                 21 page printout, pages 60 - 80
                           CHAPTER IV

                     The Myth of Immortality

          The Law of Death -- Evolution and the Soul --
        Is the Mind a Spirit? -- What Is Personality? --
    Modern Theories of Immortality -- The Freedom of the Will

                        THE LAW OF DEATH

     IN Chapter II, "The Origin of Religion," I defined religion as
the belief in and worship of gods. If there is any error in that
definition, it is that it ignores the belief in immortality. That
man's mind survives the body is, in fact, as we saw, the oldest of
all religious beliefs, the germ of all religious thought. Gods were
but the princes of the spirit-world. God is its monarch. What if
the spirit-world became, like the human world of which it is a
fantastic imitation, a republic without aristocracy or princes?
Could we have religion without God?

     One would expect men to cling more desperately to the belief
in immortality than to the belief in God, yet in that universal
decay of religion which I have described there is as much
indifference to the disappearance of the one as of the other dogma.
Did men ever profoundly believe in their immortality?

     The logic of theology is nowhere more inexorable than in this
section. If we are to live three score years and ten on earth, and
an eternity in some other sphere, it matters vitally how we prepare
for that larger life. And the majority of men have always behaved
as if they did not entirely believe the story. The flesh, and its
impulses and pleasures they knew, but that dim far-away crown....

     Yet at a time when even the dimmest vision of the crown seems
to fade, when the rumor spreads that heaven is an illusion, one
would think that the most earnest efforts would be made to save the
hope. No. Few but professional theologians concern themselves with
it. Hardly one in ten of our more learned men now believes in
personal immortality, and the news passes from ear to ear. And not
a tear falls: not the thinnest shade clouds the unconquerable
gaiety of modern life. The angelic harp is the butt of our
comedians. Hell is the text of humorous stories.

     And the official reply to all this is remarkably feeble. Every
man who believes in God has one or another reason for doing so
always present in his mind. God must have made the world, or at
least the order and beauty of the world, or must have laid down the
moral law. But ask your religious neighbor why he believes that he
is immortal. The answer will be a series of gasping exclamations:
"Why-er, surely-er." And so on. I venture to say that not one
believer in a thousand has in his mind one single definite reason
for thinking that he is immortal.

     Most people will candidly reply that they believe because the
Bible says so, or the Church says so. Since the Church can say so
only on the authority of the Bible, we are reduced to that. And to
accept such authority with any confidence in the truth of your
belief, you must first be quite convinced, by solid proof, that
there is a God to make the promise, and that He actually did
inspire the Bible. In the next chapter, "The Futility of Belief in 

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God," I show how frail is the belief in the very existence of God,
and another chapter shows that the claim of revelation in the Bible
(whether there is a God or not) is far frailer.

     It is strange how people forget that religion is a series of
statements of fact, and the boldest and most tremendous statements
imaginable. Perhaps the reader will be surprised to know that it is
profoundly difficult -- many thinkers say impossible -- to prove
the existence of the material world; of your body and the house you
live in. Religion makes the far more formidable statement that
there is a Power beyond and greater than the world. But in claiming
that man is immortal it makes an even more astounding statement,
and one for which we require very clear and cogent proofs.

     Death is the law of the universe. In the days when Plato
worked out the first rational arguments for immortality, as
distinct from mere religious tradition, the claim was not so
exorbitant. The stars themselves, the Greeks thought, were
immortal. They were small, undying fires set in the firmament.
Plants and animals died, of course, but these stars made men
familiar with things which never died.

     Now we know that the stars -- not three thousand of them, as
the Greeks thought, but two billion -- are born and grow and die
just like dogs, except that their life is immeasurably longer.
There is a time when each is a shapeless cloud of star-dust. There
will be a time when the most brilliant star in the heavens will
fade from the eyes of whatever mortals there may then be. They are
made of the same material as our bodies: of gas and earth and
metal. They fall under the great cosmic law that things which come
together shall in the end go asunder -- shall die.

     A hundred years ago a few religious men of science, trying to
help theologians to reconstruct belief, said that, while stars were
certainly not immortal, the atoms of matter of which they were
composed never changed and never died. An atom of carbon or of
oxygen, they said, is an article "manufactured" (or created) once
for all. There is no dissolution for it.

     They were wrong, as everybody now knows. Atoms are composed of
tinier particles called electrons. They break up into these
electrons. In the hottest stars very few of our atoms are as yet
formed. And now astronomers tell us that the stars may entirely
burn themselves out, so to say, and leave not an atom behind.
Matter may change into "energy." I would not here press my own
opinion, but I believe that it will eventually be found that matter
is evolved out of ether and in the star much of it may return to
ether. The electrons, I think, are centers in ether and may
dissolve into it.

     In that case, you may say, ether is immortal. Probably it is.
As I say in Chapter v, "The Futility of Belief in God," men of
science now generally regard the universe as eternal, and it is
only the ultimate and fundamental material of it, the ether, which
shows no beginning and no end. That does not help the belief in
human immortality, however. Man is the most complex thing in the
universe, and the law of death is that all complex things return 
sooner or later into their elements. It is a law of universal
dissolution.
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     If I cared to indulge my imagination, to let my pen weave
pretty patterns of words, as Theosophists, Hindu mystics,
preachers, and poets do, I could make out a good case for this law
of death. Nature, one might say, thus gives a chance to countless
myriads of things to enjoy their hour of life. The stuff which made
a star of a quadrillion years ago now shines in Arcturus or
Aldebaran. The matter of which the brontosaurs and cycads were
compacted in the earth's Middle Ages is now molded into horses and
palms. We humans have our chance because the living things of long
ago died and left the matter of their bodies to be used in new
forms.

     But it is precisely the aim of this book to put readers on
their guard against such verbiage. Let us reason only with facts.
The law of the universe is, death. The day dies, as I write this,
and will never return. Spiritualist prattle about the immortal
souls of cows and cats is too frivolous to be considered here. The
law is death.

     You say. that you are an exception to this universal law. Your
body will dissolve into its elements, but you claim to be immortal.
Your "soul," you say, is not compacted of different elements, and
will not be dissolved into elements.

     I am quite prepared to consider it; only, reflect, you must
now give stronger proofs than were ever required before. "Why," you
may ask, "must I? Why should I give any proofs at all?" There was
a brilliant American (ultimately British) novelist, Henry James,
who believed in personal immortality, and he one day told the world
why be believed. "Because I choose to," be said. He knew that he
could not prove it.

