"TH E BODY OF THIS DEATH." A VERY remarkable article appears in
the current number of the Hibbert Journal entitled " What and Where is the Soul ? " by Mr. Hugh MacColl. The paper is written in answer to a statement by Professor Haeckel that consciousness is a "physiological function of the brain," and " consequently no exception to the general law of substance." Mr. MacColl contends that soul and body are distinct—he defines the soul as that which feels, and in its higher developments thinks—that the body is merely an instrument, and that the very word " instrument " implies an operator. Physiologists, he tells us, are now asserting that the eye, ear, the nerves, &a., are mere organs or instruments of transmission, being them- selves as insensitive as the wire which conveys the entity which we call electricity ; and, pushing their argument still further, declare that "the brain is the ultimate recipient of the impressions caused by the vibrations of the air and ether; hence it is the brain, and the brain alone, that hears and sees." This seems comprehensible to the ordinary man when he reflects that a person stunned by a blow on the bead has no feeling in any part of his body, or when he thinks of the effects of chloroform. But why, asks Mr. MacColl, do these physiologists " exclude the brain from the category of insensible channels or instruments " ? They follow, he argues, the trail of consciousness "from the extremity of the nerve (where our deluded senses assured us it both originated and remained), and all along its course," till they finally reach the brain, and there they lose the scent. Does it, he demands, necessarily, or even probably, follow that the brain, the ever- changing brain, is the real abode of consciousness, of the soul or ego that feels ? When a hound loses the trail of a fox, be argues, at the bank of a running stream, neither hound nor huntsman concludes that the stream is its real abode ; they seek it further, and follow it up afresh upon the other side. If we have evidence, as Mr. MacColl believes, that no part of the human body feels except the brain, what ground have we for believing that the brain is an exception to this general insensibility ? But if we go beyond the brain, what do we get to ? The ether, replies our author, " with its infinite possi- bilities (as sham in wireless telegraphy)." Here he comes to the real point of his argument :—" Do not the phenomena of wireless telegraphy make it plain that certain mechanisms, wonderfully suggestive of the nervous system, can be operated upon by conscious Beings from afar, and by these made to trans- mit thoughts and sensations which the mechanisms themselves neither feel nor understand " To put it shortly, Mr. MacColl maintains that the whole body, including the brain, is nothing else than an automaton.
Having brought his readers so far upon scientific lines, Mr. MacColl boldly enters the region of speculation,— speculation based, in his belief, upon one immense certainty, the certainty that there is a soul. As to where and what that soul is Science has at present no data from which to draw an inference. "Science looks wistfully forward, patiently bides her time, and is silent " ; but Philosophy meanwhile "may legitimately send forth her truth-seeking feelers in all directions." Mr. MacColl gives us his own guesses and ideas for what they are worth. He thinks the soul or ego existed before the body, and will exist after the body is done with, being continually re-embodied in some form or other, and always rising in the long run " from higher to higher, and from better to better." He regards that vague form of unreasoning knowledge which we call instinct as a species of memory. This is an idea which follows from his premisses, but it is one which has never until lately commended itself to the Western mind. Christianity contains no hint of such a possibility, unless we consider the theological suggestions of St. Paul and St. John as to the pre-existence of our Lord to imply something of the sort, or are prepared to put an unusual interpretation upon the mysterious sentence : " Before Abraham was, I am." The Jews who instructed the West in the things pertaining to God, hard as they tried to vindicate the justice of fate, and long as they held to the impossible dogma that sooner or later in this world good men succeed and bad men are confounded, never, so far as Scriptural evidence goes, fell back upon previous existence to explain the apparent injustice of the world. The question put to our Lord, " Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind ?" does, it is true, seem to allude to sin committed in another life, but it is a passage whiclestands alone in the Bible. Many commentators, how- ever, deny that this is the real meaning of the phrase, which they take to be elliptical, and our Lord brushed the suggestion aside, if such suggestion there was, without comment. Such a notion is pagan rather than Christian, in that it almost inevitably connects misfortune with fault, and so taps the springs of pity. Yet it has a very attractive side. The clouds of glory which children trail make us all wonder from time to time whether there may not be something in it, and the strange manner in which the mind of man accepts—as we say, by some kind of instinct—the fact that there is a moral law above expediency suggests an experience which is not from hence. From this point of view, however, it is a fall rather than a perpetual rising which suggests itself to the mind. That death is powerless to injure the soul all religions have taught from the beginning ; but Mr. MacColl seems to think it very probable that those who die may be. supplied with a new human body, unless they have deserved a superhuman one, and may come back here. Much so-called indifference to the question of a future life is due to nothing but a want of imagination. Men cannot grasp the notion of any life but this one, and the old similes and metaphors in which those gifted with sufficient spiritual genius to do so were once able to convey both hope and faith are no longer capable of con. veying either in an age in which the exacting use of language has largely destroyed its power of expressing emotional con- viction. Men still long for the more abundant life of which Christ spoke, but crowns and golden streets and glassy seas and eternal prostrations before a great white throne no longer typify to us an eternal citizenship, a spiritual triumph, or the beatific vision. They bring before our eyes a garish picture and nothing more. Is it not in consequence of this failure of
the old methods of expression that an idea of reincarnation— an idea not within the line of Scriptural revelation at all—has lately commended itself to Christendom ? In this matter Mr. lifacColl is merely, we think, giving voice to a passing intel- lectual phase. " We must live again," sighs the ordinary thinker; " but we can conceive no life outside this. May the Buddhist not be right ? May we not live here again ? " But the highest Western minds, if they accept the supernatural at all, show a strong tendency to revert to the standpoint of Christ, and we doubt whether any Buddhistic heresy will find favour for more than a transitional period in the West. In some sense the world is home to all of us, and if we might but choose our circumstances we should many of us like to come back. For the few the attraction of the world consists in nothing but the fact that the world contains the people whom they love; for very many women, and for a good many men, the desire for a future life means simply the desire to see once more those whom they have known here. Browning, for one, asked fornothing else; but for the majority the world, apart from affection, has the eternal attraction of the familiar and the dramatic, and without those two elements they cannot conceive of pleasurable life. They want still to be onlookers, still to be actors, still to make part of a familiar scene. There is no prophet just now who can convince them that their longings may be satisfied elsewhere, and they would rather think of themselves as citizens of a sorrowful world than as exiles in bliss.
Mr. MacColl's speculations do not, as we have shown, follow orthodox lines. The whole effect of his paper is, however, intensely spiritual. We feel the writer has come by reason to the conclusion at which St. Paul arrived by inspiration,—that the victory of death is a delusion and the soul the only reality. To be always in this exalted frame of mind was not possible even to St. Paul. There were times when he felt, as we do, " sentence of death in ourselves." Probably it is possible to no one. The man who pinches his finger in a door will find it difficult to believe for the moment that he has no feeling in his hand. Yet the physiologists who tell him so may bring to bear upon his reason an unanswerable proof, and when the pain is over he may be unable not to believe them, and so may those who now by faith assure us that the soul of man is independent of that mortal instrument we call the body.
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