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 Whence and whither: an JnflV'fy ,,M9,,,'''^ 
 
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WHENCE AND WHITHER 
 
 AN INQUIRY INTO 
 
 THE NATURE OF THE SOUL, ITS 
 ORIGIN AND ITS DESTINY 
 
 B7 
 
 DR. PAUL CARUS 
 
 "for what is a man profited, if he shall gain the 
 whole world and lose his own soul?" 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 LONDON AGENTS 
 
 Kegan Paui., Tresch, Tedbner & Co., Ltd, 
 
 1900 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 SOME psychologists of the modern school have 
 characterised their science- as a "psychology 
 without a soul." They mean thereby that the old 
 dualistic conception of the soul as a metaphysical 
 ego-being, with faculties and functions, has been dis- 
 carded; that there is no such thing as a soul-entity; 
 and that, accordingly, our psychology must be recon- 
 structed, pretty much after the manner in which we 
 might reconstruct the play of "Hamlet" with the r61e 
 of Hamlet omitted. The author of this little book is 
 fully aware of the gravity of the charges that have 
 been made against the old-fashioned soul-conception ; 
 in fact, he himself is one of the most energetic sup- 
 porters of the monistic philosophy, but he would in- 
 sist that, while a deeper insight into the nature of 
 things necessitates a revision of our science, the facts 
 of man's soul-life remain the same as before, and the 
 new psychology is not a psychology without a soul, 
 but a psychology with a new interpretation of the 
 soul. 
 
 The soul, it is true, can no longer he regarded as 
 
iv WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 a mystical being, as an entity, or an essence, — a some- 
 thing in itself, possessed of certain qualities and en- 
 dowed with faculties : the soul is not that which feels 
 and thinks and acts, but is the feeling itself, the think- 
 ing itself, and the acting itself ; and the faculties, so 
 called, are simply various categories under which the 
 several sets of psychical functions may be subsumed. 
 
 There is as little need for the psychologist to as- 
 sume a separate soul-being, performing the several 
 soul-functions, as there is for the meteorologist to as- 
 sume a wind-entity, which, by blowing, produces a 
 commotion in the air. According to the positive 
 school, the commotion in the air itself is the wind. 
 But though we deny the existence of a metaphysical 
 wind-entity, winds blow as vigorously as they ever 
 did ; and why should the soul of the new psychology 
 be less real than the soul of the old psychology? 
 
 The dualistic conceptions of thing-in-themselves, 
 which are supposed to be the agents of phenomena, 
 constituting the concrete things, is gone forever; and 
 some thinkers to whom this conception of the world 
 has grown dear, feel sad at heart and sigh over the 
 loss of their spiritual treasures, for they fancy that 
 the highest ideals of mankind have been impaired, 
 and science is doomed to end in dreary nihilism. But 
 let us remember, that, if ihings-in- themselves have no 
 real existence, the things themselves remain. If the 
 metaphysical soul-conception must be abandoned, the 
 facts of our soul-life remain. 
 
Pre FA CE. V 
 
 The personality of man, so little understood before, 
 is not of less significance, if we can analyse it and trace 
 the fibres which enter into the wonderful system of its 
 make-up ; and the unity of the soul is not gone, be- 
 cause man's psychical activity is not a rigid unit, not 
 an atom, not a monad. The soul is a complex organ- 
 ism, consisting of many ingredients and different parts 
 with varied functions. It is a compound, but, being 
 an organism, it does not lack unity. It is subject to 
 change, but for that very reason it is capable of 
 growth, of expansion, of advancement, and elevation. 
 
 The main fact of man's psychical activity is the 
 continuity of his soul, for this is the ultimate basis for 
 the identity of a man's personality through all the 
 changes of his development. The continuity and 
 identity of each soul are conditions which beget the 
 feeling of responsibility, and thus force upon man the 
 necessity of moral conduct. 
 
 The first questions of psychology are the Whence 
 and Whither of the human soul ; and we must under- 
 stand their significance in order to be able to answer 
 the main question of life, "What shall we do? How 
 shall we act ? Which aim shall we pursue ? " 
 
 The continuity of man's soul-life is not limited to 
 the span of time that lies between birth and death ; it 
 extends beyond the boundary line of individual exist- 
 ence, and links the fate of each single person to the 
 lives of his ancestors and contemporaries, as well as 
 to the generations to come. 
 
vi WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 It is not impossible to comprehend the nature of 
 man's soul, to trace its Whence, and to point out its 
 Whither; and we trust that when a man has gained 
 an insight into the relation of his own being to the 
 general life of the race, he will think with greater rev- 
 erence of the past and with more consideration for the 
 future. It will make him judicious in whatever he 
 undertakes, and will serve him as a mariner's com- 
 pass on his journey over the stormy ocean of time. 
 
 The Author. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 rACE 
 
 I. The Nature of the Soul i 
 
 The Problem, i ; Subjectivity and Objectivity, 7 ; 
 The Origin of Organised Life, 15 ; The Origin of 
 Mind, 17 ; The Rise of Subjectivity, 26. 
 
 II. The Mould 30 
 
 Form and the t-aMis of Form, 30 ; The Divinity of 
 Pure Form, 35 ; Schiller the Prophet of Pure Form, 
 42 ; Man as an Incarnation of the Logos, 49. 
 
 III. Whence? 54 
 
 The Ego, 54 ; The Unity of Man's Corporeality, 56 ; 
 Heredity, 58 ; Epigenesis, 61 ; The Consciousness of 
 Corporeality, 62 ; The Image on the Retina, 65 ; Fu- 
 tility of Introspection, 67 ; Dispositions, 69 ; A Com- 
 plex of His Ancestors, 72 ; The Newness of Each 
 New Individual, 77 ; A Basis for the Higher Life of 
 the Soul, 77 ; The Continuity of Man's Personal Re- 
 collections, 79 ; Importance of the Name, 79 ; A 
 Record of Life's History, 84 ; An Identity of Form, 
 86; Reproduction of Tradition, 89; Man Identified 
 with His Ideals— The Ideal Self, 94, Ideals Predeter- 
 mined, 96, Communism of Soul-Life, 100 ; A Contin- 
 uation of the Past, 102. 
 
viii WHENCE AND WBITHER. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 IV. Whither? 103 
 
 The Dissolution of the Body and the Preservation of 
 the Soul, 103 ; In Communion with the Whole, 109 ; 
 Time and Its Indestructibility, 113 ; The Immortality 
 of Ideas, 118; The Spirit-Empire, 120; The Blend- 
 ing of Souls, 123 ; It Thinks, 125 ; A Higher Con- 
 ception of the Self, 131 ; Death, 135 ; Fear of Death 
 Unnecessary, 136 ; The Origin of Death, 138 ; Death 
 the Fountain of Youth, 143 ; Ethics, 145 ; Heaven 
 on Earth, 151. ■ 
 
 V. Is Life Worth Living? 153 
 
 Optimism and Pessimism, 153 ; Yearning for Eter- 
 nity, 155 ; The Eternal in the Transient, 158 ; The 
 Prototypes of Existence, 160 ; Man's Fravashi, 163 ; 
 The Fabric of Spirit-Life, 163 ; The Realm of Spirit, 
 168 ; Is Life Worth Living ? 173 ; Brute and Man, 
 177 ; Religion, 179 ; The One Thing that is Needful, 
 183. 
 
THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. 
 
 THE PROBLEM. 
 
 THE SpHnx tliat threatens to destroy the 
 wanderer on Ms pilgrimage througli life 
 is the problem of man, — the problem of the 
 human soul, its nature, its origin, and its des- 
 tiny, — a problem which must be solved on pen- 
 alty of perdition. Does the problem lie within 
 the ken of human comprehension, or must we 
 surrender all hope of ever attaining, even in 
 broad outlines, the proper solution? 
 
 Heinrich Heine, the poet of sentimental 
 world-pain, tersely portrays in a few charac- 
 teristic lines the despair of agnosticism : 
 
 ' ' By the sea, by the desolate nocturnal sea, 
 Stands a youthful man, 
 His breast full of sadness, his head full of doubt. 
 And with bitter lips he questions the waves : 
 
 " ' Oh solve me the riddle of life I 
 The cruel, world-old riddle 
 
2 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 Concerning which, many a head has been racked — 
 Heads in hieroglyphic caps, 
 Heads in turbans and in cowls. 
 Periwigged heads, and a thousand other 
 Poor, sweating human heads. 
 
 Tell me, what signifies man ? 
 
 Whence does he oome? Whither does he go? 
 
 Who dwells yonder above the golden stars? ' 
 
 ' ' The waves murmur their eternal murmur, 
 The winds blow, the clouds flow past. 
 Cold and indifferent twinkle the start, 
 And — a fool awaits an answer.* 
 
 This little poem is a wonderfully artistic 
 and beautiful sketch of the human heart that 
 has failed to find its bearings in life ; it is full 
 of bitterness and disappointment, branding the 
 noblest aspiration of the thinker, the search 
 for light on the main problem of existence as 
 a vain undertaking which a clever man will 
 wisely abandon. 
 
 And at first sight, the poet's despair seems 
 justified. Here we are — frail creatures of condi- 
 tions which we do not control, hungry for food, 
 beset with innumerable dangers that almost 
 at every minute of our existence threaten to 
 destroy us, burning with various desires, full 
 
 * Translated by Emma Lazarus. 
 
THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. 3 
 
 of hopes and fears, yearning for innumerable 
 things which, we expect will give us pleasure 
 and assure our happiness, drifting along on 
 the infinite ocean of time, without seeing a 
 goal in which we can find the satisfaction of 
 our many wants : and the anxious question 
 rises in us. Whence do we come, and Whither 
 do we fare? This question, we need not hesi- 
 tate to say, is the main problem of life, and 
 the answer which every one accepts to his own 
 satisfaction, becomes necessarily the dominant 
 factor and regulative principle of his whole 
 life. 
 
 This problem possesses more than a mere 
 theoretical value ; it is a matter of practical 
 and most vital importance; for the solution 
 of this problem serves us as a mariner's com- 
 pass ; it helps to gtiide us and will generally 
 determine the direction of the course of our 
 life's ship. 
 
 There are many other problems which tem- 
 porarily appear more urgent and may prove 
 more attractive, yet none of them retains that 
 lasting importance which the question of our 
 Whence and Whither possesses. The elabo- 
 
4 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 ration of a mathematical theorem is of great 
 interest to the mathematician; the decipher- 
 ing of ancient hieroglyphs will absorb the con- 
 centrated attention of archaeologists and give 
 us the key to problems of the past ; the solu- 
 tion of puzzles and conundrums will prove an 
 enjoyable diversion to the wit who in conge- 
 nial company whiles away an idle hour ; but 
 among all the problems that can ever be pro- 
 posed, those which are really serious are more 
 or less dependent upon our problem, which is 
 the fundmental problem of life. 
 
 The answer which is given to the problem 
 of man's Whence and Whither constitutes the 
 essence of religion. Your solution of this 
 problem is your religion. 
 
 Religion is conviction. It is the convic- 
 tion of a man with regard to the significance 
 of life. And this conviction conditions our 
 general attitude in the world ; it gives color to 
 our existence ; it moulds our sentiments ; it 
 determines our sympathies and antipathies; 
 it is the mainspring of our actions ; in a word, 
 it is the quintessence of our soul. 
 
 In the history of mankind the problem of 
 
THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. 5 
 
 the wtence and whitter of man was first ap- 
 proaclied by propliets and priests, by tbose 
 wbo saw its practical bearings on moral con- 
 duct; and tbe solution of tbe prophet, as a 
 rule, bears tbe stamp of instinctive discoveries. 
 The practical purpose of the problem stands 
 in the front, and a theoretical explanation 
 forms the background, pretending to be the 
 essential thing, the key that will unlock all 
 mysteries, and comes as a revelation of that 
 power to which we must conform and whose 
 authority we must accept as a final decision. 
 All problems of practical importance are 
 first practically solved. Mankind has been 
 groping its way and is groping still. We can 
 say the same of almost all the great leaders of 
 our race, that they builded better than they 
 knew. Progress, no doubt, is as much a mat- 
 ter of necessity, of natural law, as is the growth 
 of a tree ; but, on the part of man, most of the 
 advance is made by lucky incidents, happy 
 guesses of genius, by the visions of dreamers, 
 by inspiration ; and all blessings appear, and 
 actually are in this sense, by the grace of God. 
 The lever was discovered millenniums before 
 
6 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 tlie science of meclianics could explain the 
 theory of the lever, and even to-day there are 
 many discoveries made, the theory of which 
 remains shrouded in mystery. The religious 
 question has been solved for practical purposes 
 by the founders of the various religions in a 
 practical way, as a system of morals ; and the 
 underlying theory found expression in myths, 
 in parables, in dogmatic formulations of sym- 
 bolical formulas, in creeds and confessions of 
 faith. The theoretical difficulties are, as a 
 rule, passed over with the declaration that the 
 solution of the problem must be accepted as 
 divine revelation without argument, simply on 
 the ground of its inner evidence. 
 
 We propose here to survey the facts of the 
 problem and show them in their connexion 
 with the universe and with the ultimate ground 
 of all existence, as well as in their correlation 
 among themselves. Our intention is to sys- 
 tematise the facts without resorting to hypo- 
 thetical assumptions and also without at all 
 entering into the theories that have been pro- 
 posed as a solution, be they religious or meta- 
 physical; and, I hope, we shall learn, first, 
 
THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. 7 
 
 that the problem is not entirely beyond the 
 ken of human comprehension ; secondly, that 
 the facts themselves present a solution the 
 moral lesson of which cannot be mistaken; 
 and, thirdly, that we shall appreciate the re- 
 ligious solutions which anticipate by instinc- 
 tive inspiration some of the most important 
 results of the science of these latter days, — 
 nay, of the distant future ; for we expect that 
 with the progress of knowledge many details 
 will be brought to light which will corroborate 
 the injunctions of the religion of love and 
 good-will on earth and will justify its ethics of 
 sacrifice as set forth in the example of Him 
 who died on the cross as a martyr of His Mes- 
 sianic mission. 
 
 SUBJECTIVITY AND OBJECTIVITY. 
 
 An analysis of our own being reveals to us 
 first of all the spirituality of our own exist- 
 ence. We are conscious ; that is to say, man 
 consists of feelings varying in kind, and in 
 clearness, and in intensity. There are pleas- 
 ures and pains and indifferent states. There 
 are images of sight, sounds, tastes, smells, 
 
8 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 and feelings of toucli and temperature. The 
 motions executed by the efforts of our muscles 
 are noted. Further there are commotions urg- 
 ing us to action, there are representations of 
 things, of our own self, of our bodily condi- 
 tions, of our exertions and deeds, of our 
 hopes and fears, of our desires, our volitions, 
 our plans of action, and other thoughts — an 
 infinite variety of feelings. 
 
 Feelings are most wonderful phenomena. 
 If feelings did not exist, the universe would 
 be a grand display of physical forces without 
 any purpose, a kaleidoscopic exhibition with- 
 out any meaning ; life would be mere mechan- 
 ical motion, and the events of the world's evo- 
 lution would possess no significance. 
 
 What are feelings? 
 
 The philosophers of the old-fashioned ma- 
 terialism attempted to explain feeling from 
 matter and motion, but they failed lament- 
 ably. Cabanis and Karl Vogt spoke of thought 
 as " a secretion of the brain ' ' and compared 
 it to the secretions of the liver and the kid- 
 ney. If thought were a secretion of the brain, 
 the chemist ought to be able to analyse 
 
THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. 9 
 
 thouglit, and we might have it bottled up and 
 sold at the grocer's in tin cans. The truth is 
 that sentiments, sensations, perceptions, and 
 thoughts, or briefly, all kinds of feelings are 
 not material at all. Materiality and feeling 
 are two disparate ideas ; and why? Because 
 feelings do not belong to the domain of objec- 
 tive existence, but are subjective states.* 
 
 The contrast between feelings and things 
 cannot be emphasised strongly enough. They 
 are radically different in their nature. 
 
 Selfhood in itself is feeling; otherness, 
 whatever it may be in itself, is always, so far 
 as it is concrete, represented by our senses as 
 matter in motion ; and its interactions are de- 
 termined by the laws of form, causation, time, 
 and space. 
 
 The contrast between feeling and objectiv- 
 ity has been brought out most clearly by Leib- 
 nitz who emphasises the truth that feelings of 
 others, as feelings, cannot be felt or seen or 
 perceived. He says : 
 
 "If we could imagine a machine the operation of 
 
 *For further details see the chapter "The Error of Material- 
 ism" in the author's Fundamental Problems, 2d ed., pp. 350-354. 
 
10 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 which would manufacture thoughts, feelings, and per- 
 ceptions, and could think of it as enlarged in all its 
 proportions, so that we could go into it as into a mill, 
 even then we would find in it nothing but particles 
 jostling each other, and never anything by which per- 
 ception could be explained." 
 
 Feelings as such cannot be explained from 
 principles of meclianics, and the reason is ob- 
 vious: feelings are subjective, not objective. 
 Every subject feels its own feelings ; it cannot 
 directly apprehend the feelings of others. For 
 all otherness, all things not-ourselves, make 
 their presence felt by resistance, and resist- 
 ance is objectivity, i. e., something confront- 
 ing or opposing us, which is apperceived in 
 the shape of bodily existence. 
 
 Suppose that there were ghosts of things 
 that were real, or any entities that could affect 
 us somehow so as to force us to perceive their 
 presence ; we should through contact with 
 them feel a sensation, and the cause of the 
 sensation would necessarily appear as an ob- 
 jective phenomenon. In other words, the 
 cause of this sensation, as of all other sensa- 
 
! THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. ii 
 
 tions, would represent itself as consisting of 
 matter. 
 
 Materiality is objectivity, and objectivity 
 is the presence of otherness. 
 
 While feeling and objectivity are disparate, 
 they need not be separate. Objectivity and 
 subjectivity are two different sets of abstrac- 
 tion, and neither of them may exist as an iso- 
 lated entity. In the case of our own body, 
 both are intimately interrelated as the inside 
 and the outside of the same reality. We our- 
 selves are feelings, and wherever through our 
 senses we become acquainted with our limbs, 
 we find ourselves possessed of the same corpo- 
 reality as other objects. Our body appears to 
 us as well as to others as an object among 
 other objects of the objective world. Thus we 
 argue from our own experience when we as- 
 sume that bodies analogous to our bodies are 
 possessed of analogous feelings, and the con- 
 clusion appears justified that creatures of an- 
 other organisation are in their inner subjec- 
 tivity souls of another type. 
 
 The limit of sentiency seems to be reached 
 when we leave the domain of animal organ- 
 
12 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 isms and descend into tlie kingdom of plants ; 
 but even here we find irritability, and the 
 claims of botanists that plants are possessed 
 of peculiar kinds of souls, of plant-souls, can 
 by no means be refuted. 
 
 We may regard the kingdom of organ- 
 ised life as the realm of those phenomena 
 which show evidences of soul-life, of sensibil- 
 ity and irritability ; but the inorganic king- 
 dom is for that reason not absolutely void of 
 an analogous, although we may grant, a lower 
 kind of subjectivity. Chemicals apparently 
 exercise choice, for we find, they eagerly seek 
 one another or abandon one liaison for the sake 
 of a preferred partner ; and we have no other 
 means of clearly describing their behavior 
 than by allegories selected from analogous oc- 
 currences in the human world, that is, by 
 characterising them as "afiinities." 
 
 The whole world is aglow with a spon- 
 taneous activity which betrays animation and 
 life. Every speck of reality has an intrinsic 
 proclivity to do something ; and the action of 
 things, so far as we can judge, depends upon 
 their form. 
 
THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. 13 
 
 Life (in the sense of activity, or better, 
 activeness) is a universal feature of existence, 
 and wliat we call life in the limited sense of 
 the word is that one kind of life which through 
 organisation rises above the dumb animation 
 of purely phj'^sical existence into the realm of 
 consciousness and thought. 
 
 We distinguish three degrees of life : First, 
 the general life of nature, which is identical 
 with existence in general. Secondly, organ- 
 ised life, which characterises the phenomena 
 of the animal and vegetal kingdoms ; and 
 thirdly, psychical life, which appears to be 
 limited to the animal kingdom alone. There 
 is a radical difference between the three kinds 
 of life, which are like three concentric circles. 
 The smallest circle of most limited circum- 
 scription is a part of the middle circle of a 
 wider circumscription, and the latter in its 
 turn is contained in the largest all-compre- 
 hensive circle. All psychical life is organised 
 and all organised life is in its elements a dis- 
 play of the universal life. 
 
 We need not assume that the combustion 
 of a flame is a sentient process ; nor need we 
 
14 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 believe that plants are conscious : but we are 
 driven to the conclusion that the potentiality 
 of feeling lies latent in inorganic nature, and 
 its rise is simply due to a peculiar interaction 
 of its molecules such as actually takes place 
 in the living substance of all animal creatures, 
 from the amoeboids upwards to the highest 
 organisms of the zoological kingdom. 
 
 Accordingly, subjectivity or the inner state 
 of reality, is existence as it is in itself ; objec- 
 tivity, or the external appearance of reality, 
 is existence as it presents itself to other ex- 
 istence. From the simple subjectivity of in- 
 organic nature the higher subjectivity of or- 
 ganised life originates which manifests itself 
 in feelings. 
 
 Feelings are states of awareness. They 
 rise from the indistinct irritation of experien- 
 cing resistance of some kind. When new im- 
 pressions are made, they are felt to be this 
 and not that. In the further course of devel- 
 opment they run up through a scale of distinc- 
 tions from the crude apprehension of contact 
 to a vivid discrimination of self in contrast to • 
 not-self. Thus feelings are the product of a 
 
THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. 15 
 
 two-fold interaction, first an interaction be- 
 tween subject and object, or the apprehension 
 of impacts felt to be external; and secondly 
 the interaction of correlated internal condi- 
 tions, i. e., comparisons of two, or several feel- 
 ings, constituting an organisation of the sub- 
 ject. Organised life, therefore, is the condi- 
 tion of sentiency. 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF ORGANISED LIFE. 
 
 Our scientists cannot produce the forms 
 of any kind of organised life in their test-tubes, 
 but they have discovered that the materials of 
 which plants and animals consist are the very 
 same elements as those of the inorganic world. 
 The hope of discovering a life-substance has 
 not been realised, and we are therefore inev- 
 itably driven to the conclusion, which is now 
 commonly accepted as a tautology, that the 
 nature of organised life is due to its organisa- 
 tion, viz., it is a matter of form. 
 
 Life is a process, not a substance ; it is a 
 slow oxidation in which the form of the living 
 substance remains the same. Thus its char- 
 acteristic feature is a metabolism, or a con- 
 
1 6 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 stant cliange of material with a preservation 
 of form. The waste products are discarded, 
 which, is called dissimilation; and the new 
 materials that come to replace them are as- 
 similated, which means, they replace atom for 
 atom and molecule for molecule, thus contin- 
 uing the life process in exactly the same way. 
 If assimilation surpasses dissimilation there is 
 growth, viz., an increase assimilated forms, 
 which, being the same in kind, are a repro- 
 duction of the form of life from which they 
 take rise. 
 
 We need not wonder that organised life 
 has not as yet been produced artificially ; for 
 even the lowest organisms with which we are 
 acquainted have a long history and in order to 
 produce the tiniest bacillus, a chemist would 
 have to let the ingredients pass through all 
 the influences that have shaped its particular 
 form of life, among which there may be con- 
 ditions which he cannot repeat in his labora^ 
 tory. 
 
 We cannot here recapitulate the history of 
 the problem of the origin of life, nor give an 
 account of how far science has succeeded in 
 
THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. 17 
 
 the artificial reproduction of the products of 
 organised life. With reference to the main 
 point, here under consideration, be it sufficient 
 to quote Professor Clifford, who sums up the 
 question as follows :* 
 
 "We know from physical reasons that the earth 
 was once in a liquid state from excessive heat. Then 
 there could have been no living matter upon it. Now 
 there is. Consequently non-living matter has been 
 turned into living matter somehow." 
 
 The rise of organised life apparently leads 
 to, and renders possible, the rise of sentiency 
 from the insentient and purely physical life of 
 the great storehouse of nature ; but more im- 
 portant than the problem of sentiency is, for 
 our present purpose, the problem of the rise 
 of mentality. 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF MIND. 
 
 What is the mind, and how does the mind 
 originate? 
 
 The mind of man is a marvellous phenom- 
 enon, because it possesses the quality of di- 
 recting, of marshalling, of ruling the things 
 
 •Clifford, Virchovj on the Teaching of Science. 
 
l3 WJtENCE AND WHtTH£R. 
 
 of his surroundings. Man is tlie king of cre- 
 ation, the sovereign of the earth, and he has 
 become the master of destiny through his 
 mind. 
 
 Man thinks ; he devises, he plans, he acts 
 with design; and thus he, a relatively weak 
 creature, conquers the world, exterminates 
 wild brutes, subdues and tames those that can 
 become serviceable to him ; tills the ground ; 
 invents machinery to which he harnesses the 
 forces of nature, steam and electricity; and 
 the path of further progress stretches out be- 
 fore him in vistas that know no boundaries. 
 
 The grandeur of the effect of man's men- 
 tality has blinded psychologists to the sim- 
 plicity of the phenomenon. Most of the solu- 
 tions are far-fetched and lose themselves in 
 mysticism. The essential feature that char- 
 acterises man's mentality is the faculty of 
 representation. Man's thoughts are sentient 
 images of the things and relations of the ob- 
 jective world ; and thinking is simply a com- 
 bining of these sentient images, and the at- 
 tempt at adjusting them in such a way as to 
 determine our action to suit our ends, 
 
THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. 19 
 
 The problem of the origin of the mind, 
 accordingly, will be solved in its main out- 
 lines if we can answer the question, how do 
 the irritations or feelings of sentient beings 
 become representative. Representativeness is 
 the characteristic feature of mentality. 
 