     Possibly many people believe because they choose to, and,
since this book is concerned with supposed proofs of religious
statements, let us have a word on this point.

     When you say that you believe because you choose to, what do
you mean by "believe?" The usual meaning is to accept a statement
as true. But to accept a statement as true without proof is
impossible, unless you take it on the authority of others. All that
you can mean is that you will go on repeating the statement because
you like to. It may be a pretty statement. It may soothe your mind.
You may be indifferent as to whether it is true or not. But it is
psychologically impossible for you to believe it to be true without
proof or authority, and I am not concerned with people who repeat
creeds and care not whether their statements be true or false.

     So we are concerned here only with the proofs of the
statements they make. The law of the entire universe is death, and
you state that one single being in it, man, one amongst myriads of
living things on a single globe out of myriads of globes, is a
grand exception to the law. I ask proof in proportion to the
magnitude of the claim.

     But, you will say -- and this is the nearest approach to an
argument that most people could offer -- man is so obviously
different from everything else in the universe that the claim 


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really has a plausible ground. Man builds cities, writes poems,
measures the universe. Does any other creature in the world even
remotely approach him in his powers and his nature?

     There is certainly one human power which is remarkable and
convenient: the power of generalizing. Remember that in reality
there is no such thing as "man." There are only men. Now which man
do you mean? I presume that you do not build cities, write poems,
or measure the universe. A few men do these things. But --

     But, you say, there is a perfect gradation of power from me to
these intellectual aristocrats of the race. It is only a question
of degree. I have the same nature as they.

     Yes, quite true, and it cuts both ways. The sodden, stupid
brute in the gutter has the same nature as you. The laborer, so low
in intelligence that he cannot even understand what other men
discover, has the same nature. The native in the forests of the
Congo has the same nature. The wild Veddah in the forests of Ceylon
has the same nature. Are they so mightily different from the other
forms of life?

     In fact, not so long ago there were no men who could write
poems or measure the universe. Consider the whole race as it was a
hundred thousand years ago, and we know it well. Men could not even
make homes of the rudest description. They had not begun to scratch
the outline of an elephant on a bone or a stone. The utmost that
any man could do was to chip a piece of flint a little better than
his neighbor.

     And this is by no means the lowest level of humanity that is
known to us. On the contrary, man was then already some millions of
years old. We can trace him to half a million years ago. There is
no savage in the world so low as the entire race then was. Suppose
some glimmer of the philosophic spirit had then arisen in the dull
brain of one of these early prehistoric humans. Suppose be had
announced to his fellows that they were so vastly superior to all
the rest of the living world that they must be immortal. I fancy
that these squat, hairy, beetle-browed predecessors of ours would
have smiled their first smile.

     You see the fallacy. A few men can do wonderful things, and we
naturally claim the credit for "man": which includes ourselves. But
even we, though most of us are not very obviously spiritual and
immortal beings, are certainly evolved from a lower type, which
looked still less spiritual and immortal. From this we go back to
a still earlier type of man, so brutal and animal-like that the
claim of a spiritual and immortal nature really begins to be
grotesque. And, finally, we go back even beyond this type and we
see the most primitive semblance of humanity merging into the
"lower animal" type from which, you say, we are so glaringly
different that you can claim for man the unique privilege of
deathlessness.

     in other words, the one reason which most people have in their
minds for claiming immortality is quite unsound. The ordinary and
unanimous teaching of modern science has, I will not say 
undermined, but annihilated it.

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                     EVOLUTION AND THE SOUL

     Scientific men -- the few scientific men -- who assure you
that there is no conflict between science and religion mean between
their science and their religion -- not yours. And these men
generally know as little as the general public does about those
branches of science which chiefly concern us when we talk of such
a conflict. Professor Pupin, for instance, is a mathematician, and
we agree that mathematics does not conflict with theology.
Professor Millikan is a physicist, and physics also has no point of
contact with religion. They both speak in the name of sciences
which they do not know. Sir Oliver Lodge, a physicist, is in the
same position.

     The case of Professor Osborn, the self-constituted loud
speaker of American science, is different. He says that he is a
Christian, though not a Christian in the meaning of any Christian
Church, of course. Creation of Adam, Eden, Fall, Deluge, Atonement
for original sin -- he pocsh-poohs the lot of them. What exactly he
does believe he is too discreet to say. But, after all, religion is
generally understood to include a belief in the immortality of the
soul, and, when Professor Osborn, who is an authority on the
evolution of man, assures the world that there is no conflict
between the statements of science and the statements of the
Christian religion, we will assume that he is not ignoring the one
branch for which he is entitled to speak.

     Let us see. It is the settled and unanimous teaching of many
branches of science -- anatomy, physiology, psychology,
archaeology, anthropology -- that man was evolved from a common
ancestor with the apes. I am not going to prove this here. This
book is for serious people: not for men who imagine that Mr. Bryan
or Dr. Riley, or Dr. Straton, or Dr. William A. Sunday, to say
nothing of the average Fundamentalist preacher, really knows
better, on a point of science, than all the experts in the world.
That is a humorous, not a serious, attitude. Science most decidedly
teaches, without a single dissenting voice today, officially, that
man, body and mind, was evolved.

     My point is that on the accepted and unanimous teaching of
science man took several million years to evolve from the ape to
the ape-man stage. He then took a few hundred thousand years to
evolve from the ape-man to the savage-man stage.

     A child could see the bearing of this on the belief that man
has a spiritual and immortal soul. The ape has no such spiritual
principle. Then at what stage in this long and gradual evolution
was an immortal soul infused into the developing body? Do you think
the Java ape-man had an immortal soul? If so, can you suggest any
reason whatever why this transcendent mental principle of his took
three or four hundred thousand years to raise the race to the level
of the Australian black?

     Let us see where we are, then. Evolution has brought us from
the common ancestor of ape and man to the ape-like human of a
quarter of a million years ago, and I know no one who seriously
wonders if these men of a quarter of a million years ago really had


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an immortal soul. The Fundamentalist attitude is to deny the facts.
That sounds easy, when you do not know the evidence, though
personally I have never elicited from any Fundamentalist spokesman
any plausible reason why all the experts in the world should be
wrong and he right.

