6. Again, ideas must be given through something; and we are always prone
to argue about the soul from analogies of outward things which may serve
to embody our thoughts, but are also partly delusive. For we cannot
reason from the natural to the spiritual, or from the outward to the
inward. The progress of physiological science, without bringing us
nearer to the great secret, has tended to remove some erroneous notions
respecting the relations of body and mind, and in this we have the
advantage of the ancients. But no one imagines that any seed of
immortality is to be discerned in our mortal frames. Most people have
been content to rest their belief in another life on the agreement of
the more enlightened part of mankind, and on the inseparable connection
of such a doctrine with the existence of a God--also in a less degree
on the impossibility of doubting about the continued existence of those
whom we love and reverence in this world. And after all has been
said, the figure, the analogy, the argument, are felt to be only
approximations in different forms to an expression of the common
sentiment of the human heart. That we shall live again is far more
certain than that we shall take any particular form of life.
7. When we speak of the immortality of the soul, we must ask further
what we mean by the word immortality. For of the duration of a living
being in countless ages we can form no conception; far less than a three
years' old child of the whole of life. The naked eye might as well try
to see the furthest star in the infinity of heaven. Whether time and
space really exist when we take away the limits of them may be doubted;
at any rate the thought of them when unlimited us so overwhelming to us
as to lose all distinctness. Philosophers have spoken of them as forms
of the human mind, but what is the mind without them? As then infinite
time, or an existence out of time, which are the only possible
explanations of eternal duration, are equally inconceivable to us, let
us substitute for them a hundred or a thousand years after death, and
ask not what will be our employment in eternity, but what will happen to
us in that definite portion of time; or what is now happening to those
who passed out of life a hundred or a thousand years ago. Do we imagine
that the wicked are suffering torments, or that the good are singing the
praises of God, during a period longer than that of a whole life, or
of ten lives of men? Is the suffering physical or mental? And does the
worship of God consist only of praise, or of many forms of service? Who
are the wicked, and who are the good, whom we venture to divide by a
hard and fast line; and in which of the two classes should we place
ourselves and our friends? May we not suspect that we are making
differences of kind, because we are unable to imagine differences
of degree?--putting the whole human race into heaven or hell for the
greater convenience of logical division? Are we not at the same time