Living beings are alive because the very substance in them is living. Life belongs to this substance exactly as materiality belongs to matter. As living substance can exist only in the form of living individuals, all living beings fall outside the limitations of time and possess individual immortality without exception. The cell, therefore, is as immortal as man. But if this is the case, the fact that the duration of the earthly life of man is different from that of the cell must now at last appear in its full significance. During man’s life a series of cell-generations have lived, acted and disappeared, although the phenomenon here, as in the body of society, passes comparatively unnoticed because the cell is invisible to the naked eye. Of course we observe a daily growth of nails, hair and of the whole outer skin. This outer layer consists exclusively of dead cells, which daily scale off by the millions through wear, washing or otherwise, and are replaced by other dying cells from the inner living tissues. The same process of dying and renewal takes place in the organs of the cell. As man’s lifetime often depends on the trade he has chosen, so it is with the cells in his organism. Those that perform heavy work, as for instance glandular cells, often die in the moment their mission is filled. This process commences even in the individual’s embryonic state. With lower animals, whose generation takes place outside the mother-body, we can often observe with the naked eye how whole organs normally die and disappear.
If the cells as well as men are immortal beings, the question naturally arises: what becomes of these incessantly dying cell generations? The answer must necessarily be apparent if we can show, First, that the tie between the soul and the cells is indissoluble so that man’s organism, i. e., his spiritual body, consists of the same cell-individuals in a future life as here in time; Second, that the cells at the same time are self-existent and so independent of the soul, that in a future existence also, as here in time, they can and must build up man’s organism independently.
In such case no reason can be advanced that would prevent the dying cell-generations from immediately arising to a new and higher evolution, which, as we will endeavor to prove, must be identical with the upbuilding of the higher, transfigured body which man shall possess in a future life. This form of resurrection must be common to all organisms because they are all built according to the same general plan and are consequently subject to the same general process of evolution. Men are themselves the cells in another higher organism, humanity, which entity cannot rise to a richer life in another world otherwise than through its upbuilding by the dying human generations under the new conditions that exist over there.
As a preliminary experiment in order to find out if the soul is indispensable to the life of the organism, or if the cells possibly might do without the soul, we may appropriately remove the latter from an organism and thus directly observe the importance of the soul for the cells.
But how can this be done, or at least, how may we deprive the organism of all influence from the soul? The physiologists have proved the possibility of such an experiment. It is fully established that the soul communicates with the body through the brain proper, or the cerebrum, and experience shows that this important organ may be removed and yet the body continue to live. We will here give briefly the results of such experiments made with animals.
If the brain be removed from a dove or a hen, the bird often recovers from the radical operation and may remain alive for months and even years. But the dove has become an entirely different being. Immobile she sits on the same place. If she were not heard to breathe she might be taken for a stuffed bird. She lacks ability to judge her position and resembles a living machine that breathes, and swallows the food brought into her bill. The higher qualities of the dove are entirely lost. She shows no signs of fear and is incapable of initiative. She remains sitting in the same place and will not even fly down from small heights. If thrown into the air, she flies until her wings are tired or until she strikes an obstacle that she makes no effort to avoid. From the first day she must be fed artificially, but she digests her food as usual. The heart, the circulation of the blood, the respiration, in short, all the vegetative functions of life continue regularly. Such a state has been characterized by Flourens as a continuous sleep without dreams.
The same observations have been made with regard to dogs that have been deprived of a large part of the brain.
With lowered head and dead eyes, such a dog moves about indifferent to everything taking place around him. He shows no signs of fear, envy or joy. Neither threats nor friendly speech impress him. He never partakes in the barking of other dogs and is, as a rule, mute. Only should he be hungry he might set up a howl. Although indifferent to the strongest light or sound, he is not entirely blind or deaf. At the stronger sounds he might move his head slightly. All higher life is lost, but he digests his food and all vegetative functions continue just as regularly as if he were in normal condition.
Observation of the effect of certain accidents and diseases intimates that man forms no exception but that the same results would probably be obtained from similar experiments with him. Though such experiments are out of the question, we can, however, in many different ways ascertain that the soul of man is also inactive in the vegetative functions of his organism. In earliest childhood this is perfectly evident. To possess a soul that has no functions is, as far as the result is concerned, identical with possessing no soul.
If we observe a child during the very earliest period of its life we will find that it behaves essentially just as the animals referred to above. Even the child remains in the position it is given and is unable to comprehend what happens around him. The child would likewise starve to death unless food were brought to his mouth, but he swallows and digests the nourishment normally. The movements of the heart, the circulation of the blood and respiration all take place as normally as with the fully developed man during sleep when his soul also ceases to function.
