are apparitions and alleged communication with the dead. There are other supernormal phenomena of great interest, but they do not directly prove the existence of spirit, and perhaps would not even suggest it to critical minds. Apparitions and mediumistic phenomena, on the contrary, if their validity can be proved, certainly conform to the scientific demand for the isolation of an individual consciousness. They at least are the kind of phenomena which we might expect if spirits exist and can produce any effect in the physical world. They show that it is not necessary to decide the nature of consciousness before believing in survival, that we may prove or show to be probable the fact of survival, while leaving the nature of consciousness wholly unexamined. The result may give rise to a philosophy, but does not depend on it.

 Before the adoption of the scientific method, men paid the penalty for being less thorough than the situation required. They exposed their belief to the corrosive influence of the doubt cast by further knowledge. We have arrived at a stage of culture in which the faiths of the past have lost their power. The triumphs of science have established the confidence of men in its practical value and in its ability to explain the universe. 'The intelligence of the world is on its side; and mankind must follow intelligence always, if it is to gain its ends. Evidence, proof, reason, fact instead of faith, hope and desire influence belief. Whatever value these latter have, rests on the basis of proved truth, not on imagination and arbitrary hopes originating in the emotions and the will.

 The problem is, therefore, not to bolster up faith without science, but to establish the truth by science, so that faith will become either unnecessary or rational. The authority of the priesthood is lost. If it acknowledges the conclusions of science, it can regain its power, but only on that condition. The intelligent world no longer takes its ipse dixit [an assertion made but not proved] as final, but asks for evidence, which science alone can furnish. Materialism also must no longer select for consideration only the phenomena which support its preconceived theories, based upon a partial view of nature. It must take into account the exceptional phenomena as well as the regular routine of experience. If it fails to do this, it is exposed to the same criticism that it has directed against faith. It is only another dogmatism to neglect the rare facts of nature, a dogmatism the less excusable because science professes to found its, beliefs on facts and not on preconceptions. Even in physical science, the exceptional phenomena of nature have deeper significance than ordinary occurrences. The discovery of Roentgen rays was due to an accident. The discovery of argon was due to the observation of an anomaly in the behavior of nitrogen, the neglect of which would have resulted in a false conception of that element. It is, therefore, not beyond the function of science to study the unexplained phenomena of mind. They cannot be explained as merely abnormal events. Whatever place abnormality may have in them, there is a relation between some of them and events not known to the subject, which makes some new explanation imperative. The facts have to be explained, and they are not explained by the usual theories. To deny the facts is not to explain them. The question is: do they demonstrate the isolation of consciousness from the body?

 Of course, to laymen, the problem does not seem so technical. They follow public opinion in their conception of the issues. In all ages, being unable to investigate or philosophize for themselves, they have relied on the intelligent members of the community to furnish them their science and their philosophy. They have accepted all ideas on authority. When the intelligent classes were priests and philosophers and believed in immortality, the laymen felt assured of the truth of the belief. But when these same classes of men doubt or deny it, the laymen either follow them into skepticism, or allow the belief to atrophy. They may not have the courage to deny it altogether, but they feel their inability to defend it except by sheer force of will or faith. Niceties of scientific method do not enter into their processes of fixing their beliefs. They simply seize the easiest way of deciding the question, either yielding to authority on one side or the other, or stubbornly standing by their emotional preferences.