less it be a faint
glimpse of Sheol. The philosophy of Job halts accordingly. The Hebrew
believed that he would be rewarded or punished in his posterity.

Bishop Butler's grand argument for belief in the possibility of a
future life goes upon the supposition that our conscious personality is
distinct and separable from our perishable frame, and is in itself
"indiscerptible," so that there is no reason why it should not survive
the death of the body. To prove that it ever has survived the death of
the body, or to show the mode of its survival, the Bishop does not
attempt. But Butler lived long before Evolution and the general
advance of physiology in these later days. Johnson, who was no
sceptic, owned that he yearned for more light on the "spiritual world,"
by which he apparently meant immortality.

Positivism tenders us endless existence as particles in a collective
humanity, the "colossal man." But would there be much satisfaction in
existence when individuality and personal consciousness had been lost?
Would the prospect lead the ordinary man to work and suffer for
generations to come, at all events, for any beyond the circle of the
immediate objects of his love? What the end of the colossal man is to
be seems undetermined. The Positivist Church has produced very good
and beautiful lives, but its power as a religion to go alone would be
more clearly seen were not Christianity at its side.

Is there or is there not after all something in human nature apparently
unsusceptible of physical explanation and seeming to point to the
possibility of a higher state of being? Evolution may ultimately
explain our general frame, emotional and intellectual, as well as
physical. It may in time explain the marvels of imagination and
memory. It may explain our aesthetic nature with our music and art.
It may explain even our social and political frame and our habit of
conformity to law. But beyond conformity to law, social or political,
is there not, in the highest specimens of our race at least, a
conception of an ideal of character and an effort to rise to it which
seem to point to a more spiritual sphere?

End of Project Gutenberg's The Religious Situation, by Goldwin Smith

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