structing an argument for or against tariff revision. The only desire was to bring out the salient features in our foreign trade relations, which will undoubtedly claim a prominent share of the attention of our government in the near future. The only way in which it would seem the situation could be met is by vesting the administration with power to enter into negotiations with the governments of the different countries at the proper time. This could be done either by amplifying the scope of Section 3 of the Dingley law, which would give to the President power to arrange reciprocity treaties on a basis of a larger number of articles than those now provided for; such a provision would enable the President to conclude new treaties without requiring the sanction of the Senate, as was done in the case of the four trade agreements concluded by President McKinley with Germany, France, Italy and Portugal, now in force. Or a new lease of life might be given to Section 4 of the Dingley law, under which Mr. Kasson unsuccessfully tried to conclude reciprocity treaties, and which expired by limitation on July 24th, 1899. Or, finally, an entirely new enactment might be passed by Congress looking to that end.

N. I. STONE.

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.

BY JAMES H. HYSLOP, FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF LOGIC AND ETHICS IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

It is not surprising that the orgies through which history has passed in the name of immortality should have been followed by a period of indifference. Otherworldliness had become a curse worse than Greco-Roman naturalism. It seems that, when man reacts against ideas which he discovers to have represented an error and to have disturbed the motives of a healthy will, he does so with his whole heart, and preserves his dignity, his freedom, and his independence only by disavowing all interest in what his predecessors had valued above all else. Having discovered that the belief in a future life had been as much abused as it was lacking in the credentials which supported other beliefs, he resolved to waste no time in crying over his losses and to divert his energies into the salvation of his present life. In this way, he gave health to his activity while he crushed the puling sentiments of despair, making himself a man while he sought his hopes and enthusiasms in the order in which he has to live and struggle. Nature had effectually concealed from him any other order than the present, at least according to the accepted standards of philosophy and science, and thus apparently taught him not to try discovery in the transcendental or to build and act on hopes that were not based on facts intelligibly reflecting another world. The reaction against mediævalism thus had its healthy character. But to achieve this development it had to neglect another side of the belief in a future life, and this was its influence on the individual and social ideals of man. In spite of the moral abuses associated with the idea of immortality, it has had a profound influence on man's attitude toward nature and its treatment of his fellows, as well as the spiritual estimate which he placed upon himself.

This view is clearly evinced by the observations of Mr. Goldwin Smith in an earlier number of this REVIEW, in which he gave a frank and emphatic recognition of the social value attaching to the belief in immortality; and a special interest attaches to these observations, because they come from a historian and not from a philosopher, from a man who has observed closely the movement of political events, and who has not been primarily occupied with abstract speculation.

Though the utility of the belief is conceived from the point of view which his agnosticism has discarded, there can be no doubt that Mr. Goldwin Smith rightly estimates the natural consequences of surrendering the longer and more ideal conception of human life and consciousness, a surrender that must entail a return to the economic and materialistic conception of conduct. The recognition of this utility wherever it is admitted ought to awaken the inquiry whether the belief can be wholly an illusion. The fact that a belief has beneficial consequences through long periods of time rather supports the conviction that it contains a truth, whether provable or not. The very doctrine of evolution would tend to confirm a suspicion of this kind, as in it survival, whether of ideas or things, is more or less the test of truth and value. Of course, scientific method will rightly demand better evidence than utility for its convictions on so important a subject, but it can hardly escape responsibility for investigation after conceding a value to the belief.

But, when it comes to estimating the intellectual grounds of this belief, Mr. Goldwin Smith has the choice between philosophy, revelation and science. He rightly rejects the conclusiveness of philosophic arguments, and he distrusts revelation because it has no way of satisfying our doubts about its alleged facts. To science he does not turn, though he does refer to the allegations of a false spiritualism, without mentioning that psychical research which is an effort to discriminate in the claims of the spiritualists, and to investigate a set of facts that, if genuine, suggest a fair reason for the hope that Mr. Goldwin Smith admits is possible in spite of his agnosticism. For strategic purposes he had to omit all mention of this subject. The inadequacy of philosophy and revelation will always be felt wherever scientific method prevails, and it will be scientific method that will always determine the strength of agnosticism on the problem of survival after death.

