A handbook of Freethought : $b containing in condensed and systematized form a vast amount of evidence against the superstitious doctrines of Christianity
Religion
A handbook of Freethought : $b containing in condensed and systematized form a vast amount of evidence against the superstitious doctrines of Christianity
Christianity -- Controversial literature; Free thought
Samuel Johnson: ("Oriental Religions," p. 543.) Various North-American
tribes believe that the soul of a dying person may be drawn into
the bosom of a sterile woman, or blown by the breath into that of
the nearest relative, and so come again to birth in the way that the
receiver desires.
Theodore Parker, John Wesley, Jeremy Taylor, Coleridge, Lamartine,
Agassiz, and hosts of other men well known to fame, taught that
animals as well as men, had immortal souls.
Brodie: (President of the Royal Society, 1858.) The mind of animals
is essentially the same as that of man. Every one familiar with the
dog will admit that that creature knows right from wrong, and is
conscious when he has committed a fault.
Du Bois-Reymond: With awe and wonder must the student of nature
regard that microscopic molecule of nervous substance which is the
seat of the laborious, constructive, orderly, loyal, dauntless soul
of the ant. It has developed itself to its present state through a
countless series of generations.
John Fiske: But the propriety of identifying soul and breath, which
really quits the body at its decease, has furnished the chief name
for the soul, not only to the Hebrew, the Sanskrit, and the classic
tongues; not only to German and English, where geist, and ghost,
according to Max Muller, have the meaning of "breath," and are akin
to such words as gas, gust, and geyser; but also to numerous barbaric
languages. ("Myths and Myth-Makers," p. 225.) The belief in wraiths has
survived into modern times, and now and then appears in that remnant
of primeval philosophy known as "Spiritualism," as for example, in
the case of the lady who "thought she saw her own father look in at
the church window at the moment he was dying at his own house." (Ib.,
p. 229.) The Kamtchadales expressly declare that all animals, even
flies and bugs, will live after death,--a belief, which, in our day,
has been indorsed on philosophical grounds by an eminent living
naturalist. (Ib., 230.) [Mr. Fiske refers to Agassiz.]
M. Figuier: Human souls are for the most part the surviving souls of
deceased animals; in general, the souls of precocious children like
Mozart come from nightingales, while the souls of great architects
have passed into them from beavers, and etc., etc. ("The To-morrow
of Death," p. 247.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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