 Suppose we have a sentient being that is 
 exposed to the various impressions of the sur- 
 rounding world. It will feel an irritation of 
 a peculiar kind, perhaps under the influence 
 of the rays of the sun, or on a change of tem- 
 perature, or upon contact with a hard body, 
 or when affected by various chemicals. Every 
 impact of the outer world produces a reaction 
 of some kind in the sentient substance, the 
 form of which remains, as a whirl of water 
 continues for a long time until it wears out by 
 friction with the other particles which have 
 remained quiet. The disturbance in sentient 
 substance passes away, but it leaves a trace 
 still preserving a disposition which, if stirred 
 into renewed activity, will be a repetition of 
 the original commotion. 
 
 The preservation of form is a universal 
 quality of nature, for the product of every for- 
 
20 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 mation remains until it is modified or perhaps 
 entirely obliterated by the action of other 
 forces ; but in the domain of sentient life it 
 acquires a special significance as the physical 
 condition of memory. Memory is nothing but 
 the psychical aspect of the preservation of 
 physiological form. Some sense-impression 
 or its reaction has left a trace which in the 
 general metabolism preserves its form, for 
 every particle discarded is replaced in the 
 very same mode of grouping by another par- 
 ticle of the same kind, so that the structure 
 remains the same in spite of the change of the 
 material and possesses the capability of pro- 
 ducing the same kind of feeling.* 
 
 Now let us consider the condition of a 
 speck of living substance exposed to the in- 
 fluence of the surrounding world. It receives 
 constantly a great variety of impressions which 
 leave traces and render sundry parts specially 
 adapted to receive special kinds of impressions. 
 As the vibration of a definite note will set a 
 tuning fork of the same pitch in motion and 
 
 *See Prof. Ewald Hering's excellent essay On Memory. Eng- 
 lish translation published by The Open Court Pub. Co., Chicago. 
 
THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. ai 
 
 will pass by others, so the ether vibrations 
 will affect the spots especially prepared for 
 them by previous either-vibrations in the eye. 
 
 The development of definite paths of sense- 
 impressions is not a matter of least resistance 
 (as Mr. Spencer has it) , but is due to the fact 
 that sensory commotions naturally follow the 
 grooves of their own pattern. It is a selection 
 according to qualitative dispositions, and not 
 a matter of forces to be overcome or of magni- 
 tudes that can quantitatively be measured. 
 
 Just as the eye originates under the in- 
 fluence of ether- waves, so other organs de- 
 velop through the various reactions to the 
 different impacts of the surrounding world. 
 
 It is obvious that the traces of the various 
 impacts of the surrounding world will natur- 
 ally be grouped in a definite order, thus creat- 
 ing a system of sense-organs which again will 
 be associated through the commotions of their 
 interactions, and all further growth will con- 
 tinue to be an orderly and systematic arrange- 
 ment of the innumerable sense-impressions 
 which pour in from the outside through the 
 gate-ways of the senses. The systematisation 
 
22 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 of the sense-impressions is as necessary and 
 natural as is the systematic regularity of crys- 
 tals, the formation of which depends simply 
 upon their angle of crystallisation. 
 
 So far we have spoken of memory only 
 and the building up of psychical structures 
 through the constant repetition of sense-im- 
 pressions, and we must now ask the question, 
 raised above : How do psychical states acquire 
 representativeness ? 
 
 An impression upon any one of the organs 
 of a sentient being in so far as it is felt, is 
 called a sensation, and in so far as the sensa- 
 tion corresponds somehow in its form to the 
 form of the cause that produced it, we call it 
 an "image." The term image (which means 
 likeness or copy) denoted originally only sen- 
 sations of sight but is now applied by way of 
 linguistic licence to any kind of sense-impres- 
 sion. We speak of sound-images, of images 
 of touch, of taste, and of smell, and denote 
 thereby the individual form of sensory com- 
 motions. Whenever a sense-impression is 
 made, it travels on the path best fitted for its 
 reception and awakens the image of the same 
 
THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. 23 
 
 kind made by prior sense-impressions. The 
 sight of a cat has left in the mind of a dog a 
 definite memory -image ; as soon as another 
 cat presents itself to the dog, the new sense- 
 impression sets up a commotion which travels 
 to the old cat-image and reawakens its mem- 
 ory. The new sense-impression is felt to be 
 the same in kind as the memory-image and 
 the object whose presence has caused the sen- 
 sation is no longer an absolutely unknown 
 thing. We know little of the physiological 
 functioning of the brain, but we are quite fa- 
 miliar with the psychical fact of the presence 
 of sense-impressions and the reawakening of 
 memory -images. For our present purpose the 
 how of the physiology of the brain is indiffer- 
 ent and the fact that these processes take place 
 is quite sufficient. 
 
 It is not necessary that sense-images should 
 always be perfect pictures of the causes by 
 which they are produced. The air- waves are 
 not sounds, and ether- vibrations are not light, 
 but certain sound-images in the ear correspond 
 to certain air- waves in space, and certain im- 
 ages of sight correspond to certain ether- Adbra- 
 
24 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 tions issuing from objects of our surroundings, 
 and it is sufficient tlia,t the same cause always 
 produces the same effect. The uniform cor- 
 relation that obtains between the same things 
 and the same sensations makes recognition 
 possible. The same kind of sensation comes 
 to be regarded as indicating the presence of 
 the same kind of cause, and thus the sense- 
 images acquire a representative value, they 
 signify objects; they become symbols of 
 things. 
 
 Significance is the characteristic feature of 
 spirituality. 
 
 The most primitive sorts of significance 
 are sensations which are interpreted to be pic- 
 tures of the concrete objects of experience. 
 
 And there is this strange feature to be no- 
 ticed. We do not feel the sense-impressions 
 of our senses, the compression of the organs 
 of touch, the images of sight, the commo- 
 tions of the auditory nerves, etc., but our 
 sense-impressions feel the objects by whose 
 presence they are caused. We feel the re- 
 sistance of the table, we see the tree outside, 
 we hear the words spoken without our ear. 
 
THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. 85 
 
 Thus the soul is truly telepathic ; it is an in- 
 strument for taking note of and recording ob- 
 jects and events that take place at a distance. 
 
 The soul in itself is subjectivity ; but it is 
 like a mirror : it reflects the objective world. 
 The objective value of its images is the main 
 thing ; and upon their truthfulness the worth 
 of the soul depends. 
 
 The animal mind is limited to sensation, 
 to a thinking in sense-images, and could only 
 pass beyond it to a higher condition, if it 
 could form symbols that would be representa- 
 tive of these representations, and thus classify 
 them in abstract conceptions. This is done 
 through language. Word -symbols denote 
 whole classes of sensations and thus tie large 
 bundles of them together into units that can 
 be as easily handled as single sense-impres- 
 sions. 
 
 Words are symbols of symbols ; they are 
 sounds signifying entire sets of significant ex- 
 periences, and thus by an economy of thought 
 (as Mach would say) language becomes the 
 instrument through which the lower mentality 
 of the brute develops into the human mind. 
 
a6 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 We are now ready to give a brief definition 
 of tlie nature of tlie soul as being ' ' a system 
 of sentient symbols." 
 
 Our answer to tlie question, Wbat is the 
 nature of the soul? is perhaps much simpler 
 than could be anticipated and may at first sight 
 appear disappointing to those who had ex- 
 pected a definition that would be high-sounding 
 and mystifying. Most people love mystifica- 
 tion, and have a contempt for that which is 
 simple and intelligible. But it seems to me 
 that thoughts which are simple and intelligible 
 are not the worse for it, and will prove more 
 useful and even more dignified than bewilder- 
 ing and hazy ideas. 
 
 What after all is more simple than that 
 which furnishes the most general explanation, 
 and we shall not have a proper conception of 
 that which is best and highest until we com- 
 prehend it in its simplicity. 
 
 THE RISE OE SUBJECTIVITY. 
 
 A consideration of the contrast that ob- 
 tains between physical and psychical phenom- 
 ena, suggests the idea that the significance of 
 
THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. 27 
 
 evolution consists In tlie gradual rise and the 
 increasing importance of tlie subjective side of 
 nature. In tlie realm of physics the subjec- 
 tive, apparently, plays no part whatever, and 
 might, for all we know, be absent. The 
 atoms of chemical substances are guided 
 neither by pleasure and pain, nor by ideas, 
 i. e., representative feelings. Hence their be- 
 havior does not change ; they do not learn by 
 experience. They combine or separate, they 
 dissolve, they congeal, they burn, in the self- 
 same way again and again. However, in the 
 domain of organised life, feelings play an im- 
 portant part. Organisms are modified by ex- 
 perience ; they are endowed with memory ; 
 they develop ideas, or representative feelings, 
 and their subjectivity grows in importance 
 until in man it becomes the dominant factor 
 determining his course of action. By an or- 
 ganisation of the subjectivity of nature the 
 soul rises into existence and creates the hyper- 
 physical domain of spiritual life. 
 
 The contrast of subjectivity and objectivity 
 and the interaction between the two is the 
 condition under which the soul rises. If there 
 
28 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 were not the disposition of innerness in na- 
 ture, if one part of reality could not become 
 aware of the existence of other parts, sentient 
 beings could not come into being. We must 
 regard this feature of subjectivity as an in- 
 trinsic and inalienable property of nature, and 
 we would thus not countenance the idea that 
 the appearance of soul-life is a mere accident 
 which took place by hap-hazard. On the con- 
 trary, we would deem it probable that organ- 
 ised life appears wherever the conditions are 
 present with the same necessity as vapors and 
 fluids crystallise at a specific temperature. 
 
 -Subjectivity is the condition of the soul, but 
 subjectivity does not constitute its character. 
 The character* of a man's thoughts and sen- 
 timents has been stamped upon his sentiency 
 by sense-impressions that come from the out- 
 side, all of which, though extremely varia- 
 gated and individual, bear the traces of a uni- 
 formity that pervades the objective world. The 
 uniformities of nature, as the very word indi- 
 
 * Character (from x"-?^"^'-'" , to scratch) means that which has 
 been scratched into a thing ; the letter, or picture, or symbol chis- 
 elled into a stone. 
 
THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. 29 
 
 cates, are regularities of form; and it is tlie 
 perception of the regularities of form wiiicli in 
 tlie course of evolution comes to constitute 
 man's rationality. 
 
 Our next problem therefore will be an in- 
 quiry into the nature of form and the form- 
 ative factors of the objective world, as being 
 the mould in which man's soul has been cast. 
 
THE mould: 
 
 FORM AND THE LAWS OF FORM. 
 
 BY form we understand any shape or struc- 
 ture, any combination of forces, any 
 constellation of points or atoms, any rela- 
 tional arrangement or configuration; and it 
 is obvious that form is the all-important fea- 
 ture of reality. 
 
 Science is a tracing of form ; it is a des- 
 cription of facts in their causal concatenation. 
 
 Science traces transformations to the move- 
 ments that start the change (to their causes) ; 
 it analyses the nature of the changing things 
 (discovering the reasons of the change) , and 
 accounts for the surrounding influences (called 
 conditions) * 
 
 Natural laws are formulas which in the 
 
 *For a detailed exposition of the problem of causation com- 
 pare the author's Fundamental Problems, pp. 79-109, and the 
 Primer of Philosophy, pp. 137-172. 
 
THE MOULD. 31 
 
 tersest possible way describe the actions of 
 things. They are comprehensive answers 
 given to the question why things act in spe- 
 cial ways, ultimately reducing reasons to uni- 
 versal statements, which are applications of 
 the laws of form. 
 
 As the best known instance we cite the 
 law of gravitation. Bodies fall to the ground 
 because they are attracted by the earth. Com- 
 ets are attracted by the sun and move round 
 it in the form of a conic section which is the 
 diagonal of their own movement and the solar 
 attraction. All bodies attract each other, and 
 the force of their attraction varies directly as 
 the product of the masses of the bodies and 
 inversely as the square of the distance. At- 
 traction is a fact of the objective world, and 
 its force can be measured and formulated. 
 Thus science, in determining the nature of 
 gravitation, arrives ultimately at a description 
 in terms of mathematics, the science of pure 
 space-forms. 
 
 In the same way, all the sciences approach 
 the solutions of their various problems by re- 
 ducing their statements of fact to comprehen- 
 
32 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 sive formulas, wHcli are always applications 
 of some one of tlie sciences of form, i. e., 
 arithmetic, algebra, logic, geometry, or the 
 theory of change.* 
 
 The work of exact science always begins 
 with measuring and counting, which are a de- 
 termination of quantitative form ; and in addi- 
 tion there is a consideration of grouping or 
 configuration, which is qualitative form. The 
 amount and proportion of ingredients in chem- 
 icals is not sufi&cient ; we must also know the 
 way in which they combine; but in either 
 case, science is nothing but a tracing of form. 
 
 The chemist speaks of different substances 
 as elements, simply because, with the means 
 now at his disposal, he is unable to break up 
 their forms and determine their nature ac- 
 cording to the laws of molecular statics and 
 dynamics. No one, however, since the dis- 
 
 *Kant speaks of reine Naturwissenschaft as that kind of 
 purely formal science which treats of the purely formal laws that 
 underlie the natural sciences. These laws are the law of causation 
 and its counterpart the law of the conservation of matter and en- 
 ergy, which may be supplemented by a consideration of the origin 
 of new forms and the changes of form through combination and 
 separation of old forms. It is practically the pure science of trans- 
 formation, and we propose to translate it here by "theory of 
 change." 
 
THE MOULD. 33 
 
 covery of the law whicli bears Mendeljeff's 
 name can doubt that tbe differences of the ele- 
 ments are due to a difference of form. 
 
 We speak of laws of form, but these laws 
 are not decrees, not ukases or acts of legisla- 
 tion. Like all laws of nature, tbey are de- 
 scriptive formulas, wbicb from given facts 
 predict tbe result. If you add "one" to 
 ' ' one, ' ' you bave ' ' two, ' ' and you will always 
 have "two." If two angles in a plane tri- 
 angle are together ninety degrees, the third 
 angle will be a right angle. We say that the 
 laws of pure form are necessary, but their ne- 
 cessity is not compulsion, it is not an applica- 
 tion of violence with brute force, but simply 
 a prediction of the results that will be pro- 
 duced without fail. The term "necessity" 
 has proved misleading and has erroneously 
 given rise to much anxiety as to the tyranny 
 of law and the yoke of iron that all creatures 
 bear. There is no such a thing : The laws of 
 nature, and the more general laws of pure 
 form, are simply descriptions of the conse- 
 quences of given conditions. There is no cur- 
 tailment of liberty or freedom of will, but sim- 
 
34 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 ply a state of the determinedness of the pres- 
 ent by the past, and of the future by the 
 present. 
 
 Now forms have this peculiarity that the 
 abstract laws which determine them (the 
 mathematical uniformities) are necessary and 
 universal ; they constitute an empire of abso- 
 lute verities which are immutable, uncreate, 
 and indestructible. But the concrete forms 
 themselves, the actualisation of the immu- 
 table laws of form, are always transient and 
 subject to change. They have originated 
 through a process of formation, are modified 
 according to the forces that act upon them, 
 and disappear through disintegration while 
 producing new compounds. Pure forms know 
 of no origin and no decay. They are eternal. 
 
 Every concrete thing that exists is in a 
 special place, it is here, not there ; it is this 
 particular thing, not that; but the laws of 
 form are not thus limited : they are here and 
 there. They are here, yet not here alone, but 
 everywhere. 
 
 Form, accordingly, is that which consti- 
 tutes the suchness of things ; materiality the 
 
THE MOULD. 35 
 
 thisness. Materiality is indispensable for 
 making things actual; it renders tliem con- 
 crete and imparts to them particularity ; but 
 form is the essential feature of all existences 
 as it gives them their own distinctive charac- 
 ter. 
 
 The domain of pure forms and purely for- 
 mal laws is a spiritual empire ; which is to 
 say, it is not material but supermaterial, not 
 physical but hyperphysical. 
 
 THE DIVINITY OF PURE FORM. 
 
 The truth of the eternity and omnipres- 
 ence of pure forms as the indestructible proto- 
 types of all bodily forms was formulated with 
 great clearness by Plato in his doctrine of 
 ideas. Plato's "ideas" which exist above 
 time and space are nothing else than pure 
 forms ; they alone, as the abiding in this 
 world of change, are regarded as real; all 
 material things are fleeting phenomena ; be- 
 ing transient and shadowy appearances of the 
 immutable types of existence. Pain and mis- 
 ery attach to the material, not to its proto- 
 
36 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 type, not to the pure form that finds in some 
 bodily concreteness its temporary abode. 
 
 THe realm of pure forms bas not only been 
 tbe foundation of science and pbilosopby, but 
 bas also become tbe source of religious com- 
 fort and artistic aspiration. Tbe logos-idea 
 wbicb brings Cbristianity into direct relation 
 witb Platonism, is notbing but tbe quintes- 
 sence of tbe doctrine of ideas ; for tbe Logos 
 is tbe most comprebensive term of tbe ulti- 
 mate unison and significance of all ideas. 
 Tbe "word," as tbe embodiment of rational 
 tbougbt, symbolises tbe general principle of 
 tbe logicality of all tbe relations tbat deter- 
 mine tbe formation of tbe world. 
 
 Tbe term logos is used only once in tbe 
 New Testament, viz., in tbe very beginning 
 of tbe introductory sentences of tbe fourtb 
 Gospel, and since it is not repeated in tbe 
 Gospel itself, in spite of tbe paramount im- 
 portance attached to it in the introduction, 
 these first lines are under the suspicion of 
 having been added by some one who was not 
 tbe author of the book itself. However tbat 
 may be, tbe term bas been accepted by Chris- 
 
THE MOULD. 37 
 
 tianity and has become tlie comer-stone of its 
 philosophical foundation. At present, the 
 idea of "the Logos that was in the begin- 
 ning" and has become flesh in Jesns of 
 Nazareth, has become endeared to the Chris- 
 tian world more than any other expression of 
 Christian sentiment and thought. 
 
 The term logos* has a long history in 
 
 * Logos ^yjyyo^) means ' ' word " in the sense of rational expres- 
 sion of thought. As a philosophical term it was first employed by 
 Heraclitns who uses it to denote the logicality of existence, the law 
 that pervades nature and constitutes the order of the cosmos, as 
 well as the principle that underlies the adjustments of human so- 
 ciety. Thus the Logos forms on the one hand a contrast to matter 
 and motion ; and is distinguished from the world-fire (Trii/j) from 
 which all things have developed. On the other hand it is iden- 
 tified with the necessity of natural law iflvdyKt) or elfiapfitvrf) and 
 with the moral ideal of justice (S'uai). Nothing can be thought 
 to be void of the Logos, and the human sotU is claimed to be a 
 a special manifestation of it. • 
 
 Plato uses Logos, I\rous, and Sophia as synonyms and gives 
 prominence to the cognate term dSoq, i. c, image, type, or idea. 
 The Stoics, however, lay again much stress upon the Logos con- 
 ception and use the word in the plural form Uyoi as a synonym of 
 Platonic ideas. 
 
 The Christian conception of the Logos has been derived from 
 the Neo-Platonist Philo, an Alexandrian Jew of Greek culture, 
 who called it ' ' the son of God, " " the first bom son, " " the second 
 God," " the likeness of God," "the arch priest." Philo's Logos is 
 the representative of the highest God and the medium of his reve- 
 lation to the world. 
 
 It is interesting to find a similar use of terms denoting "word " 
 in India, in Iran and also in China. In the Vedas we read of ' ' the 
 voice in the cloud" (Vdch 4mbhrint) that issues from the forehead 
 
38 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 wWcli several rival terms play an important 
 part, such as sophia or wisdom, dynaniis or 
 power {Svvafxii) , tte icon (eihwv) or image, 
 also called the second deity, oeon* or the 
 spirit of the divine dispensation in time, the 
 en-soph (-T'D l^) or "infinitude " of the Kabbalah 
 which in one aspect is ayin (pS) or the non- 
 existent, and in another becomes manifest as 
 the ten shepiroth (niiv'^') or intelligences, in the 
 archetypal man. The Kabbalah claims a pre- 
 existence of all souls in the Divine emana- 
 tions — in the realm of pure forms which are 
 the eternal thoughts of God, the creative fac- 
 tors that shape the world in its evolution. 
 
 Non-Christian religions have similar con- 
 ceptions which are clearest in Buddhism. 
 Buddha is he who acquires enlightenment, 
 
 of the Father and hurls the deadly arrow against the foe of Brah- 
 man ;" and Ahura Mazda, the Lord Omniscient, when attacked by 
 Angra Mainyu hurls him down by uttering the Honover or Ahuna 
 Vairya, the veritable word, the same which he reveals to Zoroaster 
 as the prayer of the righteous (Cf. Farg, XIX, g, 43, Yasha, XIX). 
 Historically independent is Lao-Tze's conception of the Tao, which 
 means Word, Path, or Reason. The CKang Too or Eternal Rea- 
 son (the Logos) is actualised in the sheng yen, the saintly man. 
 
 * yEon (a'l&v) means time, then the dispensation of an epoch in 
 the evolution of the world, and in Neo-Platonic philosophy the 
 spirit of such a dispensation. 
 
THE MOULD. 
 
 39 
 
 the eternal bodhi. He is pre-exist ent in the 
 Tusita heaven, the domain of unmaterial and 
 uncreated spirituality. He enters the virgin 
 womb of Maya, his mother, in the shape of a 
 white elephant, the symbol of wisdom, and is 
 bom as Bodhisatva, the Buddha to be. He 
 passes through all the stages of a search for 
 enlightenment for the sake of delivering man- 
 kind from error and sin, until he finds the 
 bodhi under the sacred bodhi-tree, while the 
 starry constellation that indicates the fulfil- 
 ment of the times rises on the horizon at the 
 dawn of day. Nirvana is the attainment of 
 the realm of the indestructible, the arupa or 
 bodiless, i. e., the pure form which is without 
 material form ; and Nirvana is attainable in 
 this life by ceasing to cling to anything par- 
 ticular, one's own body included. Thus it is 
 the annihilation of all sinful desire, of ego- 
 tism, greed, and self-indulgence. It is the 
 attainment of the bodhi which now takes its 
 abode in the Buddha's personality, using it as 
 its instrument for the purpose of extending 
 the bliss of -salvation to all the world. 
 
 The Buddhists insist on the truth that all 
 
40 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 compounds will' be dissolved, and derive from 
 it the moral, not to cling to transient things, 
 but to find the resting-place of that wbicli is 
 not subject to decay, the unmaterial, the un- 
 create, that which never originated and never 
 will pass away. The world of compounds is 
 the universe of bodily form ; the realm of the 
 uncreate is the empire of pure form. 
 
 The Zarathustrian doctrine of "fravashis 
 which have existed from of old," or eternal 
 prototypes of the various beings which remain 
 with their bodily actualisations as a kind of 
 guardian spirits, is quite analogous to the 
 conception of Platonic ideas and of pure forms. 
 The fravashi of the prophet revealed itself in 
 a vision to the primeval bull three thousand 
 years before it was incarnated in ' ' the glori- 
 ous man-child."* 
 
 The empire of pure form is in one sense 
 indeed a pure Nothing or Non-existence, as 
 the Jewish thinkers said that wrote the Kab- 
 balah. Pure form is unmaterial, it is not 
 anything particular and concrete, but it is the 
 
 *Dk. 7, 2, 59-61. West's translation, Sacred Books of the 
 East, XLVII. 31. 
 
THE MOULD. 41 
 
 law that determines, according to particular 
 conditions, the shape, the character, the na- 
 ture, the actions and the fate of every particu- 
 lar thing or being. As such, however, it is not 
 a non-entity, but the most real reality of the 
 actual world. It is above time and space ; in 
 a word, it is superreal, for it does not depend 
 upon the existence of bodily reality. And 
 all the pure forms together are one insepar- 
 able system, a harmonious body of inter- 
 related laws, or truths, or etemalities, or 
 whatsoever we may call them, which in their 
 oneness constitute the immutable, omnipres- 
 ent and eternal Deity that sustains the world 
 and directs its course. This oneness of all the 
 norms of existence is the power* that makes 
 for righteousness ; it is the curse of sin, the 
 bliss of goodness, the standard of right, the 
 condemnation of falsehood, and the prototype 
 of truth. 
 
 *" Power" is used here as an allegorical expression. It does 
 not mean power in the common acceptation of the word, which is 
 the power of muscle or steam that can be measured in foot-pounds. 
 In quoting this well-known definition of God, we interpret ' ' power " 
 as that super-dynamic efficacy which determines the direction of 
 power, and thus without being either matter or energy is that 
 which disposes over all motions and actions. 
 
42 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 This is not pantheism, but Nomotlieism, 
 a view of God which, conceives him as the 
 eternal norm, as the nomos {vdpios) of exist- 
 ence. It is the proclamation of the superper- 
 sonal God, being a purification of the tradi- 
 tional conception which looks upon God as 
 a huge individual. It teaches that God, the 
 highest norm of existence, is possessed of a 
 definite character, giving purpose to the world 
 and being the standard of truth and right, the 
 ultimate raison cfHre of all that is, and was, 
 and will be. 
 
 SCHII.LER THE PROPHET OF PURE EORM. 
 
 What a fruitful idea the conception of the 
 empire of pure form has been in art and po- 
 etry ! Friedrich Schiller sings a hymn of re- 
 ligious praise to pure form in his poem Ideals 
 and Life., and describes the home of art and 
 poetic inspiration as follows : 
 
 "In yon region of pure forms, 
 Sunny land e'er free from storms, 
 Misery and sorrow cease to rave. 
 There our sufferings no more pierce the soul, 
 Tears of anguish there no longer roll. 
 Nought remains but mind's resistance bravs. 
 
THE MOULD. 43 
 
 Beaateons as the rainbow's colored hue, 
 Painted on the canvas o£ the cloud, 
 E'en on melancholy's mournful shroud 
 Rest reigns in empyrean blue." 
 