     From this human level of a quarter of a million years ago to
the Beethovens and Shakespeares of the race the gradual evolution
is so well known that I do not see how anyone can find a stage in
which he would claim the infusion of an immortal soul: a soul which
never knew its own existence until, long afterwards, it began to
speculate childishly on the shadow of the body or its reflection in
water.

     By this time man had begun to chip flints and give them a
rough cutting edge. The first thing be learned to do, when he
became intelligent enough, was to brain his neighbor. Anyhow, these
stone implements reflect the intelligence of early man as
faithfully as if he kept a diary through the ages. And the gradual
rise of them during a quarter of a million years is portentously
slow and never shows a sudden advance. We should surely expect so
tremendous an event as the infusion of an immortal soul to break
the monotonously slow advance somewhere and give us an appreciable
rise!

     There is no such thing. Those stone implements, representing
several hundred thousand years of human life -- we have millions of
them -- put the gradual evolution of the human mind beyond
question. Alfred Russel Wallace was the last man of science to
question it, and he had no knowledge of prehistoric science, and
merely acted in the interest of his spiritualist beliefs. Amongst
the experts on the subject the evolution of the human mind was
settled thirty years ago.

     But I am forgetting a rather consoling piece of news which
Professor Osborn gives the believer. Many years ago we found
certain human bones at Cro-Magnon in France, and the skulls were
remarkably large. The brain of these representatives of some lost
race of about twenty thousand years ago was larger than that of the
average European of today! They were a race of geniuses, says the
Professor. If you could put their sons beside yours on the benches
at Columbia or Chicago University, they would take all the prizes.
And so on.

     Well, this sounds promising. Does Professor Osborn draw the
conclusion that here a spiritual and immortal soul was infused into
man? He does not go so far. For a good Christian he is singularly
shy of creations. He merely says that this is a case of "emergent
evolution." What, You ask, is that? and I can only reply that it is
a pretty phrase coined by another religious scientist, Principal
Lloyd Morgan.

     Seriously, we need not go into this emergent evolution because
Professor Osborn does not understand the simple facts about this
"Cro-Magnon race." He does not seem to know that they were
exceptionally tall men, more than six feet high. The brain
generally is the dynamo of the body. It is only the thin film of 


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nervous tissue over the forepart of it that is the organ of
intelligence. As a matter of fact, we have the tools, weapons, and
decorations of these Cro-Magnon men. They are at about the same
level as those of the Eskimo. Moreover, European ethnologists
assure us that the Cro-Magnon type of head is still common in
northern Spain and southern France: amongst the stupid peasants,
not the aristocracy. The Cro-Magnon genius is a clumsy myth.

     This is no place to tell all the facts, but the reader may
care to know how it is that such a myth could arise. The truth is
that twenty or thirty thousand years ago the European race was
advancing rather rapidly in comparison with its advance of the
previous ten million years. Do not misunderstand. Man's progress
even then was enormously slower than it is today. Moreover, we
quite understand the quickening of the pace. Man was in the throes
of his struggle with the Great Ice Age. You must read elsewhere all
that that meant for man. It led to articulate speech, clothing,
social life and a hundred new things.

     It would be too ironical to claim that man became gifted with
a soul just when he came to disbelieve in it! But we moderns have
made more mental progress in a century than the race ever before
made in a millennium. Do not be misled by the brilliance of a score
of Greeks two thousand years ago. The race has made far more
progress in our time. Do not listen to essayists who tell you that
the race has made no mental progress since twenty thousand years
ago. They are thinking of the myth of the Cro-Magnon race. Ours is
the great age of advance -- and of Materialism.

     But that is another story. For the moment our case is
complete. Evolution makes the belief in an immortal soul improbable
in the last degree. It does not disprove it. We do not attempt to
prove negative statements. But, clearly, we now, in face of the
general law of death and man's continuity with the animals, demand
very strong and clear proof of the religious claim.

                      IS THE MIND A SPIRIT?

     Many readers will be impatient of the caution, the reserve,
the timidity, with which I draw my conclusions. If man's mind is
but a gradual evolution of the mind of the ape, why not say
outright that the myth of the soul has been disproved? If there is
no serious evidence for God in nature or in the mind or the heart
of man, while there is so much that excludes the idea of a divine
ruler, why not declare bluntly that you are an Atheist?

     For the following reason: Materialism -- which means that
matter alone can exist, and therefore that spirit does not exist --
and Atheism are dogmatic negations. I do not like dogmatic
negations. The old Scottish jury-verdict "Not proven" seems to me
the more rational attitude. But on this question of the soul there
are strong reasons for hesitating, and we must see these first.

     The brain is the organ of the mind. We all admit that. A
genius or an idiot is a man with an abnormal brain. The mind, a
believer might say, can express itself only according to the
quality of its organ or instrument. Paderewski himself could not 


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make perfect music with a hundred-dollar piano. So we may suppose
that the spiritual and immortal soul was there all the time, but it
could not express itself until the organ was perfectly developed.

     A very sound principle -- in the abstract. It is conceivable
that mind is a spiritual artist using a material instrument. Luther
Burbank said somewhere that Mr. Bryan, of whom he was a personal
friend, had a "skull which visibly approached the Neanderthal
type." So the many foolish things Mr. Bryan said may have been due
only to the imperfectness of his mind's instrument. The mind may be
the same, all the time, in everybody. It may be merely the brain
that differs, from age to age, and in different individuals now.

     All this is conceivable; in fact, we may find it useful later
in this chapter. But the religious person must think clearly what
he is saying. When does he suppose that God created the immortal
mind of man? He might as well put the great event in the Miocene
Age, since there is no other time more suitable. Well, we are to
see in the next chapter that there probably is no God to create a
soul, but even granting that there is, the whole thing remains a
painful mystery. Why create the soul millions of years before it
can act? Why go on creating souls -- for the only plausible
theological theory is that the soul has to be created in each
individual human being -- during those millions of years of the
lowest savagery? Not very plausible, is it?

     Moreover, let us reflect for a moment on this musical
instrument idea. Sir Oliver Lodge is very fond of using this figure
of speech, and it is as superficial as most of his work in the
field of religion. Preachers find it most impressive. The brain is
merely the organ, the piano, the violin, the harp. The soul is the
musician.

