But, it may be replied, it is not open to any one handling the question
of Immortality from the side of Science to remain neutral as to the
question of fact. It is not enough to announce that he has no addition
to make to the positive argument. This may be permitted with reference
to other points of contact between Science and Religion, but not with
this. We are told this question is settled--that there is no positive
side. Science meets the entire conception of Immortality with a direct
negative. In the face of a powerful consensus against even the
possibility of a Future Life, to content oneself with saying that
Science pretended to no argument in favor of it would be at once
impertinent and dishonest. We must therefore devote ourselves for a
moment to the question of possibility.
The problem is, with a material body and a mental organization
inseparably connected with it, to bridge the grave. Emotion, volition,
thought itself, are functions of the brain. When the brain is impaired,
they are impaired. When the brain is not, they are not. Everything
ceases with the dissolution of the material fabric; muscular activity
and mental activity perish alike. With the pronounced positive
statements on this point from many departments of modern Science we are
all familiar. The fatal verdict is recorded by a hundred hands and with
scarcely a shadow of qualification. "Unprejudiced philosophy is
compelled to reject the idea of an individual immortality and of a
personal continuance after death. With the decay and dissolution of its
material substratum, through which alone it has acquired a conscious
existence and become a person, and upon which it was dependent, the
spirit must cease to exist." [l] To the same effect, Vogt: "Physiology
decides definitely and categorically against individual immortality, as
against any special existence of the soul. The soul does not enter the
foetus like the evil spirit into persons possessed, but is a product of
the development of the brain, just as muscular activity is a product of
muscular development, and secretion a product of glandular development."
After a careful review of the position of recent Science with regard to
the whole doctrine, Mr. Graham sums up thus: "Such is the argument of
Science, seemingly decisive against a future Life. As we listen to her
array of syllogisms, our hearts die within us. The hopes of men, placed
in one scale to be weighed, seem to fly up against the massive weight of
her evidence, placed in the other. It seems as if all our arguments were
vain and unsubstantial, as if our future expectations were the foolish
dreams of children, as if there could not be any other possible verdict
arrived at upon the evidence brought forward." [2]
[1] Buechner: "Force and Matter," 3d ed., p. 232.
[2] "The Creed of Science," p. 169.
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