the assertion that 'we who know that a higher form of activity is only to be reached by a subjective life in society, will continue to regard a perpetuity of sensation as the true Hell,' a sentence in which Mr. Harrison would commonly be understood to mean that he and all his friends, if they had a vote in the matter, would give a unanimous suffrage against this 'perpetuity of sensation,' and, so far from trying to eliminate or postpone death, would be inclined to cling to and even hasten it. For, in this place at least, it is not the perpetuation of deteriorated energies of which Mr. Harrison speaks, but the perpetuation of life pure and simple. Indeed, nothing puzzles me more in this paper than the diametrical contradictions both of feeling and thought which appear to me to be embodied in it. Its main criticism on the common view of immortality seems to be that the desire for it is a grossly selfish desire. Nay, nicknaming the conception of a future of eternal praise, 'the eternity of the tabor,' he calls it a conception so gross, so sensual, so indolent, so selfish, as to be worthy of nothing but scorn. I think he can never have taken the trouble to realise with any care what he is talking of. Whatever the conception embodied in what Mr. Harrison calls ceaseless psalmody' may be-and certainly it is not my idea of immortal life-it is the very opposite of selfish. No conception of life can be selfish of which the very essence is adoration, that is, wonder, veneration, gratitude to another. And gross as the conception necessarily suggested by psalm-singing is, to those who interpret it, as we generally do, by the stentorian shoutings of congregations who are often thinking a great deal more of their own performances than of the object of their praise, it is the commonest candor to admit that this conception of immortality owes its origin entirely to men who were thinking of a life absorbed in the interior contemplation of a God full of all perfectionsa contemplation breaking out into thanksgiving only in the intensity of their love and adoration. Whatever else this conception of immortality may be, the very last phrase which can be justly applied to it is gross' or 'selfish." I fear that the Positivists have left the Christian objects of their criticism so far behind that they

have ceased not merely to realise what Christians mean, but have sincerely and completely forgotten that Christians ever had a meaning at all. That Positivists. should regard any belief in the 'beatific vision' as a wild piece of fanaticism, I can understand, but that, entering into the meaning of that fanaticism, they should describe the desire for it as a gross piece of selfishness, I cannot understand; and I think it more reasonable, therefore, to assume that they have simply lost the key to the language of adoration. Moreover, when I come to note Mr. Harrison's own conception of the future life, it appears to me that it differs only from the Christian's conception by its infinite deficiencies, and in no respect by superior moral qualities of any kind. That conception is, in a word, posthumous energy. He holds that if we could get rid of the vulgar notion of a survival of personal sensations and of growing mental and moral faculties after death, we should consecrate the notion of posthumous activity, and anticipate with delight our coming incorporation with the glorious future of our race,' as we cannot possibly consecrate those great hopes now.

But, in the first place, what is this 'glorious future of our race' which I am invited to contemplate? It is the life in a better organised society of a vast number of these merely temporary creatures whose personal sensations, if they ever could be 'perpetuated,' Mr. Harrison regards as giving us the best conception of a 'true hell. Now if an improved and better organised future of ephemerals be so glorious to anticipate, what elements of glory are there in it which would not belong to the immortality looked forward to by the Christian-a far more improved future of endlessly growing natures? Is it the mere fact that I shall myself belong to the one future which renders it unworthy, while the absence of any 'perpetuity' of my personal 'sensations' from the other, renders it unselfish? I always supposed selfishness to consist, not in the desire for any noble kind of life in which I might share, but in the preference for my own happiness at the expense of some one else's. If it is selfish to desire the perpetuation of a growing life, which not only does not, as far as I know, interfere

with the volume of moral growth in others, but certainly contributes to it, then it must be the true unselfishness to commit suicide at once, supposing suicide to be the finis to personal sensation.' But then universal suicide would be inconsistent with the glorious future of our race, so I suppose it must at least be postponed till our own sensations have been so far perpetuated' as to leave heirs behind them. If Condorcet is to be held up to our admiration for anticipating on the edge of the grave his coming incorporation with the glorious future of his race,' i.e. with ourselves and our posterity, may we not infer that there is something in ourselves, i.e. in human society as it now exists, which was worthy of his vision-something in which we need not think it 'selfish' to participate, even though our personal 'sensations do form a part of it? Where then does the selfishness of desiring to share in a glorious future even through personal sensations' begin? The only reasonable or even intelligible answer, as far as I can see, is this ;- -as soon as that personal'sensation' for ourselves excludes a larger and wider growth for others, but no sooner. But then no Christian ever supposed for a moment that his personal immortality could or would interfere with any other being's growth. And if so, where is the selfishness? What a Christian desires is a higher, truer, deeper union with God for all, himself included. If his own life drop out of that future, he supposes that there will be so much less that really does glorify the true righteousness, and no compensating equivalent. If it be Mr. Harrison's mission to disclose to us that any perpetuity of sensation on our own parts will positively exclude something much higher which would exist if we consented to disappear, he may, I think, prove his case. But in the absence of any attempt to do so, his conception that it is noble and unselfish to be more than content grateful for ceasing to live any but a posthumous life, seems to me simply irrational.

