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A GOLDEN FUTURE FOR THE GOLDEN AGE-Page Five
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THE QUESTION OF INNORTALITY
C. E. W. DOS VS
We are glad to give the place of honor on our
front page this week to Dr. C. E. W. Dobbs, that
great thinker about sacred themes who blesses the
people of historic Fernandina, Fla., with his stalwart
ministry. And we are gladder still to announce that
Dr. Dobbs has agreed to furnish the readers of
The Golden Age with occasional articles the coming
year.
“The Question of Immortality,” which he so ably
discusses this week, only gives the more thought
ful of our readers a “taste” of the good things that
are to follow. We congratulate ourselves and our
readers on the acquisition to our staff of contribu
tors of a pen so classical, so brilliant, and withal, so
sound, as the lucid pen of Dr. C. E. W. Dobbs.
T
HIS ever old and ever new question will
not permit itself to be silenced. The
heart of humanity insists upon thinking
and reasoning concerning it. I have
been reading Plato’s account of the
death of Socrates, with its accompany
ing presentation of that sage’s view of
the immortality of the soul. One turns
away disappointed, especially when he
may have just listened to some extravagant refer
ence to the “luminous and cogent argument of the
Greek philosopher.” In truth one finds little of the
“luminous” and the “congent” in the famous “trilogy”
which it is the fashion to vaunt as the supremest
wisdom on the subject discussed. Plato, reporting
Socrates, reached the height of the argument in the
universal conviction of man that the soul must con
tinue to exist after death. He had absolutely no
proof, only conjecture, much of which was based on
the supposed recollections of former existences of
the soul.
Os course we should think much of the inference
legitimately drawn from the practically universal
conviction of mankind. God appears to have im
planted this conviction in the soul, and it is unrea
sonable to shut the ear to its voice.
Plato wrote more than two millenniums ago, and
thought universal moves in the same circle still.
The immortal life ever evades demonstration. Man
hopes it to be his destiny, but in so hoping the mind
and heart walk by faith, not by sight. Ever and anon
some venturesome disciple of science tells a waiting
world that he has discovered the path, but meets an
incredulous smile from his fellows. Among the great
lights in the world of science was the late John Fiske,
who passed away all too soon a few years ago.
Starting out a materialistic evolutionist he found his
mind shrinking from the end to which his science led.
He believed thoroughly in Darwinian evolution, de
riving man from a remote simian ancestry. But his
heart rebelled against the materialism to which that
theory logically conducted. I have read with great
delight four of Fisks’s latest volumes, tracing the
path through which that eminent scientist reached
God and immortality. He declares that, “Atheism is
ATLANTA, GA., SEPTEMBER 16, 1909.
very bad metaphysics, while the materialism which
goes with it is utterly condemned by modern science.
. . . . Our moral sense revolts against it no less
than our intelligence, and that is because, on its prac
tical side, atheism would remove humanity from its
peculiar position in the world, and make it cast in its
lot with the grass that withers and the beasts that
perish, and thus the rich and varied life of the uni
verse, in all the ages of its wondrous duration, be
comes deprived of any such element of purpose as
can make it intelligible to us or appeal to our moral
sympathies and religious aspirations.”
Though Fiske writes of that "divine spark, the
soul,” he, strangely enough, insists that man “be
longs, as a genus, to the catarrhine family of apes'.”
He contends that “there is no more reason for sup
posing that this conclusion will ever be gainsaid than
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C. E. W. DOBBS.
for supposing that the Copernican astronomy will
sometime be overthrown and the concentric spheres
of Dante’s heaven reinstated in the minds of men.”
And yet he saw clearly that his theory of evolution
did not —could not —account for the soul. The dawn
ing of consciousness must forever evade the con
sistent evolutionist. Fiske said that the soul “could
not possibly be the product of any cunning arrange
ment of material particles.” That fact, he declared,
“is demonstrated beyond peradventure by what we
now know of the correlation of physical forces.” Such
reasoning led Fiske to accept the existence of God
as a necessary postulate even for scientific investi
gation.
Fiske thought that “it is not likely that we shall
ever succeed in making the immortality of the soul
a matter of scientific demonstration, for we lack the
requisite data. It must ever remain an affair of re
ligion rather than of science.” Still he tenaciously
clings to the thought that his science intimates im
mortality. He does not seriously attempt to account
for the soul’s existence, simply assuming that some
where in the process of evolution that “divine spark”
attained consciousness. That soul does not perish
with its material tenement, the “vehicle of the soul.”
According to his thinking the materialistic conten
tion that its life ends with the life of the body “is
perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless as
sumption that is known to the history of philosophy.”
True, he says that there are serious difficulties con
fronting the scientist in this theory, but these will not
weaken his faith, especially when he remembers that
upon the alternative view the difficulties are at least
as great. “We live in a world of mystery, and there
is not a problem in the simplest and most exact de
partments of science which does not speedily lead
us to a transcendental problem that we can neitner
solve nor shift.” It would be well if all who assume
to speak in the name of science were to imitate the
modesty of this eminent master in that realm.
In concluding his essay Fiske expresses his belief
as follows: “For my own part, therefore, I believe in
the immortality of the soul, not in the sense in which
I accept the demonstrable truths of science, but as a
supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God’s
work. ... I feel the omnipresence of mystery in
such wise as to make it easier for me to accept the
view of Euripides, that what we call death may be
but the dawning of true knowledge and of true life.
The greatest philosopher of modern times (Herbert
Spencer), the master and teacher of all who shall
study the process of evolution for many a day to
come, holds that the conscious soul is not the product
of a collocation of material particles, but is in the
deepest sense a divine effluence.”
And this is the highest reacn of the evolutionist’s
faith. For him there is no revelation from the Al
mighty Father, no assurance of immortality coming
to anxious humanity through the Word and resurrec
tion of humanity’s Lord and Christ. He gropes his
way through the tangled underbrush of ancient pagan
thought, confessedly rising to no higher plane than
that on which stood Plato and Euripides. Still it is
something that material science is compelled to ad
mit, that its conclusions do not invalidate the argu
ment from philosophic premises in favor of the soul’s
immortality. When one hears the petty advocates of
evolutionary theories uttering their scarcely conceal
ed sneers at our faith in spiritual things, it might be
well to remind them of.' the loftier and more modest
words of their masters. Still humanity’s hope is
bright with tb/» assurance of the life beyond the tomb
“A solemn murmur in the soul
Tells of the world to be,
As travelers hear the billows roll
Before they reach the sea.”
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