ef
that it imports; and this is the real origin, the inward origin, of his
_Critique of Practical Reason_, and of his categorical imperative and of
his God. But in spite of all this, the sceptical affirmation of Hume
holds good. There is no way of proving the immortality of the soul
rationally. There are, on the other hand, ways of proving rationally its
mortality.

It would be not merely superfluous but ridiculous to enlarge here upon
the extent to which the individual human consciousness is dependent upon
the physical organism, pointing out how it comes to birth by slow
degrees according as the brain receives impressions from the outside
world, how it is temporarily suspended during sleep, swoons, and other
accidents, and how everything leads us to the rational conjecture that
death carries with it the loss of consciousness. And just as before our
birth we were not, nor have we any personal pre-natal memory, so after
our death we shall cease to be. This is the rational position.

The designation "soul" is merely a term used to denote the individual
consciousness in its integrity and continuity; and that this soul
undergoes change, that in like manner as it is integrated so it is
disintegrated, is a thing very evident. For Aristotle it was the
substantial form of the body--the entelechy, but not a substance. And
more than one modern has called it an epiphenomenon--an absurd term. The
appellation phenomenon suffices.

Rationalism--and by rationalism I mean the doctrine that abides solely
by reason, by objective truth--is necessarily materialist. And let not
idealists be scandalized thereby.

The truth is--it is necessary to be perfectly explicit in this
matter--that what we call materialism means for us nothing else but the
doctrine which denies the immortality of the individual soul, the
persistence of personal consciousness after death.

In another sense it may be said that, as we know what matter is no more
than we know what spirit is, and as matter is for us merely an idea,
materialism is idealism. In fact, and as regards our problem--the most
vital, the only really vital problem--it is all the same to say that
everything is matter as to say that everything is idea, or that
everything is energy, or whatever you please. Every monist system will
always seem to us materialist. The immortality of the soul is saved only
by the dualist systems--those which teach that human consciousness is
something substantially di