But, further, the equivalent which Mr. Harrison offers me for becoming, as I had hoped to become, in another world, an altogether better member of a better society, does not seem to me more than a very doubtful good. My posthumous

activity will be of all kinds, some of which I am glad to anticipate, most of which I am very sorry to anticipate, and much of which I anticipate with absolute indifference. Even our best actions have bad effects as well as good. Macaulay and most other historians held that the Puritan earnestness expended a good deal of posthumous activity in producing the license of the world of the Restoration. Our activity, indeed, is strictly posthumous in kind, even before our death, from the very moment in which it leaves our living mind and has begun to work beyond ourselves. What I did as a child is, in this sense, as much producing posthumous effects, i.e. effects over which I can no longer exert any control, now, as what I do before death will be producing posthumous effects after my death. Now a considerable proportion of these posthumous activities of ours, even when we can justify the original activity as all that it ought to have been, are unfortunate. Mr. Harrison's papers, for instance, have already exerted a very vivid and very repulsive effect on my mind-an activity which I am sure he will not look upon with gratification, and I do not doubt that what I am now writing will produce the same effect on him, and in that effect I shall take no delight at all. A certain proportion, therefore, of my posthumous activity is activity for evil, even when the activity itself is on the whole good. But when we come to throw in the posthumous activity for evil exerted by our evil actions and the occasional posthumous activity for good which evil also fortunately exerts, but for the good results of which we can take no credit to ourselves, the whole constitutes a mélange to which, as far as I am concerned, I look with exceedingly mixed feelings, the chief element being humiliation, though there are faint lights mingled with it here and there. But as for any rapture of satisfaction in contemplating my 'coming incorporation with the glorious future of our race,' I must wholly and entirely disclaim it. What I see in that incorporation of mine with the future of our race-glorious or the reverse, and I do not quite see why the Positivist thinks it so glorious, since he probably holds that an absolute term must be put to it, if by no other cause, by the gradual cooling of the sun-is a

very patchwork sort of affair indeed, a mere miscellany of bad, good, and indifferent without organisation and without unity. What I shall be, for instance, when incorporated, in Mr. Harrison's phrase, with the future of our race, I have very little satisfaction in contemplating, except so far, perhaps, as my 'posthumous activity' may retard the acceptance of Mr. Harrison's glorious anticipations for the human race. One great reason for my personal wish for a perpetuity of volition and personal energy is, that I may have a better opportunity, as far as may lie in me, to undo the mischief I shall have done before death comes to my aid. The vision of 'posthumous activity' ought indeed, I fancy, to give even the best of us very little satisfaction. It may not be, and perhaps is not, so mischievous as the vision of 'posthumous fame,' but yet it is not the kind of vision which, to my mind, can properly occupy very much of our attention in this life. Surely the right thing for us to do is to concentrate attention on the life of the living moment-to Imake that the best we can-and then to leave its posthumous effects, after the life of the present has gone out of it, to that Power which, far more than anything in it, transmutes at times even our evil into good, though sometimes, too, to superficial appearance at all events, even our good into evil. The desire for an immortal life—that is, for a perpetuation of the personal affections and of the willseems to me a far nobler thing than any sort of anticipation as to our posthumous activity; for high affections and a right will are good in themselves, and constitute, indeed, the only elements in Mr. Harrison's 'glorious future of our race to which I can attach much value-while posthumous activity may be either good or evil, and depends on conditions over which he who first puts the activity in motion, often has no adequate control.

And this reminds me of a phrase in Mr. Harrison's paper which I have studied over and over again without making out his meaning. I mean his statement that on his own hypothesis there is ample scope for the spiritual life, for moral responsibility, for the world beyond the grave, its hopes and its duties, which remain to us perfectly real without the unintelligible hypothesis.'

Now I suppose, by the hopes' of the world beyond the grave,' Mr. Harrison means the hopes we form for the 'future of our race,' and that I understand. But what does he mean by its 'duties'? Not, surely, our duties beyond the grave, but the duties of those who survive us ; for he expressly tells us that our mental and moral powers do not increase and grow, develope or vary within themselves do not, in fact, survive at all except in their effects-and hence 'duties for us in the world beyond the grave are, I suppose, in his creed impossible. But if he only means that there will be duties for those who survive us after we are gone, I cannot see how that is in any respect a theme on which it is either profitable or consolatory for us to dwell by anticipation. One remark more: when Mr. Harrison says that it is quite as easy to learn to long for the moment when you shall become the immaterial principle of a comet,' or that you really were the ether, and were about to take your place in space,' as to long for personal immortality-he is merely talking at random on a subject on which it is hardly seemly to talk at random. He knows that what we mean by the soul is that which lies at the bottom of the sense of personal identity-the thread of the continuity running through all our chequered life; and how it can be equally unmeaning to believe that this hitherto unbroken continuity will continue unbroken, and to believe that it is to be transformed into something else of a totally different kind, I am not only unable to understand, but even to understand how he could seriously so conceive us. My notion of myself never had the least connection with the principle of any part of any comet, but it has the closest possible connection with thoughts, affections, and volitions, which, as far as I know, are not likely to perish with my body. I am sorry that Mr. Harrison should have disfigured his paper by sarcasms so inapplicable and apparently so bitter as these.

