From The Christian Register we republish, under the above title, the following review of 's last lecture:—
The Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard University provides once a year an occasion for the public consideration of the doctrine of immortality. Dr. John Fiske's little volume just issued by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. contains the lecture delivered in this course last December. It was carefully written, and is now printed without change, and may be regarded as his last message to those whom he has left behind in a world which he enjoyed to the uttermost.
It is difficult to describe this address, and impossible to state the grounds of the confidence which is imparted to the reader by the argument. It is not an array of proofs, and no appeal is made to divine inspiration; and yet few statements are so convincing. Dr. Fiske seems to take it for granted that what we need is not a proof of immortality, whether derived from science or given by authority. The process of evolution through which we have come has put us at the point of view where it is natural to take for granted an unseen world, and to believe that, when things seen and temporal pass away, things unseen and eternal will come into view. With full confidence, therefore, the statement is made that, no matter how we came to it, "the belief in a future life, in a world unseen to mortal eyes, is not only coeval with the beginning of the human race, but is also coextensive with it in its subsequent stages of development. It is, in short, one of the differential attributes of humanity." Starting with this faith in immortal life, a "sublime poetic conception" which gives human life its atmosphere, the remainder of the address is a stately march along the King's highway, of which the progress is marked not by successive proofs, but by a setting aside of disproofs that are vain and a scattering of the obstacles which, in the name of science, have accumulated in the way of faith.
The certainty of the author is convincing, because one feels that,when he is dealing with materialism, positivism, and agnosticism, he knows all that the critics may know concerning the value of the arguments which they bring against faith in the unseen world. Such statements as "there is no thought without phosphorous," that "the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile," he sets aside so easily and so conclusively that the reader wonders how any thinker ever offered such a suggestion. "No thought without brain" is a simple statement, so long as one is thinking only of creatures with brains; but to say, Because the universe has no brain of which we have any knowledge, therefore there is no thought in the universe, is not scientific, unless there is a kind of scientific idiocy which is content with such a baseless assertion.
The mysteries of the ether—heat, light, electricity, actinism; the visible rays, and the still more wonderful, invisible rays, of the spectrum, and the revelations of the spectroscope, and the magic of the Roentgen rays—open to us an unseen world which surpasses any prophet's dream. And yet among them all there is not one of which science can offer the suggestion of a proof that it is identical with thought, or can be transmuted into thought, or that in any way brings the human soul within the range of "a mode of motion in matter" in such a way as to prove, or even to suggest, that the soul is the product of molecular change of any sort.
These fresh discoveries in the unseen world of physical science have made even the common mind familiar with the idea that matter, after all, is not so solid and dense as we had thought it. We know that the ether in which, light, heat, and electricity are modes of motion—the ether which is so much less compact than the viewless air that it never touches one of our senses with the magic of its power—is still so solid that in moving we do not pass through it, but it passes through us without displacing a particle. When we think of these things, it becomes easy to follow Mr. Fiske in his confident assertion that matter and science furnish no argument whatever against the probability that consciousness survives, whatever happens to the body.
Father of light and life! Thou Good Supreme!
O teach me what is good! teach me thyself!
Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,
From every low pursuit! and feed my soul
With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure;
Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!