     A figure of speech is useful only if it helps you to
understand something. Now this musical instrument idea only helps
you to understand the relation of mind and body by assuming
precisely the point which you have to prove. That point is whether
the mind is a spirit, and the action of the musician's mind on the
piano does not help us in the least unless we suppose, to begin
with, that it is a spirit. If, as many hold, the mind is only a
function of the brain, then it is a question of the action of
matter (brain and muscle) on matter. It illustrates nothing.

     In any case, even on religious principles, the mind does not
play on the body. It is one with the body. They make a composite
being of the most intimate nature. There is not the least analogy
with the musician, who can close his piano and leave it when he
likes. The "analogy" is just a slipshod, superficial substitute for
accurate thinking.

     To return, however, to our point. We all admit that the brain
is the organ of the mind. The Materialist says that the mind is
merely a function of the brain, and there are quite brilliant
scientific men, such as Dr. Chalmers Mitchell or the late Professor
Loeb, who say this. The believer in immortality -- the Spiritualist
in the proper sense of the word -- says that mind is a spirit which
uses brain as its organ.


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     It has always been an insoluble problem in religious
philosophy how a spirit can act on or through matter. I do not want
to press this, but the reader who is inclined to think that "God"
and "soul" explain things ought to be reminded of it. No thinker
who ever lived has given us the least plausible idea how spirit can
act on or with matter. It merely introduces new mysteries instead
of "explaining" the mystery of thought.

     So again, and for the third time, we have a reason for
demanding that the proofs of the spirituality of the soul shall be
particularly strong. There is a strong presumption against it: (1)
because death is the rule of the universe, (2) because man's mind
is certainly evolved from a mind that is not spiritual and
immortal, and (3) because it is unintelligible and creates more
mysteries than it solves. And we shall see further reasons later in
this chapter.

     But a presumption against a statement is not a disproof of it.
Let us be open-minded and logical. Practically all philosophers
hold that the mind is a spirit. Why?

     By the way, it occurs to me that the believer will have a
sudden gush of joy on reading the preceding sentence. For once, he
will exclaim, I have "practically all" the experts on my side,
because philosophers are experts in this matter. But the point is
not so important as it may seem. In the first place, half these
philosophers say that the natural world does not exist. Do you
follow them in that? In the second place, very few of them believe
in personal immortality. I am sorry to discourage hope, but
philosophy (of which I was once a professor) is a dangerous ally to
invoke.

     Let us first see what we mean by spirit. I hope I have many
religious readers, and I invite them frequently just to reflect on
what they mean. What do you mean by spirit? How does it differ from
matter? I have had a very large experience in asking this question,
and I scarcely ever got a coherent answer to it. Nine-tenths, at
least, of the preachers and essayists who tell the world that its
future depends entirely on cultivating the spirit and avoiding
Materialism could not tell you what spirit is. Spiritual books
always forget to define it.

     The religious philosophy which I taught thirty years ago was
clear enough on the point. Matter, it is said, is extended or
quantitative substance. It has dimensions. It consists of parts,
and so it can be dissolved. Spirit has no parts, no dimensions, no
quantity, no extension. It has only qualities.

     I do not think that any better definitions have ever yet been
given. Body is quantitative, and can dissolve into its parts. Mind
is not quantitative (they say) and so cannot dissolve into parts,
or die. So said the learned Aristotle, and we cannot go much
further. Modern definitions of "matter" do not improve on his. It
is generally said to be "that which occupies space," which is the
same thing. Spirit is like a mathematical point. It has no
magnitude.



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     It may not sound so warm and thrilling to say that your soul
is a non-quantitative substance, but on this point depends entirely
your hope of immortality. You have to prove that your mind is
immaterial or unextended. What are the proofs?

     The Roman Catholic philosophy, which prides itself on being
the severest and most logical, while it is merely the most
medieval, is very confident about the matter. I have ideas of
things: pictures of them in my mind. Let us say that I have a
mental picture of a beautiful woman; that I see one before me. I am
conscious of the picture as a whole. I may fasten my attention on
her hands, her feet, or her bosom, but I may also contemplate her
as a whole. Now if consciousness is a function of the brain, how
can I see such a picture as a whole? Each cell in the brain is
composed of innumerable atoms, and each atom is composed of tens or
hundreds of protons and electrons, at an appreciable distance from
each other. Each atom, nay, each electron, ought to have its own
fraction of the brain-picture, on the Materialist hypothesis. The
unifying principle at the back of matter must, surely, be a
spiritual substance, a soul, which has no atoms or parts.

     This seems to me a better argument than most of those one
finds in modern or Modernist literature, but the fact only shows
how feeble the modern arguments are, for even this one is a tissue
of fallacies.

     Take a sleep-walker. He has no consciousness. On the spiritual
hypothesis, his soul is switched off from his body. One theory of
sleep is that the cells of the brain draw in the little branchlets
or fibrils by means of which they ordinarily communicate with each
other. Something like that happens in the brain. In any case, the
soul, the supposed seat of consciousness, is switched off for the
time being. The body acts mechanically and automatically. Yet
objects are "seen" as a whole, as the conduct of the somnambulist
shows. He avoids every obstacle. Put a table in his path, and he
goes round it.

     The truth is that those who use this and similar arguments are
simply building on the temporary ignorance of science, just as they
do when they try to prove the existence of God. Candidly, we do not
know how we see objects as a whole. For the matter of that, we do
not know how we see them at all. That is precisely why many
philosophers deny the existence of material objects. There are,
they say, only images in the mind, and from these you may more or
less riskly infer that there are objects corresponding to them
outside the mind.

     The whole mental world is still obscure in the last degree.
Psychology is largely a matter of verbiage, and it declines
entirely to speculate on the nature of mind or consciousness. I
have read all the attempts to explain consciousness, and I cannot
see anything in them but words. The human brain is immeasurably the
most complicated structure in the universe (as far as our knowledge
goes). It consists of hundreds of millions of cells put together in
a structure which we as yet very imperfectly understand. Each cell
consists of millions of molecules, put together in a way we do not
understand at all; for molecular structure is below the range of 


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our most powerful microscopes. Each molecule, further, consists of
atoms, put together in a structure which we very imperfectly
conjecture. And, finally, we now know that each atom is a
wonderfully complicated world of protons and electrons.