As for myself, I recognize no conclusive evidence independent of scientific method.

I say "conclusive evidence," because I wish to admit the existence of a body of influences (not evidence) which keep the belief alive without being able to satisfy human reason. I refer to our so-called instincts, love of friends, love of existence, the feeling that life is irrational without it, the moral law, and the implications of a divine intelligence. I cannot regard nature as rational unless it involves the persistence of personal consciousness and of man's highest ideals, quite as much as the persistence of force. But then nature may not be rational, and I shall not insist on that rationality unless I prove this survival as the most probable fact. To assume the rationality of nature in order to prove immortality is only begging the question. When we come to assuring ourselves, we have to discover facts that will permit no other interpretation than survival, facts that will stand the scrutiny and analysis of scientific method.

It is admitted by all parties that Christianity and its doctrine of immortality were founded upon the story of the resurrection. Whatever the facts may have been which were embodied in this story, it is clear that the idea took the form in later thought of the bodily resurrection, that is, the reappearance of the physical organism at some particular time with the identical consciousness that characterized it in its mortal existence. But, in assuming this form, the belief had forgotten the intellectual conditions which had given rise to the original form of statement for it, and so had distorted conceptions which were conceivable under the assumptions of a philosophy quite different from that of later periods. This is worth a careful examination.

Ancient philosophy maintained that all substance was "physical" or "material." Immaterial substance was inconceivable to it. If it even thought of the "immaterial," it was only as the functional activities of matter, or as space which was practically nothing. When it came to making distinctions to explain certain phenomena whose causes did not clearly reveal themselves to sense perception, a distinction was drawn between heavier and lighter matter, and the lighter matter, in the process of refinement, became wholly supersensible and at least approximated the conception of the spiritual in later times, if it did not become identical with it. It was a widely prevalent view that the soul

consisted of this fine matter, and that conception easily gave rise to a doctrine of the resurrection. But, when religious thought came forward with its theory of the creation of "matter," accepting its phenomenal character from the philosophy of Plato, it was forced to carry the distinction made between heavy and light, sensible and supersensible "matter" over into the antithesis between "matter" and "spirit," and two kinds of reality were set over against each other. This opposition or dualism matured in the philosophy of Descartes, that is, obtained the clearest conscious expression in him, though it had determined men's mode of thought in these matters for centuries before this maturity. This development of thought tended to associate the idea of "matter" with sensible substance, or when its supersensible form was admitted, to exclude the spiritual from it. In this view of things, a doctrine of the resurrection would most naturally take the form of asserting the resurrection of the biological organism with which we are familiar, and this would be the tendency of all who were not familiar with the philosophic conceptions which might make the resurrection of the soul or finer supersensible matter a possible fact. The system of thought which conceived the soul as a fine "matter" would have no such difficulties with a doctrine of the resurrection as we should have with it when applied to the physical body as we know it, and the common mind of the ancient period, not being familiar with the speculations of the schools, would easily enough mistake references to the "spiritual body" for those of the physical body, as both were of the same nature. Let us examine this more carefully.

There were three systems of philosophy prevalent at the time in which Christianity originated. They were the Platonic, the Epicurean, and the Neo-Platonic. The Platonic philosophy has always been known as advocating the immortality of the soul, but it is easy to be deceived by its language. Immortality, as maintained by Christianity, means a personal survival after death. But Plato did not affirm personal survival. His immortality was the indestructibility of substance, and not the permanence of its phenomenal forms. He was influenced by the general conceptions of his time which had observed the continuity of species and kind; and, with the conviction that there was something permanent at the basis of these phenomena, his conception of the imperishable was the same as our conservation of energy in its essential aspects.