nihilation; incapable of
attaining the summit of their beatified destiny. Not the crude
reflection of the present state, but a criticized and purged
portion of the results of speculation on it, is thrown forward,
and composes the doctrine of the future life. This is the
condition of faith in which civilized mankind, for the most part,
now are.

The third stage of development is that wherein the thinker
perceives that it is illegitimate to reflect into the future any
of the realities or relations of the present, and then to regard
them as the truths of the experience which awaits him after death.
His experience here is the resultant of his faculties as related
to the universe. Destroy his organization, and what follows? One
will say, "Nonentity." Another, more wise and modest, will say,
"Something necessarily unknown as yet." We have no better right to
project into the ideal space of futurity the ingredients of our
thoughts than we have to project there the objects of our senses.
Bunsen, whose thought and scholarship included pretty much all the
knowledge of mankind, represents this stage of faith. He stands on
the religious side of the movement of Science, believing in
immortality without defining it. Comte stands on the positivist
side, blankly denying all objective immortality. These two
represent the results in which, advancing from its opposite sides,
the logical development of the doctrine of a future life ends.
With Comte, atheistic dogmatism crushing every eternal hope; with
Bunsen, Christian faith pointing the child to an eternal home in
the Father. For all but fetichistic minds the only choice lies
between these two.

The organic evolution of the doctrine of a life to come is,
therefore, a process of faith beginning with the crude
transference of the elements of the present into the future,
continuing with refined modifications of that transference, ending
with an entire cessation of it as inapplicable and incompetent.
Having examined all the historic, experimental, and scientific
data within our reach, we pause on the edge of the PART which we
know, and wait, with serene trust, though with bowed head and
silent lip, before the UNKNOWABLE WHOLE.

CHAPTER VIII.

CRITICAL HISTORY OF DISBELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE.

IF the first men were conscious spirits who, at the command of
God, dropped from the skies into organic forms of matter, or who
were created here on an exalted plane of insight and communion far