the soul greater apparent vividness and tenacity than
belong to outer phenomena, tends to produce faith in the
independence and immortality of the spirit. Hence it is quite to
be expected that until our modern concentration on objective toil
and study and amusement reaches its destined climax and begins the
return career to subjective reason and feeling, the skepticism of
the age will increase.

Meanwhile the remedy for the evil is, first, to perceive it, and
then, to cultivate the kinds of experience calculated to
neutralize it. For the logical invalidity and fallaciousness of
the doubts concerning immortality, arising from the immense
disparity of such a belief with the mental habits of ignorant
earthlings and social parasites, appear from the fact that there
are others with whose experience and thought the doctrine has no
such disparity, but for whose spiritual range and haunt it is as
natural to believe it as to breathe. And, in explaining the
destiny of man, it is legitimate to take the most finished and
furnished specimens, not the abortive ones. There are grounds of
knowledge, domains of imagination, heights of nobility, familiar
to the most exalted characters, perfectly cognate and harmonious
with the conception of eternal life, and making the faith in it
fully as credible as the transcendent truths of science and
philosophy which have been actually demonstrated. Those who are
familiar only with the little affairs of sense, in narrow bounds
of time and space, may well gasp in despair and denial when the
bewildering contents of the doctrine of immortality are held
before them; but for all who have mastered what science reveals of
the objective world of nature, and what literature records of the
subjective world of soul, both these spheres furnish ample
illustrative examples and data to make the faith in every way
congruous with what else they know, and as easy as it is pleasing
to receive. Assuredly the belief resulting in this latter class
from their positive perception and correspondent desire and
persuasion, are, on every ground of reason or moral fitness, more
than a counterbalance for the unbelief resulting in the former
class from their negative experience and incompetency. If we
sought to estimate the possibility and destined fulfillment of
human nature when all its conditions shall have been perfected,
should we choose for the basis of our judgment the incapacity of
the lower specimens of man? or the