John Fiske

“ On the other hand, the student whose mood is truly scientific will feel that one of mankind's cardinal beliefs must not be dismissed too lightly because of the crudeness and error in that primitive stratum of human thought in which it first took root. In his perceptions within certain limits the savage is eminently keen and accurate, but when it comes to intellectual judgments that go at all below the surface of things his mind is a mere farrago of grotesque fancies, wherein, nevertheless, some kernels of truth are here and there embedded. ”

“ It was a time of spiritual awakening such as mankind had never before witnessed, but it was also an age of new problems, an age wherein the seeds of revolt were thickly germinating. The nature and constitution of the Unseen World had been too rashly and too elaborately set forth in theorems born of the slender knowledge of primitive times, and the growing tendency to interrogate Nature soon led to conclusions which broke down the old edifice of thought. ”

“ Science has given us so many surprises that our capacity for being shocked or astounded is well-nigh exhausted, and our old unregenerate human nature has been [Pg 53] bullied and badgered into something like humility; so that now, at the end of the greatest and most bewildering of centuries, we may fitly pause for a moment and ask how fares it, in these exacting days, with that Unseen World which man brought with him when he was first making his appearance on our planet? And what has science to say about that time-honoured belief that the human soul survives the death of the human body? ”

“ Who can tell but that this which we call life is really death, from which what we call death is an awakening? From this vantage ground of thought the human soul comes to look without dread upon the termination of this terrestrial existence. ”

“ Primitive theorizing is sure to be faulty and in the light of later knowledge comes to seem absurd and bizarre. Such has been in modern days the fate of the savage's ghost-world, along with the Ptolemaic astronomy, the doctrine of signatures, and many another sample of the "wisdom of the ancients." But the fact that primitive man mis-stated his relation to the Unseen World in no wise militates against the truth of his assumption that such a world exists for us. ”

“ The furniture of your mind consists in great part of sensuous images, chiefly visual, and you cannot in thought follow yourself into a world that does not announce itself to you through sense impressions. From all this it plainly appears that our notion of the survival of conscious activity apart from material conditions is not only unsupported by any evidence that can be gathered from the world of which we have experience but is utterly and hopelessly inconceivable. ”

“ But in the lower animal grades and in the vegetal world the courting of life and the shrinking from death go on without conscious intelligence, as the blades of grass in a meadow or the clustering leaves upon a tree compete with one another for the maximum of exposure to sunshine until perhaps stout boughs and stems are warped or twisted in the struggle. ”

“ The maxim that Nature makes no leaps is far from true. Nature's habit is to make prodigious leaps, but only after long preparation. Slowly rises the water in the tank, inch by inch through many a weary hour, until at length it over-flows and straightway vast systems of machinery are awakened into rumbling life. ”

“ So now it was further shown that the myriad properties or qualities of matter are simply the expression of myriads of activities which are all in a final analysis motions; that no motion is ever lost but only transformed, and that every kind of motion at any moment perceptible—whether in the form of movement through space, or of light, or heat, or electricity, or the actinism that builds up the green stuff in the leaves of plants—owes its existence to the metamorphosis of some previous kind of motion. ”

“ If consciousness is a product of molecular motion, it is a natural inference that it must lapse when the motion ceases. But if consciousness is a kind of existence which within our experience accompanies a certain phase of molecular motion, then the case is entirely altered, and [Pg 80] the possibility or probability of the continuance of the one without the other becomes a subject for further inquiry. Materialists sometimes declare that the relation of conscious intelligence to the brain is like that of music to the harp, and when the harp is broken there can be no more music. ”

“ It not only fails to disprove the validity of the belief, but it does not raise even the slightest prima facie presumption against it. This will at once become apparent if we remember that human experience is very far indeed from being infinite, and that there are in all probability immense regions of existence in every way as real as the region which we know, yet concerning which we cannot form the faintest rudiment of a conception. ”

“ In the very circumstance which to the ancient mind was the acme of humiliation and horror his genius discerns the occasion for most exalted panegyric, the bitterness of death is lost in the abounding triumph of the soul enlarged and set free, the attributes of woe are transformed into crowning glories. ”

“ It was in order to secure philosophic peace of mind that Auguste Comte undertook to build up what he called Positive Philosophy, in which the existence of all such problems was to be complacently ignored,—much as the ostrich seeks escape from a dilemma by burying its head in the sand. In a far more reverent and justifiable spirit the agnostic like Huxley or Spencer acknowledges the limitations of the human mind and builds as far as he may, leaving the rest to God. ”

“ Thus the faith in immortal life is the great poetic achievement of the human mind, it is all-pervasive, it is concerned with every moment and every aspect of our existence as moral individuals, and it is the one thing that makes this world inhabitable for beings constructed like ourselves. ”

“ An opposite view, long familiar to us, is that the conscious soul is an emanation from the Divine Intelligence that shapes and sustains the world, and during its temporary imprisonment in material forms the brain is its instrument of expression. Thus the soul is not the music, but the harper; and obviously this view is in harmony with the conclusions which I have deduced from the correlation of forces.
Upon these conclusions we cannot [Pg 81] directly base an argument sustaining man's immortality, but we certainly remove the only serious objection that has ever been alleged against it. ”

“ The physical circuit of motions is complete in itself; the state of consciousness is accessible only to its possessor. To him it is the subjective equivalent of the vibration within the brain, whereof it is neither the cause nor the effect, neither the producer nor the offspring, but simply the concomitant. In other words the natural history of the mass of activities that are perpetually being concentrated within [Pg 79] our bodies, to be presently once more disintegrated and diffused, shows us a closed circle which is entirely physical, and in which one segment belongs to the nervous system. ”