     So who is going to say what the brain can or cannot do? Men
who use the argument I have described imagine a brain-image of an
object as a miniature picture of it spread over a certain surface.
It is not in the least likely. What would the brain-stores of a
very learned man be like in that case?

     Or take it this way. You see a tree. Some sort of image of it
is impressed on your retina by the waves of light. This is no more
a picture of it than a phonograph record is a tune. Then this
impression on the retina is converted into some kind of movement
along your optic nerve. It is now still less like a picture of the
tree. The nerve-movement is converted into something else in the
optic center of the brain, and finally you see a tree. To say that
there is a little picture of a green tree with yellow oranges in
your brain is absurd.

     We do not know what the machinery of perception is and cannot
build any argument on it, We do not know where and how we are
conscious of the objects we see. We have not the least idea what it
is that is "stored in memory." We have still less idea how we can
fuse together all the particular men we ever saw and get the
general abstract idea of "man." We do not know how we can draw
inferences and make arguments. We know very, very little about
mind.

     Then, you say, it may be a spirit. If people were content to
say "may be," we should not much object, though we have seen strong
reason for thinking that it is not. What we object to is the
religious assertion that it is a spirit. There is no proof of this
whatever. For all we know, it may be merely a function of the
brain.

     And a hundred things suggest that it is merely a function of
the brain. Mind varies with every minute alteration of the brain.
A fever or an opiate speeds up the mental activity. A heavy meal or
a dose of alcohol benumbs it. During the War the Germans gave their
shock-troops a certain drug which made them giants in "spirit" for
the time being. It is difficult to understand -- impossible, in
fact, -- how a spirit-mind can act on the brain; but it is the
easiest thing in the world for chemicals to act on the mind.

     To sum up the whole matter, people generally assume that the
mind is a spirit and the reason generally is that mind is "so very
different" from matter. I quite understand the force of the
impression. At times I reflect on this wonderful thing, that this
whole vast universe can be mirrored in the tiny mind of man; that
the mind can reconstruct scenes in the story of the earth which
passed away millions of years ago or scenes in the interior of
atoms which no eye will ever behold.





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     But it is only the imagination that is impressed. The
intellect waits upon the advance of science. Not in our time -- 
not, possibly, for centuries -- will science unravel the mysteries
of mind and brain. Mind ought to be far more wonderful than
anything else in the universe. Its organ, the brain, is the most
wonderfully intricate material structure that exists. When we
understand that structure, we shall know whether or not
consciousness is merely a function of it. Until then there is no
logic whatever in pretending to say what can, and what cannot, be
a function of the brain. There is no force in saying that something
must be a spirit until you know positively that it cannot be
material.

                      WHAT IS PERSONALITY?

     Until not many years ago the provision of milk in a mother's
breast just when she needed it for the babe was a mystery. But for
the delicacy of the subject I suppose that preachers would have
chosen it as an impressive proof of the soul or God, and their
audiences of women would have been deeply impressed.

     Then a London professor set about investigating the mystery,
and it is a mystery no longer. A woman's breasts are stimulated by
a certain chemical. This chemical is poured into the blood by the
foetus in her womb, and, naturally, the more the foetus grows, the
more of the drug it produces, so the stimulation reaches its
maximum at a time when the foetus is largest and is ready for
birth. We can extract the chemical from the foetus of a rat and
inject it into the veins of a rat which is not pregnant, and,
although she does not require milk, she gets it.

     You might take that as a parable. What science cannot explain
today it may explain tomorrow, and the man who builds on its
ignorance today will retreat tomorrow. For the last hundred years
the theologian has been engaged in retreating: of course, "upon
positions which were prepared in advance."

     But I quote this to introduce a new aspect of the question of
immortality. What on earth can the rat or the foetus have to do
with it? Nothing whatever, but this material secretion which
stimulates the milk-glands introduces us to new discoveries in
science that do bear on the subject.

     If you open a physiological book of the last century, you find
many references to the telegraphic system in the human body. The
nerves are the wires. The brain is the central station. A fly hits
against your eye. A message goes to your brain: an order is flashed
back along another nerve: and in a fraction of a second you raise
your hand and brush the fly away.

     The new discovery is that there is a postal, as well as a
telegraphic, system in the body. Letters are posted in the blood,
and they travel round the vascular system until they reach their
destination. In other words, certain small glands in the interior
of the body pour chemicals into the blood, and these are carried
round and round until they reach the part which they are to
stimulate. I will assume that every reader has heard of the thyroid
gland, which is one of them, and I must refrain here from any 
further account.
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     The point is that the thyroid and some of the other glands
have a most profound effect upon our mental vitality and our
personality, The character of an old man can be rejuvenated. A born
idiot can be transformed into a sane child. Whole districts in
which a large portion of the children have for ages been born
idiots (cretins) have been rid of idiots by means of thyroid
extract. When we have mastered the chemical nature of the stuff
produced and poured into the blood by these glands, when we can
make it in the laboratory and sell it in the drug store, it will be
time to talk of the musician playing on the piano. For then the
chemist will play on the "spirit," on human nature, as no religion
ever did.

     Now the point of this is that we have one more illustration of
the way in which mind depends upon body. We were, of course, quite
familiar with this. In the very early days of science temperaments
or characters were divided into four main types: the lymphatic
(sluggish), choleric, bilious and sanguineous. This was crude
psychology, but it expressed the well-known fact that a very great
deal of a man's personality depends upon his bodily qualities.
Nerve and brain, stomach and liver and pancreas, blood and muscular
tone, all have their respective influences on what we call
character. Drugs still further complicate the character. I spoke
once of the "genius" of a certain British author to a man who is
the highest living authority on him. "Genius?" he said: "No, simply
nicotine." A man drunk is often not the same man sober. And now we
know that the quality of a man's endocranial glands has an even
greater influence on those qualities which make up what we call his
personality.

     The question therefore naturally arises: What sort of a thing
will the soul be even if we suppose it to be immortal?
Philosophers, as I said, assume that the mind is a spirit. It is
singular how little they think of proving this. The order of ideas
and that of material realities seem to them to differ so profoundly
that the former is referred to a spirit-world; when, as we saw, we
do not know sufficient about the brain to say that ideas cannot be
aspects, or functions of material things. However, philosophers
rarely believe in personal immortality. Psychologists still more
rarely accept it. There are very few real experts on the subject in
the world who do.

