The exceeding difficulty of getting a strictly unbiased summary of the scientific conclusions concerning Mind, or Soul, may be illustrated by a sentence from the works of Prof. Ladd, of Yale; which, however, with some modification, will answer:—
As to the first and last things of the mind—its origin and destiny, its mortality or corruption—Physiological Psychology finds itself unable to pronounce.—Phys. Psy., p. 687.
The only trouble with this statement is that it is worded in such a way as to convey the impression that the soul is immortal and that nothing is known to the contrary. By the insertion of the words “immortality or incorruption” after the word “corruption,” with the addition of a strong presumption against its immortality (since we know absolutely nothing of mind separate from matter), we shall have a sufficiently accurate summary of the conclusions not only of physiological psychology, but of science in general.
Mind—Metaphysics.
It is worthy of note how anxious defenders of natural immortality are, when they find the current of science dead against them, to throw discussion of the subject into the realm of logic, talk, mist, apparently with the despairing hope that some expert juggler with dialectics may conjure up a phantom soul from the fog of an argument. Thus the author above quoted adds,—“It [physiological psychology] entrusts the full consideration of these questions . . . to rational psychology, to ethics, to metaphysics, and to theology.”
But in regard to the first three of these studies the learned professor seems to have allowed his drowning fright to grasp at a straw. Theology, dealing as it does with a revelation, belongs to a different class from the others, which are simply products of the human mind, and must fail to give certainty of knowledge beyond that obtainable by physical science. This is well stated by Prof. R. M. Wenley of the University of Michigan in another connection. He says:—
No basis can be found for the idea that philosophy has means of access to special knowledge denied to science; that one can afford to neglect science in favor of rational forms; that the conclusions of physics, chemistry, and biology are subject to revision at a higher [human] tribunal; or that the work of science is a monstrous delusion. On the contrary, there is every reason for insisting that science and philosophy are intertwined inextricably. . . . Both are upon the same closed universe. . . . Their disciplines alike end in approximation and hypothesis.
Hence as rational psychology, ethics, and metaphysics are simply human products, worked up from materials lying altogether within the knowable limits of a “closed universe;” and when science, using these same materials, says that nothing can be affirmed with reference to the immortality of the soul, it is a strange species of logic that could make the above-named branches of knowledge prove diametrically the opposite!
When the phoenix rises from the ashes of its progenitors; when the Wandering Jew is captured and exhibited in the pulpits of the land as a proof of immortality; when a living Mahatma from the sacred fastnesses of Tibet is wafted on the subtle substance of thought across lands and seas, as witches ride astraddle of their mystic broomsticks; when the Missing Link hob-nobs about our streets in an automobile; then, perhaps, we shall begin to hope that philosophers may find the long-sought stone which will enable them to transmute the cold steel of science into a golden demonstration of inherent immortality.
What then?
“Is this the whole sad story of creation,
Told by its breathing myriads o’er and o’—,
One glimpse of day, then black annihilation,
A sunlit passage to a sunless shore?”
To this mournful appeal no answer can be given—the aching heart must ever throb in dumb and fearful uncertainty—unless a revelation shall come from without this “closed universe.”
[“The Meaning of Soul in Scripture Revelation” is the next article, No. 7 in the series.]
