nature of the life and conditions under which consciousness supposedly survives. The various systems of belief about the nature of the after life are the answers to that query and it is not necessary to review them here. That they should be different from each other would be a natural corollary of the differences in human intelligence and experience For us here it is the way in which the tendency gives rise to different philosophies that interest us. It determines the way in which we should defend or deny the possibility of survival. Whether the continuance of consciousness is possible or not will depend on what we expect to go with it or upon what relation we think it sustains to the physical body. If it be a function of the physical organism and this organism perishes it is as impossible for consciousness to survive as it would be for digestion or circulation to continue after death. Hence some other view of the nature of consciousness would be necessary as a precondition of entertaining the conceivability of continuance after the dissolution of the body.

1. The first answer to the human query would be that of Metchnikoff. He starts with the hypothesis of materialism which makes consciousness a function of the organism and endeavors to prevent death. Physiologists tell us that, so far as physiology is concerned, there is no reason why we should die at all. The laws of chemistry are such that it is only a question of keeping up the equilibrium between assimilation and dissipation of energy, between waste and repair. Metchnikoff proposes the protection of the digestive tract as a measure of preventing the survival of those destructive agents that cause death, and hence his conception of immortality is to get rid of death, to preserve consciousness with the body, not apart from it. This is certainly a new point of view, whether feasible or not. But it attacks the problem very dif

ferently from those who accepted death as a final and unpreventable fact. Mankind, assuming that death is as much a law of nature as waste and repair, has insisted on preserving consciousness in spite of the apparent disappearance of it and so have constructed their philosophic theories to suit the demand. But Metchnikoff takes the bull by the horns and endeavors or proposes to preserve the existing condition of things, accepting the materialistic theory of the world.

But many minds would not be satisfied with any such order. Men would divide on the desirability of such a regime. Some would prefer annihilation to any such system. Others no doubt would prefer the continuance of the material existence to any spiritual life that might be conceived. Besides, Metchnikoff would have to show some probability that death could be set aside and that it was not a law of nature before much attention could be paid to his proposal. We must accept this law and make our peace with it, with or without a future life, and if we can find reasons to believe that life continues in spite of death we must form some conception of consciousness and its conditions different from the materialistic one. The materialist will get his answer only by denying the possibility of survival or by preserving life along with the body. He can affirm continuance only by preserving the present order and eradicating the fact of death.

2. The second answer to the question was made by the believers in the doctrine of a physical resurrection. Their solution differed little from that of Metchnikoff. They, however, while admitting that consciousness was a function of the body also admitted that death was unescapable, and sought to overcome it by a system of causes, the act of God, for restoring that consciousness to its bodily possession and so fixed a time when the body should be raised from the dead.

I suspect, however, men would differ regarding the

desirability of such a thing as they would about the perpetual earthly existence, whether rightly or wrongly. At any rate, whatever attractions it might have for the lovers of life, our present knowledge makes such a thing so improbable or impossible that hopes cannot be founded upon it We have to look elsewhere for salvation or reconcile ourselves with the prospect of eternal death. The physical resurrection of the body would seem a more improbable or impossible thing than the scheme of Metchnikoff and perhaps just as undesirable. Of course our desires have nothing to do with the matter, but they determine for us the persistence of the problem.

3. The third system for protecting survival is the supposition of the Pauline "spiritual body," the theosophists "astral body," and it might have been the Epicurean "ethereal organism," if that system had not denied survival in spite of admitting that there was a "soul."

The advantage of the Pauline and theosophic doctrine is that they preserve the ordinary demand for a "ground" for consciousness, a basis for its persistence as a function. It answers the question as to how we may survive rather than the fact of it. It also provides a basis for conceiving the after life in accordance with the ordinary feeling of men that consciousness does not exist apart from conditions; that, if it be a function instead of a thing, it must have a subject or "body" of some kind of which it is the function. Besides these schools can set up a cosmos repeating the analogies of the physical world without being physical in our ordinary sense of the term.

But both of these systems depend for their protection upon proving that there is such a "body." Their philosophy seems to have been contrived merely to render survival possible, not to prove it a fact. It is true enough that survival would be probable or certain,

if we were assured of an organism other than the brain as a subject for consciousness. The ordinary materialism would be set aside and the inferences from its conception of the relation between consciousness and the organism would not be valid. But it may be as difficult to prove the existence of a spiritual body as to prove survival, and even when you did prove its existence you would still have to prove that consciousness was a function of it to be assured that personality continued after the separation of the spiritual body from the physical organism.

4. The next doctrine cannot be summarized in a word. It represents what I may call the Cartesian point of view, the doctrine that the soul does not occupy space. It holds the belief that there is a soul but that space is not one of its attributes. Descartes maintained that there were only two substances or things in the world, mind and matter. The essential attribute of mind was consciousness without extension. The essential properties of matter were space and motion. He could get their independence of each other by insisting on this radical distinction. The consequence was the doctrine of Leibnitz; namely, that the soul was a spaceless point of force and that consciousness was a stream of activity connected with this spaceless thing. Whether true or not makes no difference for the statement of the doctrine. I do not care whether it be thought conceivable or not. It was an effort to save consciousness from extinction and to do it by denying any affinity with the phenomena of matter and it ruled philosophy for a long period of time. It was the beginning of idealism which eliminated all sense conceptions from the nature of the soul and would make a future life a stream of inner activity, a constructive function of the mind in the creation of its own world, so to speak, as in day dreaming or poetry and imagination, a function more realistically

exercised in dreams and subconscious actions generally, as in deliria and hallucinations, though it is the intention that such functions would be rationalized. Its main point was that it refused to regard consciousness as a function of the physical organism. But it had to contend against a double difficulty; namely, the paradoxical conception of the soul as spaceless and the problem of evidence. It is not easy to make any such theory of the soul intelligible and the view that consciousness is so different from physical events as to require another subject than the body is not an empirically proved fact. The whole system was, therefore, a speculation, legitimate and even possibly true, but a speculation nevertheless and lacking in the evidence which science produces for its claims.

5. There is a theory defending the possible survival of human consciousness which was presented by Professor James. He called it the transmission theory. It meant that, even though consciousness might be a function of the organism, it might be transmitted to some other reality. This, in effect, might be similar or identical with either the resurrection or reincarnation, but he meant neither of these views by his theory. He conceived it after the analogy of the transmission of motion in mechanics. He recognized the law of transmission of motion and thought consciousness might conceivably be transferred in a similar way from the physical body to some other subject. He gave neither evidence nor illustration of what such a subject would be, and it seems to me he could not have done so without importing into the theory the facts of psychical research in favor of some spiritual or ethereal body. He made no mention of such a possibility, and even if he had, it may be questioned whether the doctrine has as much possibility as either reincarnation or the physical resurrection, which he did not advocate and perhaps would not venture to do. Besides he did not