     Now you know why. It was always quite impossible to imagine
how the mind could think without a brain. As usual, it was
cheerfully said to be a mystery -- while the general public
imagines that the soul "explains" thought. Now we see that whether
the soul could or could not think when it is disembodied, it
certainly cannot have anything like the personality it had on
earth.

     Think of every little trait or feature of the child or the
woman you love. The golden curls or fine glossy hair, the soft blue
or fine brown eyes, the round limbs and graceful carriage these
things, of course, go down into the grave forever. But even the
features of character depend entirely on the body. The vitality,
the sweetness or quaintness of disposition, the warm affection, the
reserve or the spontaneous effusiveness -- all depend on bodily 


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organs. What will this disembodied soul of wife or mother, whom you
hope to meet again, be like? What will even memory be without the
brain? For whatever be its nature, it depends vitally on the brain.

     This doctrine of immortality begins to look very far from
simple and satisfactory when you examine it. The pagan Romans,
whose cold and vague attitude towards a future life was so much
derided by the new Christians, were nearer the truth; quite apart
from the fact that the view of the future life which Christianity
brought was, with its eternal torment for the majority of the race,
the most repulsive yet formulated. The Roman, like the Babylonian,
believed that the soul survived the grave, but it was a pale, thin
"shade" that survived. He had little interest in it.

     In psychology, in fact, the idea of soul has long since been
surrendered. It became the science of the mind, not of the soul.
But the more progress the science made, the less it liked the idea
of a substantial something of which ideas and emotions were
individual acts. All that we are sure about now is that there are
ideas and emotions and volitions. The world of consciousness is a
world of atoms of consciousness. But whence comes the unity of
conscious life? It may, surely, come from the unity of the nervous
system, the most completely centralized structure in the universe.

     In other words: religious ideas not only melt into mysteries
and unintelligibilities when you analyze them, but they are
decidedly in conflict with our new knowledge. And it is not a
question of evolution only. The science of psychology itself must
have a deadly effect on belief when hardly one in ten of our
psychologists believes in personal immortality. But the most deadly
solvent of religious belief -- let the anti-evolutionists realize
this -- is the patient examination of the so-called evidence which
is offered us in support of it. This makes ten Agnostics for every
one that is made by the teaching of science.

     I have said that Materialism seems to me too dogmatic an
attitude. It might be added that what we commonly call matter is
now known to be not the ultimate reality of the universe, so it may
be questioned if the term is a good one. Matter is composed of
mysterious things which we call electrons and protons. Many
physicists say that it is composed of "energy," and some call
themselves Energists. It seems more likely that ether is the
ultimate reality, and those who like labels might adopt that of
Etherist. Most of us prepare to leave it to a much wiser generation
to put a comprehensive label on the universe.

     Yet, the Agnostic attitude must not be understood to mean that
it is a quite open question whether the mind is or is not a spirit.
I mean, we must not in the least suppose that the chances are even.
The thinkers of the race have been weighing this question ever
since the days of Socrates. In fact, we can clearly enough see that
educated men, apart from the clergy, were speculating on these
fundamental religious issues in Egypt four or five thousand years
ago. In Asia, Buddha and Confucius came to the conclusion that
religious speculation was a waste of time several centuries before
the great thinkers of Athens appeared, and the earliest Greek
thinkers seem to have been of the same opinion.


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     Now, what has been the general issue of these thousands of
years of thinking about God and the soul? Has anything been settled
on the religious side? Nothing. We are no wiser than the first
thinkers. We rule out the "proofs" of immortality given by Plato
and St. Augustine, and we have no better to offer. In the spiritual
scale of the balance there are only argument about which there is
no agreement whatever.

     The whole weight of our new knowledge falls into the material
scale, against immortality. Modern philosophy, when it started, at
once shattered the older proofs, which Roman Catholics still use.
Evolution proved a deadly weight against the belief. Psychology, as
it evolved, turned against it. Physiology, as this chapter shows,
throws all its weight into the Materialistic scale. Not a single
fact has been discovered in the last hundred years that favors the
view that the mind is a spirit. We remain open-minded, but with
little doubt about the result.

                 MODERN THEORIES OF IMMORTALITY

     Ours is the age of reconstruction, not only of all beliefs,
but of all arguments for the beliefs. We think of man as profoundly
conservative in his nature and anxious, if possible, to cling to
his old beliefs in some form. And this is said to be particularly
true of religious beliefs. Many imagine the soul of the race in our
time as heroically braving the great new waves of thought in an
effort to preserve its religious identity.

     All this kind of rhetoric is false to the obvious facts of
life. It is always a few who do the reconstructing of beliefs and
arguments, and these few are nearly always people who have an
interest in the survival of the beliefs. This is, surely, a plain
reading of the facts of life. The majority of the race are
profoundly indifferent to the disappearance of the old traditions.
New religions, even of the most liberal character, make little
appeal to them. Even the movement for Ethical Culture, which
describes itself as religion without the least theology, makes
almost no progress either in America or in England.

     Let us finish with the "proofs" which modern theologians
attempt to give of the immortality of the soul. The more learned of
them frankly give it up. Immortality is, they say, a matter of
faith. An infinite God can make us immortal, and the Bible says
that He will.

     This, unfortunately, is to prop up a feeble and tottering
belief by means of two other beliefs which are just as feeble and
tottering. We may see this about the belief in God. We may see it
about the belief in the inspiration of the Bible. I cannot imagine
what comfort the argument gives to anybody.

     Other religious writers prefer to say that, while they cannot
prove the spirituality and immortality of the soul, they can
suggest reasons for believing in it. For instance, some of them
say, science has discovered that the conservation of energy is a
law of the universe. No energy is ever destroyed or annihilated. So
the mental energy must persist. The soul must survive.


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     An extraordinarily feeble argument. Let us admit -- with
certain reserves about the energy of electrons -- the general truth
that energy is never annihilated. But it is just as universal a law
that energy is constantly changing its form, and when the energy is
associated with a complex material structure, and that structure
breaks up, it is bound to change its form very materially.

