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HUMAN IMMORTALITIES.

THE OLD AND THE NEW.

BY THADDEUS BURR WAKEMAN.

HENCE, Why, and Whither?" are the great religious questions which it has taken our race and its science all of the past ages to answer, but to which the answer, now given by the sciences, from astronomy to sociology with its new interpretation of religion, morals and immortality, seems to be conclusive. Of course there is, and will ever be, no end of matters and things to be cleared up, learned and applied; but no one has shown how the natural and scientific solution of man's origin, duty and destiny, can be other than affirmed, extended and applied in the human future.

In this view the answer given by science to the question "whither?" is perhaps the more important. For man's immortality. or his belief about it, determines his "why" or duty; but both rest upon his "whence" or origin.

Accordingly in the history of most peoples we find, that, after the necessities of existence are tolerably provided, their beliefs on this subject control their conduct, religions, ideals, and even the conditions and progress of their physical and practical life. For instance, in China railroads must not be allowed, for they would disturb the "spirits" of the ancestors; and some such superstition generally lies across the paths of progress.

The first beliefs about existence after death were formed in the childhood of the peoples. They were naturally those of children. and therefore inevitably mistaken, illusory, and generally the reverse of the truth. Herbert Spencer, in his descriptive and other works on sociology, has well condensed the facts in regard to these beliefs, and shown how they arose from plain misapprehensions in regard to the breath (spirit or ghost), the air, winds, echoes, reflections, shadows, mists, clouds, motions, thoughts, feelings, willactions, dreams, sleep, faintings, trances, and above all the sense of will and selfhood. Hence have grown up all of the religions of the world: animistic, with their ancestral fetishism; astrolatry; polytheism, and monotheism - culminating in Christianity, Islamism, Spiritualism and Mormonism--all one vast mass of illusions and errors, transfused by empirical social and moral truths and customs of value.

The chief of those illusions, out of which all of these "spookreligions" grew, and upon which they still rest, were: (1) The geocentric astronomy, which was the natural and common belief of the race until reversed by the Copernican or heliocentric astronomy in or about 1600 A. D.; (2) The belief that there was a "spirit" or spirits, (with materiality of feeling, mind, will, and self) forming Deity in the outer world of space and time; to which spirits all motions, things and "creations" were referred for their cause, origin, actions and ends-including man and the universe itself: and (3) a spirit-world, "supernatural"; which is to be the abode of souls after death-as a heaven or hell.

All of this old cosmogony is entirely reversed and shown to be impossible by and in the modern scientific world-view. When we meet the inevitable we must find its compensations. Since then we cannot have what was thought to be, or wanted, let us be contented and happy in making the best of what we have.

All of this old world is simply impossible on the basis of known facts: Our sun is moving northward towards Lyra with the inconceivable speed of three hundred million of miles each year. At the same time our earth yearly circles the sun in an orbit of five hundred and fifty millions of miles, besides rotating on its axis twenty-four thousand miles each day. If we had "souls" which could pierce space with the speed of light to find one "heaven"-as we all die at different times, and in immensely different places, (from which "ascensions" would be in opposite directions)-how long will it take our souls to meet there? or any where?

Take next that law of equivalent correlation and its true version of the soul, viz., "the totality of our brain functions in active process of conscious cooperation." From that law it is impossible to escape with even a trace of the old immortality. All there is of any human being is a correlation of the past of the universe continuing ever onward into the future. All of our existence, conscious and other, is a jet of fire-light constantly and correlatively "created" by the infinite worid behind us, and ever illuminating our way into that infinite future which can be no other than a correlation of the present. As Col. Ingersoll said in his last lecture, "We now know that the supernatural never did, and never can exist."

We know that all of our subjective ideas, thoughts, feelings and aspirations-even that of immortality itself, are the sequent or concomitant correlations of the infinite objective processes upon which they depend as a part, and without which they have no existence. Our sensations of substance (matter) and its changes; of rest and motion; of space and time; of facts and events; of relation and law; of feeling and consciousness; of I and thou; of fancy and imagination; are realities: for they are direct, continuous and inevitable correlates of the infinite objective, never beginning and never ending, creation. Other "creation" never was, but as an Oriental myth, and as such only, real. Thus the world that was, and is, vanishes every instant and leaves not a "wraith" nor "ghost" behind, but a clean, clear, perfect new creation as a foundation of the world that is to be. "By and under infinite, changeless, eternal laws must we the little circle of our being complete"-was one of the earliest conclusions to which science and Goethe brought us.

