f
contained will, intelligent of immaterial verities and perhaps
transcendent of space and time, how burlesque is the terror of the
ancient corpuscular theorists lest the feebly cohering soul, on
leaving the body, especially if death happened during a storm,
would be blown in pieces all abroad! Socrates, in the Phado, has a
hearty laugh over this; but Lucretius seriously urges it.15 The
answer to the skeptical reasoning from analogy is double. First,
the lines of partial correspondence which visibly terminate within
our tangible reach can teach nothing as to the termination of
other lines which lead out of sight and disappear in a spiritual
region. An organized material form for instance, a tree is fatally
limited: else it would finally fill and exhaust the earth. But no
such limiting necessity can be predicated of mind. Secondly, as
far as there is genuine analogy, its implications are much
stronger in favor of immortality than against it. Matter, whose
essence is materiality, survives all apprehensible changes;
spirit, whose essence is spirituality, should do the same.

Another attack on the doctrine of a future life is masked in the
negative Argument from Ignorance. We do not know how we shall live
again; we are unable to construct the conditions and explain the
details of a spiritual state of existence; and therefore, it is
said, we should of right conclude that there is no such thing. The
proposition is not usually stated so blankly; but it really
amounts to that. The Epicureans say, as a tree cannot exist in the
sky, nor clouds in the ocean, nor fishes in the meadow, nor water
in stone, thus the mind cannot exist apart from the nerves and the
blood. This style of reasoning is a bold begging of the question.
Our present experience is vacant of any specific knowledge of the
conditions, methods, and contents of a life it has not yet
experienced: therefore there is no such life. Innumerable millions
of facts beyond our present knowledge unquestionably exist. It is
not in any way difficult to conceive that innumerable millions of
experiences and problems now defying and eluding our utmost powers
may hereafter fall within our comprehension and be easily solved.
Will you accept the horizon of your mind as the limit of the
universe? In the present, experience must be confined within its
own boundaries by the necessity of the case. If an embryo were
endowed with a developed reasoning consciousness, it could not
construc