The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918Various
History
The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918
Various
American periodicals
"The materialistic assumption that the life of the soul ends with the
life of the body is perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless
assumption that is known to the history of philosophy. No evidence for
it can be alleged beyond the familiar fact that during the present life
we know Soul only in its association with Body, and therefore cannot
discover disembodied soul without dying ourselves. This fact must always
prevent us from obtaining direct evidence for the belief in the soul's
survival. But a negative presumption is not created by the absence of
proof in cases where, in the nature of things, proof is inaccessible.
With his illegitimate hypothesis of annihilation, the materialist
transgresses the bounds of experience quite as widely as the poet who
sings of the New Jerusalem with its river of life and its streets of
gold. Scientifically speaking, there is not a particle of evidence for
either view."
On this his biographer justly comments:
"This positive statement will be more seriously questioned now than at
the time when Fiske wrote. The many able investigators engaged in
probing scientifically the mysteries of psychical phenomena, are
bringing forth a mass of evidence which goes to show the presence of a
form of existence which transcends mere physical existence."
And as showing Fiske's attitude toward the religion around him, his
biographer says:
"In Fiske's mind Christianity was the mightiest drama in human
civilization: it was his rare gift that he could appreciate it with the
feeling of the poet as well as with the critical judgment of the
philosopher."
The passages quoted will seem almost pathetically limited, in view of
the new phenomena of mind which, whether they be or be not found to
demonstrate for our souls a longer existence than experience has ever
demonstrated before, unquestionably already demonstrate for them a wider
scope.
* * * * *
It has not been more than a couple of years since a leading American
author, whose work has often ornamented the pages of the UNPOPULAR
REVIEW, said: "I hate the very name of Evolution." This was because
Spencer traced the law no farther than it could be expressed in terms of
Matter and Motion, and our friend was a profound student of the Greek
and Oriental imaginings which try to transcend all that can be expressed
in those terms.
And yet a few years before, the same scholar was one of the earliest
students in this country of M. Bergson--the Bergson to whom a friend
lately said: "People run after you because you have covered the colossal
forbidding structure raised by Darwin and Spencer, with flowers." "No,"
said Bergson, "I have shown that the flowers necessarily grow out of
it."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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