PROFESSOR HUXLEY.

Mr. Harrison's striking discourse on the soul and future life has a certain resemblance to the famous essay on the snakes of Ireland. For its purport is to show that there is no soul, nor any future.

life in the ordinary sense of the terms. With death, the personal activity of which the soul is the popular hypostasis is put into commission among posterity, and the future life is an immortality by deputy.

Neither in these views, nor in the arguments by which they are supported, is there much novelty. But that which appears both novel and interesting to me is the author's evidently sincere and heartfelt conviction that his powerful advocacy of soulless spirituality and mortal immortality is consistent with the intellectual scorn and moral reprobation which he freely pours forth upon the 'irrational and debasing physicism' of materialism and materialists, and with the wrath with which he visits what he is pleased to call the intrusion of physical science, especially of biology, into the domain of social phenomena.

Listen to the storm :

We certainly do reject, as earnestly as any school can, that which is most fairly called Materialism, and we will second every word of those who cry out that civilisation is in danger if the workings of the human spirit are to become questions of physiology, and if death is the end of a man, as it is the end of a sparrow. We not only assent to such protests, but we see very pressing need for making them. It is a corrupting doctrine to open a brain, and to tell us that devotion is a definite molecular change in this and that convolution of grey pulp, and that if man is the first of living animals, he passes away after a short space like the beasts that perish. And all doctrines, more or less, do tend to this,

which offer physical theories as explaining moral phenomena, which deny man a spiritual in addition to a moral nature, which limit his moral life to the span of his bodily organism, and which have no place for 'religion' in the proper sense of the word.

Now Mr. Harrison can hardly think it worth while to attack imaginary opponents, so that I am led to believe that there must be somebody who holds the 'corrupting doctrine' 'that devotion is a definite molecular change in this and that convolution of grey pulp.' Nevertheless, my conviction is shaken by a passage which occurs at p. 627: "No rational thinker now pretends that imagination is simply the vibration of a particular fibre.' If no rational thinker pretends this of imagination, why should any pretend it of devotion? And yet I cannot bring myself to think that all Mr. Harrison's passionate rhetoric is hurled

at irrational thinkers: surely he might leave such to the soft influences of time and due medical treatment of their 'grey pulp' in Colney Hatch or elsewhere."

On the other hand, Mr. Harrison cannot possibly be attacking those who hold that the feeling of devotion is the concomitant, or even the consequent, of a molecular change in the brain; for he tells us, in language the explicitness of which leaves nothing to be desired, that To positive methods, every fact of thinking reveals itself as having functional relation with molecular change. Every fact of will or of feeling is in similar relation with kindred

molecular facts.

On mature consideration I feel shut up to one of two alternative hypotheses. Either the 'corrupting doctrine' to which Mr. Harrison refers is held by no rational thinker-in which case, surely neither he nor I need trouble ourselves about it. --or the phrase, 'Devotion is a definite molecular change in this and that convolution of grey pulp,' means that devotion has a functional relation with such mo

lecular change; in which case, it is Mr. Harrison's own view, and therefore, let us hope, cannot be a 'corrupting doctrine.'

I am not helped out of the difficulty I have thus candidly stated, when I try to get at the meaning of another hard saying of Mr. Harrison's, which follows after the corrupting doctrine' paragraph: 'And all doctrines, more or less, do tend to this [corrupting doctrine], which offer physical theories as explaining moral phenomena.'

Nevertheless, on pp. 626-7, Mr. Harrison says with great force and tolerable.

accuracy:

Man is one, however compound. Fire his conscience, and he blushes. Check his circulation, and he thinks wildly, or thinks not at all. Impair his secretions, and moral sense is dulled, discolored, or depraved; his aspirations flag, his hope, love, faith reel. Impair them still more, and he becomes a brute. A cup of drink degrades his moral nature below that of a swine. Again, a violent emotion of pity or horror makes him vomit. A lancet will restore him from delirium to clear thought. Excess of thought will waste his sinews. Excess of muscular exercise will deaden thought. An emotion will double the strength of his muscles. And at last the prick of a needle or a grain of mineral will in an instant lay to rest for ever his body and its unity, and all the spontaneous activities of intelligence, feeling, and action, with which that compound organism was charged.