 The material world is a world of death, 
 and all bodily existence is doomed to become 
 the prey of Hades : 
 
 ' ' Yonder power whose tyranny we bemoan. 
 On our bodies has a claim alone. 
 Form is never bound by time's design. 
 She, the gods' companion,* blessed and bright, 
 Liveth in eternal realms of light 
 'Mongst the deities, herself divine. 
 Wouldst thou on her pinions soar on high 
 Throw away the earthly and its woe I 
 To the ideal realm for refuge fly 
 From this narrow life below." 
 
 Schiller loves to utilise Greek mythology, 
 because the personification of natural laws, of 
 ideals, and other influential factors of life, in 
 the noble types of the Olympian gods, ap- 
 peals to his artistic taste ; but his description 
 of the empyrean region reminds us, at the 
 same time, of St. John's Revelation, where 
 we read: "And God shall wipe away all tears 
 
 * Die Gesfiielin seliger Naturen, means the companion of the 
 blessed ones, i. e., the gods, and not (as Mr. Bowring has it), 
 "blissful Nature's playmate." 
 
44 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 from tteir eyes, and there shall be no more 
 death." Peace of soul exists alone in the 
 realm of pure form ; for what is painful strug- 
 gle in real life, appears in the domain of the 
 ideal merely as beauteous contrast. Pure form 
 is divine, while its bodily realisation is min- 
 gled with that element that is of the earth 
 earthy. Therefore the poet exhorts us, not 
 to lust after the fruit of sensuality : 
 
 ' ' Wouldst thou here be like a deity, 
 In the realm of death be free, 
 Never seek to pluck its garden fruit. 
 On its beauty thou may'st feed thine eyei 
 Soon the impulse of desire will rise 
 And enjoyment's transient bliss polnte. 
 E'en the Styx that nine times flows around 
 Ceres' child's return could not delay ; 
 But she grasped the apple — and was bound 
 Evermore by Orcus' sway." 
 
 Sensuality, says Schiller, involves us in 
 the doom of death, — an idea in which Greek 
 views are strangely mixed with Christian as- 
 ceticism. So long as we are able to discard 
 all earthly sorrow, and seek refuge in the 
 realm of the ideal, we need not fear death. 
 Death is the fate of Eve who tasted the for- 
 bidden fruit of sensual desire, but death has 
 
THE MOULD. 45 
 
 no power over Proserpine, Ceres's daughter, 
 the goddess of spring, whose return to life 
 from the domain of Orcus, Styx cannot pre- 
 vent. 
 
 And what is the ethics to which Schiller's 
 philosophy of pure form leads? Schiller says: 
 
 ' ' Man before the law feels base, 
 Humbled and in deep disgrace. 
 Guilt e'en to the holy ones draws nigh. 
 Virtue pales before the rays of truth. 
 From the ideal every deed, in sooth, 
 Must in shame and in confusion fly. 
 None created e'er surmounted this, 
 Neither a bridge's span can bear, 
 Nor a boat o'er that abyss. 
 And no anchor catches there. 
 
 "But by flying from the sense-confined 
 To the freedom of the mind, 
 Every dream of fear thou'lt find thence flown, 
 And the endless depth itself is filling. 
 If the Godhead animates thy willing, 
 It no longer sits upon its throne.* 
 Servile minds alone will feel its sway 
 When of law they scorn the rod. 
 For with man's resistance dies away 
 E'en the sovereignty of God." 
 
 • Schiller's expression that "God descends from his throne " 
 and ' ' abdicates his sovereignty, ' ' have been misunderstood by Mr. 
 Bowring He translates : 
 
 (The Godhead) 
 "Will soar upwards from its earthly throne." 
 
46 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 This is an ethics both of modesty and of 
 moral endeavor. Since the ideal can never be 
 attained in its purity, even the holy man is 
 not free from guilt, and absolute perfection 
 can never be realised. Nevertheless, the ideal 
 is not a beyond ; it can become an immanent 
 presence finding its incarnation in man. And 
 the ideal ceases to appear as an implacable 
 condemnation of our shortcomings as soon as 
 it dominates our entire bein*g. Says Schiller : 
 
 "Nehmt die Gottheit auf in euren Willen, 
 Und sie steigt von ihrem Weltenthron.'' 
 
 [If the Godhead animates thy willing, 
 It no longer sits upon its throne.] 
 
 That God reigns no longer above us, looks 
 like outspoken atheism, but it is the atheism 
 of Christ who said, "I and the Father are 
 one." It is an expression of that moral en- 
 deavor which renders man divine, and gives 
 rise to the ideal of the God-man. 
 
 The same spirit that permeates these stan- 
 zas, reappears in Schiller's poem Words of 
 Faith, which contain a poetical formulation of 
 Kant's three postulates. Freedom, Virtue, and 
 God. Schiller says : 
 
THE MOULD. 47 
 
 "These words I proclaim, important and rare 
 To all generations forever. 
 The heart to their truth will witness bear, 
 Through the senses you'll prove them never.* 
 Man will no longer his worth retain 
 Unless these words of faith remain. 
 
 "For Liberty man is created ; he's free, 
 Though fetters around him be clinking. 
 Let the cry of the mob never terrify thee, 
 Nor the scorn of the dullard unthinking I 
 Beware of the slave when he breaks from his chain, | 
 But fear not the free who their freedom maintain. 
 
 "And Virtue is more than an empty sound, 
 In life you render it real. 
 Man often may stumble before it be found. 
 Still can he obtain this ideal. 
 
 And that which the leam'd in their learning ne'er knew. 
 Can be done by the mind that is childlike and true. 
 
 ' 'And a God, too, there is, a purpose sublime. 
 Though frail may be human endeavor. 
 High over the regions of space and of time 
 One idea supreme rules forever. 
 While all things shifting are tempest pressed. 
 Yet the spirit pervading the change is at rest. 
 
 * Schiller has here in mind the contrast made by Kant be- 
 tween sensation rising from the outside and thought, having its 
 roots in the pure forms of our mind. Schiller means to say that 
 the three ideas, "freedom (i. e., moral responsibility), virtue, and 
 God," are not sense-given. 
 
 f While Schiller says, "the slave must be feared when he 
 frees himself, not the free man," Bowring translates, "Fear not 
 the bold slave, nor the free man." 
 
48 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 ' ' Proclaim these three words, important and rare, 
 To all generations for ever, 
 The heart to their truth will witness bear, 
 Through the senses you'll prove them never, 
 Man will forever his worth retain. 
 While these three words of faith remain." 
 
 When Schiller speaks of God as * ' a pur- 
 pose sublime" ; literally, "a holy will," ^'et'n 
 heiliger Wille^'''' and as "the idea supreme," 
 '■''der hbchste Gedanke.,^'' and when he con- 
 trasts God with the restlessness of the world, 
 stating that "a ,'spirit of rest pervades all 
 change," ^^Es beharret im Wechsel ein ruhi- 
 ger Geist ■)'''' we do not believe that these ex- 
 pressions were framed under strain of versifi- 
 cation. They must, in our opinion, be re- 
 garded as carefully worded- definitions which 
 are the matured product of the poet's thought, 
 whose God is not an individual, not a supreme 
 being, but a highest idea, an all-dominating 
 norm. Here Schiller agrees with the philo- 
 sophical conception of Christianity, which 
 finds its expression in the Fourth Gospel 
 where Christ says, "God is Love." Christ 
 does not say, God is a loving being. Christ's 
 
THE MOULD. 49 
 
 God is more ttan a being. His God is Love 
 itself. 
 
 In the same way, Christ does not say, God 
 is a spirit (as our translation has it) , but 
 nvsvfxa 6 ^eo's, God is spirit. 
 
 MAN AS AN INCARNATION OF THE LOGOS. 
 
 The laws of form mould the world and de- 
 termine the evolution of life, showing their 
 potency in the formation of man. 
 
 What is man? 
 
 Is man a heap of atoms? Ohnol Living 
 organisms are not statues, which preserve the 
 same material until they break to pieces. The 
 particles that constitute the human body come 
 from the surrounding world: food from the 
 soil, water from the well, oxygen from the 
 air. They rush through the system and will 
 soon pass out again. It has been calculated 
 that even the most stable substances of a hu- 
 man organism are renewed on an average in 
 about every seven years ; and that organ 
 which for good reasons is supposed to repre- 
 sent the seat of thought and sentiency, the 
 nervous system, consists of the most unstable 
 
So WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 tissues of all, being subject to a constant 
 cbange whenever tbey are active. The par- 
 ticles that are in motion while I am now 
 thinking, are being discarded at this very 
 same moment as waste material. 
 
 Our tissues are constantly being disinte- 
 grated, and if death means disintegration, the 
 old Latin church hymn is literally true, which 
 reads : 
 
 "Media in vita nos in morte sum us." 
 [In the midst of life we are surrounded by death.] 
 
 As the light consumes itself while it burns, 
 so our tissues suffer decay while we live ; and 
 we continue in life only because they are con- 
 stantly redintegrated. The old forms break 
 down, but new forms are being built up, and 
 our identity depends solely upon this restora- 
 tion of form. 
 
 Some people seek the essential quality of 
 man's being in his vitality, and would iden- 
 tify him with the energy that is stirring in his 
 nerves and muscles. We grant that the en- 
 ergy of man's bodily system is, as much as 
 matter, an indispensable condition of man's 
 existence, but it is not less accidental. The 
 
THE MOULD. 51 
 
 energy that is needed for maintaining man's 
 vitality lias been derived from tlie external 
 world, and is given back to it in tbe measure 
 tbat it is used. Tbe beat of the sun builds up 
 the flora of the world and is stored up in the 
 fruit of our fields. Tbence it is imported in 
 tbe shape of food into the bodily systems of 
 animals and men, where it is transformed by 
 assimilation into muscular and nervous sub- 
 stance. It is utilised for the various functions 
 of life, and returns to the inorganic world as 
 heat and work. Thus energy passes through 
 the machinery of the human body as much as 
 it does through a steam engine ; and we must 
 confess that the human element of man's life 
 is not vitality itself, but the mode of his vi- 
 tality. 
 
 Man is neither matter nor energy, but a 
 peculiar form of matter and energy. His soul 
 has been impressed upon him by the mould- 
 ing influences of the uniformities of nature, 
 the laws of form. 
 
 This truth is so obvious that we meet with 
 a statement of it in one of the oldest records 
 of our race. We read in Genesis ii. 7: 
 
52 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 "The Lord Go^ formed man of the dust of the 
 earth." 
 
 Man is not the dust, of which, his hody con- 
 sists, nor the life that pulses in his heart, but 
 the image which has been stamped upon the 
 animated dust. 
 
 Man is a sentient being, but it is his spir- 
 ituality, not his sentiency, that is the charac- 
 teristic feature of his being. Sentiency man 
 shares with all animals ; but man's sentiency 
 is more refined, his pain more keenly felt, 
 while the possibility of foreseeing the future 
 adds a greater intensity to the burdens of 
 life. Spirituality, however, is the character- 
 istic feature of man's manhood which gives 
 him dominion over the forces of nature and 
 renders ideal aspiration and moral endeavor 
 possible. The highest and most important 
 forms that constitute man's spirituality have 
 been begotten by rational speech, which in the 
 Fourth Gospel is called the Logos, — a term 
 which for good reasons has acquired a re- 
 ligious meaning, as denoting the mould in 
 which man's soul has been cast. 
 
 Every man is an incarnation of the eter- 
 
THE MOULD. 53 
 
 nal principles of reason, but the perfect man, 
 the highest moral ideal of mankind, is their 
 full and final realisation, which therefore in a 
 special sense is called the actualised Logos. 
 
 Man's spirituality consists in a compre- 
 hension of the uniformities of nature, and he 
 may therefore be regarded as an embodiment 
 of the quintessence of the cosmic order, as a 
 reflexion of the divinity that pervades the 
 world. 
 
 Thus we accept on philosophical grounds 
 the religious truth that man has been created 
 in the image of God, and the ideal man is an 
 incarnation of the Logos. 
 
WHENCE? 
 
 THE EGO. 
 
 SO far our investigation has been of a gen- 
 eral nature, treating of consciousness, 
 of life, of form, and of the forms of man's sen- 
 tiency in their significance. We are now pre- 
 pared to enter into details and begin an anal- 
 ysis of the particulars of our own self. 
 
 It is our particular self, our personality, 
 that we care for most. Says Goethe: 
 
 ' ' Prince, and folks, and those who conquer, 
 Mankind in totality, 
 Freely own that all they hanker 
 For is ' personality.' " 
 
 Every one of us is quite definite and differ- 
 ent from others, and the peculiarities which 
 are particularly our own, are naturally very 
 important to us, and we are interested to know 
 how we have become such as we are. 
 
WHENCE ? 55 
 
 What am I? How did I originate, and 
 whence did I come? What are the causes that 
 brought me into being and determined the 
 formation of my personality? Do I remain 
 the same, and if not, what constitutes my 
 identity throughout so many changes ? 
 
 * * 
 
 What do I mean when I say, "I"? Ap- 
 parently the whole personality of myself, — 
 my consciousness, my volitions, my thoughts, 
 my hopes, and also my bodily system with all 
 its limbs, — in brief, my individuality which 
 every one is inclined to believe is quite dis- 
 tinct, absolutely separate, and original. In 
 philosophical language this feeling of one's 
 own personality is commonly called the ego 
 and sometimes, although improperly, the 
 Me* 
 
 When a man says "I," he utters a word — 
 a simple little word, but of exceeding impor- 
 
 •The grammatical objections to the term Me are, as all ques- 
 tions of purely grammatical correctness, irrelevant. The grammar 
 of a language changes, and the accusative has acquired the valne 
 of a casus absoluHvus : but the form Me has been monopolised 
 by the translators of Fichte, and is therefore liable to be confused 
 with Fichte's ego-conception, which is not psychological but met^ 
 physical. 
 
56 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 tance. It is not tlie first word the child learns 
 to use, but the first use of the word "I" may 
 be regarded as the dawn of the child's devel- 
 oping personality. 
 
 In the adult man, the ego is a conscious- 
 ness of great complexity in which we distin- 
 guish three layers or strata, growing one 
 from another and forming one organic whole 
 These three layers are : (1) the consciousness 
 of our corporeality in its unity ; (2) the con- 
 sciousness of the continuity of our personal 
 history, and (3) the consciousness of an iden- 
 tification of our own being with our aspira- 
 tions and ideals. 
 
 THE UNITY OF man's CORPOREALITY. 
 
 The cerebral structure which commands 
 the pronunciation of the word "I" by the 
 muscles of the mouth undoubtedly lies in the 
 motor centre of speech, viz., in the convolu- 
 tion of Broca which is situated at the upper 
 border of the fissure of Sylvius on the left 
 hemisphere of the brain. But more impor- 
 tant than the site of the physiological struc- 
 ture of the word "I" is its significance, the 
 
WHENCE t 57 
 
 complexity of whicli forms a strange contrast 
 to the simplicity of sound of this comprehen- 
 sive term. The significance of the word "I," 
 consisting of the sentiments that accompany 
 the utterance of the sound "I," is what in 
 psychology is called the ego. 
 
 The foundation of the notion "I" (i. e., 
 the ego) consists of the conception of the 
 speaker's own body in contrast to the sur- 
 rounding world. It is of a local nature and 
 appears as the consciousness of our skinbound 
 existence, limited to definite dimensions in 
 space. All the various limbs of the body are 
 felt and represented as parts of one coherent 
 system. This conception of one's own bodily 
 existence in its totality indicates, as a rule, 
 dimly, yet whenever thought of, strongly, the 
 main divisions of our stature in their relations 
 among themselves as well as to the outer 
 world. Connected with it there is a general 
 sentiment, vague and ill-defined, of a different 
 tenor at different times, called ccenessthesis., or, 
 as the German physiologists translate it, Ge- 
 meingefuhl. 
 
 The corporeal consciousness of the ego is 
 
58 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 constantly present in a waking condition. It 
 pops up first when tlie word "I" is uttered. 
 Its main peculiarity is the predominance of 
 sentiment. All tlie sensations at a given mo- 
 ment, including the more or less comfortable 
 feelings of the intestines and other internal 
 organs which cannot definitely be localised, 
 are present, roughly registered according to 
 the place where they seem to be seated. 
 
 Heredity. 
 
 Our corporeal existence with its organs 
 and main dispositions has been inherited and 
 thus the deepest and most basic layer of our 
 personality which becomes illumined by self- 
 consciousness is the product of factors which 
 antedate our existence. 
 
 The problem of heredity does not fall 
 within the scope of our present discussion, 
 but we cannot help touching upon it when we 
 ask. Whence comes this bodily system of 
 which we are constituted? We are not con- 
 cerned here with the problem, how heredity 
 works, but simply with the fact, that it exists. 
 No one denies that the physical constitution 
 
WHENCE t 59 
 
 of wticli our corporeal ego is the psyctical 
 exponent, is an ancient heirloom that has 
 come down to us from our ancestors. Doc- 
 tors disagree as to whether or not acquired 
 characters can be transmitted by heredity. 
 but all naturalists, and I may as well add, the 
 unschooled also are one on the point that her- 
 edity is a law of nature and that heredity is 
 traceable in the most trivial details. There 
 are aberrations from the present type of a 
 race, but these aberrations are explained 
 either as symptoms of atavism or by a theory 
 of arrested development. A white baby's hair 
 may be blond or black, brown or red, but it 
 will never have the curly wool of the negro. 
 The reason is that the white race exhibits all 
 these types and in all likelihood there are 
 very few white individuals whose ancestors 
 were throughout solely blond, or solely brown. 
 Heredity does not mean a reproduction of the 
 father's type, nor of the mother's type, nor a 
 combination of the two, but a reproduction of 
 the composite type of all ancestors, resulting 
 in a new mixture, the idiosyncrasy of which 
 escapes all our means of determination. 
 
6o WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 It would lead us too far to enter into the 
 problem of heredity, its why and its how, 
 questions which form an independent field of 
 investigation of their own. Suffice it to say, 
 that however wonderful the fact of heredity 
 may be, we can easily understand, that if all 
 the secret workings of nature lay open to our 
 comprehension, we would probably deem her- 
 edity a matter of course. Heredity is simply 
 preservation, it is the law that the same, so 
 long as it remains the same, will, in repro- 
 ducing itself, continue to be the same. 
 
 Whatever the mode of transference may be 
 by which the life impulses of the parent or- 
 ganism are transferred upon the sperm and 
 the ovule, the fact of heredity itself remains 
 unchallenged. Nobody doubts that the young 
 life started thereby is a reproduction of its 
 species, or, more accurately speaking, a con- 
 tinuance of the life of its ancestors. We pre- 
 fer the expression continuance in order to 
 point out the connexion between heredity and 
 evolution. 
 
WHENCE t 6i 
 
 Epigenesis. 
 
 We must in this connexion call attention 
 to tte inappropriateness of the term evolution 
 wHcli literally means unfoldment or a bring- 
 ing out to visible appearance tbat wMcb ex- 
 isted before in a latent form. Evolution is no 
 evolving of latent form, but an increase and 
 euricliment of living forms by additional 
 growth, or briefly, as the theory has been 
 called by a Greek term, epigenesis. The 
 theory of epigenesis, as an explanation of the 
 various forms of life, now in existence, was 
 propounded, more than a century ago, in 
 1759, by Caspar Friederich Wolff in his Theo- 
 ria generationis . His doctrine stood in' op- 
 position to the views of the greatest biological 
 authorities of the time, which were the French- 
 man Bonnet and a German Swiss Haller, who 
 clung to the erroneous theory of an enfold- 
 ment of life by evolution. They believed that 
 the ovule of a chicken ^^% contained an in- 
 finitely small chicken, and in a similar way 
 all the life that develops upon earth existed in 
 a latent form in the aboriginal germs from 
 
62 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 which it has descended. This theory of en- 
 casement {^Einschachtelung or emboUemeni) 
 has been surretidered ; the word evolution, 
 however, has been retained and stands now for 
 its opposite, viz., epigenesis. The so-called 
 doctrine of evolution of to-day is in all main 
 points of contention the theory of the origin 
 of the forms of life by additional growth. We 
 need not go into details, for the main facts 
 are sufficiently known. The reflexes that take 
 place under the influences of the outer world 
 harden into functions and develop organs. 
 They are differentiated by a division of labor : 
 the eye originates in response to the ether- 
 waves of light, the ear in response to the air 
 vibrations of sound, the organs of taste and 
 smell by a chemical analysis of foreign sub- 
 stances. Muscles and nerves are formed, and 
 all the advances made become hereditary, be- 
 ing reproduced again and again in new indi- 
 viduals that grow from sperms and ovules or in 
 sexual generation from a combination of both. 
 
 The Consciousness of Corporeality . 
 The various limbs of our bodily system 
 
WHENCE f 63 
 
 become acquainted with one another by touch. 
 There is a time when the eyes of the baby 
 discover the presence of its own legs, and the 
 astonishment is great when the hands touch 
 the legs, while the legs experience the sensa- 
 sation of being touched. I once carefully 
 watched the expression of a baby's face at 
 this important moment of its mental develop- 
 ment, but I am sure that similar scenes must 
 be familiar to all observing mothers and nur- 
 ses. The baby enjoyed the new information 
 and took delight in repeating the experiment 
 of making feet and hands meet. 
 
 The hide-bound consciousness of our cor- 
 poreality is composed of a great number of 
 such experiments, in which tv/o limbs of our 
 body mutually play the parts of subject and 
 object; and I might add here that whatever 
 we know directly about our own bodily exist- 
 ence has been thus acquired through the chan- 
 nels of external sensation. Therefore our body 
 is necessarily and naturally conceived and 
 represented in our corporeal consciousness as 
 an object in the objective world. There is no 
 self-cognition by introspection pure and sim- 
 
64 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 pie. All internal sentiments wWcli on account 
 of their being inaccessible to touch or to sight 
 cannot become an object of observation to 
 any one of our senses, are simply dull feel- 
 ings ; they remain unlocalised and unspecified 
 and therefore hazy and undefined. As a rule, 
 we are ignorant about the internal construction 
 of our own self. The feeling of a comfortable 
 condition passes unnoticed , while disturbances 
 of any kind loom up in consciousness as pains 
 without affording any conception of the real 
 state of things. Internal pains and other feel- 
 ings that lack the comparing control of the 
 external senses, such as hunger and thirst, 
 remain shapeless and nondescript ; proving 
 beyond the shadow of a doubt that all clear 
 knowledge must be based upon objective ob- 
 servation, and that the much vaunted theory 
 of introspection will never lead to definite re- 
 sults. This is the reason we are absolutely 
 ignorant of the motions of our brain. While 
 our brain is confessedly, for physiological rea- 
 sons which we need not point out here, the 
 seat of thinking and the central station of all 
 our sensations, we are familiar only with the 
 
WHENCE i 65 
 
 significance of our brain-functions, not witli 
 their forms or modes of action. 
 
 The Ivtage on the Retina. 
 
 The image of the tree that is pictured on 
 the retina of the eye is not perceived as a 
 chemical reaction of the color-substances in 
 the rods and cones, nor as a commotion of the 
 nerves in the optic tracts, nor as an affection 
 of any cerebral matter in the centers of sight, 
 but simply and solely as a tree outside. The 
 significance alone of all the physiological pro- 
 cesses of our nervous system, i. e., their final 
 purpose, appears in consciousness ; all the 
 details of the process remain unheeded and 
 are absolutely inaccessible to introspection. 
 
 Further, the images of objects are not ap- 
 perceived in the inverted position as they ap- 
 pear on the retina, but as they are outside, — 
 a fact which has unnecessarily mystified many 
 physiologists and students of optics. The ex- 
 planation of the phenomenon is this : the pic- 
 ture appears inverted on the retina, but its 
 dimensions and successive parts are deter- 
 mined by the function of the mtiscles that 
 
66 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 move the eyeball, laying down the directions 
 in straight lines which from the affected 
 patches of the retina-picture pass through the 
 focus of the lense to the object outside. Thus, 
 when looking up to the top of a tree, a direc- 
 tion upward is perceived which at once refers 
 a point at the bottom of the retina to a point 
 high up on the top of the tree. We feel, not 
 the special spot on the lower part of the retina, 
 but the whole function which results in our 
 seeing the tree in the direction in which our 
 eye-muscles hold the eye. In other words, 
 we do not see the picture of the tree on our 
 retina; but the sentient retina-picture with 
 the cooperation of the sensory nerves that 
 make a record of the motions of the muscles 
 of the eyeball, see the tree outside and the 
 picture appears therefore outside where our 
 hands would find it, if we should walk up to 
 the tree and touch it. 
 
 We have two eyes and yet we see one ob- 
 ject only. There are two retina images of the 
 same object, one on each retina, yet one ob- 
 ject only appears in the field of vision. And 
 why? because there is onl}? one field of vision. 
 
WHENCE f 67 
 
 The two eyes look out upon tlie same object 
 and their converging focuses indicate the spot 
 where it is to be sought. 
 
 We can artificially become conscious of the 
 fact that our vision is binocular, by pushing 
 one eyeball out of place thus preventing the 
 two retina images from coinciding, but in the 
 normal state, the fact apprehended is not the 
 function, but the purpose of the function : not 
 the methods by which the aim of the activity 
 of our senses is attained, but the aim itself. 
 No doubt the images on the retina are sen- 
 tient, but they are exactly the organs which 
 do the seeing, not the things that are seen. 
 Hence the unity of vision in spite of a two- 
 hood of our organs of sight. 
 
 Futility of Introspection. 
 
 What is true of sight is true of all the 
 other senses, and also of our abstract thought. 
 The idea itself, i. e., the thought which we 
 thinh, looms up in consciousness, not the 
 function of thinking. We are absolutely in- 
 capable of self-introspection or a self-appre- 
 hension of the function of thought. As a re- 
 
68 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 suit, we know neither tlie place wliere ot r 
 thouglits take place nor the form in which, 
 they run their course ; all that we know about 
 the physiology of thought is by objective in- 
 vestigation and pathological observations. 
 