The fact that the vegetative processes of the organism are not governed and controlled by the soul may be observed by anyone also during his conscious state. In regard to respiration we may repress it only for a few minutes. A command is soon given by certain cells in the central nerve-system which against the soul’s will brings the organ in question into action. Experience tells us that strong agitations generally disturb the vegetative processes. Sudden fear, for instance, accelerates the heart’s motion. Therefore these processes take place more evenly with animals deprived of their brain just because disturbing influences from the soul are then impossible.
Thus it is certain beyond doubt that the cells not only execute but regulate and control through the central nerve-system a multitude of functions in which the soul does not take part. But just as certain it is that there are many functions which the cells could not perform without the co-operation of the soul. Vision, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling would be entirely meaningless to the cells without the aid of the soul. The same is the case in a high degree with the motions of the body which also require such a higher guidance. The dove could fly, the dog walk, and so forth, but the motions were relatively purposeless. The predetermined plan was lacking. The cells could assimilate the food, when brought into the body, but they could not search it in nature. Such action requires a power of combination that exceeds their measure of intelligence.
We see consequently that the cells may do without the soul in such functions as are not related to the exterior world comprehensible through our senses. Here they need the guidance of a higher, more developed intelligence. In the outside world with its more complicated relations, the soul is to the cells very nearly what we mean by the word Providence. The soul performs, in the interest of the cells, such a higher, regulating and guiding function.
The organism, then, is divided into two sections, separated by a sharply defined boundary. As independent and autocratic as the cells are in one of them, is the soul in the other. This bisection in two widely separated spheres is in itself remarkable, but may be explained, if we remember that the organism is an individual composed of lower individuals. As different as these classes of individuals are in their nature and faculties, equally incongruous are also the realms in which they dwell. The cells move in the atomic and molecular world. To them the molecules and atoms appear with a clearness comparable to the plainness with which the exterior world reveals itself to us. It is natural then that the cells attend to the vegetative functions of the organism which just fall within their sphere of life, a sphere of which the soul can obtain knowledge only indirectly by way of deductions. Equally obvious it is that only the soul can employ the organs of the body, the functions of which fall within the visible world.
We have now endeavored to obtain an understanding of the importance of the soul to the cells by depriving the latter of the direct influence of the former. This resulted from the removal of the brain, the organ by which the soul more directly expresses itself. But the soul is not actually removed from the body. It still remains in the whole cell-mass. The brain itself consists of cells, in which the soul is not present except as in all the other cells. The difference is only that the brain-cells are developed for the functions of thought, whereas the cells in the other organs are intended for their specific purposes. In order to remove the soul from the body we must remove the life from every cell. The soul, as we intend to show, is inseparably connected with every particular cell-individual. But in order to understand how the cells may be at once independent of, and yet intimately united with the soul, we must first know what an organism really is. Its nature and fundamental idea is the only thing that can explain this remarkable relationship. But it is just here as to the essential qualities of an organism that the conceptions are generally very dim and vague.
Commonly the organism is thought of as a very complicated mechanism whose members and organs mutually depend upon each other. The organism is what the word implies, a tool. But every tool is intended for somebody’s use. Who this one is, is not said, simply because it is considered self-evident. If it be a human organism, it is obviously the man who uses it; if it be an animal organism, it is the animal, and so on. That this is a truth, cannot be denied; but still it expresses only half the truth and scarcely that. Every organic body is used directly by the individuals that form its building material. The human organism is a society of cells, and it is these latter that first of all use the body’s organs for their purposes. But so dominating are the old ideas about the body, that even the cytologists themselves have not been able to shake them off. The cells are continually studied from man’s point of view, but what man may be from the cell’s point of view is never thought of.
We do not hereby deny all justification to the old conception. The body is also an organ for the soul. The latter, as experience shows, uses the body for its own specific purposes. But this takes place only to a somewhat limited extent. The incomparably larger part of the soul’s work, cares, and endeavors, is devoted to finding means to satisfy bodily wants. But so far as the soul provides for the necessities of the body, it acts as organ for the cells. When man believes that he is running his own errands, he is in reality carrying out the missions of those beings that compose his body. These latter demand for their purposes, if not all, yet at least the largest part of all the work the soul performs in this world.
In order to illustrate the fundamental characteristics of an organic structure in general, we will begin with comparing it with what it most resembles, namely, a complicated mechanism. The likeness is so striking that the very dissimilarities become instructive.
First of all we notice the parts of which the machine is composed. What these parts are to the machine the members and organs are to the organism. Every part, like every organ, has a certain duty to perform which it incessantly repeats. The work of the machine is divided among the parts as that of the organism among the organs. As the organ, so the part of the machine can do its share only when in right position and in right order.
The most obvious similarities are now exhausted. The parts of the machine are actuated by external, but the organs by internal, forces. The organism is a living machine. No organism, whether organic or mechanic, labors for its own sake. Every such apparatus exists for somebody’s use. But while those that employ a machine stand in outer relation to the same, those who utilize an organism are beings that themselves constitute the organic machine-parts. These are not composed of dead atoms, but of living individuals. The organism is a society which puts the organic machinery into service. It is the social tie that connects the individuals which otherwise would be a multitude of isolated beings.
