SCIENTISTS, POETS, LITERATI.
Kant: "After death the soul possesses self-con sciousness, otherwise it would be the subject of spiritual death, which has already been dis proved. With this self-consciousness neces sarily remains personality and the conscious ness of personal identity." Benjamin Franklin: "Life is a state of embryo, a preparation for life. A man is not completely born until he has passed through death.° Charles Darwin ('Life and Letters)): "Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-con tinued slow progress.' John Stuart Mill ('Essay on Theism>): "All the probabilities in the case of a future life are that such as we have been made or have made ourselves before the change, such we shall enter into the life hereafter; and that the fact of death will make no sudden break in our spiritual life. If there be a future life, it will be at least as good as the present, and will not be wanting in the best features of the present life, improvability by our own efforts." Thomas Carlyle: "Man endures but for an hour, and is crushed before the moth. Yet in the being and in the working of a faithful man is there al ready (as all faith from the beginning, gives assurance) a something that pertains not to this wild death-element of Time, but that which triumphs over Time, and is, and will be, when Time shall be no more." Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Of what import this vacant sky, these puffing elements, these insignificant lives, full of selfish loves, quarrels and ennui? Every thing is prospective, and man is to live here after. . . . All the comfort I have found teaches me to confide that I shall not have less in times and places that I do not yet know. . . . All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen. Whatever it be which the great Providence prepares for us, it must be, something large and generous, and in the great style of his works." George Eliot: L _ " This is life to come Which martyred men have made more glorious For us to strive to follow. May I reach That purest heaven; be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony; Enkindle generous ardor; feed pure love; Beget the miles that have no cruelty; Be the sweet presence of • rod diffused, And in diffusion ever more intense." John Fiske Nature to "So far as our knowledge of Nature goes the whole momentum of it carries us onward to the conclusion that the Unseen World, as the ob jective term in a relation of fundamental im portance that has co-existed with the whole career of mankind, has a real existence. . . .
The lesson of evolution is that through all these weary ages the human soul has not been cherishing in religion a delusive phantom, but in spite of seemingly endless groping and stumbling it has been rising to the recognition of its essential kinship with the ever-living God." Mark Twain CA Biography,' by Albert Bigelow Paine): "I have never seen what to me seemed an atom of proof that there is a future life. And yet — I am strongly inclined to expect one." Richard Watson Gilder (on the death of Alice Freeman Palmer): " When fell to-day the word that she had gone, Not this my thought: Here a bright journey ends Here rests a soul unresting; here, at last.
Here ends the earnest struggle, that generous life— For all her life was giving. Rather this, I said (after the first swift, sorrowing pang) Radiant with love, and love's unending power Hence, on a new quest, starts an eager spirit . . ." Hugo Miinsterberg ('The Eternal Life,' 1905): "Who dares to speak the word 'uncom pleted)? Are the influences of our will con fined to those impulses which directly and with our knowledge act on the nearest circle of our neighbors? Will not our friend, who left us in the best energy of his manhood, influence you and me and so many others throughout our lives, and what we gained from his noble mind — will it not work through us further and further, and may it not thus complete much of that which seemed broken off and uncom pleted?" "Nor is it so with intellect and conscious ness and will, nor with memory and love and adoration, nor all the manifold activities which at present strangely interact with matter and appeal to our bodily senses and terrestrial knowledge' they are not nothing, nor shall they ever vanish into nothingness or cease to be. They did not arise with us : they never did spring into being; they are as eternal as the Godhead itself, and in the eternal Being they shall endure for ever' Edward Roland Sill: " What can we bear beyond the unknown portal? No gold, no gains Of all our toiling: in the life immortal No hoarded wealth remains, Nor gilds, nor stains.
" Naked from out that far abyss behind us We entered here: No word came with our coming, to remind us What wondrous world was near, No hope, no fear.
" Into the silent, starless night before us, Naked we glide: No hand has mapped the constellations o'er us, No comrade at our side, No chart, no guide.
" Yet fearless toward that midnight, black and hollow, Our footsteps fare: The we follow— alone No curse, no care."