 The idea that the brain is the seat of 
 thinking has so strongly impressed itself upon 
 the present generation as to make us believe 
 that we actually feel our thoughts to take 
 place in our heads. But remember that Aris- 
 totle sought the seat of the rational soul in 
 the breast, regarding the brain as a kind of 
 refrigerator to cool off the blood. 
 
 Nothing can be more untrue than the old 
 maxim, quoted by Marcus Aurelius, i'vSov 
 /SAfTTf, look within, — a maxim that is true 
 enough in a certain sense, but has been in- 
 sisted on in a wrong sense by intuitionalists, 
 mystics, and all other lovers of the unintel- 
 ligible. A famous modem poet voices this 
 sentiment in these words : 
 
 ' ' Truth is within ourselves ; it takes no riss 
 From outward things." 
 
 Truth is a relation between subject and 
 object. Truth is not, as Mr. Browning says : 
 
WHENCE f 69 
 
 " . . . . produced mysteriously as cape 
 Of cloud grown out of the invisible air." 
 
 Trutli is not comparable to clouds or hazy 
 fogs, but to luminous images reflected in a 
 clear mirror. Thus while it is true that truth 
 is within, it yet rises from outward things by 
 observation. No naturalist can discover a law 
 of nature by introspection. By introspection 
 we may consult our conscience, but even our 
 conscience has been built up by experience, 
 partly by race-experience. Conscience is our 
 moral experience, which has grown automatic 
 and instinctive ; and a moralist who would in- 
 vestigate the truth of a moral rule or the relia- 
 bility of the inner voice of conscience would 
 have to follow the methods of the naturalist ; 
 he would have to fall back upon experience. 
 
 Truth cannot be based upon introspection 
 but must ultimately always rest on observa- 
 tion. 
 
 Dispositions. 
 
 The corporeal system which constitutes 
 our existence at the moment of our birth, 
 consists of two things: (1) organic struc- 
 tures representing a very complex set of in- 
 
70 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 Merited reflex functions, and (2) large tracts 
 of physiological conditions wHch are compar- 
 aMe to virgin tracts of land, tlie harvests from 
 wliicli depend upon the seeds that fall upon 
 them. We call these tracts dispositions. For 
 example, the knee-jerk is inherited; upon a 
 proper irritation, the reflex motion will take 
 place. In the same way the contraction and 
 dilation of the iris in the eye in proportion to 
 the light that is admitted is inherited. The 
 reaction is automatic and presupposes a def- 
 inite system of muscular and nervous func- 
 tions the nature of which in all its maiii 
 details is determined by heredity. In ad- 
 dition to these inherited reflex functions, 
 there are dispositions, called talents or apti- 
 tudes. They are what Aristotle would call 
 "potential" tendencies, the development and 
 character of which depend upon stimulation 
 by the experiences of life. The best instance 
 is the power of speech which is an inherited 
 tendency in man, but absent in animals. 
 Language itself is not inherited, but the dis- 
 position to learn a language is undoubtedly a 
 characteristic quality of human offspring. 
 
WHENCE ? 71 
 
 Educate a baby-monkey in a perfectly htmian 
 manner; teacb liim human ways, train his 
 ears to human speech, and teach him one or 
 several languages, he will probably never ac- 
 quire even the rudiments of the faculty of 
 speech; but the human infant possesses the 
 aptitude of language as an inherited and in- 
 alienable disposition, and if physical short- 
 comings deprive it of all means of learning a 
 language, it naturally develops a system of 
 signs for the purpose of communicating its 
 wants to its fellow-men. But it is the dispo- 
 sition only which is inherited, not the lan- 
 guage itself. No Englishman knows English 
 by heredity. The language that a child will 
 speak does not depend upon its ancestry, but 
 upon its surroundings and education. An 
 English baby would learn Chinese, and a Chi- 
 nese baby would learn English, if we could 
 exchange them in their cradles. 
 
 The same is true of all dispositions, what- 
 ever be their nature. A talent for music may 
 be an inherited disposition, but whether or 
 not it will be developed, and if developed in a 
 vigorous mind whether it will turn out to be 
 
72 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 the powerful genius of a Beetlioven, or a 
 grand master like Bacli, or a light-winged 
 composer of waltzes like Strauss, or perhaps 
 a frivolous cynic like Offenbach, will mainly 
 depend upon the education received in life, 
 and not so much upon the nature of the talent 
 itself. 
 
 A Complex of His Ancestors. 
 
 Bvery individual takes up the torch of life 
 and hands it over to the following generation, 
 thereby preserving the special type of its own 
 form of soul. 
 
 The heredity of our corporeal system and 
 its dispositions connects the life of the individ- 
 ual with the history of its race, and consider- 
 ing its importance as the foundation upon 
 which our entire personality has to be built, 
 it teaches modesty to the man whose main 
 ambition in life is originality. The hanker- 
 ing after originality is so natural that almost 
 everybody has a period in his life in which he 
 falls a prey to it. Originalomania is a kind of 
 spiritual measels. In the language of Jean 
 Paul Richter we might call it die Flegeljahre 
 
WHENCE / 73 
 
 of the soul, i. e., those years of indiscretion 
 in which a man sows all his wild oats, and 
 Goethe drastically characterises this disease 
 at the moment when be begins to be cured of 
 it, in these famous lines : 
 
 "From father my inheritance 
 Is stature and conduct steady ; 
 From mother, my glee, that love of romanca, 
 And a tongue that's ever ready. 
 
 "My grandpa was fond of ladies fair, 
 Which still my sonl is hatmting. 
 My grandma jewels loved to wear, 
 Like her I'm given to vaunting. 
 
 "Now since this complex can't but be 
 The sum of all these features, 
 What is original in me 
 Or other human creatures?" 
 
 Goethe cures his originality-measles by 
 irony. In a good-humored self -persiflage he 
 ridicules his own vanity and so rises above 
 the dejecting influence of a truth that to the 
 conceited seems to deprive man of his most 
 cherished dignity, but to the wise is a lesson 
 that teaches him gratitude to and reverence 
 for his ancestors. 
 
74 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 The Unity of the Ego-Conception. 
 
 But how does the sentiment of unity origi- 
 nate which is involved in the ego-conception? 
 
 The unity of our soul is as little as the 
 unity of vision due to the action of an un- 
 known unifying power. The unity of con- 
 sciousness is imposed upon the organism by 
 the necessity of acting as a unit. It is by no 
 meanS'' impossible that a man can think two 
 or three or more things at the same time. 
 This actually happens, when he is unattentive 
 and allows (as we may say) his mind to wan- 
 der. But if a man allows his mind to wander 
 and think of several things at the same time, 
 he will find that he can think of none of the 
 things which he has in niind with precision. 
 In order to give attention to a thing, he must 
 at one given moment devote his attention to 
 it and to it alone. There is, so far as we can 
 search the soul, no metaphysical unity in our 
 ego which would be a stable and constant 
 identity of one thought, or one state of mind, 
 or one continuous unifying power. There is 
 nothing of the kind. On the contrary, states 
 
WHENCE t 75 
 
 of distraction and a dissipation of thouglit 
 without any unity of mind are by no means 
 an uncommon occurrence. They are states 
 of inattention in wMcli a number of memory- 
 images and sensations float over the soul in 
 dreamy -indifference; but such dispositions 
 give way to a concentration of mind under 
 the strain of the dire necessity of life demand- 
 ing a well-planned action for the sake of our 
 self-preservation. 
 
 Different ideas possess a different interest 
 according to the importance they have for us ; 
 and we need not add that the same objects 
 arouse different thoughts in different people 
 according to their character. 
 
 Uneducated people depend almost exclu- 
 sively upon their sensations ; what is out of 
 sight is out of mind. The higher a man rises, 
 the more will his conception of absent things, 
 recollections of past experiences and expecta- 
 tions of the future, play a part in his mental 
 machinery; and the power of concentration, 
 of directing the mind upon one object, and of 
 keeping it steadily there until the special pur- 
 pose in view be accomplished is a quality that 
 
76 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 characterises tlie superiority of a strong mind 
 over a weaker one. 
 
 There are creatures far below the level of 
 man's intellectuality who are entirely devoid 
 of a unity of soul, since their limbs are psy- 
 chically and physiologically of equal value. I 
 mean such creatures as the star-fish. The five 
 arms have a mouth in common, but no head 
 that would undertake to assume the leadership. 
 They form a unity by being joined to one an- 
 other in a circle and connected by nerve-fibres 
 on terms of perfect equality. And yet when- 
 ever the need arises these five limbs act in 
 concert, as though they had a head. They 
 assist one another in much the same way as 
 a pack of dingoes, wild hounds, or wolves do, 
 when chasing game. Though there is no 
 leader, they are all ensouled with the same 
 purpose and act accordingly, which produces 
 the impression of the presence of a mysterious 
 power that directs them. 
 
 The spirit of solidarity that prevails among 
 hordes of wild beasts, develops in human so- 
 ciety into a well-conducted government, and 
 the solidarity of the limbs of a living organ- 
 
WHENCE f 77 
 
 ism results in its higher phases in the con- 
 sciousness of its indivisible oneness which in 
 man forms the corner-stone of his ego. 
 
 Tke Newness of Each New Individual. 
 
 While there is no originality in the abso- 
 lute sense in our inherited qualities, be they 
 bodily structures or the gifts of special tal- 
 ents, we cannot deny that the peculiar mix- 
 ture — or, as it is commonly called, the idio- 
 syncrasy — of every single human being is in- 
 dividual and unique. Such is the variability 
 of human nature that in spite of the sameness 
 of details, each personality forms a type of its 
 own. All the ingredients are inherited, and 
 if we were omniscient, we could probably trace 
 them to their various sources, but their com- 
 bination is new in each fresh individual, which 
 adds not a little to the zest of life as every new 
 life opens a new chance of viewing the world 
 from a new standpoint with new opportunities. 
 
 A Basts for the Higher Life of the Soul. 
 
 We sum up : the ego of our corporeality is 
 a complicated mass of sentiments, unified in 
 
78 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 tlie consciousness of tlie solidarity of tlie 
 v.'hole body. Tlie framework of ttis complex 
 feeling consists of the notions of our bodily 
 organs and tbeir functions gathered by expe- 
 rience and self-observation, not by introspec- 
 tion but tbrougb tbe mutual apperception of 
 tbe various limbs and sense-organs. 
 
 Tbe nature of the sentiments as to our re- 
 lation to tbe external world is mainly deter- 
 mined by our bodily constitution. Robust 
 muscles, vigorous lungs, a strong heart, pure 
 blood, a good stomach, hale eyes and other- 
 wise keen senses, but, best of all, an active 
 brain, are important factors in the general 
 tenor of the corporeal ego. In the education 
 of the race, therefore, and in the raising of 
 our children, we must never forget that the 
 bodily constitution is the basis of all, and 
 however much it is true that a mind grown 
 strong will be master of the body and will 
 even when health and strength begin to fail 
 assert [its superiority, the easiest way of pro- 
 ducing strong minds, steady in purpose, cour- 
 ageous in the battles of life, undaunted by 
 danger and disaster, is by invigorating the 
 
WHENCE t 79 
 
 physiological system, of whicli tte corporeal 
 consciousness is but tlie psychical expression. 
 Physical strength is not as yet moral strength ; 
 but the physical life is the root from which 
 the higher spiritual life of man's ego develops. 
 
 THE CONTINUITY OF MAn's PERSONA!, RECOL- 
 LECTIONS. 
 
 The significance of the word <'I" is not, 
 however, exhausted by the notion of our cor- 
 poreality. The most prominent feature in 
 man's ego is the consciousness of a continued 
 identity consisting of a chain of memories 
 which form a more or less complete record of 
 all the main events of his life from the days of 
 early childhood to the present. This con- 
 sciousness of our temporal existence, of our 
 life's history, is somewhat more spiritual than 
 the notion of our corporeality and in addition, 
 it promises more individuality and a more dif- 
 ferentiated selfhood. 
 
 Importance of the Name. 
 
 Our name becomes associated at the very 
 beginning with this consciousness of our tern- 
 
8o WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 poral continuity, and the identity of the name 
 contributes not a little to the sentiment of the 
 identity of our person throughout the various 
 stages of our life. Kvery man enjoys the 
 possession of a name that is individual and no 
 one finds satisfaction in being one of the sev- 
 eral Messrs. Brown or Smith who live in the 
 same town and have the same initials. Our 
 name as a rule whenever we meet with it un- 
 expectedly, be it that we hear it pronounced 
 or see it in print or writing, touches us at 
 once to the quick and produces a stir in us ; 
 and this excitement sometimes does not abate 
 even in men whose name is constantly before 
 the public. 
 
 What an important thing this combination 
 of a few letters is to every one of us and how 
 do people labor and spend money to give it 
 currency and a wide circulation! 
 
 What is a name — a mere sound, nothing 
 more. Why should we care to have our name 
 remembered when we are gone? Is not this 
 the height of man's vanity? 
 
 Let us not be too quick in condemning the 
 vanity of man's love of having his name men- 
 
WHENCE i 8i 
 
 tioned witli Honor and reverence and perpetu- 
 ated by Hs fellow-beings. Sbakespeare dwells 
 on the futility of a name, as a mere name; 
 and lie is rigbt, tbe mere name is notbing. 
 He says : 
 
 " What's in a name ? That which we call a rose 
 By any other name would smell as sweet." 
 
 Tbat is true in tbe world of objects, of 
 dumb tbings, but not in tbe realm of tbe 
 mind, not in tbe soul of man and wberever 
 mental conceptions play a part. 
 
 Tbe name tbat is given to a disb is of 
 great importance. A good name associated 
 witb appetising memories, makes a disb as 
 mucb welcome as wben presented in a beauti- 
 ful form and eaten from an artistic plate on a 
 clean table-clotb. I Inow of some children 
 wbo could not be prevailed upon to toucb tbe 
 cream tbat gatberes on milk, because tbey 
 called it skin and associated it witb buman 
 skin, peeled off. Names bave associations 
 wbicb are not easily obliterated. Tbis is even 
 more true of personal names. Every name 
 stands for a certain personality as its deno- 
 tation witb wbicb tbe man becomes identified. 
 
82 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 The young Goethe, while studying at 
 Strassburg, became acquainted with Herder, 
 who had an unpleasant manner of making 
 himself disagreeable by perpetrating insulting 
 puns. Goethe took offence at a comment that 
 suggested the possibility of his name being 
 derived from the word Koth., i. e., dirt, and 
 submitted to such maltreatment only because 
 he felt that intercourse with a clever man, 
 his senior in years and experience, was ex- 
 tremely profitable to his development. He 
 vents his indignation, however, in his Wahr- 
 heit und Dichtung in these words : 
 
 "It was certainly impolite to take this liberty with 
 my name : for the proper name of a man is not like 
 a mantle which hangs about him and at which people 
 may pull and tear, but like a perfectly fitting dress, — 
 nay, it is like his skin covering him completely, and 
 one cannot scrape or scratch it without hurting him." 
 
 No doubt, there is much vanity connected 
 with a man's love of his own name, and many 
 ridiculous things happen that show it. There 
 are several book companies making fortunes 
 out of it, and it seems to pay them better than 
 a gold mine. They publish encyclopaedias of 
 
WHENCE ■? 83 
 
 great men, or of special states or towns, and 
 send out tlieir agents to men wliom they expect 
 to pay for the glory of having their names and 
 pictures published. If you are a merchant or 
 tradesman, they want you to appear among 
 successful business men ; if you are a surgeon, 
 you must be ranked with the famous physi- 
 cians, etc., etc. ; but woe to you if you have 
 written a book, or published a poem in the 
 local newspaper : they are bound to mention 
 you among the prominent authors of the day, 
 ' ' not yet knov/n to the public at large as your 
 merits deserve." A business man of good 
 common sense will perhaps sternly resist the 
 temptation of becoming famous, but a poet — 
 as a rule, for I do not mean to say that there 
 are no exceptions — will fall an easy prey to 
 such schemes. The bait is too tempting! 
 
 An immediatised duke of Brunswick, who 
 had done nothing whatever to deserve being re- 
 membered by later generations, except that he 
 had inherited an old name and a large fortune, 
 left on his death several million francs to the 
 city of Geneva, Switzerland, on the condition 
 that a monument be erected to him in a prom- 
 
84 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 inent place. Tlie city accepted tlie undertak- 
 ing, probably not v/itbout misgivings, and 
 tbere tbe statue of tbe duke still stands, a 
 witness to tbe vanity of an ambitious man 
 who bad not sense enougb to bequeath his 
 money for a noble and useful purpose. His 
 name might now be mentioned with gratitude 
 by many, instead of being the laughing stock 
 of the foreign traveller who looks up with as- 
 tonishment to the fool who has erected a 
 statue to himself. 
 
 A Record of Lifers History. 
 
 The consciousness of our continued iden- 
 tity is simply the record of our life's history. 
 There is no true identity in the nature of 
 one's personality, for that is exactly the thing 
 that changes. The baby becomes a boy, the 
 boy a man, the man passes through various 
 phases, he falls a prey to the calamities of old 
 age until he dies, leaving his bodily system 
 to its inevitable dissolution. Saul before the 
 conversion and Paul after the conversion are 
 the same man ; yet the nature of the person- 
 ality is changed. The identity is the identity 
 
WHENCE f 85 
 
 of the term "I," including the name (but 
 even that may be changed) and the continuity 
 of the life. He who persecuted the Christians 
 and had Stephen stoned is the same person as 
 he who swooned on the way to Damascus and 
 later on preached Jesus the Crucified. Paul 
 himself knew that he had become another than 
 his old " I " that had died : it has been cruci- 
 fied with Christ, and he has acquired a new 
 soul which is no one else than Christ who has 
 been resurrected in him. These are facts of 
 life which naturally are of great interest, for 
 if by little changes in the make-up of a soul 
 we can change its entire attitude in life, we 
 possess a power to change men which in its 
 importance and on account of its application 
 to all the fields of human life, the education 
 of children, and the reformation of society, 
 will be more wonderful than magic. We see 
 that the great miracle is not that the. succes- 
 sive actions of the same body are referred to 
 the same personality, but that new experi- 
 ences can arouse new ideas, new thoughts, 
 new hopes in a man, and that by a broader 
 
86 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 insight into certain trutlis tte wliole attitude 
 of a man towards the world may be changed. 
 
 An Identity of Form. 
 
 The difficulties of the problem of the iden- 
 tity of our personality have been artificially 
 increased by lovers of the mysterious in order 
 to render the nature of personality incompre- 
 hensible. 
 
 Every thought, every sensation, every ex- 
 perience is in its physiological aspect a nerv- 
 ous commotion of a definite form, leaving a 
 trace of this form behind which, when again 
 resuscitated through some irritation to active 
 sentiency, revives in the form of a recollec- 
 tion. Memory is, as we have seen, simply 
 the ps3'chical aspect of the preservation of 
 physiological forms, and there is no greater 
 mystery in the personal recollections which 
 constitute the consciousness of our temporal 
 development in the shape of our life's history, 
 than in any other memory. Its unity and 
 continuity are the inevitable result of the unity 
 of the bodily system and of the continuity of 
 its life. 
 
WHENCE f 87 
 
 It is a cliaracteristic feature of tte histori- 
 cal consciousness of everybody's life, that the 
 idea of one's personality is always complete. 
 Tlie wtole life up to the present moment ap- 
 pears as a unity as much so as does the con- 
 sciousness of the solidarity of all the limbs of 
 our body and the unity of our ego-conception. 
 
 We must here call attention to the fact 
 that the abiding in man is not the substance 
 of which he is made, not the material of which 
 his body is built up, but the form. The sub- 
 stance passes through the structures which 
 make him such as he is, and if there were not 
 a constant preservation of form, man would 
 never have risen into existence. 
 
 Having acquired our knowledge through 
 the channels of our senses, we are apt to ex- 
 aggerate the importance of matter and the 
 most common form of a wrong metaphysicism 
 consists in the belief that matter is a thing in 
 itself which is endowed with qualities and as- 
 sumes various forms. Form is supposed to be 
 something that passes away and is of no ac- 
 cotint, and the substance or the material of 
 which a thing consists is regarded as esscn- 
 
88 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 tial. However useful this way of looking at 
 phenomena may be in chemistry, where mat- 
 ter is the object of investigation, its truth is 
 very relative, and the notion becomes posi- 
 tively false and misleading when we inquire 
 into the nature of phenomena which are es- 
 sentially forms and relations ; and we must 
 always bear in mind that forms, proportions, 
 and relations are not indifferent accidents but 
 realities — in fact they are the chief and dom- 
 inant facts of life. 
 
 Man's existence as a sentient and rational 
 being is a matter of form. Our ego -conscious- 
 ness does not result from an identity of sub- 
 stance but depends purely and simply upon 
 an identity of structure. We are not a heap 
 of material atoms that assume a certain form, 
 but we are a form in the flux of living sub- 
 stance that assimilates new matter and throws 
 off the waste. The author of the Faerie 
 Queene says : 
 
 ' ' For of the soule the bodie forme doth take, 
 For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make."* 
 
 * Spenser, An Hymne in Honcur of Fcautie, line 132. 
 
WHENCE f 89 
 
 Reproduction of Tradition. 
 
 The notion of our life's history, the sum 
 total of our recollections, is regarded as the 
 characteristic feature of our personality and 
 wherever the unity of this series is broken up 
 through a morbid condition of the brain, our 
 psychologists speak of the diseases of person- 
 ality. A person whose memories of the past 
 are either totally or in part wiped out from 
 consciousness, has no choice but to start life 
 over again and to begin a new series which in 
 itself will form as much a complete unity as 
 does any chain of personal recollections. An 
 interesting case of not infrequent occurrence is 
 the alternate reappearance of the original per- 
 sonality and the disappearance of the newly- 
 started series of recollections, which is called 
 the second personality. Thus it happens that 
 two souls with different aptitudes, of a differ- 
 ent character and possessing a different chain 
 of recollections, the one knowing nothing 
 whatever of the other but being rooted in the 
 same subconscious conditions of the corporeal 
 personality, live in the same body and come 
 
go WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 alternately to the front, the changes becoming 
 the more rapid the more the patient approaches 
 his final dissolution. 
 
 We found no originality in the ingredients 
 that make up the bodily system and its dis- 
 positions. Shall we be more fortunate in our 
 analysis of the constituents of our temporal 
 personality? How is the character of a child 
 formed, and how are the inherited talents de- 
 veloped? 
 
 Professor Wernicke describes the formation 
 of a man's personality as follows:* 
 
 "The family life of the parents undoubtedly stamps 
 a definite character upon the child and upon its spir- 
 itual personality. The consciousness of one's person- 
 ality comprises all those qualities which result, ac- 
 cording to the same law as instinct, from the social 
 atmosphere in which the individual grows up and 
 lives. " 
 
 The language itself which one learns in 
 childhood must be regarded as an important 
 factor in the formation of personality. Says 
 Wernicke : 
 
 * Grundriss der Psychiatiie, I., p. 59. 
 
WHENCE t 91 
 
 "Together with language, the entire spiritual pos- 
 session of the adult, not of isolated individuals but 
 of uncounted generations whose spiritual heirs we are, 
 is transferred upon the child's brain in a definite logi- 
 cal order and arrangement The well adjusted 
 
 modes of logical thought, all intricate mental func- 
 tions have, undoubtedly, their main root in the art of 
 language which is transmitted to us ready-made." 
 
 Apparently, what is true of the preserva- 
 tion of form in the individual hold^ good also 
 as to the race. The identity of myself as re- 
 flected in my ego-consciousness is possible 
 because the same structures representing the 
 same kind of thought and sentiment are pre- 
 served in the metabolism of our bodily sys- 
 tem. The multiplication of cells is a repro- 
 duction of the form of the cells from which 
 they grow; and the new cells inherit, as it 
 were, the souls of their parent cells and per- 
 form the same functions. In the same way, 
 the whole life of mankind presents a continu- 
 ity which is characterised by a preservation of 
 form, involving a reproduction of the same 
 kind of thoughts and aspirations, — or simply 
 a reincarnation of the same souls. 
 
92 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 Here, accordingly, we are again confronted 
 with tlie trutli that our personality is a repro- 
 duction. Our character, our habits, our modes 
 of thought are formed by the example of those 
 under whose care we grow up. The man who 
 hankers for originality will find little satisfac- 
 tion in this truth, but he who overcomes his 
 disappointment may acquire a better treasure 
 than the doubtful guarantee of a justification 
 of his vanity; he may, by having the cream 
 of the life of his predecessors concentrated in 
 him, become a genius, a thinker, an artist, a 
 poet, as did Goethe. 
 
 Goethe, full of native vigor, was undoubt- 
 edly, in the period of his youthful immatur- 
 ity, filled with the thought of being some- 
 body in distinction to others, a self of its own 
 kind, a new star that appeared on the horizon 
 of mankind ; but true greatness always rises 
 above vanity. Goethe describes his experi- 
 ence of being disillusioned of his ambition in 
 a poem which breathes the same sentiment as 
 the lines we have quoted above ; but whereas 
 the former poem refers to the inherited ingre- 
 dients of his soul, the present one declares that 
 
WHENCE t 93 
 
 tlie make-up of his life's History is simply tlie 
 product of tradition. His personality is a re- 
 production of the past. 
 
 Tlie poem reads as follows : 
 
 ' ' When eagerly a child looks round, 
 In his father's house his shelter is found. 
 His ear, beginning to understand. 
 Imbibes the speech of his native land. 
 
 ' ' Whatever his own experiences are. 
 He hears of other things afar. 
 Example afEects him ; he grows strong and steady 
 Yet finds the world complete and ready. 
 
 ' ' This is prized, and that praised with much ado ; 
 He wishes to be somebody too. 
 How can he work and woo, how fight and frown ? 
 For everything has been written down. 
 