     Luther Burbank recently startled California, of which he was
one of the greatest citizens, by declaring that be did not believe
in the immortality of the soul. It disappears at death, he said,
just like the life of the old automobile that is condemned to the
scrap-heap. That is a very good figure of speech. The life or soul
-- the particular function -- of the automobile does not continue
to exist. It breaks up into the separate energies of the parts of
the machine or of the fuel which is no longer used. So says the
Materialist of the human mind, and what he says is perfectly
consistent with the law of the conservation of energy. The law is
not that any particular form of energy shall be preserved or
conserved as such. It is rather the reverse.

     Sir Oliver Lodge, who uses this argument, helps it out with
another which is worse. I am constantly asked why a "great
physicist" like Sir Oliver Lodge is found on the side of religion.
Well, to begin with, be is not a "great" physicist, and, secondly,
his science, physics, is precisely the one which least qualifies
him to deal with religious questions. It has nothing to do with the
nature of life or mind. But, thirdly, I have shown in my "Religion
of Sir Oliver Lodge" that there is not a single doctrine of the
Christian religion which he accepts, and, fourthly, he is just one
of the survivors of the little scientific group which was duped by
mediums in the early uncritical days of Spiritualism.

     Sir Oliver has discovered a remarkable principle which helps
him to prove the immortality of the soul. Whatever really exists
just goes on existing: always existed and always will. The mind
really exists, therefore ....

     Quite simple, isn't it? In fact, rather too simple. There is
no such principle. Matter and energy go on existing in some form.
That is all we can say. So the body goes on existing in some form,
but its functions do not. The whole argument assumes what it sets
out to prove: that the mind is not a function of the brain.

     Then there is a philosophical argument which has of late years
gone the round of "advanced" religious literature. It is called the
argument from the conservation of values. A man grows up to wisdom
and settled character and personality. Can we suppose that all this
is to be thrown away by the act of death? What a shocking waste it
would be if each individual is to learn laboriously to become wise
and to form his character, and then it were all to be annihilated:
if the human race were during millions of years to construct its
wonderful science and art and idealism and all were to end in the
great silence of the death of the race.

     So the argument runs: and the answer requires little
reflection. -- What does the great inanimate universe care about
waste? What does it know of values and of conserving them? Quite 


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clearly, the argument has no sense whatever unless you mean that
you are appealing to God. It is not very forcible even then, but it
has not the least meaning except in so far as it relies on the
wisdom or power of God, and we have seen how far you can appeal to
that.

     Other writers keep recalling from its well-merited rest an
argument which was much used in the early days of science. The
matter of the human body is always changing. Nerve and muscle wear
out. Even the material of the bones is withdrawn and replaced in
the course of time. It is commonly said that the entire material of
the body changes every seven years. We do not, in fact, know how
long it takes. We can put bands on a pigeon's leg bones, and see
how long it takes for them to disappear, but no man can say the
time for all the organs of the body, especially the brain. There
is, however, no doubt about the fact. Probably I have not now a
single atom of the body I had ten years ago. Yet I am the same
person, and I vividly remember experiences of ten, and even forty,
years ago.

     Quite so. But I have already explained that mind is said to be
a function of the brain, and, if so, it depends upon the structure
of the brain, which does not change. Molecule by molecule the
material is renewed, but the structure even of each individual cell
remains unaltered. An idea, we saw, is not a miniature picture of
an object, spread over a certain area. It is an activity of the
brain.

     Suppose you regard the beauty or grace or symmetry of an
ancient cathedral as a function or aspect of its structure. You may
go on for centuries restoring a beam here or a few stones there. It
is conceivable that in time you might renew nearly the whole
material of it. But the identity remains.

     It is conceivable that -- if it were worth while -- you could
in time renew all the parts of your automobile. There might not be
left a single bit of the original machine. But its function would
be unaltered, and most particularly if, as in the case of the human
body, there were some subtle way of replacing atom by atom, without
disturbing the structure, the original material of the machine.

     Finally, there are those who find an argument in the moral
order. In so far as this argument merely appeals to the fact that
man has moral perceptions, a criticism which I make in Chapter v,
"The Futility of Belief in God," disposes of it.

     Moral law is social law, and it is as easily formulated by the
mind itself as what we commonly call law is. Philosophers like the
famous Kant or the modern German thinker Eucken write about
conscience and the moral law as if they had never taken the trouble
to study men in the flesh. There is no such thing as a "categorical
imperative," as Kant said. There is no such thing as an eternal
moral order existing apart from the material order, existing before
humanity was born and independent of it, as Eucken says. For most
of us there is just a moral ideal implanted in us by education and
evolved out of the needs of social life.



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     Nor is there any force whatever in the claim that this
commanding law implies that God is prepared to reward the observer
of it in another life. You cannot rely on the disputed existence of
God to prove a disputed immortality.

                     THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL

     In several of his works my friend Professor Haeckel, whose
fine and vigorously honorable character was personally known to me,
gives God, Freedom and Immortality as the three fundamental
religious beliefs. They are. And it is unfortunate for the believer
that the independent experts on these subjects are overwhelmingly
against him. Few philosophers believe in a personal God. Few
psychologists believe in free will or personal immortality.

     I can imagine a religious reader saying to himself that in
this case at least he does not care a rap about the experts. He
will quite understand that I am nowhere trying to intimidate him
with the authority of experts. I merely ask him to reflect on the
significance of the fact that all or the majority of the men who
have devoted their lives to a particular study are against him, and
that on his side are only preachers with poor training and little
knowledge.

     But what he will reply here is that the best expert on himself
is he himself. He knows whether or not he has free will, he says.
When it comes to a question of his summer holiday, he is free to
choose between ten different places. He pleases himself whether he
wears a straw or a felt hat, whether he is a Republican or a
Democrat.

     And if man has this pure power of choice between alternatives,
his mind is not of the order of material realities. There is no
freedom for matter. It goes where it is pushed or pulled. Even the
moth which flies round the candle is ruled by a purely mechanical
principle. If man is free, if his will can act without compulsion
or coercion from any power or motive, then man does stand out from
all the rest of the universe, and the law of death may not be for
him. His mind must be an indissoluble spirit.

     But plain folk must recollect that psychologists have just the
same consciousness as they have, and have a far greater ability to
analyze it. They have been analyzing and disputing about this
apparent consciousness of freedom for a century. And they are now
generally agreed that it is an illusion. Surely that has some
significance.

