Aiming to confine ourself to our range of known facts and to considerations within the reach of the lay brother, let us inquire,
What Is the Soul?
Can we know its essential nature? Can we ascertain its attributes or properties? Can we define it as something capable of existing in a conscious condition separated from the body? Can we scientifically determine its quality? Has any one seen a soul apart from a body? There are chiefly two things which we purpose to use in answering these questions, (a) common sense, (b) the Scriptures; and we shall proceed on the belief that these are within reach of every one who may follow this thesis. Without taking up these questions categorically, there are also two phases under which we shall treat the subject: (1) Scientifically; (2) Scripturally.
I. Scientifically.
1. On Necessary Consciousness.
A glory of mellow sunlight is poured from the blue sky upon our portion of creation, this beautiful spring day, and the earth responds to the genial rays of the fervent sun. The early flowers are rushing into blossom; the bluebird’s back reflects the azure overhead; on yonder twig a warbler, whose song is sweeter than his vesture is bright, makes music for my pleasure as sweetly as if he were doing it for himself instead.
But not a sight in all this joyous scene is half so fair as your own sweet babe, as she lies in dimpled sleep on yonder couch. Asleep; aye, with never a dream perhaps—no thought, no dream, the mind a perfect blank. But for that reason has she no soul? Because she is unconscious, because she neither thinks, feels, nor wills, has her soul left her body? Or tho she be not yet advanced to that age when consciousness dawns, shall you say she is a soulless thing? Her fond and happy mother, just at hand, would excommunicate you for a heretic, apostate, and brute at the mere suggestion.
The sum of all this is, that the soul (whatever it is) is not necessarily conscious at all times. When you are sleeping soundly, have you no soul, tho no single dream flits through your passive fancy? I shall do you the honor to believe your soul remains. Your soul, then, is not necessarily conscious at all times.
We cut the following from a newspaper, in the month of March, 1894:—
Horace Tetlow of Philadelphia has been restored, by a surgical operation, to reason. He uttered the other day his first intelligent words since the Conemaugh flood, Friday, May 31, 1889, when his skull was crushed by a piece of falling timber. Since that time he has been an imbecile. Last week he was examined by physicians, when trephining was decided upon. The operation was performed, a bone button the size of a dollar being removed. The patient upon opening his eyes said, “It comes from the dam.” His mind is a blank as to the occurrences of the last five years; but he recalls the events of his life preceding the accident that rendered him speechless.
Query: Where was Horace Tetlow’s conscious (thinking, feeling, willing) soul during these five years?
No argument that we have ever yet encountered has been able to remove from our mind the common-sense conclusion that, if an infant has a soul before it reaches the age of thought; if after reaching that age she may fall into a perfectly unconscious condition in sleep and still retain her soul; if she can by the force of a blow or by chloroform be made unconscious for hours, and yet no one think of denying that she has a soul; if by some sad accident she may be bereft of reason and become an idiot, and every one admit that she retains her soul; it is altogether too much of an assumption, a conclusion entirely gratuitous in its nature, to say, had she died before reaching years of accountability, or while in a dreamless sleep, or while accidentally unconscious, or while an imbecile, that somehow “in the dissolving chemistry” of death her “immortal” soul would have become eternally conscious. Too much; too much for common sense!
The obvious bearing of this on the condition of the soul in death is that, whatever or wherever it is, it is not necessarily conscious.
Necessary consciousness must therefore be excluded from a scientific definition of soul.
2. Do We Know What the Soul Is?
Two other corollaries follow from the preceding conclusion: (a) the soul is not one’s thoughts. Neither will any one claim for a moment that it is feeling, either mental or physical, as the mental experience of grief, or the physical sensation of a burn. No one will attempt to support such an idea; for tho a person under the influence of chloroform feels no pain of any kind, yet it is not because his soul is dead or absent. The same is true of the mental fact called willing. A sleeping or unconscious man wills nothing; none the less his soul is in him.