 ' ' Nay, worse, it has appeared in print, 
 The youth is baffled but takes the hint. 
 It dawns on him, now, more and more 
 He is what others have been before." 
 
 A further explanation of the same thought 
 is found in these lines: 
 
 ' ' Would from tradition break away. 
 Original I'd be ! 
 Yet the feat so grand, to my dismay, 
 
 Greatly discomfits me. 
 The honor of being an autochthon 
 Would be a great ambition. 
 
94 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 But strange enough, I have to own, 
 I am myself tradition." 
 
 Self-cognition, according to Goethe, can 
 be attained only by dispelling the illusion of 
 the absolute and independent existence of a 
 self. Goethe says : 
 
 " ' Cognise thyself,' 'tis said. How does self-knowledge pay ? 
 When I cognise myself, /must at once away." 
 
 MAN IDENTIFIED WITH HIS IDEALS. 
 
 The Ideal Self. 
 
 There would be no originality at all, were 
 our ego not possessed of a very inconvenient 
 quality, the consciousness of our wants. Hun- 
 ger is the stimulus that goads sentient crea- 
 tures to look out and acquire forethought. 
 Hunger sharpens the wit. All living crea- 
 tures owe the acquisition of their virtues to 
 the needs of life, and in the same way, the 
 sentiment of our short-comings is a positive 
 factor in the formation of our future. They 
 determine our desires, our longings, our as- 
 pirations, our ideals. 
 
 Riickert says : 
 
WHENCE f 95 
 
 • ' An ideal of oneself ensouleth every mind, 
 Ere it be realised, the soul no peace can find." 
 
 The negative qualities of that which we do 
 not possess, of that which we are not but 
 should like to be, of that which we know not 
 but wish to know ; of that which we have not 
 accomplished but are anxious to accomplish, 
 are the most important parts of our soul. 
 Our aspirations, too, have been transmitted to 
 us from our ancestors and nothing, indeed, is 
 cherished more dearly and impressed upon the 
 young mind with greater seriousness than our 
 ideals, be they of a moral or intellectual or 
 purely affectionate nature. 
 
 The ideals of our soul, we do not hesitate 
 to say, are the strongest and most irresistible 
 forces that are in us. They are comparable 
 to the heart -leaves of a plant, to the buds that 
 are sprouting, to the growth of spring shoots 
 in which the new life thrives. As the tiny 
 rootlets of a tree break rocks to pieces, so the 
 yearnings of man, be they religious or patri- 
 otic or personal, instigate him to the utmost 
 to overcome all obstacles, and the cases are 
 by no means rare in which men — even those 
 
96 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 wlio do not believe in an immortality of the 
 soul — willingly and gladly lay down their 
 lives for their ideals. 
 
 Ideals Predetermined. 
 
 The soul is not a finite being limited to 
 what it is ; the soul is capable of growth and 
 its potentialities are infinite. The ideals of 
 life are unlimited, and every one has his 
 chance of realising his part of them. There 
 are ideals of science and invention, of success 
 in practical life, of enhancing the comforts of 
 life, of diminishing pain, and making the ar- 
 tistic taste more refined, of preserving the 
 good of past generations as embodied in insti- 
 tutions and customs, of reforming social evils, 
 rendering possible a greater and ever greater 
 actualisation of justice, etc., etc. Here, if 
 anywhere, is a chance for a man to become 
 something of his own, to be original, to ac- 
 quire an individuality and particular selfhood 
 that would raise him above the crow of the 
 average reproductions of the commonplace 
 specimens of the human race. 
 
 True, very true; and with the advance 
 
WHENCE f 97 
 
 of civilisation the chances of accomplisliing 
 something that shall possess a special worth, 
 either on account of its newness, or through 
 opening and widening the resources of life, 
 are growing. But mark that the chances of 
 going astray are assuredly not less varied. It 
 is easy enough to acquire a particular indi- 
 viduality by turning a fool or by committing 
 a crime. The possibilities of error and sin 
 surround us everywhere while the advance of 
 truth, of righteousness, and of a general use- 
 ftilness can proceed only on a straight and 
 narrow path. All deviations both to the right 
 and to the left are aberrations. 
 
 Suppose now a man to be a genius, sup- 
 pose him to be an inventor, or discoverer, or 
 poet, or a leader in Church or State. What 
 then is the nature of his peculiar soul -idiosyn- 
 crasy, if not the realisation of some of the 
 eternal laws of existence. Kepler discovered 
 the three laws that bear his name. They ex- 
 isted before him, and his peculiar merit con- 
 sists in the fact that with the knowledge that 
 had been handed down to him from the pre- 
 ceding ages he was able to find the truth and 
 
98 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 to State it in exact formulas. Nor can tte in- 
 ventor construct anything tliat is absolutely 
 his own. The inventor, also, is merely a dis- 
 coverer; he finds a method by which some- 
 thing can be accomplished. The conception 
 of a wheel, of a needle, of a lever, of a pulley, 
 of a watch, of a steam engine, are discov- 
 eries ; they are inventions in the literal sense 
 of the world, that is, something that is found 
 out ; and the same is true of moral laws and 
 wise sayings — including the expression of hu- 
 man sentiment in poetry. 
 
 The poet appears to be the most original 
 and most independently creative genius of all ; 
 yet it is to be borne in mind that the success 
 of a poet depends upon the fact that he ex- 
 presses sentiments that find an echo in the 
 hearts of the people. The poet who is orig- 
 inal, in the true sense of the word, will prove 
 a failure. His songs will thrill the people 
 only if he makes himself the mouth-piece of 
 their feelings and reduces to a definite shape 
 that which is dimly in everybody's mind. 
 
 The doctrines of Christianity teach us that 
 Jesus is the Christ, and the Christ is the in- 
 
WHENCE i 99 
 
 carnation of tlie logos. This means that the 
 prototype is the eternal truth. We have no 
 reason to quarrel with the philosophical sig- 
 nificance of the Logos doctrine ; on the con- 
 trary, we would apply the same idea to the 
 soul of every great man who has become the 
 incarnation of some special verity, or prin- 
 ciple whose home is the divine realm of eter- 
 nality. 
 
 Thus we have seen that every man starts 
 in life as a reproduction of his ancestry. He 
 acquires the quintessence of their souls 
 through education and then starts in life to 
 work out the ideals which he has made his 
 own. We may freely grant that man, consid- 
 ered as a separate individual, is nothing of 
 himself, that he has received even his ideals 
 and the power to work them out to higher 
 completion. He is nothing but the impulse 
 of former aspirations carried on to new fields 
 of work. Nevertheless, if he does not bury 
 his talents, the moment he puts them to usury 
 and makes them bring returns, a new start is 
 
loo WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 made whicli is rightly called his own and 
 justly bears his name. 
 
 This part of man, the realisation of his 
 ideals, is the highest summit of his soul-life, 
 and this is the most individual and most char- 
 acteristic feature of his personality. All the 
 rest is the foundation only from which he 
 starts ; here he becomes himself. The founda- 
 tion may be more massive than his ideal self 
 which is only a superadded portion, but it is 
 the result of his own exertion ; it is that 
 which distinguishes him among his fellow- 
 beings, it is a new revelation of which he has 
 made himself the medium. 
 
 Communism of Soul-Life. 
 
 There is no individual in the absolute 
 sense. We are not separate beings, distinct 
 and original ; we are parts of a greater whole, 
 and in this greater whole our destiny, our ante- 
 cedents as well as our future, is encompassed. 
 Only he to whom by a habit of thought the 
 old view of individuality has been endeared 
 can see harm in the breakdown of the limits 
 that separate us from the life of others. The 
 
WHENCE t loi 
 
 tnitli is, that when we learn to recognise our 
 spiritual identity with the soul-life outside the 
 boundary of our individual existence, our soul 
 broadens and we feel a thrill of joy at the ap- 
 prehension that we are infinitely greater than 
 we thought. He who shrinks in dismay from 
 this broader conception of the soul may be 
 sure that he has not as yet understood the 
 significance of its truth. 
 
 The nature of all soul -life, intellectual as 
 well as emotional, is founded upon commun- 
 ism. No growth of ideas for any length of 
 time is possible without communication. It 
 is the exchange of thought and mutual criti- 
 cism that produces intellectual progress. And 
 it is the warmth of a sympathetic heart which 
 kindles similar feelings in others. 
 
 With every sentence that you speak to 
 others, a part of your soul is transferred to 
 them. And in their souls your words may 
 fall like seeds. Some may fall by the way- 
 side, where the fowls come and devour them 
 up. Others may fall upon a rock where they 
 have not much earth. Some may fall among 
 thorns which will choke them. Yet some of 
 
102 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 them will fall upon good ground: and tlie 
 words will take root and grow and bring forth 
 fruit, some a hundred-fold, some sixty-fold, 
 some thirty-fold. 
 
 A CONTINUATION OF THK PAST. 
 
 In delineating the constitution of man's 
 soul, we have answered the question : Whence 
 do we come? We are the continuation of the 
 soul-life under whose parentage and general 
 care we have taken our start, and represent 
 the sum total of the endeavors of our ancestry 
 since times immemorial, when at the dawn of 
 creation the first speck of living matter began 
 its venturesome career — 
 
 "Not from the blank Inane emerged the soul : 
 A sacred treasury it is of dreams 
 And deeds that built the present from the past, 
 Adding thereto its own experiences. 
 Ancestral lives are seeing in mine eyes, 
 Their hearing listeneth within mine ears. 
 And in my hand their strength is plied again. 
 Speech came, a rich consignment from the past, 
 Kach word aglow with wondrous spirit life, 
 Thus building up my soul of myriad souls." 
 
WHITHER? 
 
 THE DISSOLUTION OF THE BODY AND THE 
 PRESERVATION OF THE SOUL. 
 
 ALL nations have invented myths and 
 dogmas wHcIl reflect tlie conviction 
 that onr soul shall remain when our life has 
 reached its consummation. The allegories in 
 which this doctrine is couched, if taken liter- 
 ally, are to a great extent untenable and ob- 
 jectionable, but we would not hesitate to say 
 that the belief in immortality is in itself true 
 enough and cannot lose its importance on ac- 
 count of the superstitions which it assumes in 
 unscientific minds. 
 
 Whither do we fare? 
 
 Apparently our body is dissolved at death 
 and disintegrated into its elements. Feeling 
 becomes extinct in it, thought discontinues, 
 and all activity ceases. Is not then our life 
 
104 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 Spent for notliing? For, if we are gone and 
 notMng is left of our bodily organisation, wliat 
 is tlie use whether we were good or bad, 
 whether we were a genius or a fool, whether 
 our existence was idled away in empty pleas- 
 ures or filled with great and noble deeds? Is 
 it not quite indifferent whether or not later 
 generations praise or blame us, whether we 
 become a blessing to posterity or a curse? 
 
 But we have learned to distinguish between 
 our material make-up and its form, between 
 body and spirit, between the ego and the soul. 
 
 ' ' The ' I ' is but a name to clothe withal 
 The clustered mass that now my being forms. 
 Take not the symbol for reality — 
 The transient for th' eterne. Mine ego, lo ! 
 'Tis but my spirit's scintillating play 
 This fluctuant moment of eternities 
 That now are crossing where my heart's blood beats. 
 I was not, am, and soon will pass. But never 
 My soul shall cease ; the breeding ages aye 
 Shall know its life. All that the past bequeathed, 
 And all that life hath added unto me, 
 This shall endure in immortality," 
 
 The explanation of the nature of our soul 
 and its Whence suggests the answer to the 
 question, Whither? so anxiously asked by 
 
WHITHER f 105 
 
 millions of quivering lips. The vanity fair of 
 life wHcli contributes so much to produce the 
 ego-illusion becomes most apparent in death, 
 but when the vessel is broken, its contents 
 are not spilled to evaporate into hazy clouds. 
 In order to know what shall become of us, 
 we must ask ourselves, What has become of 
 our ancestors? Their bodies have crumbled 
 into dust and nothing is left of them, noth- 
 ing, except those life-forms which have been 
 transmitted to later generations and have 
 finally built up our own soul. Yet these life- 
 forms are their souls. All that which proved 
 good is treasured up and preserved in the con- 
 tinued life of the race. Their bodies are gone, 
 but their souls remain. 
 
 "Life's every throb and thrill 
 Of ages past 
 
 Remains for good and ill 
 A living presence still 
 That aye will last. 
 Our fathers are not dead, 
 Their thoughts pulse in our head. 
 Their sentiments warm our heart, 
 Their souls ne'er part." 
 
io6 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 PERSONAL IMMORTALITY. 
 
 We distinguisli between individuality and 
 personality. 
 
 By individuality we understand tlie corpo- 
 real life wliicli takes its start at the moment 
 of conception, enters the world at birth, cov- 
 ers a definite span of time, and is dissolved in 
 death. By personality we understand the form 
 of life, of thought, and of sentiment, in con- 
 trast to its material concreteness. Personal- 
 ity is that which makes us such as we are, 
 which constitutes our character and deter- 
 mines the greater or lesser worth and dignity 
 of our individuality. 
 
 Personality and individuality are not two 
 separate entities, but two abstractions of the 
 same reality. Each term emphasises a differ- 
 ent aspect. The former comprises those fea- 
 tures which change an individual into a person 
 of a definite character, while the latter denotes 
 their bodily actualisation in material concrete- 
 ness. Both terms are synonymous, being at 
 times interchangeable, but forming a contrast 
 when we distinguish between the essential 
 
WHITHER t 107 
 
 and accidental of man's life, between that 
 wliicli is permanent and that which is tran- 
 sient. 
 
 Our corporeal individuality is dissolved in 
 death, but not our personality. Our existence 
 after death, far from being a dissolution into 
 the All, consists in this that we are gathered 
 to our fathers, and in this state all our per- 
 sonal lEeatures are preserved. As sure as the 
 law of cause and effect is true, so sure is the 
 continuance of soul-life even after the death of 
 the individual according to the law of the 
 preservation of form. It is not non-existence 
 but a condition of intense usefulness, a higher 
 kind of life, the grandeur of which suggested 
 to George Eliot this noble prayer: 
 
 ' ' O may I join the choir invisible 
 Of those immortal dead who live again 
 In minds made better by their presence : live 
 In pulses stirr'd to generosity, 
 In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
 For miserable aims that end with self, 
 In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, 
 And with their mild persistence urge man's search 
 To vaster issues. 
 
 ' ' This is life to come, 
 Which martyr'd men have made more glorions 
 For us who strive to follow. 
 
io8 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 ' ' May I reach 
 That purest heaven, be to other souls 
 The cup of strength in some great agony, 
 Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love. 
 Beget the smiles that have no cruelty. 
 Be the sweet presence of a good diffus'd, 
 And in diffusion ever more intense 1 
 So shall I join the choir invisible 
 Whose music is the gladness of the world." 
 
 This view of immortality is as obvious as 
 it is undeniable even by tbe bigoted unbeliever 
 and tbe most rabid sceptic. Tbe sole difB.- 
 culty wbich tbe average man encounters is his 
 lack of appreciation of the importance of form. 
 Forms are not non-entities, not shadows, or 
 phantasms ; forms are real. Our personality 
 becomes possible through a continuance of 
 our life-forms ; and these life-forms are pre- 
 served beyond death. Our immortality, ac- 
 cordingly, is as real as is our identity in the 
 changes of life. The latter is no more nor 
 less absolute than the former, and as the for- 
 mer is generally satisfactory to mankind, why 
 should we find fault with the former? He who 
 comprehends the reality of form will certainly 
 know that it is all we may expect, and we 
 cannot ask for anything better. 
 
WHITHER ? 109 
 
 IN COMMUNION WITH THE WHOLK. 
 
 The trutli that every personality is dis- 
 tinctly definite in its character and will re- 
 main distinctly itself after death, does not im- 
 ply that it is a separate entity which might 
 have originated or could exist in seclusion. 
 There is no isolation in the domain of spirit, 
 and the life of the soul is rooted in commun- 
 ism. 
 
 Every spiritual giving is a gaining ; it is 
 a taking possession of other peoples' minds. 
 It is an expansion, a transplantation of our 
 thoughts, a psychic growth beyond the nar- 
 row limits of our individual existence into 
 other souls ; it is a rebuilding, a reconstruc- 
 tion of our own souls or of parts of our own 
 souls, in other souls. It is a transference of 
 mind. Every conversation is an exchange of 
 souls. Those whose souls are "flat, stale, 
 and unprofitable," cannot be expected to over- 
 flow with deep thought. But those who are 
 rich in spiritual treasures will not, as misers, 
 keep them for themselves. For out of the 
 abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh, 
 
no WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 and spiritual treasures are not wasted when 
 imparted ; tiey are not lost, but put out on 
 usury, and will multiply and tlius bring great 
 reward, altbougb tlie reward be not a material 
 profit to ourselves. 
 
 Good and noble ideas, instructive truths, 
 warm words of good-will and sympathy will 
 accomplish great things. But evil words pos- 
 sess a similar power. Strong characters will 
 hear and reject evil words, but weak minds 
 will be poisoned by them. It is the great con- 
 sequence that speech draws with it, which de- 
 mands that before uttering it we should weigh 
 every word. Every idle word that men speak, 
 says Christ, they shall give account thereof in 
 the day of judgment. And the day of judg- 
 ment takes place now and here. 
 
 The communism of soul-life is not limited 
 to the present generation; it extends to the 
 past as well as to the future. The present 
 generation of humanity is like the present 
 generation of live corals who have grown 
 from, and rest upon, the work of former gen- 
 erations. The ancestors of the corals now on 
 the surface lived in the shallow places of the 
 
WHITHER i III 
 
 ocean, where the sun made the waters warm 
 and the surf afforded them suf&cient food; 
 and when in the lapse of time through terres- 
 trial changes the bottom on which they had 
 settled, sank slowly deeper and deeper, they 
 built higher and higher, and in this way they 
 managed to keep near the surface. The 
 branches in the cold, deep waters are now 
 dead ; yet they furnish a solid basis to the 
 coral life above, where the sun shines and the 
 currents of the surf pass to and fro. 
 
 If the corals could think and speak, I won- 
 der whether the living generation on the sur- 
 face would not rail at the corals in the cold 
 deep below ! At least the present human gen- 
 eration very often proves ungrateful to its 
 predecessors. Those who feel the necessity 
 of progress, who wish humanity to remain 
 uppermost and to rise higher, are apt to over- 
 look the merits of their ancestors; they -ob- 
 serve that the ideas of former generations 
 are antiquated and do no longer fit into the 
 present time. Thus they brand the old views 
 as superstitions and forget that the views of 
 the present generation have developed from 
 
112 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 tlie old, and that ttey stand upon their ances- 
 tors' work. It would seem as if the dead 
 corals in the cold, dreary deep must have 
 been always unfit for life; yet there was a 
 time when their coral homes thrilled with life ; 
 and so there was a time when the supersti- 
 tions of to-day were true science and true re- 
 ligion although they are now dreary and cold. 
 
 Where is the coral life of the past? Has 
 it disappeared? No, it continues, and its con- 
 tinuation is the coral life of to-day. So the 
 humanity of former generations has not gone. 
 The life of humanity still persists, and it is 
 present in every one of us. 
 
 We may compare humanity to a coral 
 plant. The single corals are connected among 
 themselves through the canals in the branches 
 from which they grow. No one of them can 
 prosper without supplying its neighbors with 
 the superabundance of its prosperity. The 
 main difference is that the communism of 
 soul-life is much closer and more intimate 
 than that of the coral plant, and the thinker 
 who freely gives away his spiritul treasures ,- 
 unlike the giver of material gifts, does not 
 
WHITHER? 113 
 
 lose: lie is rather tlie gainer, for spiritual 
 possessions grow in importance the more pro- 
 fusely they are imparted. The commoner 
 they are, the more powerful they become. 
 
 The sacrament of the Lord's Supper sym- 
 bolises a spiritual fact — the holy communion 
 of mankind. But remember that the eating 
 of the bread and the drinking of the wine are 
 allegorical ; the actual communion consists in 
 an exchange of souls which is done through 
 the vehicle of speech, the word, the logos. 
 
 Our spiritual life is through others, with 
 others, and in others. The more we are con- 
 scious of the communism of soul-life, the more 
 our heart expands beyond the narrow limits 
 of our selfhood, the more conscious shall we 
 become of our immortality. Says Schiller in 
 one of his Xenions: 
 
 ' ' Art thou afraid friend of death and thou longest for life ever- 
 lasting? 
 Live as a part of the whole ; when thou art gone it remains." 
 
 TIME AND ITS INDHSTRUCTIBIUTY. 
 
 We have learned that there is no individ- 
 ual in the absolute sense ; every individual is 
 
114 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 such as it is tlirougTi its connexion witli the 
 race, and its personality is determined by the 
 past as well as the present conditions that 
 surround it. The individual, therefore, is a 
 phase in the entire soul-life of mankind ; it is 
 temporal and partakes of the transiency as 
 well as the immortality that attaches to time. 
 The individual proper, i. e., the bodily ele- 
 ment of man, is continually passing away; 
 but that which constitutes his personality, re- 
 mains constant. The form of life is preserved. 
 The present is always the continuation of 
 the past ; it is the past itself in that form in 
 which it has moulded itself. 
 
 " Not dead, perfected only is the past ; 
 And ever from the darkness of the grave 
 It rises to rejuvenated life. " 
 
 And the future again is a continuation of 
 the present ; it is the present, such as it trans- 
 forms its own past. 
 
 It is the nature of time to be transient. 
 Every minute, every day passes away; yet 
 the significance of every moment remains a 
 factor in building up the future. If the na- 
 ture of time were mere transiency, then the 
 
WHlTHERi 115 
 
 moment would be supreme and the future 
 would have no riglit to be considered by tlie 
 present. But tbe medal has its reverse. The 
 other side of the shield of time is the immor- 
 talisation of the moment. 
 
 The transiency of time is a comfort to the 
 weary and sorrow-laden, to those who almost 
 break doT^ni under the burdens of life or bear 
 the brunt of the battle: 
 
 ■ ' Come what come may, 
 Time and the hour runs through the roughest day." 
 
 The doing of a deed passes away with the 
 moment, so does all suffering, all laboring, 
 and all anxiety and tribulation ; but the deed 
 itself remains. The hours spent in study or 
 useful labor are not wasted. Bvery act, every 
 thought, every sentiment remains a living 
 presence with us for our life-time. Poems 
 that we learn by heart stay with us. The 
 time of conning them passes, but the verses 
 remain alive in us as a part of our soul. And 
 as the individual hours are treasured up in 
 our soul, so the personalities of the past live 
 on in the present generation, which closely 
 considered is but their own life reproduced 
 
ii6 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 and carried over to new fields of broader ac- 
 tivity. 
 
 Tlie trutli as to time and its indestruct- 
 ibility may be expressed in another form 
 tbus : There are not three times : past, pres- 
 ent, and future; there is one time only, viz., 
 the present, and the present is always. The 
 past is that which has made the present such 
 as it is ; it is the factor of the present, its de- 
 terminant, and the future is the direction of 
 the present, the work which it accomplishes, 
 the outcome determined. It is obvious that 
 in a certain sense the present alone is real. 
 The reality of the past and of the future con- 
 sists in their being the two aspects of the 
 present, the opposite poles in which it differ- 
 entiates itself, its whence and its whither. 
 
 In the same sense reality exists in eternal 
 indestructibility. The soul exists in an eter- 
 nal present of which past and future are in- 
 tegral parts. It may go to sleep, but it will 
 wake up again. The unthinking animal is 
 limited to the present as such, the thinking 
 man becomes conscious of its two outlooks, its 
 whence and its whither. And the philosopher, 
 
WHIXHERt 117 
 
 again, learns to consider the whence and 
 whither of life as one and the same reality, 
 unified under the aspect of eternity. 
 
 Eternity is the polar star in the heavens 
 above us which helps us to find our bearings 
 in life. Says Goethe : 
 
 ' ' Drop all of transiency 
 Whate'er be its claim, 
 Ourselves to immortalise 
 That is our aim." 
 
 The same poet-philosopher characterises the 
 specifically human of man as the power of 
 giving permanence to that which is temporary. 
 
 "Man can accomplish — 
 Man alone — the impossible, 
 He discriminates, 
 Chooses, and judges. 
 To the fleeting moment 
 He giveth duration." 
 
 We might as well call the specifically hu- 
 man the divine, for man can only by a recog- 
 nition of the eternal, the universal, the Logos, 
 preserve the consciousness of a continuity be- 
 tween the present and the future, and thereby 
 " give duration to the fleeting moment." 
 
ii8 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 THE IMMORTALITY OF IDEAS. 
 
 In the same way as the functions of the 
 bodily organism are immortalised by hered- 
 ity, so the treasures of civilisation are handed 
 down from generation to generation in an un- 
 interrupted chain of tradition. Ideas possess 
 a kind of personality of their own. They 
 originate by a combination of other ideas, 
 grow more or less complex, become more and 
 more perfected and prove themselves immor- 
 tal beings. They migrate froift brain to brain, 
 from mind to mind, from generation to gen- 
 eration; they spread and become "in their 
 diffusion ever more intense." 
 
 Take for instance the invention of the 
 wheel. The first thought of it may have been 
 suggested by the sight of a rolling trunk. 
 The primitive wheel was a cylinder. Then 
 the axle was invented; and perhaps much 
 later on, the hub. The cylindrical roller 
 changed into joined discs, and the discs gave 
 way to the wheel with tire-encircled spokes. 
 
 Thus the waggon-wheel came to a certain 
 
WHITHER} 119 
 
 perfection ; but the idea of a wlieel started on 
 a new career with the invention of machinery, 
 and now we have the development of cog- 
 wheels, fly-wheels, balance-wheels, eccentrics 
 and then the crank, the favorite child of the 
 eccentric. With the invention of steam, the 
 wheel again enters into a new field of greater 
 usefulness, and throughout the history of the 
 wheel the thought of that unknown genius 
 who invented it in the pre-historic age of 
 primitive mankind, still lives on. 
 