     Let us take it in our own way. When you say that you are free
to choose -- say, between the train and the surface car, or between
the movies and the theater -- you are using rather ambiguous
language. All common speech for expressing mental experiences is
loose and ambiguous. You have the two alternatives -- movies or
theater -- in your mind. You hover between them. You do not feel
any compulsion to choose one or the other. Then you deliberately
say to yourself -- not realizing that you have thereby proved the
spirituality of the soul, which has made apologists perspire for
centuries -- "I choose Greta Garbo."


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     Well, let us examine it patiently. In the ordinary acts of
life you behave automatically. You don your clothes and shave and
eat and walk, and even work, in a mechanical way. The motive
arises, by routine, at the proper moment, and the action follows.
It is only in graver things -- such as whether you shall go to see
Greta Garbo or Bebe Daniels -- that you use your freedom. To be
quite accurate -- am I not right? -- it is only when two or more
motives seem to have about equal force that you are conscious of
your freedom. If one motive, if the reason for doing one action, is
palpably stronger than the reason for doing the alternative, you do
not hesitate. The "will" follows or acts on the stronger motive.

     Why, you ask, do I put "will" in inverted commas? It may shock
you to know that psychologists are not sure that there is such a
thing. You may be surprised to know that your "will" is only a
theory. What you are really conscious of is a series of acts. It is
just a theory of yours that there is a thing you call your will
behind them.

     Well, to come back to the "acts of will." When you hesitate
between two courses, do you for a moment doubt that your will
eventually follows the one which seems to you wiser or more
profitable? Yes, I know. Just to prove your freedom you may choose
the less wise course. But in that case you merely have a new motive
thrown into the scale. Your "will" always follows the weightier
motive. How, then, is it free? All that you are conscious of is the
hesitation of your mind, because for a time one motive balances the
other. They may remain so balanced that you do nothing, or leave it
to others to decide. But if you do decide, you are merely conscious
that the battle of motives is over and the stronger carries your
will.

     But, you ask, what about moral responsibility? What about
praising and blaming people for their conduct? What about crime and
its punishment? Is not our whole social and moral system based upon
the theory that a man is responsible for his actions?

     Again we have a tangle of rhetoric, which we must unravel, and
some serious questions which we must seriously discuss,

     The reader who is genuinely alarmed about crime and criminals,
either on account of sermons be has heard or from his own
reflections on the subject, ought to study the statistics of crime.
In such matters it is the facts that count. He will find that crime
has steadily decreased during the whole modern period when free
will and religion have been just as steadily abandoned. The
greatest reformers in the treatment of crime, the men who have done
more than any others in initiating measures which led to its
reduction -- Beccoria, Bentham, Lombroso -- were Rationalists who
did not believe in free will. It is a century and a half since
their ideas began to be adopted, and in proportion as they were
adopted, crime has diminished.

     In the United States crime is abnormally high. But this is no
reflection on the normal character of the American, which is finer
than it ever was before, and is as fine as any in the world. The
very large figures of crime are due to Political conditions. In 


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England and other normal civilizations, where there is at least an
equal amount of unbelief, crime has been reduced by fifty per cent
and it is now at its lowest level.

     So much for the pulpit cry that we are in danger of an orgy of
crime and violence. But, you will say, we cannot logically blame
the criminal if he has no free will.

     What does it matter? The practical point is that you can make
unsocial conduct or crime very unattractive to the man who may be
disposed to indulge in it. The sentence inflicted today is not so
much a punishment. It is not the revenge of society for an injury
done to it. The penal system is now an intimidation. We lodge in
the mind of the possible criminal a very strong motive to deter
him.

     The cat which steals your chop or your chicken has no free
will. You admit that. Well, do you take it in your arms and say:
"Poor dear, you only acted according to your nature?" And are you
logical if, on the contrary, you thrash it, to teach it propriety?
When you pat on the head the dog or the horse that has done good
service, and so encourage it to repeat its performance, are you
acting foolishly? You know better. Good feeling as a reward of good
conduct is a new motive to the will. The frown or the stroke of
society is a deterrent.

     So far it is easy. Determinism, or the theory that denies free
will, has no social consequences whatever, except good ones. When
we grasp the real nature of the criminal, we treat him more wisely.
We are, on Determinist principles, slowly eliminating him.

     Candidly, it is not so easy to talk about praise and blame and
responsibility in other than criminal matters. When you have a
social practice founded upon thousands of years of wrong ideas the
readjustment is not easy. But it is really only a question of
reading a new shade of meaning into the words.

     It is clear that we can still imprison or otherwise annoy
people who act criminally, though we do not "punish" them in the
old sense. It is just as clear that a man is responsible to his
fellows for any evil consequences of his acts, and, since the moral
law is social law, he has moral responsibility. I mean that society
has just as much right to protect itself from breaches of those
laws which we call moral -- such real moral laws as truthfulness
and justice -- as it has against breaches of common law, and for
this purpose it can quite sensibly use the system of reward and
punishment which we call praise and blame. We praise or blame the
act, because of its consequences. We know quite well that there was
no free will in it.

     Did you ever applaud Tetrazzini or some great actor or
actress? Did you ever cheer an athlete? There was no free will in
the performance. A singer happens to have an exceptionally good
larynx; an athlete to have some abnormal muscle or nerve. But what
would you say if a man in black rose in the audience and said:
"Don't applaud. These people are not responsible for their gifts."



                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               79

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     Well, tell that to the next man in black who says that we
cannot on Determinist principles praise or blame conduct. Until
good or social conduct is automatic, as it will be one day, society
has every right to smile encouragement or frown its disapproval.
The price of a lie shall be an unpleasant quarter of an hour. As
long as we have something of the nature of the cat left in us, we
may be treated as even a humane person. treats a cat.



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    Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.


   The Bank of Wisdom is a collection of the most thoughtful,
scholarly and factual books. These computer books are reprints of
suppressed books and will cover American and world history; the
Biographies and writings of famous persons, and especially of our
nations Founding Fathers. They will include philosophy and
religion. all these subjects, and more, will be made available to
the public in electronic form, easily copied and distributed, so
that America can again become what its Founders intended --

                 The Free Market-Place of Ideas.

   The Bank of Wisdom is always looking for more of these old,
hidden, suppressed and forgotten books that contain needed facts
and information for today. If you have such books please contact
us, we need to give them back to America.



                          ****     ****



               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
                               by
                          Joseph McCabe

                              1929


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                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               80
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