The Destiny of the Soul: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future LifeAlger, William Rounseville
Religion
The Destiny of the Soul: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life
Alger, William Rounseville
Future life -- Christianity -- Bibliography; Future life -- Christianity -- History of doctrines
new born child into the already constructed body which before has
only a vegetative life. The Germans call this representation
panspermismus, or the dissemination theory. Leibnitz, in his
celebrated monadology, carries the same view a great deal further.
He conceives the whole created universe, visible and invisible, to
consist of monads, which are not particles of matter, but
metaphysical points of power. These monads are all souls. They are
produced by what he calls fulgurations of God. The distinction
between fulguration and emanation is this: in the latter case the
procession is historically defined and complete; in the former
case it is momentaneous. The monads are radiated from the Divine
Will, forth through the creation, by the constant flashes of His
volition. All nature is composed of them, and nothing is
depopulated and dead. Their naked being is force, and their
indestructible predicates are perception, desire, tendency to
develop. While they lie dormant, their potential capacities all
inwrapped, they constitute what we entitle matter. When, by the
rising stir of their inherent longing, they leave their passive
state and reach a condition of obscure consciousness, they become
animals. Finally, they so far unwind their bonds and evolve their
facultative potencies as to attain the rank of rational minds in
the grade of humanity. Generation is merely the method by which
the aspiring monad lays the organic basis for the grouped building
of its body. Man is a living union of monads, one regent monad
presiding over the whole organization. That king monad which has
attained to full apperception, the free exercise of perfect
consciousness, is the immortal human soul. 9 Any labored attempt
to refute this ingenious doctrine is needless, since the doctrine
itself is but the developed structure of a speculative conception
with no valid basis of observed fact. It is a sheer hypothesis,
spun out of the self fed bowels of a priori assumption and
metaphysic fancy. It solves the problems only by changes of their
form, leaving the mysteries as numerous and deep as before. It is
a beautiful and sublime piece of latent poetry, the evolution and
architecture of which well display the wonderful genius of
Leibnitz. It is a more subtle and powerful process of thought than
Aristotle's Organon, a more pure and daring work of imagination
than Milton's Paradise Lost. But it spurns the tests of
experimental science, and is entitled to rank only among the
splendid curiosities of philosophy; a brilliant and plausible
theorem, not a sober and solid induction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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