 The same is true of every other invention, 
 the pin, the needle, the pot, the hammer, the 
 drill, the bow, the brush, the pen, etc., etc. 
 
 Nor are the more impalpable ideas less im- 
 portant: good advices, moral lessons, noble 
 sentiments — all these spiritual treasures are 
 the soul of mankind. They grow and develop 
 in a continuous historical evolution, preserv- 
 ing an identity of the fundamental idea 
 throughout all changes and complications. 
 Ideas are not non-entities, not airy nothings, 
 mere sounds and empty worA.Sf flatus vocis, as 
 the nominalists called them; they are reali- 
 ties, spiritual realities, and indeed the highest 
 
I20 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 treasures in our possession. They are the 
 stuff of which our souls have been made. 
 
 THE SPIRIT-EMPIRE. 
 
 Personalities are built up of ideas and par- 
 take with them of the same immortality, — an 
 immortality which with the progress of inven- 
 tion and by the increase of culture becomes 
 ever more assured. 
 
 With the invention of writing, thoughts 
 gain a stability which they lacked before. 
 Hence the history of mankind begins with the 
 origin of speech, but the history of civilisa- 
 tion is ushered in by the invention of writing. 
 
 Modem history does not begin with polit- 
 ical events, but with the invention of printing. 
 It was printing which made a diffusion of 
 knowledge possible, which gave birth to the 
 Reformation and bred the soul of a Columbus 
 whose happy combination of science with dar- 
 ing prompted him to venture out West in 
 search for the East. 
 
 As to the importance of books and the soul 
 that animates these little black symbols on 
 white sheets of paper John Milton uttered the 
 
WHITHER i 121 
 
 following classical sentences, spoken in de- 
 fence of tiie liberty of thought and denouncing 
 the barbarous indifference with which the 
 Government would suppress books. He said 
 in the Areopagitica : 
 
 "I deny not but that it is of greatest concern- 
 ment, in the church and commonwealth, to have a 
 vigilant eye how books demean themselves, as well as 
 men ; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do 
 sharpest justice on them as malefactors. For books 
 are not absolutel}' dead things, but do contain a po- 
 tency of life in them to be as. active as that soul was 
 whose progeny they are ; nay, they do preserve as in 
 a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living 
 intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, 
 and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dra- 
 gon's teeth, and, being sown up and down, may chance 
 to spring up armed men. 
 
 "And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be 
 used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book : 
 who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's 
 image ; but he who destroys a good book kills reason 
 itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. 
 Many a man lives a burden to the earth ; but a good 
 book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, em- 
 balmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond 
 life. It is true, no age can restore a life, whereof, 
 
122 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 perhaps, there is no great loss ; and revolutions of 
 ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, 
 for the want of which whole nations fare the worse." 
 
 Gtistave Freytag expresses the same senti- 
 ments in similar language : 
 
 "There remains attached to every human work 
 something of the soul of the man who has produced 
 it, and a book contains between its covers the actual 
 spirit of the author. The real value of a man to others 
 — the best portion of his life— remains in this form for 
 the generations that follow, and perhaps for the far- 
 thermost future. Moreover, not only those who write 
 a good book, but those whose lives and actions are 
 portrayed in it, actually continue to live among us. 
 We converse with them as with friends and opponents; 
 we admire or contend with, love or hate them, not 
 less than if they dwelt bodily among us. . . . 
 
 "No one who has written a book has of himself 
 become what he is ; every one stands on the shoulders 
 of his predecessor; all that was produced before his 
 time has helped to form his life and soul. Again, 
 what he has produced has in some sort formed other 
 men, and thus his soul has passed to later times. In 
 this way, the contents of books form one great spirit- 
 empire on earth, and all who now write, live and 
 nourish themselves on the souls of the past genera- 
 tions. From this point of view the soul of mankind 
 
WHITHER? 123 
 
 is an immeasurable unity, which comprises every one 
 who ever thus lived and worked, as well as those who 
 breathe and produce new works at present. The soul 
 which the generations of the past felt as their own, 
 has been and is daily transmigrating into others. 
 What is written to-day may to-morrow become the 
 possession of thousands of strangers. Those who have 
 long ago ceased to exist in the body, continue to live 
 in new forms here on earth, and daily revive in thou- 
 sands of others." 
 
 The conception of mankind as a great spir- 
 itual unity, an empire of souls, led Auguste 
 Comte to tiie strange notion of worshipping 
 humanity in the place of God. We cannot 
 approve of the ritual, which is too much an 
 imitation of the Romanism to which he was 
 accustomed, but we appreciate his sentiments. 
 And is not the proposition to deify mankind 
 simply an inversion of the belief in the incar- 
 nation of the Logos? If we call the latter the 
 God-man, we may call the former the man- 
 God. 
 
 THE BLENDING OF SOULS. 
 
 The spirit empire of mankind is like unto 
 a temple that is in building, whose stones are 
 
124 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 human souls. Bach stone retains its own 
 shape and is a little unit in itself, yet serves 
 at the same time as an integral part of the 
 whole structure. Thus every personality re- 
 mains itself and loses nothing of its peculiar 
 character or idiosyncrasy ; and yet all of them 
 are welded into an indissoluble union, — a 
 union more intimate than chemical combina- 
 tions, which are the most complete blending of 
 substances that is possible at all in the world 
 of bodily existence. 
 
 If lovers desire to be united, they cannot 
 ask for a closer fusion of their souls than is 
 actually produced in their children ; and how 
 wondrously are friends and foes united in the 
 souls of later generations into a systematic co- 
 operation. The feuds of former ages are com- 
 posed. In fiction the Montagues and Capulets 
 shake hands over the dead bodies of their chil- 
 dren, but in history the souls of the bitterest 
 enemies are welded into one and live on in 
 the higher unison of the spiritual harmony 
 which is the music of God's revelation on 
 earth. 
 
 Our souls are the trysting place of former 
 
WHITHER f 125 
 
 souls, and tlie wortli of a man depends upon 
 tlie guests wliom he has received into the 
 home of his personality, whether they are 
 Socrates or Lycon, Plato or Prodicus, the phi- 
 losopher or the sophist, he who aspires up- 
 ward or he who clings to the clod, Jesus or 
 Judas. 
 
 A comprehension of the unity of life will 
 only serve to render us reverent, serious, and 
 cheerful. It brings home to us the obligations 
 under which we are to the past ; it makes us 
 feel the full weight of our responsibility in the 
 building up of future generations and will at 
 the same time give us confidence in the days 
 of trial. The sun sets in the evening, but to- 
 morrow will be another day. When a cham- 
 pion of justice falls in battle, his cause is not 
 defeated. The final judgment is yet to be 
 spoken. 
 
 IT THINKS. 
 
 •Whenever ideas, in their progress through 
 generations, take root in a new individual, 
 they enter into relations with other ideas, in 
 some such way as a number of threads may 
 be gathered up in one knot, whence they re- 
 
126 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 issue in all directions for a renewed distribu- 
 tion. Tlie knot is tlie individual and tlie 
 cluster of its threads is aglow with conscious- 
 ness. In the interlaced network of the soul of 
 mankind, every knot is an ego, and every ego 
 is in the habit of regarding the threads that 
 pass through its twist as its own. We are 
 wont to say, *'/ have these ideas; / hold 
 these views ; this is my opinion ; ' ' and this 
 thought " /" is bloated up to an importance 
 that is apt to distort the dimensions of things 
 and to show their relation to our own exist- 
 ence in a wrong light. It is much better and 
 much truer to say, "This idea has taken hold 
 of me ; the thought has grown on me ; I have 
 arrived at the conclusion," etc. 
 
 Philosophy in a certain period of its devel- 
 opment is given to a reification of abstractions 
 which is the mythology of language taken 
 seriously. As the sky, the sun, the storm, the 
 zephir ; and then war, life and death, health 
 and disease, love and wisdom, were supposed 
 to be personal beings by polytheists, so, in 
 the metaphysical period, thinkers and scien- 
 tists speak of "things in themselves," and 
 
WHITHER ; 127 
 
 treat tliem as. essences which have an exist- 
 ence in and by themselves. This metaphysi- 
 cal method reaches its climax in the ego-illu- 
 sion which is practically a reification of the 
 word "I," as a being in itself. 
 
 Mankind as a whole has not as yet emerged 
 from this period of metaphysicism but moves 
 in the transitional stage of agnosticism, which 
 is still metaphysical, holding that we know 
 phenomena only, and that things in them- 
 selves are unknown and unknowable. Ac- 
 cording to the agnostic philosopher, the prob- 
 lems of life, of the soul, and of the soul's des- 
 tiny cannot be solved. 
 
 Psychology- as a science is just freeing it- 
 self from the shackles of metaphysicism, and 
 the thought that the ego as an independent 
 being is an illusion of the mind becomes more 
 and more recognised. 
 
 Dr. Lichtenberg, a very ingenious writer 
 of the end of the eighteenth century has indi- 
 cated the characteristic feature of the new 
 psychology by the proposition of introducing 
 the impersonal pronoun " it " in place of the 
 customary " I . " He says : 
 
128 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 "We become conscious of certain concepts or ideas 
 which do not depend upon us, and of other ideas 
 which, as we suppose, do depend upon us. But where 
 is the limit between the former and the latter? We 
 are aware of nothing but the existence of our sensa- 
 tions, perceptions, and ideas. We should say, "It 
 thinks," just as well as we say, "It hghtens," or, "It 
 rains.' In saying cogito, the philosopher goes too far 
 if he translates it, '/ think. ' " 
 
 The idea contained in this short passage 
 must be digested, before we can hope to un- 
 derstand the process of thinking, for it is 
 indeed the leading principle of modem psy- 
 chology. Modern psychology looks upon the 
 ego-consciousness not as the cause, but as the 
 product, of thought. The ego-onsciousness ap- 
 pears to be a simple and elementary fact, but 
 it is a very intricate and complex phenome- 
 non, the ultimate constituents of which are 
 sensations. And even these sensations are 
 not simple; they also in their turn are the 
 effects of a wonderful complication of innu- 
 merable causes. 
 
 The sentient reflex machinery of our body 
 is a reproduction of the life of our ancestors. 
 It receives impressions and has the thoughts 
 
WHITHER? 129 
 
 of parents and educators stamped upon its 
 constitution. The very word "I" originates 
 by imitation, and now this word assumes dic- 
 tatorship and behaves as a sovereign king; 
 but it is a usurper. We imagine we think. 
 But thoughts arise in us according to irrefrag- 
 able laws. We do not produce ideas, but ideas 
 produced in the cerebral processes of a brain 
 become conscious, and thus they produce us. 
 
 St. Paul is not the originator of the gospel 
 of crucifixion ; the idea of the crucified Savi- 
 our seized him in spite o^ himself and changed 
 the persecutor of the Nazarenes into a Chris- 
 tian apostle. 
 
 But is the ego nothing? By no means! 
 The ego is not anything in itself; but con- 
 sidering it as representing the whole person- 
 ality of a man, it is as real as is the knot in a 
 network of fibres, where they are twisted into 
 a new and original combination. The ego in 
 itself is unreal, but it represents man's per- 
 sonality ; and man's personality is real. 
 
 While the traditional expression "I 
 think ' ' is wrong when interpreted in the sense 
 of the antiquated psychological metaphys- 
 
I30 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 icism, it is (as is tlie case witt almost all 
 popular sayings) quite appropriate if used in 
 the popular sense, where "I" stands for the 
 speaker's person in contrast to others. There 
 is a great difference between the various 
 speakers. While it is not the ego-conception 
 that does the thinking, the personality in 
 which "it thinks" contains the determinants 
 of the result. The worth of the personality 
 depends upon the ideas and impulses which 
 enter into its make-up, and the "I think so" 
 has weight only if backed by principles of 
 honesty and justice, scruptilous truthfulness, 
 clearness of thought, correctness and preci- 
 sion in statement as well as critique and 
 method in arrangement. If the term "I" 
 represents an authority on the subject, the 
 statement has another weight than if made by 
 Tom, Dick, or Harry. 
 
 The notion " I " has as good a sense if it 
 is not understood in the old signification of 
 an independent ego, as has for instance the 
 term "sunrise," which closely considered is 
 also an antiquated expression since the accep- 
 tance of the Copemican system. 
 
WHITHER? 131 
 
 A HIGHER CONCEPTION OF THE SELF. 
 
 People frequently say, "We do not care 
 wliat our souls may accomplisli when they re- 
 appear in otter people, whether they shall 
 prove blessings or curses ; for we can no longer 
 recognise our identity. We do not mind what 
 our ideas will accomplish when they have been 
 transferred to others, to our contemporaries, 
 or to future generations ; for then our thoughts 
 have ceased to be ours ; they have become for- 
 eign to us. And whether posterity will bless 
 or curse our memory, is a matter of utter in- 
 difference if our individuality has been dis- 
 solved." 
 
 They may say so ; but if they will hon- 
 estly analyse their own sentiments, they can 
 soon find out that they are mistaken ; they do 
 care for the destiny that awaits their souls be- 
 yond the grave ; and the reason is that they 
 instinctively feel the identity with their con- 
 tinued existence, the reality of which they 
 deny. 
 
 People want the restoration of their per- 
 sonality. — Very well; that they have. — But 
 
132 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 no ! People want tlieir ego perpetuated. They 
 do not care for their character, nor for their 
 thoughts, nor for their ideals. It may be good 
 to keep these things too ; but they are un- 
 essential, for the main thing is the ego itself. 
 Now what is this ego, the thing that says 
 "I"? Is it not an empty idea? which in it- 
 self is meaningless. The following passage of 
 Schopenhauer is instructive. He says :* 
 
 "We cannot become conscious of ourselves in our- 
 selves alone, independently of the objects of cognition 
 and of the will. As soon as, in the attempt of doing 
 so, we retreat upon ourselves, and direct cognition 
 upon our interior, for the purpose of bethinking our- ■ 
 selves of our own self, we lose ourselves in a bottom- 
 less void and find ourselves to be like a hollow glass 
 globe, from whose empty inside a voice proceeds the 
 cause of which cannot be found there. While we thus 
 try to seize ourselves, we take hold only of an un- 
 real phantom." ' 
 
 Schopenhauer has apparently made experi- 
 ments on himself ; and endeavoring to isolate 
 the ego, to comprehend its proper nature, and 
 
 * World as Idea and Representation. First German edition, 
 II., p. 327- 
 
WHITHER} 133 
 
 see it in its absolute purity, lie finds it empty 
 like a hollow glass globe. 
 
 The same philosopher formulates in a dis- 
 course ' ' On the Indestructible Nature of the 
 Soul" the common view of immortality as 
 held by an untrained mind in these words, 
 which he puts into the mouth of a boisterous 
 antagonist : 
 
 "But surely, my individuality, whatever it may 
 be, is myself. 
 
 ' ' Naught can surpass me, replace, or supply, 
 For God is God and I am I. 
 
 " I, it is I, it is myself who desire existence. My 
 individuality concerns me, and not an existence which 
 has first of all to be proved to me that it is mine." , 
 
 In answer to this objection, Schopenhauer 
 explains the unmeaningness of the notion 
 •'I." He says: 
 
 " But consider the matter ! What is it that cries, 
 ' I, it is I myself who desire existence, ' that is, not 
 you alone, but everything, simply everything, that has 
 a trace of consciousness. Consequently this wish in 
 you is precisely that which is not individual, but com- 
 mon to all without distinction. It does not spring 
 from your individuality but from existence generally, 
 
134 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 is essential to everything that exists, is indeed that 
 whereby it exists, and will accordingly be satisfied by 
 existence in general to which alone it refers, and not 
 exclusively by any determinate personal existence. 
 For it is not at all directed to the latter, although it 
 always has the appearance of being so because it can- 
 not attain to consciousness otherwise than in an indi- 
 vidual being, and therefore always seems to have ref- 
 erence to such. But this is a mere illusion, to which 
 indeed the crudity of the individual cleaves, but which 
 reflexion can destroy and free us from." 
 
 The lowest individuals care only for their 
 thisness, for the preservation of their bodily 
 existence, but as they rise in the scale of evo- 
 lution they begin to cherish more and more 
 their suchness, until they reach the stage in 
 which the body is used as the instrument of 
 their ideals. Thus the longings for immor 
 tality, which on the lowest stages of life are 
 coarse and carnal, become purified through a 
 nobler and ever nobler conception of the self 
 whose aspirations are more and more identi- 
 fied with the divine norms of moral goodness. 
 
 The root of our desire for immortality is 
 the desire for self-preservation. Consequently, 
 with a nobler conception of self our views of 
 
WHITHER i 135 
 
 immortality are naturally and inevitably puri- 
 fied. 
 
 Let people but feel tbe unison of all life 
 and be tbrilled witb tbe grandeur of a bound- 
 less soul reaching out into eternity, and tbey 
 will no longer prate of their not caring for the 
 nobler, the truer, and the better view. They 
 will come and drink from the fountain of life. 
 The truth is wholesome. It will give them 
 guidance in the vicissitudes of life, support in 
 tribulations, and comfort in affliction. 
 
 DEATH. 
 
 Not the least important application of a 
 comprehension of the soul in its superindivid- 
 ual significance will be found in our attitude 
 toward death; for the man who has risen 
 above his corporeal self into the realm of su- 
 perindividual life can confront death with 
 equanimity. Death appears under this aspect 
 no longer as an annihilation ; for our soul is 
 as little wiped out as the law of causation can 
 be suspended; death is simply the consum- 
 mation of life. 
 
136 WHENCE AND- WHITHER. 
 
 Fear of Death Unnecessary . 
 
 Death is frequently feared on account of 
 the supposed pains that it causes. A mediae- 
 val preacher impressed his audience with the 
 terrors of death by saying : 
 
 "Think of the pain ye suffer from a little sore on 
 your finger; then you will understand how terrible 
 death will be when the whole body falls into decay.' 
 
 Such a view is based on a wrong concep- 
 tion of the nature of death. 
 
 Fatal diseases may be painful, but death 
 itself is not. Death is the ceasing of the sen- 
 sibility which is the cause of agony, and death 
 is therefore a release from suffering. 
 
 The dread of death that commonly prevails 
 among mankind is the product of a morbid 
 imagination, and quite unnecessary. Death 
 as a dissolution of our bodily constitution has 
 nothing terrible ; it is simply a ceasing of all 
 physiological functions, an absolute stillness 
 of all life activities. We might as well be 
 afraid of falling asleep as of dying. A sage of 
 antiquity said: 
 
WHITHER? 137 
 
 "Why should we fear death? Death is not here 
 so long as we are here ; and if death is here we are no 
 longer." 
 
 Death is no evil to the individual, but in 
 tlie economy of nature it is even a boon and a 
 blessing. 
 
 Death is the great teacher of life. Death 
 points higher to the superindividual sphere of 
 existence. Death teaches us to distinguish 
 between our bodily self and the soul, between 
 the transient and the permanent. We shall 
 lose all fear of death as soon as we cease to 
 identify ourselves with our corporeality. We 
 learn that our body is like unto a tabernacle. 
 When we are dead our remains are buried, 
 not we : our better part survives and will not 
 sink into the tomb. 
 
 When Crito asked Socrates, "In what way 
 shall we bury you? " he answered: 
 
 " I cannot make Crito believe that I am the So- 
 crates who has been talking and conducting the argu- 
 ment. He fancies that I am the other Socrates whom 
 he will soon see a dead body, — and he asks how he 
 shall bury me. . . . False words are not only evil in 
 themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. Be of 
 
138 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 good cheer, then, my dear Crito, and say that you are 
 burying my body only, and do with that whatever is 
 usual and what you think best." — Plato, Phmdo, 115. 
 
 The old dualism wliicli looks upon tlie soul 
 as a separate entity tliat has been inserted 
 into a body, is wrong, but it contains a great 
 trutb, wbicii consists in tbe appreciation of 
 the soul as the essential and abiding part of 
 man. The human body is comparable to the 
 paper of a book, but the soul is the thought 
 expressed in words. The paper may be torn 
 or burnt, but the words can be reprinted and 
 appear in new editions. The various copies 
 of a book will be used up ; but the words will 
 be read and remembered ; they will be copied 
 and preserved. The words are the soul of the 
 book; they, and not the paper and printer's 
 ink, are the book itself. 
 
 The Origin of Death. 
 
 Immortality being the corollary to the 
 truth that we are the continuance of prior life 
 must be regarded as the natural state and is 
 so much a matter of course that not it, but its 
 counterpart, death, is the real problem that 
 
WHITHER i 139 
 
 demaTids a solution. Life is in its evolution 
 so much a continuity tliat death seems to con- 
 tradict the laws of existence. Death does not 
 exist in the realm of the lowly organised 
 beings. Amoebas and moners grow and di- 
 vide, they do not die. The mother breaks up 
 into two daughters, but leaves no corpse be- 
 hind, for the daughters are identical in struc- 
 ture as well as substance with the mother, 
 only that they are two in number. 
 
 If thus immortality be the natural state of 
 life on its lowest scale, how is it that death 
 appears with the rise of the higher forms of 
 life? Is not death perhaps a factor in life 
 which is subservient to a purpose that works 
 for good? Such in fact is the case ; death ap- 
 pears in the scale of life as the necessary con- 
 comitant of individuality; and individuality 
 originates with birth.* 
 
 Multiplication by division is not entirely 
 limited to the very lowest creatures ; we find 
 it also among animals that stand compara- 
 tively high in the scale of evolution, much 
 
 *For further details see the chapter "Whence Came Death?" 
 in The Soul of Man, pp. 404-407. 
 
140 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 higher at least than the moner. Some polyps, 
 and among them corals, multiply by division. 
 Their mouths having the appearance of a 
 flower, grow broader in size ; the opposite 
 edges approach each other at the median line, 
 until they unite. Thus the two corners of the 
 mouth are separated for good and form two 
 corals upon one stalk. 
 
 There is a great advantage for the animal- 
 cules that come into existence through a pro- 
 cess of multiplication by division. Every mo- 
 ner, every polyp thus produced starts in life 
 as a full-fledged creature. There is no state 
 of infancy with all its troubles and dangers to 
 be passed through, for these creatures make 
 their first appearance in a state of maturity. 
 It is natural that the form and soul of the 
 original organism should thus be preserved in 
 all the details of their parts. The heredity of 
 these animals is no similarity, but absolute 
 identity. 
 
 These advantages are lost in the measure 
 that the procreation of new individuals ap- 
 proaches the system of sexual generation. 
 Buds are at first very tender and may easily 
 
WHITHER? 141 
 
 be injured before they are as strong as tlieir 
 mother organism. Spores are helpless and 
 may be devoured as food by the many hungry 
 animals that swarm about them. And the 
 higher we rise in the scale of evolution the 
 greater become the difficulties of a germ, of a 
 young animal, of a baby, to reach maturity. 
 These disadvantages to the individual, how- 
 ever, are richly overbalanced by the higher ad- 
 vantages afforded through the greater possibil- 
 ities of development and progress. The strug- 
 gle for life grows fiercer, yet in and through 
 the struggle the organisms grow stronger; 
 they adapt themselves to conditions, first un- 
 consciously, then consciously, teaching the 
 lessons of a higher morality than self-preser- 
 vation, the ethics of parental love; and in 
 man they acquire that foresight' and circum- 
 spection which make him the lord of creation. 
 Death is the twin of birth. Birth and death 
 are boundaries with which certain phases of 
 the universal life of the race are limited ; so 
 as to give them a well-defined domain of their 
 own, with a sovereignty of their own and a 
 responsibility of their own, without, however. 
 
142 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 severing them entirely from the rest of the 
 world. It is as though nature had devised this 
 trick to bring forth better results and spur its 
 creatures on to use their utmost efforts in a 
 sniggle for existence. 
 
 Those animals that survive can upon the 
 whole succeed only by great efforts ; they were 
 not strong at the start, so they had to learn to 
 be strong ; they were unmindful in the pres- 
 ence of dangers, so they had to learn to be on 
 their guard in perilous situations. In every 
 respect they had to pass through a severe 
 school, and every single virtue that can lead 
 them onwards they had to acquire themselves. 
 
 Innumerable individuals, it is true, are 
 sacrificed in the struggle for existence; yet 
 their lives are not mere waste in the house-"" 
 hold of nature : their souls continue even so 
 as the resistance of the conquered become part 
 and parcel of the cause of the victor. Those 
 who go to the wall in the struggle for exist- 
 ence are the martyrs of progress; and the 
 generation of to-day lives upon the fruits of 
 their sacrifice. 
 
WHITHER ? 143 
 
 Death the Fountain of Youth. 
 
 In the evolution of mankind the fallacy of 
 individuality as something absolute and the 
 vanity resulting therefrom exercise a tempo- 
 rarily beneficial influence. There is some- 
 thing good even in errors and mistakes. The 
 vanity of the ego-illusion is better than the 
 dumb indifference of the lower forms of life 
 which are still void of the thought of self. 
 The ego-illusion becomes immoral only when 
 it hinders the development of superior forms 
 of life. In the normal course of evolution a 
 truer conception of the soul introduces better 
 and higher ideals which find their realisation 
 in the moral man, who regulates his actions 
 from considerations, not of present advantage, 
 but of the enhancement of the life to come. 
 
 The illusion of individuality originating 
 with birth is cured by birth's twin, death. We 
 grow one-sided through one-sided occupations, 
 we grow stiff-necked and vain, and become 
 more and more incapable of ridding ourselves 
 of the errors which we have acquired. What 
 can we wish for better than to drop from time 
 
144 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 to time all our prejudices and begin life over 
 again as a fresh individual. The institution 
 of death and birth, accordingly, is a very 
 wholesome and beneficent arrangement. It 
 is the fountain of youth in which our souls 
 bathe, and through ^ its agency alone life can 
 bloom with an ever rejuvenescent vigor in un- 
 fading virginity. 
 
