Ever since men knew how to think, they have been speculating on the great subject of life. The mind, the brain, the soul, the body,— all these have engaged their thought and have led, from the time of the Greeks, and before the Greeks, down to our own day, to a long line of philosophic schools, all sufficiently amazing in their conclusions. Diogenes, for example, defined the soul as air, whilst Heraclitus imagined it as fire. Centuries later a Frenchman, Descartes, insisted that its principal seat was in the brain; whilst, later again, the great materialist, Locke, declared that it was of a substance capable of thinking, and had the power to excite motion in a body by writing or by thought. To the Hebrew, on the other hand, the soul was originally the spark of life and sensibility in any animate organism, from which there followed the natural transference to the organism itself, just as the nature worshiper, beginning with the tree as the symbol of Deity, ended by worshiping the idol.
All through this curious philosophic argument, there is an underlying current of suggestion that soul is an equivalent of mind. The eastern peoples, for instance, pictured the soul as a bird, and in their rude attempts to portray death, showed it fluttering over the human body, at the moment of dissolution, before making its final flight to Sheol, to Hades, or even to Paradise. In this way the soul, the mind, and the body became knit together in a curious unity, divergent at many points, having many points in common, but tending generally to make the human brain the center of human thought, a theory which, passing from theology to medicine and philosophy, produced in turn scholasticism and modern natural science. Berkeley, in his discussion of the metaphysics of sensation, and Huxley, in his essay on "Sensation and the Sensiferous Organs," paved the way, by means of a clear statement of the differences which separate idealism from materialism, for the conclusions of men like Lord Kelvin, and for a whole train of philosophic thought, culminating in the theories of Professor Bergson to-day.
Now, summed up very shortly, what Mr. Bergson maintains is that the mind of the human being is not only superior to but independent of his physical brain. This being so, and having, he insists, been scientifically demonstrated to be so, memory and every other function of human thought are quite distinct from any physical action of the brain; and, in consequence of this, what is known as death, or the dissolution of the material body, would leave untouched the human power of thought and conversation. The soul of man, therefore, he argues, remains untouched by the death of the body, from which body it escapes in death to assume whatsoever position in the after state of life its conduct in its previous material environment may have fitted it. Life, then, is eternal, and the only reason a man has for doubting a future life is the argument of his own body, an argument which vanishes the very moment a human being realizes that mind is not contained in the brain nor thought trammeled by a physical, carnal body.