But is not our will free? The answer is, Yes, and No! If the vine had consciousness as we have, every motion and turn of its tendrils and growing ends towards sunlight, food and moisture would be felt as its own act of choice and will; yet every such act we now see is determined by the endless correlations of the endless universe. Our subjective "free"-will is the illusory "sun-rise" and "sun-set" as noted in our almanacs; our determined will, and no sun-rise, are the real facts, as we learn when we study psychology and astronomy. We have simply made the mistake of the astronomer in Dr. Johnson's Rasselas, who had lived so long, and so intimately with the heavenly bodies that he verily believed that their motions were a part of himself, and the result of his own will, without which they would cease to move. The difference between his case and ours is, that our will instead of being the cause is the result of our bodily correlations and ceases with them.

Yet these appearances of sun-rise and of free-will are facts as such, and when so understood we practically and most usefully make them the bases of our daily and practical life. They are our subjective devices, well used to measure objective processes, and their concomitants, which are the real causes, though apparently the result of those devices. We most usefully measure the motions of the clock's pendulum or spring by figures on the dial and a time table, but they do not make the clock go. Yet they, too, are the results of natural brain-processes far more wonderful than the objective clock motions. Indeed the clock soon wears out, but these

figures and their time are "immortal," because continuously felt, repeated and used by the whole renewing human race, as a necessity of their life, welfare and improvement. Thus all human telesis and teleology is but the highest process of nature, "willfully" using the lower to its advantage; just as the flower "chooses" to turn to the

sun,

"As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets
The same look which she turned when he rose."

From that fact of nature it is but a step to the wonderful Xenion of Goethe and Schiller, called "The Highest," viz.:

"Seekest thou the Highest, the Greatest?
The plant can tell it thee:
What she without willing is
Be thou willing that is it."

And from this it is but another step to the still more wonderful conclusion of Shakespeare over Perdita's flowers in "The Winter's Tale," which conclusion it has taken science and philosophy three hundred years to reach, and which is the death-knell of the supernatural in every shape and form, viz.:

"Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean: so o'er that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes."

That art is the highest telesis of nature-the conscious, designing, feeling, knowing, "willing" reaction of nature upon itself. The human "free"-will is thus the exquisite correlate flower of the universe!

Thus culminates in man that new world which science has opened up to us as our enduring home, instead of the old.

But if it is supposed that the souls which are fabled to escape from the death of the body still remain on this planet, and do not go beyond the earth's atmosphere, then Shakespeare gives their sad and unendurable fate in "Measure for Measure," in the familiar lines:

"Claudio, Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;

The weariest, and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise

To what we fear of death.

Isabella, Alas, Alas!"

We have only to read the whole of this passage to feel the horror of the old immortality. Shakespeare's real sympathy was with the new world which he did so much to introduce. He uses the word "immortality" but twice, and always in its new and human sense: in Lucrece, 1. 725; and in Pericles, Act 3, Sc. 2-all of which Scene is written in the new instead of the old psychology! I have found the word "immortal" twelve times in Shakespeare, but so used that the new meaning is applicable. Shakespeare's ghosts only appear to those whose conscience creates them.

THE NEW GOD AND WORLD AS REALIZED BY THE GREAT HOME MAKER GOETHE.

Now let us turn from 1600 to 1800 and its first and greatest of real modern men-Shakespeare's great successor, Goethe. Some other person might have sensed and realized the new state of existence and its consequences, introduced by the new astronomy, but as he was the only one who did, there is no help for it but to let him be our guide in exploring the new, as Virgil was to Dante in realizing the old, world. He was fortunate in natural gifts; in not being dwarfed by the old learning; and in striking the real lines of human growth and evolution in Bruno and Spinoza. These he followed by a most wonderful "fore-feeling" poesy and prophecy up to the very heart of our present century. His literature, and that which he inspired, and the astonishing progress of science which has confirmed and realized it, has made most other literature of our day really "of the past"-a back number! He first led the heart, intellect and soul of man into the new world, to settle there; and then planted its barren wastes with the seeds of the flowers and fruits which are making it the cheerful, enduring home-the "earthly paradise," of the children of men.

The work of Goethe, "the Reconciler," began with the clear conception of the world as a unity of motion and matter. "No matter without motion; no motion without matter."-And "spirit" was a mode of motion impossible without matter. The universe was an infinite process of changes correlated, so that "No thing that is can to nothing fall." The true conception of his poems, "God and World," is this reconciliative unity, in which matter, motion and spirit are "one and inseparable." The "spirit" being the life-manifestation and process of the bio- or proto-plasm which Goethe and Oken discovered as Urschleim in 1800. "No matter without motion, no real consciousness or spirit without protoplasm." Such is the way in which Ernst Haeckel, the great biological successor of