 Before the comprehension of the true na- 
 ture of the soul, birth as an absolute begin- 
 ning vanishes ; and so does death as an abso- 
 lute annihilation. We learn to recognise the 
 intimate interconnexion of our selves with the 
 life of the distant past as well as with the life 
 of the ages to come. He who attains to this 
 height lives on the summits of existence and 
 breathes the air of immortality. His soul has 
 risen into the domain of the superindividual 
 life ; death has no sting for him ; he has con- 
 quered the ills that flesh is heir to ; and he 
 looks upon the world with the eye of divine 
 enlightenment. In him deity has become in- 
 carnate. 
 
WHITHER? 145 
 
 ETHICS. 
 
 A wrong view of immortality will, no 
 doubt, produce a wrong kind of ethics. The 
 monk who looks upon bodily existence as a 
 sin and wants to liberate the soul by destroy- 
 ing the body, will seek salvation in asceticism 
 and world-flight and will probably lose the 
 finer moral sentiment so as to become blind 
 to the fact that the root of his religious mo- 
 tives is pure selfishness, and his aim is not 
 the elevation of life but the attainment of eter- 
 nal happiness in heaven. How much superior 
 is the Buddhist who scorns to go to heaven 
 and prefers to be reborn in the deepest hell 
 where he can become a help to others in point- 
 ing out to them the path of salvation I * 
 
 The right view of immortality will produce 
 a right kind of morality, and it is by its prac- 
 tical application that we shall prove the truth 
 of a doctrice. 
 
 If the moments of life were not immortal- 
 ised, there would be no sense either in ethics, 
 
 * See Nirvana, published by The Open Court Publishing Co. 
 Japanese edition, p. 32. 
 
146 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 or in forethouglit, or in sacrifice of any kind. 
 But since the moment endures, the considera- 
 tion of the future becomes the highest, the 
 main and most important motive in life. As 
 much as the future in its infinite duration is 
 longer and more lasting than the present which 
 as in the onward motion of time is but a fleet- 
 ing moment, so the question of what a deed 
 will be in the life to come is more important 
 than what it is at present while it is being done. 
 In the same way our after-life is of so much 
 more gravity than our present life, and he who 
 understands the consequence of the present 
 for the future will never lose sight of its sig- 
 nificance. Morality is nothing more nor less 
 than being swayed by considerations of the 
 life to come. 
 
 The problem of ethics is ultimately a 
 question of psychology. Professors of ethics 
 and preachers of morality speak much about 
 altruism and egotism, about selfishness and 
 unselfishness, and, as a rule, fail to explain 
 what they mean by self. Morality is not 
 much helped by this contrast between self 
 and other, for morality is, at bottom', a hy- 
 
WHITHER i 147 
 
 giene of the soul. All the boons of life, all 
 earthly blessings possess value only in so far 
 as they sustain the life in which our soul 
 manifests itself ; and it is the soul alone which 
 they finally serve. Ethics is not altruism ; it 
 is not serving others because they are others, 
 nor is it a neglect of our own self. Ethics is 
 the growth, the increase, the higher develop- 
 ment of the soul. Charity extended to people 
 that are unworthy is no virtue, and good- 
 nature without circumspection is either weak- 
 ness, or foolishness, or recklessness, but never 
 a virtue. Ethics is not a neglect of self, but 
 on the contrary a culture of self, including an 
 expanse and preservation of its perfected form 
 beyond the boundary of our individual sphere 
 of being. 
 
 The goods of the world, riches, resources 
 of wealth, food, books, instruments, means of 
 instruction, and machinery to economise la- 
 bor, possess worth only because they contrib- 
 ute directly or indirectly to the enhancement 
 of our soul. Whatever the money value of a 
 nation's possession may be, the main capital 
 is the minds of the people, their moral charac- 
 
148 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 ter, tlleir intelligence, their energy. So long 
 as the souls of a people remain sound, we 
 need not worry about temporal goods, for 
 Christ's advice (if not interpreted in too nar- 
 row a sense) is truly good : ' ' Seek ye for the 
 kingdom of God and all these things shall be 
 added unto you;" and the kingdom of God is 
 within us ; it is the health and enhancement 
 of our souls. 
 
 When the Huguenots, the most prosper- 
 ous part of the population of France, were ex- 
 pelled, they lost all their worldly goods and 
 saved only their bare lives. But whitherso- 
 ever they turned they carried with them their 
 souls, their love of liberty, their faith, their 
 skill, their perseverance. They soon grew 
 prosperous again in their new homes and re- 
 paid richly the hospitality with which they 
 had been received in Holland, Prussia, and 
 England by the introduction of new industries 
 and arts, which contributed not a little to the 
 present ascendancy of all th'e Protestant coun- 
 tries. Christ says : 
 
 "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the 
 
WHITHER ; 149 
 
 whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall 
 a man give in exchange for his soul? "* 
 
 The same truth is expressed in the motto 
 of Charles of Burgundy : 
 
 "Wealth lost, nothing lost; courage lost, much 
 lost; honor lost, everything lost." 
 
 Only let us understand by honor, not the 
 tinselled escutcheon, the pride and vanity of 
 the knight-errant, but the integrity of our 
 souls, which is true honor. 
 
 The right kind of man will survive in the 
 struggle for existence in spite of all tribula- 
 tions, persecutions, and difficulties for truth, 
 courage, and righteousness are stronger than 
 death and possess the power of immortalis- 
 ing the soul. 
 
 « * 
 
 Whenever you doubt what course of action 
 you should take in a given situation, I know 
 of no better method of finding the right way 
 than by soaring above your individuality into 
 the superindividual realm. You can do it in 
 various ways, three of which suggest them- 
 
 •Mark.viii. 36-37. 
 
I50 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 selves as the easiest for him who still clings 
 to concrete conditions. First he may ask 
 himself, What advice would my father or 
 mother give me in the present situation ; sec- 
 ondly he may consider, what he would request 
 his own children to do, if one of them were in 
 his place ; or thirdly, he might become clear 
 about what he himself would wish to have 
 done if he had died, and all the troubles of the 
 present life had passed away. The decision 
 reached by these methods, will probably al- 
 ways be the same ; and if honestly obtained 
 without any attempt at equivocation or hy- 
 pocrisy may be considered as the expression 
 of the noblest motives that slumber in the 
 heart of man. It marks the highest height to 
 which his soul can soar. 
 
 The higher and superindividual view of 
 our own afifairs, which regards the span of our 
 life under the aspect of the immortalised after- 
 life, will be characteristic of our better self, 
 and an action done under the weight of this 
 thought is one which, very likely, we shall 
 never rue. 
 
WHITHER ? 151 
 
 HEAVEN ON EARTH. 
 
 The character of the world is restlessness, 
 but there is something stable in all changes. 
 There is the immutable law which remains 
 constant in all the transformations of being. 
 And we can attain it and give it a home in 
 our hearts. The vision of it is the realisation 
 of heaven on earth. 
 
 There is truly a heaven above us ; not in 
 the sky, not somewhere among the stars, but 
 in the spiritual realm of the eternal immut- 
 able conditions that shape the world and guide 
 the course of events. There are laws (so 
 called) of nature, and laws of mind, and laws 
 of the heart. There are verities of physics, 
 verities of logic, and verities of ethics ; and all 
 these verities are one eternal truth ; namely 
 God. God is the immutable order of all cos- 
 mic existence, being to the scientist the light 
 of comprehension, to the man of good-will the 
 path of righteousness, and to all the law that 
 abideth, the law of which in no wise one jot 
 or one tittle shall pass away. These eternal- 
 ities are the everlasting logos that was in the 
 
152 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 beginning, and is now and ever shall be with- 
 out end. It is the prototype of the human 
 soul which has been made in its image and is 
 its incarnation. It is the home whence we 
 come, where we find rest and anchorage in 
 the storms of life, and whither we return, or 
 better, where we remain when the temporal 
 has become a matter of the past and we have 
 shuffled off this mortal coil. 
 
 These are old truths which all the prophets 
 of our race have seen as through a glass darkly, 
 and when we now see them face to face and 
 know them as we are known, without the tin- 
 sel of their mythological dress, they remain 
 as true as ever. 
 
 Wordsworth says : 
 
 "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. 
 The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting 
 And Cometh from afar. 
 
 Not in entire forgetfulness, 
 
 And not in utter darkness, 
 But trailing clouds of glory, do we come 
 
 From God who is our home." 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 
 
 OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. ' 
 
 THE question, "Is Life Worth Living," 
 has been answered again and again, in 
 the aflSrmative as well as in the negative. But 
 on both sides the arguments have been, as a 
 rule, of a personal nature, and have appealed 
 to human instincts, such as the will to live, 
 the enjoyment of existence, the desire for 
 self-preservation, the surplus of pleasure over 
 pain. Optimists claim that the satisfaction of 
 our instincts is possible, and that therefore, 
 upon the whole, and neglecting exceptional 
 cases of extraordinary ill luck, life is worth 
 living. Pessimists, on the other hand, do not 
 recognise the validity of this argument, but 
 declare that our wants are unending. The 
 satisfaction of one want begets innumerable 
 new wants ; therefore, there is no escape from 
 pain, irom danger, from fear of disaster and 
 
154 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 deatli ; in fact, life being a constant oscillation 
 between wants and their satisfaction, we Have 
 tbe choice only between ennui and pain, while 
 the pleasures of existence are mostly illusory. 
 Not without good reason are they compared 
 to the bloom of flowers and fruit, or to the 
 iridescence of the butterfly's wing, which dis- 
 appears at the mere touch of our hand and 
 preserves its enamel hue only so long as it is 
 not too closely inspected. 
 
 But even if enjoyment were in itself of a 
 more solid character, its worth is of a doubt- 
 ful nature, because it is fleeting. There is no 
 permanence in it ; it is transient. 
 
 Transiency is the ultimate argument of 
 pessimism. And there is no gainsaying it. 
 Time is the form oi existence, and time is the 
 great leveller which renders all our efforts nu- 
 gatory. Time calls into existence kingdoms 
 of great power, and crumbles them into dust. 
 Time witnesses the furtive joys of revellers, 
 and his stem glance silences their boisterous 
 songs. It makes flowers wither and rosy 
 cheeks grow pale. It shapes the stars in their 
 fiery beauty, and decks the surface of planets 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 155 
 
 with vegetation and life; but light changes 
 into darkness, and animation sinks back into 
 death, leaving moon-like landscapes, desolate, 
 dead deserts of cold grandeur. 
 
 YEARNING FOR ETERNITY. 
 
 Religion comes to our rescue and points 
 out a goal which promises to give significance 
 to the transiency of life, encouraging us to 
 
 " . . . let onr souls on wings sublime 
 Rise from the vanities of time, 
 Draw back the parting veil and see 
 The glories of eternity." 
 
 Truly, nothing short of the abolition of 
 time — the attainment of eternity — can take 
 away the curse of the transiency of life and 
 deprive death of its sting. But is the attain- 
 ment of eternity possible, and is not the idea 
 itself an illusion? 
 
 There is a thoughtful legend which is told 
 by the Menomini Indians, of a large conical 
 bowlder near Wolf River, about three miles 
 northwest of Keshena, Wisconsin. "A party 
 of Indians once called on Manabush* to ask 
 
 *Man£bush (literally "the big rabbit") is the chief deity of 
 the Menominis. 
 
156 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 for favors, and all of tliem were accommodated 
 save one, wlio had the temerity to ask for 
 eternal life. Manabush, it is related, took 
 this man by the shoulders and thrust him 
 upon the earth, saying, ' You shall have ever- 
 lasting life,' whereupon he instantly became 
 a rock. This rock, on account of its flesh-like 
 tint, is believed to be the remains of the un- 
 fortunate Indian, who has now become a ma- 
 nido [that is, a spirit]. It is the custom of 
 all passing Indians to deposit at the base of 
 the rock a small quantity of tobacco."* 
 
 Life everlasting means death. Life is mo- 
 tion, growth, transformation, change. Take 
 away change, and life ceases. 
 
 Certainly, the conception of a heaven, of a 
 Paradise, of a millennium, here on earth or 
 above the sky, of a new Jerusalem, of the 
 Isles of the Blest, or Happy Hunting-grounds, 
 or whatever name may have been given to an 
 existence of undisturbed bliss, is a dream, a 
 mirage, a will-o'-the-wisp. It is an air castle 
 built upon self -contradictory premises, and 
 
 * Annual Refort of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 
 1892-1893, I., pp. 38-39. 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 157 
 
 its foundation is empty nothingness. The 
 critique of the pessimist as to the nugatori- 
 ness of existence applies with full force to the 
 notion of a life of everlasting happiness in 
 Heaven, — an existence which is without pain, 
 without tears, without decay, without death. 
 The very idea of a beginning without end, of 
 time without transiency, of a continued satis- 
 faction without wants, of rejoicings without 
 fears, of smiles and laughter without tears, of 
 inspirations without expirations, of life with- 
 out death, of joy without pain, is self-contra- 
 dictory ; but even if it were not, it would be- 
 come a desert of the most desolate ennui, and 
 in the unchanged sweetness of eternal bliss 
 we should soon long for bitter experiences as 
 a relief from an intolerable monotony of celes- 
 tial happiness. The mythology of Heaven 
 affords us no escape from the curse of time ; 
 for an unending time is not yet eternity ; it is 
 still time, and every moment of it is transient, 
 while that which becomes permanent in time, 
 or everlasting, loses the zest of existence, and 
 crystallises into dead rocks. 
 
158 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 THE ETERNAL IN THE TRANSIENT. 
 
 All life that is in time, be it ephemeral, as 
 sliort as a few years, a day or an hour, or 
 everlasting, infinitely long, falls under the 
 same category, and is in the same predica- 
 ment. There is no escape from its being tran- 
 sient. 
 
 But though the conception of a localised 
 heaven be wrong, in which the allegories of 
 eternity are painted in temporal imagery, we 
 need not reject the idea of eternity itself as 
 contradictory. 
 
 Existence as it is actualised in material 
 concreteness is constantly shifting and chan- 
 ging, and life is a motion that never and no- 
 where remains the same. But there are con- 
 ditions which determine the kaleidoscopic 
 display of the world ; there are factors that 
 underlie the formation of things which suffer 
 no change, and contintie in their identity. 
 They are now as they were in the beginning 
 and ever shall be, without end. They are 
 formulated by scientists under the name of 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 159 
 
 Laws of Nature, because in nature they be- 
 come manifest. 
 
 But tbe laws of nature are one aspect only 
 of tbese factors of existence. Anotber aspect 
 presents itself to tbe mathematician wbo' de- 
 velops tbem as forms of pure tbougbt, with- 
 out resorting to sense-experience, simply by 
 internal and purely mental experimenting. 
 Mathematical truths are not single facts, not 
 concrete material things, and yet they are re- 
 alities. They are not bodily realities, like 
 stones ; they are spiritual realities ; they are 
 not here alone, nor there alone, but here and 
 there. They are omnipresent and universal. 
 They are not now alone, and not anon alone ; 
 they are both now and anon ; they are inde- 
 pendent of time ; they are eternal ; they would 
 remain true, even though the whole temporal 
 display of the world-forces had never taken 
 place; they are intrinsically necessary. But 
 as such they are superreal and of greater im- 
 portance than isolated objects and individual 
 beings. 
 
 Mathematical truths are kin to natural 
 laws, and natural laws will ultimately be found 
 
i3o WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 to be applications of matlieniatics to special 
 conditions. 
 
 Tlie omnipresent and eternal verities wMcli 
 can be formulated as natural laws are tbe key 
 to tbe world-mysteries. They are to tbe sci- 
 entist tbe ultimate explanations of existence, 
 containing the raisons d''Hre of the suchness 
 of things, why in every instance, under given 
 conditions, an object or an event or a fact of 
 any kind must be such as it is; But to the 
 man of affairs, the architect, the organiser, 
 the builder and master-workman, they are the 
 factors of every new formation and creation. 
 They shape the world and mould it, and thus 
 while they themselves are above time, they 
 yet permeate everything temporal, and condi- 
 tion it. Embodied in sentient creatures, they 
 become the organ of cognition, constituting 
 those faculties which are typically human in 
 man. 
 
 THE PROTOTYPES OF EXISTENCE. 
 
 Mathematical truths are only one instance 
 of the whole group of formative factors, for 
 there are also moral and physical prototypes. 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING} i6i 
 
 Though they cannot as easily and simply be 
 formulated as mathematical truths, they are 
 neither less real nor less important. 
 
 Ideas, as Plato called the prototypes of ex- 
 istence, are unmaterial ; they are purely spir- 
 itual ; they have nothing to do with sense or 
 sensibility ; they are neither perceivable by 
 the senses nor are they themselves endowed 
 with sensation ; they are purely mental ; they 
 can be grasped by the mind only. Nor are 
 they concrete beings, but general presences ; 
 not individual objects, but universal truths. 
 
 We become familiar with a good many of 
 these truths in school, and familiarity breeds 
 contempt. We accept them as our methods 
 for acquiring knowledge. They serve- for cal- 
 culating the debts which we owe to others or 
 others owe to us. But the same rule of three 
 which adjusts our trivial business relations 
 with our neighbors unlocks the mysteries of 
 the starry heavens. There is ethics in the 
 multiplication table, and a reflexion of divine 
 omniscience resides in mathematics. Indeed, 
 our very soul is the embodiment of a collection 
 of exactly such truths, for reason — human 
 
1 62 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 reason — is notliing but an incarnation of tte 
 logic of experience. Reason is the practical 
 operation of the most common rules of the 
 formal sciences. Reason has originated by 
 experience, and is in its rude form merely an 
 instinct called * ' common sense ' ' ;, but it can 
 be refined and developed by critique and 
 method, which being done, it is called "sci- 
 ence." 
 
 But, as there are natural laws of gravity 
 and chemistry, so there are natural laws of 
 human conduct. Causation holds good in the 
 physical as well as in the moral domain, and 
 as the former develops common sense, so the 
 latter does conscience. Conscience, too, is an 
 instinct ; it has developed naturally, and is the 
 product of experience; it is partly inherited, 
 partly transmitted to us by example and edu- 
 cation, and partly acquired by personal expe- 
 rience. Conscience needs the finishing touches 
 of methodical refinement as much as does 
 common sense, for while the conscience of 
 man, if honestly consulted, is upon the whole 
 marvellously reliable, we cannot deny that 
 there are erring consciences, and sometimes 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 163 
 
 whole generations in history have gone astray 
 and done wrong — for conscience' sake. 
 
 As Reason is a witness to the existence of 
 those spiritual factors of existence which have 
 shaped the world in the course of its evolu- 
 tion, so the existence of conscience indicates 
 that there is, in the domain of the superreal, 
 a certain something that corresponds to our 
 moral ideals. We might formulate it as moral 
 laws of nature, and they are as much forma- 
 tive factors of existence, and especially of so- 
 ciety, as are the laws of gravitation and chem- 
 ical afl&nity. 
 
 Here, accordingly, we have a realm that 
 does not partake of the transiency of time — a 
 realm of spiritual presences, a superreal realm 
 which is the law and norm of the real world 
 of material existence. Man's soul is a more 
 or less perfect comprehension of some of these 
 tmths, and the worth of a man consists in the 
 way in which he practically applies them. 
 
 man's fravashi. 
 
 According to the Zoroastrian doctrine, 
 every man possesses a fravashi, an ideal pro- 
 
i64 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 totype of himself ; and this fravashi is as mucli 
 a superreal factor as are all other spiritual 
 presences, such as mathematical rules and lo- 
 gical truths. And if the fravashi of a man is 
 represented as his guardian spirit, we have a 
 deep philosophical truth clad in the garb of 
 mythology. Man's life is an actualisation, 
 ein Darleben-i of his ideal self, and in and with 
 it he partakes of eternity. 
 
 The idea of a fravashi is not exclusively 
 Zoroastrian, for other religions, too, propose 
 doctrines of a pre-existence. Buddha resides 
 in the Tusita Heaven, and when the time 
 comes descends in the shape of a white ele- 
 phant — the symbol of love — into the; womb of 
 his mother, May^ Devi. He enters the ma- 
 terial world, not as a perfect Buddha, but as a 
 Bodhisatva, a bodhi-seeker, an aspirer for 
 Buddhahood, and thus grows to be his fra- 
 vashi. He fulfils the mission of his ideal. 
 
 Nor is the idea of pre-existence missing in 
 Christianity. Jesus says to the Jews: "Be- 
 fore Abraham was, I am," which sentence is 
 commonly interpreted as a pre-existence in 
 the sense of Platonic ideas. The I/Ogos is the 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 165 
 
 eternal prototype of Christ ; it is tlie all-com- 
 preliensive idea in its moral significance, it is 
 the eternal ought — and Christianity teaches 
 that Jesus is the incarnation of the Logos. 
 
 Not Christ alone, but every man, has his 
 prototype, — an ideal that constitutes his fra- 
 vashi. Nay, all creation is in the same pre- 
 dicament. Animals are realisations of certain 
 t3rpes; and even things, from the simplest 
 crystal to the most complicated steam engine, 
 are actualisations of potentialities, whose na- 
 tures are determined according to intrinsic 
 laws, constituting the eternal norms of being. 
 
 To sum up, then, life is transient, but 
 man's soul is the effulgence of a light that is 
 eternal. 
 
 THE FABRIC OF SPIRIT-LIFE. 
 
 Every event that takes place has the roots 
 of its being in the universe; it is part and 
 parcel of the entire All, and the whole, with 
 its general laws as well as its special causes, 
 is reflected in every particular happening. In 
 other words, the cooperation of all the forces 
 of the cosmos are needed to produce every 
 
1 66 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 special incident, and every special incident on 
 becoming a matter of tlie past enters into tlie 
 fabric of causation as one of tbe factors tbat 
 are to determine tbe future. 
 
 Tbis is true of all things and finds its spe- 
 cial application in tbe life of mankind. Tbe 
 conditions of every single individual, the fac- 
 tors tbat make bim wbat be is and determine 
 bis being, existed before bim, and tbe result 
 of bis life becomes even after bis deatb an in- 
 delible presence in tbe history of mankind. 
 Thus it appears that the life of every one of 
 us is a segment of time set like a diamond in 
 a gold ring on tbe face of eternity. Every 
 personality is of unique individuality ; it is of 
 a particular suchness different from all the 
 rest; but it is after all of universal signifi- 
 cance, and receives its worth and dignity 
 through its relation to the life of tbe whole 
 and as a reflexion of its surroundings in their 
 cosmic infinitude. 
 
 Viewing man as a temporal phenomenon, 
 we have to distinguish three phases of bis 
 being: First, his pre-existence, in which bis 
 soul was not yet combined in bis special per- 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING I 167 
 
 sonality, but prepared its appearance by flick- 
 ering up in various and partial manifestations, 
 like innumerable threads destined to be united 
 in one knot. The bodily life of a man consti- 
 tutes tlie second pbase of bis being, wbicb is 
 the actualisation of his prototype in a definite 
 personality. This personality (like all events 
 in the infinite chain of causation) is at once 
 effect and cause. It is the product of innumer- 
 able definite factors, and it produces certain 
 results which are rich and multiform in pro- 
 portion as each special soul is active and 
 effective during its life-time. Here begins 
 the third phase of our existence. The threads 
 which emerge from the node that represents 
 our life are dyed with the tint of our person- 
 ality, and it may be that in several of them 
 our entire being in all its characteristic such- 
 ness is present. 
 
 Considered from the standpoint of each 
 single personality, the first phase (being the 
 phase of pre-existence) is pre-natal and merely 
 potential ; the second phase is bodily actual- 
 ity ; and the third phase is a purely spiritual 
 existence. 
 
1 68 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 THE REALM OF SPIRIT. 
 
 By Spiritual we understand that wliicli is . 
 of the nature of spirit, and spirit is the sig- 
 nificance of certain forms, — especially word- 
 combinations. The word "light," for in- 
 stance, signifies certain experiences of our 
 organs of sight, and in addition the symboli- 
 cal meaning which the conception of light has 
 come to denote by way of analogy. Word- 
 combinations render a transference of thought 
 possible, and thought is spirit. Bvery sen- 
 tence is a thought ; every exhortation is the 
 expression of a will. There are evil thoughts, 
 and there are good thoughts, and the whole 
 world of thought is a spiritual realm. 
 
 In the spiritual realm there are spirits of 
 all descriptions. There, are strong spirits, 
 and there are weak spirits, there are spirits 
 of truth, and there are lying spirits. There 
 are spirits of honesty and moral endeavor, 
 and there are spirits of treachery and ill will. 
 
 Spirits are not ghosts. They are not be- 
 ings with sublimated bodies, made of impalp- 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING i 169 
 
 able material, like air or ether. They do not 
 flit about like invisible birds, lithe and winged, 
 yet concrete and somehow substantial. Spir- 
 its are not mystical entities or mysterious 
 beings. They are simply the meaning of 
 words or other thought-symbols, and being 
 such they are the most important feature of ex- 
 istence. They rise into existence, as it were, 
 from nothingness with the rise of sentient life, 
 and become at once the center of existence, 
 its end and aim, supplying the decisive factor 
 that directs and guides all activities, giving 
 purpose and significance to life. 
 
 Spirits in themselves are abstract ideas; 
 they are bom of circumstances, through the 
 wants of sentient beings. They constitute the 
 minds of living creatures. On assuming def- 
 inite shape in words or other thought-symbols 
 they are transferable from one mind to other 
 minds, and one idea may take possession of 
 hundreds, of thousands, of millions of people. 
 
 There are sentences that will electrify 
 multitudes and even whole nations. Such 
 sentences must correspond with established 
 thought-forms expressive of special senti- 
 
I70 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 ments. Sentiments, wherever they prevail, 
 may be awakened by tbeir watcbwords. Tbus, 
 tbe clamor for liberty, rigbt or wrong, always 
 finds an echo in the hearts of men. We then 
 say : The spirit of liberty takes possession of 
 the people. There are other spirits, — the 
 spirit of restlessness, the spirit of disorder, 
 the spirit of rebellion prompting men to do 
 mischief from sheer envy or hatred. There is 
 again the spirit of benevolence and loving- 
 kindness making for peace and spreading 
 good will on earth. 
 
