such a conclusion. However badly the archery of
the sharp eyed and strong armed critics of disbelief has riddled
the outer works of ordinary argument, it has not slain the
garrison. Scientific criticism therefore leaves us at this point:
there may be an immortal soul in us. Then the question whether
there actually is an immortal soul in us, rests entirely on moral
facts and considerations. Allowing their native force to these
moral facts and considerations, the healthy ethical thinker,
recognising in himself an innermost self conscious ego which knows
itself persistent and identical amidst the multiplex vicissitude
of transient conditions, lies down to die expecting immediately to
continue his being's journey elsewhere, in some other guise.
Leaving out of view these moral facts and considerations, the
materialistic naturalist thinker, recognising his consciousness as
only a phantom procession of states across the cerebral stage hung
in ashy livery and afloat on blood, lies down to expire expecting
immediately to be turned into nobody forever. Misinterpreting and
undervaluing these moral facts and considerations, the anchorless
speculative thinker, recognising his organism as an eye through
which the World Spirit beholds itself, or a momentary pulse in
which the All feels itself, his consciousness as a part of the
infinite Thought, lies down on his death couch expecting
immediately to be turned into everybody, eternity, instead of
greeting him with an individual kiss, wrapping him in a monistic
embrace. The broad drift of human conviction leads to the first
conclusion, a persistent personality. The greatest philosophers,
from Plato to Pascal, deny the second view, a blotting extinction
of the soul, declaring it false in science and incredible in
presentation. The third theory a pantheistic absorption the
irresistible common sense of mankind repudiates as a morbid dream.
Man naturally believes himself immortal but not infinite. Monism
is a doctrine utterly foreign to undiseased thinking. Although it
be a Fichte, a Schelling, or a Hegel, who says that the soul is a
circumscribed yet omnipotent ego, which first radiates the
universe, and afterwards beholds it in the mirror of itself, and
at length breaks into dead universality, the conception is, to the
average apprehension of humanity, as overweening a piece of wild
fancy as ever rose in a madman's reveries.43

The ordinary contemplator of the phenomena of the world an