“ The savage's ghost-world is a mere repetition of the fights and hunts with which he is familiar. The early Christians looked forward to a speedy resurrection from Sheol, followed by an endless bodily existence upon a renovated earth. Dante's pictures of the Unseen World are often so intensely materialistic as to seem grotesque in our more truly spiritual age. Popular conceptions of heaven to-day abound in symbolism that is confessedly a mere reflection from the world of matter ”

“ These new capacities were applied to the interpretation of death, just as [Pg 35] they were applied to all other things; and thus, in the very process of becoming human, our progenitors arose to the consciousness of death as something with which humanity has always and everywhere to reckon. From the earliest and most rudimentary stages of the process, however, the conception of death was not of an event which puts an end to human individuality, but of an event which human individuality survives. ”

“ Now if we may take an illustration from the workings of an infant's mind, it is pretty clearly made out that as baby sits propped among his pillows and turns his eyes hither and thither in following his mother's movements to and fro in the room, she seems in coming toward him to enlarge and in going away to diminish in size, like Alice in Wonderland. ”

“ If its value as evidence were to be conceded, it would seem to point to the conclusion that the grade of intelligence which survives the grave is about on a par with that which in the present life we are accustomed to shut up in asylums for idiots. On the whole the mediumistic ideas and methods are frankly materialistic, their alleged communications with the other world are through sights and sounds, and if their pretensions could be sustained the result would be simply the rehabilitation of the primitive ghost-world. ”

“ Now suppose that all this world were crowded with disembodied souls, an infinite throng most aptly called "the majority," a thousand or more on every spot in space as broad as the point of a cambric needle, in what way could we become aware of their existence? ”

“ We have very briefly sketched the manner of its origination, and here we may leave this part of our subject with the remark that the belief in a future life, in a world unseen to mortal eyes, is not only coeval with the beginnings of the human race but is also coextensive with it in all its subsequent stages of development. It is in short one of the differential attributes of humanity. ”

“ Here materialism calls to its aid the discovery of the correlation and equivalence of forces, one of the most stupendous achievements of our century. We now know that heat and light [Pg 68] and electricity and actinism are not forces generically distinct and isolated each from the others. All are specific modes of molecular motion, transformable one into another at any moment as naturally as a cloud condenses into raindrops. ”

“ Thus came about that violent outbreak of materialistic atheism which, in spite of its generous aims and many admirable achievements, is surely one of the most mournful episodes in the history of human thought. ”

“ The all-important fact is that this dreaming savage has somehow acquired a mental attitude toward death which is totally different from that of all other animals, and is therefore peculiarly human. Throughout the half-dozen invertebrate branches or sub-kingdoms, where intelligence is manifested only in its lower forms of reflex action and instinct, we find no evidence that any creature has come to know of death. ”

“ Among such minds there is a tacit agreement that the unseen world must be purely spiritual in constitution, yet no mental image of such a world can be formed. We are all agreed that life beyond the grave would be a delusion and a cruel mockery without the continuance of the tender household affections which alone make the present life worth living ”

“ So far as our terrestrial experience goes there can be but one answer to such a question. We have no more warrant in experience for supposing consciousness to exist without a nervous system than we have for supposing the properties of water to exist in a world destitute of hydrogen and oxygen. ”

“ The far-reaching thoughts of Greek philosophers and the lofty ethics of Hebrew preachers were divorced from the primitive ghost-world, even as the mental processes of the modern scholar are separated by a great gulf from those of the woman who comes to scrub the floor. ”

“ If, however, we consider that in baby's mind the enlarged retinal spot means more and the diminished spot less of the pleasurable feelings excited by a familiar and gracious presence, the approach of which is greeted with smiles and out-stretched arms, while its departure is bemoaned with cries and tears, we see that as to the essentials of the situation the dawning intelligence is entirely right, although its specific interpretation is quite wrong. ”

“ It is not at all unlikely that the savage's notion of ghosts may have originated chiefly in his experience of dreams, and this is the explanation at present most in favour. The sleeping warrior ranges far and wide over the country, while he chases the buffalo and joins in the medicine dance with comrades known to have died yet now as active and as voluble as himself, but suddenly the scene changes and he is back in his familiar hut surrounded by his people who can testify that he has not for a moment left them. ”

“ Consciousness is not peculiar to man, but is possessed in some degree by the greater portion of the animal kingdom. Among the higher birds and mammals the amount of conscious life is very considerable, and here too it must be argued that consciousness is not a product of [Pg 82] molecular motion in the nervous system but its concomitant. The same argument which removes the objection to immortality for man removes it also for an indefinite number of animal species. ”

“ Any such molecular motion, moreover, may come from the arrested visible motion of a mass, and may in turn be liberated so as to resume the form of visible motion, as when an electric current is transformed into the onward movement of the trolley car. The change in our conception of Nature that has been wrought by this wonderful discovery is more profound than all changes that went before. ”

“ In the interests of intellectual honesty there is nothing which we need more than to be put on our guard against allowing our reasoning processes to be warped by our feelings. Nevertheless in steering clear of Scylla it would be a pity to tumble straight into the maw of Charybdis, and it behooves us to ask just how far the canons of scientific method are competent to guide us in dealing with ultimate questions. ”