FOOTNOTES LECTURE 4 PART 5

Page 151 Note 1 Renan has said: "No one in business would risk a hundred francs with the prospect of gaining a million, on such a probability as. that of the future life."--Dialogues, p. 31. Cf. Strauss, Der alte und der neue Glaube, pp. 123-134. "In fact," he says, "this. supposition is the most gigantic assumption that can be thought of; and if we ask after its foundation, we meet with nothing hut a wish. Man would fain not perish when he dies; therefore he believes he will not perish."--Pp. 126, 127.
<<Back

Page 151 Note 2 The contrast is again marked with the attitude of the last century "Natural Religion," which regarded the "immortality of the soul" as one of its most certain articles. How little assurance even Theism, apart from Revelation, can give on this subject, is seen in Mr. Greg's. statements in The Creed of Christendom, chap. xvii.; and Preface to his Enigmas of Life.
<<Back

Page 151 Note 3 Fiske's Man's Destiny. Dr. Martineau tells the story that on a report of the arguments of this. book being read to an English friend, a Positivist, on its first appearance, his exclamation was: "What? John Fiske say that? Well; it only proves, what I have always maintained, that you cannot make the slightest concession to metaphysics, without ending in a theology!"--Preface to A Study of Religion.
<<Back

Page 151 Note 4 "O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again
<<Back

Page 152 Note 1 Thus in the Indian systems, but also in modern times. Spinoza's Pantheism has no room in it for personal immortality. In Hegel's system the question was left in the same ambiguity as the question of the Divine personality (cf. Stirling's Secret of Hegel, ii. pp. 578-580; Seth's Hegelianism and Personality, pp. 149, 150). On Schleiermacher's views, see Note L.--Schleiermacher and Immortality.
<<Back

Page 152 Note 2 Cf. p. 160.
<<Back

Page 152 Note 3 Quoted by Dugald Stewart, Active and Moral Powers, i. p. 72 (Collected Works). Cf. Tusculan Disputations, Book i. 20.
<<Back

Page 152 Note 4 Analogy, i. chap. 1.
<<Back

Page 152 Note 5 Three Essays, p. 201.
<<Back

Page 153 Note 1 See Professor Calderwood's views in Note H.
<<Back

Page 153 Note 2 In his. Life in Christ.
<<Back

Page 153 Note 3 Lect. III. p. 81.
<<Back

Page 154 Note 1 Cicero urges the argument in The Tusculan Disputations, Book i. 13. For modern illustrations, cf. Max Muller's Anthropological Religion, Lecture V.; Dawson's Fossil Men and their Modern Representatives, chap. x., etc.
<<Back

Page 154 Note 2 Eccles. Institutions, chaps. i., xiv.; Strauss has a similar theory, Der alte und der neue Glaube, p. 124.
<<Back

Page 154 Note 3 Longfellow's Hiawatha, Introduction.
<<Back

Page 155 Note 1 Max Muller says: "We cannot protest too strongly against what used to be a very general habit among anthropologists, namely, to charge primitive man with all kinds of stupidities in his early views about the soul, whether in this life or the next."--Anthropological Religion, p. 218.
<<Back

Page 155 Note 2 Cf. Max Muller's discussion of the "shadow" and "dream" theory in Anthropological Religion, pp. 218--226. "Before primitive man could bring himself to imagine that his soul was like a dream, or like an apparition, it is clear that he must already have framed to himself some name or concept of soul."--P. 221.
<<Back

Page 155 Note 3 Cf. Max Muller, Anthropological Religion, pp. 195, 281, 337, 338. "It was a perfectly simple process: what may almost be called a mere process of subtraction. There was man, a living body, acting, feeling, perceiving, thinking, and speaking. Suddenly, after receiving one blow with a club, that living body collapses, dies, putrefies, falls to dust. The body, therefore, is seen to he destroyed. But there is nothing to prove that the agent within that body, who felt, who perceived, who thought and spoke, had likewise been destroyed, had died, putrefied, and fallen to dust. Hence the very natural conclusion that, though that agent had separated, it continued to exist somewhere, even though there was no evidence to show how it existed and where it existed"--P. 281. See also Mr. Greg, Preface to Enigmas of Life, p. 7; and Fairbairn's Studies in Philosophy of Religion, pp. 115ff.
<<Back

Page 155 Note 4 Plato's Phaedo, Cicero's Tusculan Disputations and Dream of Scipio, etc. Cf. Max Muller on Anthropological Religion, Lecture XI.
<<Back

Page 156 Note 1 In the Essay on "Theism," in Three Essays on Religion. See below.
<<Back

Page 157 Note 1 Adv. of Learning, Book ii. 13.
<<Back

Page 157 Note 2 It. Browning, Pauline. [The text is somewhat altered in 1889 edition. Works, i. p. 27.]
<<Back

Page 157 Note 3 "Man," says Kant, "is not so constituted as to rest and be satisfied in any possession or enjoyment whatsoever."--Kritik d. Urtheilskraft, p. 281 (Erdmann's ed.).
<<Back

Page 157 Note 4 Browning, Pauline. As revised :--

"How should this earth's life prove my only sphere?
Can I so narrow sense but that in life
Soul still exceeds it?"
Works, i. p. 29.

<<Back

Page 158 Note 1 Cf. Kant on "The Last End of Nature as a teleological System," Kritik d. Urtheilskraft, pp. 280--285; and Caird, Philosophy of Kant, ii. P. 501.
<<Back

Page 158 Note 2 "For my part," says Mr. Fiske, "I believe in the immortality of the soul, not in the sense in which I accept the demonstrable truths of science, but as a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness. of God's work."--Man's Destiny p. 116.
<<Back

Page 159 Note 1

"There is no reconciling wisdom with a world distraught,
Goodness with triumphant evil, power with failure in the aim,
If--(to my own sense, remember! though none other feel the same!)--
If you bar me from assuming earth to be a pupil's place,
And life, time,--with all their chances, changes,--just probation-space,
Mine, for me?"   BROWNING, La Saisiaz, Works, xiv. p. 178.

<<Back

Page 159 Note 2 It should be noticed that, as Kant grants a "doctrinal faith" in the existence of God, as distinguished from theoretical demonstration on the one hand, and the moral proof on the other (see note D. to Lecture III.), so he admits also a "doctrinal faith" in immortality. "In view of the Divine wisdom," he says, "and having respect to the splendid endowment of human nature, and to the shortness of life, so inadequate for its development, we can find an equally satisfactory ground for a doctrinal faith in the future life of the human soul. --Kritik d. r. Vernunft, p. 561 (Eng. trans. pp. 590, 591). 3 Phil. i. 6.
<<Back

Page 160 Note 1 Cf. Uhlhorn in his Christian Charity in the Ancient Church. "There is an idea," he says, "which has been again met with in our own day, that men, when they first clearly come to believe that human life finds its life in this life alone, would be on that account the more ready to help one another, so that at least life here below might be made as pleasant to all as possible, and kept free from evil. But, in truth, the opposite is the case. If the individual man is only a passing shadow, without any everlasting significance, then reflection quickly makes us decide: Since it is of no importance whether he exists or not, why should I deprive myself of anything to give it to him? . . . It was only when through Christianity it was for the first time made known that every human soul possessed an infinite value, that each individual existence is of much more worth than the whole world,--it was only then that room was found for the growth of a genuine charity."--Pp. 33, 34 (Eng. trans.).
<<Back

Page 160 Note 2 Three Essays, p. 249.
<<Back





This document (last modified July 20, 1998) from
Believerscafe.com