In Quest of Light - new book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL In using such a phrase as "the immortality of the soul" we put the question on a wrong footing; for the phrase seems to imply that the soul is an entity separate from our general frame, and this can no longer be maintained. But admitting that the soul is not a separate entity, does it follow that any intimation in our nature of accountability or hope extending beyond our present life must be an illusion and ought to be disregarded? I do not wish to dogmatize or even to affirm, but simply to submit the question. One of your correspondents holds that the question is settled by physical science, which pronounces that personal decease is final. All physical science rests upon the evidence of our bodily senses, however systematized by our reason. Have we ground for assuming that the evidence of our bodily senses is exhaustive? We recognize the immense revelations of sciencein all their bearings, and especially in their bearing on the origin and nature of man. But is there not some danger of our being swept away by a tidal wave? The doctrine of evolution has been carried to the length of imagining an evolution of Revelation. I am not aware that science has yet explained conscious personality, or attempted to explain it, otherwise than as a collection of memories. On such collection there must surely be something to reflect and operate. Huxley at one time confidently maintained that man was an automaton. But I believe he afterward receded from that position. Tyndall, with whom I was so happy as to be very intimate, always avowed himself a materialist. His was the formula that matter contained the potentiality of all life. Yet he would have found it difficult to account on merely material grounds for some of his own sentiments and as...