 These spirits live in the minds of real per- 
 sonalities, but their significance is in the mere 
 idea, which may be expressed in written words 
 or monuments of art. A spirit may live in a 
 book, which so far as its material substance 
 is concerned is an absolutely dead object ; for 
 we must remember that a spirit is not a ghost 
 or a mysterious being, but the significance of 
 thought-symbols. Spirits are not material 
 things, they are the meaning of forms whose 
 material substratum is without importance 
 and purely incidental. But though spirits 
 (considered in themselves as ideas) are unma- 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 171 
 
 terial, they are not unreal. On tlie contrary, 
 they constitute a Hglier, nobler, and more im- 
 portant reality than the reality of purely ma- 
 terial facts ; they are superreal, and all ma- 
 terial life gains worth and value only as a 
 means to support and enhance spiritual life. 
 
 Now, man is spirit, or rather spiritual. 
 The essential part of man, that which consti- 
 tutes his humanity, is his spiritual life, his 
 soul. Man's bodily existence is merely the 
 actualisation of his spirituality. A man is not 
 one spirit, but a great system of spiritual ac- 
 tivities ; his soul is a place of tryst for many 
 spirits ; and these spirits are welded into a 
 new unity in each new personality in which 
 they meet. They are more or less modified, 
 and they pass on to other minds with the 
 stamp of the personality from which they pro- 
 ceeded. Thus, when a man dies he continues 
 to live in the spirit, and the spiritual life of a 
 man when abiding in many other minds may 
 be more ef&cient than was his life in the flesh. 
 
 In Goethe's Faust the earth-spirit repre- 
 senting the display of life on this planet de- 
 scribes the evolution of mankind as the weav- 
 
172 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 ing of the living garment of God, character- 
 ising his own activity in these lines : 
 
 "In the tides of Life, in Action's storm, 
 
 A fluctuant wave, 
 
 A shuttle free, 
 
 Birth and the Grave, 
 
 An eternal sea, 
 
 A weaving, flowing 
 
 Life, all-glowing. 
 Thus at Time's humming loom 't is my hand prepares 
 The garment of Life which the Deity wears 1 " 
 
 Personalities disappear when the whole 
 fabric is considered, but for all that they re- 
 main of paramount importance as being the 
 centers where alone the spirit-life is pulsating 
 with the warm glow of sentiment and sen- 
 tiency. Personalities are the homes in which 
 spirits live and multiply. We feel the power 
 of great personalities, and we cherish them and 
 wish to preserve them. Hence this yearning 
 for personal immortality, which is not only 
 legitimate, but is also satisfied in the way in 
 which it is legitimate. The bodily life of every 
 individual being is broken up in death, but the 
 personality and its significance are not lost. 
 The threads which have entered into it emerge 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 173 
 
 from it and continue. Nay, more than that, 
 the personality of the deceased himself is su- 
 peradded as a new spiritual element, the im- 
 portance of which depends upon the intrinsic 
 worth of his life. 
 
 It is obvious that the world is different be- 
 fore and after the life of every one of us, and 
 the question in each single case is only whether 
 or not the world is better for our having lived 
 in it. 
 
 But what is the use of all this glorious dis- 
 play of spiritual life for the several personali- 
 ties themselves? Considering all the ills that 
 flesh is heir to and remembering that the 
 strength of a noble life is after all only labor 
 and sorrow, we ask ourselves. Is life worth 
 living? 
 
 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 
 
 As to the question, Is life worth living? 
 we grant that there is a good deal of truth in 
 the answer which a punster made, who said: 
 "All depends upon the liver." Whether or 
 not your life is worth living depends upon 
 your way of living, and the answer, howso- 
 
174 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 ever you may formulate it, is an expression 
 of your attitude in life. 
 
 Tlie question, Is life worth living? is not 
 rightly stated, for obviously the life of some 
 people is worth living, and the life of others is 
 not. The question should be : " Can life be 
 made worth living?" and this is to be an- 
 swered with an emphatic "yes." Life in it- 
 self is neither bad nor good ; it becomes bad 
 or good according to the way in which it is 
 lived. 
 
 , The optimist is wrong when he accepts life 
 as a boon on the argument that it contains a 
 surplus of pleasure over pain. He is like the 
 man of the parable, who, hanging in the well 
 a sure prey to death, forgets his plight and 
 enjoys the honey that is within his reach. 
 Our pleasures are as fleeting as our pains, 
 and the worth of life is not in them. 
 
 Optimism overlooks the most salient truth 
 of existence, the transiency of life ; and from 
 the standpoint of the pleasure-seeker the pes- 
 simist is right. Considering life in itself, the 
 span of the individual alone in its temporal 
 aspect, without an outlook into the eternal 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 175 
 
 tliat forms its radiant background, Lord Byron 
 is right when lie says : 
 
 ' ' Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, 
 Count o'er the days from anguish free, 
 And know whatever thou hast been 
 'Tis something better not to be." 
 
 As to the worth of life, all depends upon 
 the standpoint taken. Who are you that ask 
 the question? Are you the body, the material 
 particles that constitute your system at the 
 present moment ; or are you the spirit, the 
 fravashi, which determines the nature and 
 character of your self? Are you the clay and 
 its sensuous activity, or are you the signifi- 
 cance of this activity, the will — not in a Scho- 
 penhauerian sense "the blind will," but the 
 clearness of the will — the moulding factor, 
 that which directs and arranges, that which 
 determines the aim and purpose of your life? 
 Certainly, we as human beings are both in 
 one; we are incarnations, and if we under- 
 stand the superiority of the spiritual we shall 
 not hesitate to look upon the body as secon- 
 dary, as the means of a realisation of our ideal. 
 Being incarnations we are not flesh, but the 
 
176 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 word, tlie thought, the idea, become flesh. A 
 statue is not clay, but clay moulded. 
 
 It is natural that man should become con- 
 scious of his spirituality only by degrees. So 
 long as he is merely a sense-animal, he will 
 cling to the sense-life of his bodily existence. 
 Comprehending the transiency of the sensuous 
 pleasures of the body and the significance of 
 his spiritual life, he goes to the other extreme 
 and conceives his spiritual existence as a 
 ghost-soul — a kind of material essence. This 
 is materialism spiritualised, which marks the 
 period of dualism and pessimism in which 
 man yearns for liberation from ' ' this body of 
 death." In both periods, man clings to some- 
 thing temporal, to a self that is limited in 
 time and space; that is here, and not in any 
 other place, — ^here where his body is, or where 
 he feels the seat of his soul or spirit to be, 
 and the spirit is conceived after the analogy - 
 of the body, as a bodily system consisting of 
 a kind of sublimated substance. 
 
 In both periods, that of optimism as well 
 as that of pessimism, the answer to the ques- 
 tion, Is life worth living? depends solely upon 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? \Ti 
 
 wtether or not a surplus of pleasure over pain 
 be obtainable. Both views are egoistic or in- 
 dividualistic in the sense that the self is re- 
 garded as a concrete, isolated being, sensuous, 
 i. e., endowed with sensibility, and composed 
 of a substance of some kind. When the nature 
 of the spiritual comes to be understood as ptire 
 form, as the condition of all suchness, as the 
 determining factors that shape existence, as 
 the eternal norm of all temporal occurrences, 
 we shall, without returning to the primitive, 
 materialistic conception, appreciate the im- 
 portance of our bodily life as the actualisation 
 of our spiritual prototype, and yet need not 
 surrender the truth of the superiority of the 
 spiritual in us. On the contrary, we shall 
 then understand it. We are incarnations of 
 some type sublime that is eternal. Or, better 
 still, because truer, we are the type eternal in 
 its temporal actualisation. 
 
 BRUTE AND MAN. 
 
 The animal leads a life of mere sense-ex- 
 istence. The conception of its own existence 
 
4 
 
 178 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 is limited to the moment, and thus the fleet- 
 ing enjoyment is the sole aim it can see. It 
 cannot rise above itself and meditate on its 
 own nature, on the conditions that shape it, 
 and the results which it leaves. With all due 
 reserve, and acknowledging at the same time 
 the deeply moral significance of the animal's 
 instincts, we must clearly recognise that the 
 animal does not yet possess spirituality in the 
 full sense of the word ; it is irresponsible, and 
 has not as yet been confronted with the prob- 
 lem of the moral ought. It lives, but it will 
 never be in a condition to reflect on the sig- 
 nificance of life, or ask itself the question : Is 
 life worth living? 
 
 Man, as long as his conception remains 
 limited to his sensual life, is to a great extent 
 like the brute. He has progressed beyond 
 the brute in having acquired the rational fac- 
 ulty. He is, in a limited way, an incarnation 
 of the Logos, but not yet of the ethical norm, 
 the "ought." He may ask himself the ques- 
 tion: Is life worth living? But his answer 
 will be from the standpoint of egoism, accord- 
 ing to the balance of pleasure over pain. To 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 179 
 
 the spiritual man, however, the question loses 
 its meaning. Feeling eternity in himself, he 
 knows that all life is the actualisation of 
 norms that are eternal. The bodily incarna- 
 tion is incomplete, and the fleeting moment 
 insufficient. Says Goethe : 
 
 "All things in their transiency 
 But as symbols are meant." 
 
 RELIGION. 
 
 A solution of the problem. Is life worth 
 living? is proposed in the legends of various 
 religions. Klopstock, in the first chapter of 
 the Messiad, represents God the Father and 
 God the Son in Heaven ; and God the Son, 
 beholding the misery of sin, takes the task 
 upon himself to set out and become flesh, 
 saying : 
 
 "Aye, I will be of mankind the Redeemer." 
 
 Life is a field for the display of work, and 
 he who has risen above the conception of his 
 self in its temporal, specific, particular isola- 
 tion will take the pleasures of life as recrea- 
 tions only, to enable him to actualise his fra- 
 vashi, the prototype of his being, his ideal. 
 
i8o WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 This attitude is characterised in the legend 
 of a Buddhist saint who on his death -bed scorns 
 the idea of entering the state of eternal happi- 
 ness with Brahma, saying: "So long as there 
 is suffering in the world, I shall never enter 
 upon a state of rest ; I shall never desire to 
 ascend into a heaven of bliss. I want to be 
 reborn in the deepest depths of hell. There 
 the misery is greatest and salvation most 
 needed. That is the best place to enlighten 
 those in darkness, to recover what is lost, and 
 to point out the path to those who have gone 
 astray."* 
 
 This is but another formulation of the 
 truth that the fravashi of the saviour is not 
 born in the palace, but in a stable, because 
 there is no room for him at the inn. 
 
 The question. Is life worth living? assumes 
 a new aspect when viewed from the higher 
 ground of a religious and philosophical in- 
 sight into the eternality of the world-order in 
 all its glory. Life may be undesirable to the 
 egoist ; but the egoistic standpoint is purely 
 phenomenal, implying the emptiness and shal- 
 
 *Nirvdna, a story of Buddhist philosophy, p. 32. 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? i8i 
 
 lowness of all joys. However, on account of 
 its transitoriness we cannot as yet say that 
 life is not worth living ; and the compensa- 
 tion which accrues from assuming the higher 
 ground of preferring the eternal to the tem- 
 poral is greater than the loss. If our bodily 
 existence is insufficient in itself, there is no 
 need of turning our backs upon life and be- 
 coming misanthropic. The ethics of world- 
 flight is wrong; for if life has no intrinsic 
 value, it may acquire it by becoming service- 
 able to aims and purposes which are neither 
 transient nor worthless. 
 
 Life has innumerable joys which are pleas- 
 ant in spite of their transitory nature ; at any 
 rate, they are sufi&cient to make the thought- 
 less cling to life. A wise man will not hold 
 them in contempt on account of their insuflfi- 
 ciency from a higher standpoint. They retain 
 their full value for the purpose which they 
 serve, and become obnoxious only when they 
 become hindrances to our spiritual growth and 
 prevent us from understanding the deeper sig- 
 nificance of life and the duties of the moral 
 ought. We need not be disgusted with the 
 
1 83 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 bloom of the fruit because it contains no nour- 
 isbment ; and we need not revile tbe beauty 
 of the rainbow because it is not a granite 
 arch. The main fault of the average man is 
 the materialism of his expectations. He wants 
 life and soul and spirit to be substances as 
 thick and as clumsy as rocks and as gross and 
 coarse as his body, and imagines that if form 
 is the essential feature of existence, philos- 
 ophy will end in nihilism. 
 
 Schiller castigates the sensualism which 
 dominates the opinions of vast numbers of re- 
 ligious people in a Xenion called ' ' The God- 
 eaters, or Theophagi." He says: 
 
 "Oh! what gluttons! They swallow ideas to tickle their palates. 
 Spoons they would carry, and forks, Into the Kingdom of God. " * 
 
 Theological hedonism is the secret reason 
 of all narrowness ; it is sensual to the core, 
 and would not brook a spiritual conception of 
 the letter of religious dogmas. The thought- 
 less cling to the allegory of the parable be- 
 cause it pleases the senses, and they scorn its 
 spirit because the significance of the spirit 
 
 *The meter of these two lines is the Greek distich, viz., a 
 dactylic hexameter and pentameter. 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING i 183 
 
 escapes them. When sensualism no longer 
 rules supreme, the time will come when the 
 philosophy of religion will be better appre- 
 ciated. 
 
 THE ONE THING THAT IS NEEDFUL. 
 
 I/Ct us learn that form, though not a sub- 
 stance, is the reality of life, it is the super- 
 real ; and the problem of ethics is not that we 
 live but how we live. The value of life lies 
 not in its length, not in the number of years, 
 not in the amount of happiness attained in it ; 
 but in the direction in which it tends and the 
 purpose which it serves. We must get our 
 bearings in life by studying its Whence and 
 its Whither. That is the one thing which is 
 needful. 
 
 A true comprehension of the purpose of 
 life points beyond the limits of the individual 
 and teaches us the interrelation of all exist- 
 ence. It opens a vista behind us and before 
 us. It shows that every individual is but the 
 continuation of prior activities and that death 
 is the discontinuation only of this body of 
 death, of that which is temporal and material, 
 
1 84 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 and not an anniHlation of our souls, of our 
 real self. 
 
 Life in itself is a boon only as an oppor- 
 tunity to perform a task, to accomplislx a cer- 
 tain work, to actualise an ideal. Tlie aim of 
 life is its significance, and it alone establishes 
 its dignity. By having an aim that is rooted 
 in eternity, we need not mind the transiency 
 of life. We can impart to life a significance 
 that is beyond the intrinsic meaning of the 
 moment, and, being the revelation of imper- 
 ishable ideals, possesses a worth everlasting. 
 The recognition of the spiritual background 
 which transfigures our bodily life implies a 
 lesson which is the quintessence of all re- 
 ligion. 
 
 " O use life's moments while they flee, 
 In aspect of eternity : 
 
 In acts abides the actor. 
 Eternity is immanent, 
 And life remains such as 'tis spent. 
 For aye a living factor ; 
 Sowing, 
 Seeds growing, 
 Never waning 
 But attaining 
 To resplendent 
 Glories of the realms transcendent." 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Abolition of time, 155. 
 
 Affinities, 12. 
 
 Ahora Mazda, 38. 
 
 Amoebas do not die, 139. 
 
 Aristotle, 68, 70. 
 
 Assimilation and dissimilation, 
 
 16. 
 Attention, 74. 
 Anrelins, Marcos, 68. 
 
 Beethoven, 72. 
 
 Bodhi, 39. 
 
 Bodhisattva, 164. 
 
 Bodily constitution, the basis, 
 
 78. 
 Body dissolved &t death, 103- 
 
 105. 
 Bonnet, 61. 
 Bowring, 45, 47. 
 Browning, Robert, 68, 69. 
 Brunswick, Duke of, 83. 
 Buddha, 38 et seq. 
 Buddhism, 38 et seq. 
 Byron, Lord, 175. 
 
 Cabanis, 8. 
 Causation, 30. 
 CKang Tao, 38. 
 Character, 28. 
 
 Charles of Burgundy, motto of, 
 149. 
 
 Choice, 12. 
 
 Christ, 7, 46, 98, 110, 148. 
 
 Christianity, 36. 
 
 Clifford, Professor, 17. 
 
 Coenaesthesis, 57. 
 
 Communion, the holy, 113. 
 
 Communion with the whole, 109 
 
 et seq. 
 Communism of soul-life, 100 et 
 
 seq., no. 
 Compounds, dissolved, 40. 
 Comte, Auguste, 123. 
 Concentration, 75. 
 Concrete things particular, 34. 
 Conscience, 69 ; an instinct, 162. 
 Continuity of recollections, 79. 
 Coral plant, simile of, 110-113. 
 Correlations between things and 
 
 sensations, 24. 
 Crito, 137 et seq. 
 
 Death, 135 et seq.; and sensual- 
 ity, 44; body dissolved at, 103 
 -105; fear of unnecessary, 136; 
 origin of, 138 et seq.; sur- 
 rounded by, 50 ; the fountain 
 of youth, 143 et seq. ; the great 
 teacher of life, 137 ; the twin 
 of birth, 141, 143 et seq. 
 
 Dispositions, 69, 70, 71, 
 
1 86 
 
 WHENCE AJSID WHITHER. 
 
 Division of labor, 62. 
 Dualism, 138. 
 
 ^go> 55i 57 ^ SBq.; does not do 
 the thinking, the, 126 ; reifi- 
 cation of the, 126 et seq. ; rep- 
 resents man's personality, 
 129. 
 
 Ego-conception, unity of, 74 et 
 seq. 
 
 Eliot, George, 107 et seq. 
 
 Kpigenesis, 61. 
 
 Eternity, glories of, 155. 
 
 Ethics, a question of psychol- 
 ogy, 146 et seq. ; and immor- 
 tality, 145 et seq. 
 
 Evolution, 61, 62. 
 
 Exact science, 32. 
 
 Eye, 21, 62. 
 
 Feelings, 8 ; states of aware- 
 ness, 14. 
 
 Fichte, 55. 
 
 Formative factors, 160. 
 
 Forms, eternal, pure, 34 ; iden- 
 tity of, 86-88 ; importance of, 
 108 ; man a, 51 et seq.; pres- 
 ervation of, 87; the abiding 
 in man, 87. 
 
 Fravashis, 40, 163, 164, 180. 
 
 Freytag on books, 122. 
 
 Fusion of souls, 124. 
 
 God, 46, 47, 48, 49 ; image of, 
 
 53- 
 Goethe, 54, 92, 179; his Faust, 
 the earth-spirit in, 171-172 ; 
 quoted on heredity, 73 ; on 
 immortalisation, 117; quoted 
 on name, 82 ; quoted on per- 
 sonality a reproduction, 93 ; 
 
 quoted on the ego as a tradi- 
 tion, 94. 
 Gravitation, 31. 
 
 Hades, 43. 
 Haller, 61. 
 Heaven, mythology of, 157; on 
 
 earth, 151. 
 Heine, Heinrich, i. 
 Heraclitus, 37. 
 Herder, 8z. 
 Heredity, 58 et seq., 62, 70; and 
 
 preservation, 60. 
 Hering, Prof. Ewald, 20. 
 Hide-bound consciousness, 63. 
 Honover, 38. 
 Huguenots, the, 148. 
 
 I (See Ego), 55. 
 Ideals and personality, 100. 
 Ideals predetermined, 96. 
 Ideas, immortality of, 118 ; of 
 
 Plato, 161 ; produce us, 129. 
 Identity of form, 86-88. 
 Image, 22 et seq. ; of God, 53 ; 
 
 on the retina, 65 et seq. 
 Immortalisation, Goethe on, 117. 
 Immortality, 103 ; and ethics, 
 
 14s et seq. ; individual, 133 ; 
 
 personal, 106 ; Schiller on, 
 
 113 ; undeniable, 108. 
 Individual immortality, 133. 
 Individual, newness of each,77. 
 Instinctive discoveries, 5. 
 Introspection, 64, 67. 
 It thinks, 125 et seq. 
 
 Jesus, 37. 
 
 Kabbalah, 38. 
 Kant, 32, 46, 47. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 187 
 
 Kepler, 97. 
 Klopstock, 179. 
 
 Lao-Tze, 38. 
 
 Laws of form, 33 ; of nature, 
 158-159. 
 
 Laws not decrees, 33. 
 
 Leibnitz, 9. 
 
 Lichtenberg quoted, 127 et seq. 
 
 Life, organised, 14, 15 et seq. ; 
 three degrees of, 13 ; is it 
 worth living, 173 et seq. 
 
 Logos, 36 et seq., 123, 151, 164, 
 165, 178 ; and power (dyna- 
 mis), 38 ; doctrine, 99 ; incar- 
 nation of the, 49, 53. 
 
 Lord's Supper, 113. 
 
 Mach, Prof. Ernst, 25. 
 Manabush, 155, 156. 
 Man a form, 51 et seq. 
 Manido, 156. 
 Materialism, 8. 
 Materialistic metaphysicism, 
 
 87- 
 Materiality, 11. 
 Mathematical truths eternal, 
 
 159- 
 
 Me, 55- 
 
 Mechanics cannot explain feel- 
 ings, 10. 
 
 Memory, 20, 22, 86. 
 
 Memory-image, 23 et seq. 
 
 Menomini Indians, 155. 
 
 Mentality, 18. 
 
 Metaphysicism, psychological, 
 129 et seq. 
 
 Metaphysicism and materialis- 
 tic, 87. 
 
 Milton on books, 120 et seq. 
 
 Mind, origin of, 17. 
 
 Name, importance of the, 79 et 
 
 seq. 
 Nature, laws of, 159. 
 Necessity a misleading term, 33. 
 Network of the soul, 126. 
 Newness of each individual, 77. 
 NirvSna, 39, 145. 
 Nomotheism, 42. 
 
 Objectivity and subjectivity, 7 
 
 et seq. 
 Optimism, 153-154, 174, 175, 
 
 176. 
 Organised life, 12, 14, 15 et seq. 
 Originality, 92, 94, 98. 
 Originality-measles, 73. 
 Originalomania, 72. 
 
 Paul, Saint, 129; and Saul, 84. 
 
 Personal immortality, 106. 
 
 Personality, 54, 55 ; and ideals, 
 100 ; a reproduction, 91 et 
 seq.; Wernicke on, 90 et seq.; 
 worth of, 130. 
 
 Pessimism, 153-154, 174-178. 
 
 Philo, 37. 
 
 Plato, 35, 37. 
 
 Platonic ideas, 40, 164. 
 
 Platonism, 36. 
 
 Power {dynamis) and logos, 38. 
 
 Power super-dynamic, 41. 
 
 Pre-existence, 166, 167. 
 
 Preservation and heredity, 60. 
 
 Preservation of form, 87. 
 
 Problem of the Sphinx, i. 
 
 Pure forms eternal, 34. 
 
 Reason, 163. 
 Reflex functions, 70. 
 Reification of the ego, 126 et 
 
 seq. 
 Religion, 4. 
 
1 88 
 
 WHENCE AND WHITHER. 
 
 Representativeness, ig, 22. 
 Reproduction, personality a, gi 
 
 et seq. 
 Retina, image on the, 65 et seq. 
 Ruckert quoted on ideal self, g4 
 
 -95- 
 
 Saul and Paul, 84. 
 
 Schiller, Friedrich, 42 et seq., 
 182 ; on immortality, 113. 
 
 Schopenhauer, 175; on the con- 
 ception of self, 132 et seq. 
 
 Science, 30 ; exact, 32. 
 
 Self, change in, 134 ; the ideal, 
 
 94- 
 Sensuality and death, 44. 
 Shakespeare, 81. 
 Sheng yen, 38. 
 Significance the characteristic 
 
 feature of spirituality, 24. 
 Soaring into the super-individ- 
 ual realm, I4g, 150. 
 Socrates, 137 et seq. 
 Soul, defined, 26; a mirror, 25; 
 
 netvffork of the, 126. 
 Souls, blending of, 123 et seq,; 
 
 the trysting-place of souls, 
 
 124. 
 Spencer, Herbert, 21 ; on soul 
 
 or form, 88. 
 Sphinx, problem of the, i. 
 Spirit-empire, the, 120 et seq., 
 
 123. 
 Spirit, realm of the, 168. 
 Spirits, 169, 170. 
 Spiritual empire, pure forms a, 
 
 35- 
 Spirituality, significance the 
 
 characteristic feature of, 24. 
 Star-fish, unity of soul of the, 
 
 76. 
 
 Struggle for life, the, 141. 
 Subjectivity, rise of, 26 et seq.; 
 
 and objectivity, 7 et seq. 
 Suchness, 34, 134. 
 Sunrise an antiquated term, 130. 
 Superindividual realm, soaring 
 
 into, 149, 150. 
 Supermaterial, 35. 
 Superreal, 183. 
 Survey of facts, 6. 
 
 Tao, 38. 
 
 Theophagi, 182. 
 
 Thisness. 35, 134. 
 
 Three layers of the ego, 56. 
 
 Time, abolition of, 155 ; both 
 
 transient and lasting, 1 14-1 17. 
 Tradition, Goethe quoted on the 
 
 ego as a, 94. 
 Transiency, 154. 
 Truth, 68, 69. 
 Trysting-place of souls, souls 
 
 the, 124. 
 Tusita Heaven, 164. 
 
 Uniformities, 34. 
 
 Unity, of the ego-conception, 
 
 74; of man's corporeality, 56; 
 
 of soul of the star-fish, 76. 
 
 VSch Smbhrini, 37. 
 
 Vanity, 84 ; of name, 82-84. 
 
 Vogt, Karl, 8. 
 
 Wernicke on personality, 90 et 
 
 seq. 
 Wolff, Caspar Friedrich, 61. 
 Words, 25. 
 Wordsworth, 152. 
 World-flight- vprong, 181. 
 
 Zoroaster, 38. 
 
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