(b) But that the soul is capable of, and at times does actually think, feel, and will, is universally admitted; else the blessedness of heaven, the terror of Gehenna, and all theories and doctrines built on the idea of the soul’s conscious existence at some time and in some place, are chaff, myths, folly.
But to be capable of doing a thing is not to be the thing done. A bee makes honey; but a bee is not honey. The soul thinks, feels, wills; but thinking, feeling, willing, are not the soul.
The thoughtful person will here say that, since it is the mind which thinks, feels, and wills, we are trying to identify soul with mind. We disclaim the intention, but remark that from the standpoint of science the two are indistinguishable. Practically the science of psychology deals only with human soul (refusing that element to animals), and identifies it with mind; so that every casualty to the mind in life, insanity, sleep, accidental unconsciousness, hypnotic trance, and the event of death, must be affirmed likewise of the soul.
That this is not the full idea of the soul to be gathered from revelation, perhaps needs to be here stated; but the supernatural has not yet been included within the sphere of science. This phase we shall consider later.
Again, science knows nothing of what the mind is in its essence or substance, if it be such. Psychology deals only with the phenomena of mind—mental facts. Whether its quality be material or immaterial, science professes only to be ignorant. Scientifically, therefore, we know nothing of what the soul is. Much less does either nature or science know anything of natural immortality. Science does not define soul any more than it does mind. The word soul is simply a convenient symbol of an unknown something with whose functions or faculties we are to some extent familiar. We may indeed from this point of view go further in regard to the perishable or imperishable nature of the human soul. The more skilful and profound the investigations of physiologists and biologists, the more notorious becomes the fact that conscious mind is inseparable from matter. No microscope, no telescope, ever yet revealed in earth or sky a mind disassociated from matter. There is no evidence that naked thoughts flit about like angels in the atmosphere or ether. So far as the survival of mind is concerned as a separate entity after the body has suffered the mortal stroke, science stands mute as the sphinx in the desert sands. Even tho mind were indubitably demonstrated to be a function of matter, this would give no encouragement to the development hypothesis of Darwin; because it is manifestly not true that mind pertains to all matter, since inorganic matter—stones, water, air—must be excluded, as also the whole organic kingdom of plants and animals, save only man, and man alone as regards his brain. The fact is, that it was only to that very small part of matter organized as human brain, that God in the beginning gave the touch of inspiration that awakens consciousness. Thus Job 32:8,
“There is a spirit in man; and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.”
Not far removed from this is the conclusion of an eminent, scientific thinker of the day, who, tho so pronounced an evolutionist as to say that “there is no more reason for supposing that Darwin’s theory will ever be gainsaid, than for supposing that the Copernican astronomy will sometime be overthrown,” still confesses that the view that mind, or soul, is “an effluence from Godhead, which under certain conditions becomes incarnated in perishable forms of matter, is doubtless the view most consonant with the present state of our knowledge.” To be sure this is only his guess, and is not to be regarded as scientific; but it shows that evolution can not account for mind, or soul, as a natural attribute or product of matter, for he himself acknowledges in so many words, “That it can not possibly be the product of any cunning arrangement of material particles is demonstrated beyond peradventure by what we now know of the correlation of physical forces.”
Hence our common-sense conclusion is that the soul is a gift of God. But, be it remarked, this is not to say that it was necessarily a conscious entity before it became joined to matter; that is, that it pre-existed in a rational state; nor is it to say that it must remain conscious when, in the event of death, it goes back to God as life that He gave.
Tho we have here stepped outside of the realm of pure science, we trust we are still within that of common sense; and this view of the soul is confirmed by the case of Adam, who was first formed from the dust—his brain organized—then God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Not natural, but supernatural. The reason that mental science denies soul to animals is simply because they lack mind—the rational faculty.
Strictly speaking, science finds only the fact of mind; revelation tells its source.
[The above is the second article in the series; the next paper will consider some “Testimony on Soul Survival.”]
