And again about soul. What is soul? The theologian gets up and answers
at once that soul exists independent of the body. So be it. Then who has
the conception? And what is it like when you have got it? Have
Christians it? Then why can they not understand resurrection of the soul
without also the resurrection of the body? They cannot. Look at the
facts. It is such a fact it has actually forced itself into the creeds.
Angels have bodies and also wings. Ghosts have bodies and also clothes.
They are recognisable. I know a ghost who likes pork for supper. They
sometimes have horses and all sorts of additions. The body may be filmy,
but it is a body. Gas is filmy and quite as transparent as a ghost.
Perhaps the people who have put the transmigration of souls as one of
their religious tenets really have the conception of a soul apart from
any body. I doubt it even here. But this also will come later.
Meanwhile, when I use the word "soul" or "spirit," I do not infer that
it is separable from the body or inseparable. I mean simply the essence
of that which is man; the identity, the ego existing in man as he _is_.
I think, indeed, this is the correct meaning. We say that a city has
fifty thousand souls. Have they no bodies? When I wrote "The Soul of a
People" I certainly did not omit their bodies or ignore them. On the
contrary. And no one supposed I did. I do not either mean to postulate
the inseparability of body and soul. Soul means essence.
Finally, there is the word reason. What is that? By reason I mean the
faculty of arranging and grouping facts. It is the power of perspective
which sees facts in their proper relation to other facts. The facts
themselves are supplied as regards the outer world by the senses of
sight and hearing and taste, of touch and sympathy; and as regards the
inner world of sensations, such as hate, and love, and fear by the
ability to feel those sensations.
Reason itself cannot supply facts. It can but arrange them. By placing a
series of facts in due order the existence of other facts may be
suspected, as the existence of Neptune was deduced from certain known
aberrations. The observation of Neptune by the telescope followed.
In other words, reason may be called "the science of facts."
* * * * *
I offer no apology for this introduction. Most of the confusion of
thought, most of the mistiness of argument, is due to the fact that
people habitually use words without any clear idea of their meaning. A
reviewer of "The Soul of a People" declared that Buddhism was a
philosophy, not a religion. I asked him to give me a list of what he
accepted as religions, and then to furnish a definition of religion that
would include all these and exclude Buddhism. I am still waiting. No
doubt he had never tried to really define what he meant by his words.
Instead of using words as counters of a fixed value he threw them about
as blank cheques, meaning anything or nothing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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