In all organisms there are as many organs as actual wants among the individuals that compose it. Because these individuals are kindred, they have common needs and are therefore able to use the same organ. Every particular individual requires the assistance of all the organs and must therefore stand in such relation to them all that he can utilize the work of any one. But he himself enters as a working member only in one organ, whose work is the only one he can immediately press into his service, and even this only in certain cases. All other organs stand in more or less distant relation to him. How, then, will he be able to utilize them? Only so that the organs make themselves present in his own organ, and, so to speak, reach him their different products. Like every citizen in a community, each organ ought to have a system of circulation throughout all the other organs to transfer the results of its work where it is needed. If, however, each organ were provided with such a distribution agency this would be an extravagance inconsistent with the concentration of forces that the very idea of an organism implies. Instead of many such systems we find therefore in every organism but one, whose sole purpose is to circulate the products of the various organs, and thus, so to speak, make each organ represented in every part of the whole community. We find that every organic building is constructed in this way to suit the individuals that form its building-material, and so of course it must be, since it was built for that purpose by the same individuals.
The consequence is that the degree of development an organism possesses is closely related to the state of evolution reached by the individuals which constitute it. The more perfected the organism, the higher and more developed also are the necessities it is able to satisfy.
The way in which independent living beings build such an organic machine may be defined as “division of labor.” Every organism is a union, founded on the division of labor, between a multitude of kindred individuals which thus combine their isolated forces. But a large mass of individuals cannot merge at once into an all-embracing entity. This result can only be reached by a series of higher and lower intermediary units, each defined by its particular share of the total labor.
A closer study of the organisms will show that they all without exception are composed in this way.
The cells in any organism in nature combine into higher and higher units as follows:
The primary unions of the cells are the tissues, where all the cells perform the same function in the same way. Of these tissues is formed the nearest higher unit, the organ. As the tissue was a union of cells, the organ is a union of tissues. Then we have a system of organs. To each such higher system a more comprehensive function is assigned. By distributing the total labor among the different systems these merge into the organism which unites the whole cell-mass into one well-organized community of working cell-individuals.
Human society is similarly composed. The difference is only that in one case the citizens are cells, and in the other they are men. Of an organism in nature we only see the members and organs, but not the cells; in human society, on the other hand, we only observe the cells or the human individual, but not the body of society. The cells combine into a solid body; humanity is spread over a surface. Human individuals, because of their greater perfection, move in space more freely and independently of each other than do the cells in their realm. These and other differences do not, however, disturb the general organic structure. This has everywhere the same fundamental qualities. Society is essentially only a vastly enlarged copy of the same model that man traces in his own bodily organism.
Through a similar division of labor the work of the community is split into trades, corresponding to the tissues in the natural organism. As the cells in one tissue, so the men in one trade are incessantly occupied with the same work. Out of several trades are formed the social organs. A social organ consequently is a certain community or district performing a certain part of an industry. This has been called “territorial division of labor.” Several such communities make up an organ-system or an industry. A few such larger units merge into the single unit, the entire mass of human individuals as a whole.
The cells of the individuals in an organism are consequently at once building-material and builders, and in their latter capacity are endowed with wants and aspirations that with natural necessity force them to organization without conscious plan or purpose. Necessity is the teacher that tells them how to organize. Some speak of a social instinct that man does or should possess; but its existence has never been shown. On the contrary, it is only by those needs that can only be satisfied by a community that men are driven to unite socially. Similarly with the cells. Only by building up an organism are they able to satisfy their common wants. What society is to human individuals, the natural organism is to the cells. No trade or industry can be found in the state that does not serve to provide for some common want of the people, and no tissue nor organ exists in the natural organism but for satisfying collective needs of the cells. These collective needs are at the same time the higher needs of the individuals. The organism provides the power that the isolated individual does not possess. Organization allows that specializing of effort which so essentially contributes to the productivity of labor. The more limited the operations each individual has to perform, the more rapidly and perfectly are they done.
Although the cell lives in a world inaccessible to our immediate comprehension, we still possess means to ascertain that it has the same fundamental qualities as man. We observe manifestations of life in the cell corresponding to those of sensitivity, feeling and will-power in man. The cell’s comprehending faculty has been termed irritability and its power of action spontaneity. From certain physiological phenomena the conclusion has also been drawn that the cell likewise possesses memory.
Hitherto only little study has been given to the spiritual qualities of the cells, and such investigations must always meet with certain insurmountable difficulties. The reason is that we only judge others by ourselves and we are therefore unable to understand the spiritual life of any being that is not one of our kin.
If a being stands higher or lower than ourselves its spiritual experiences, if not entirely different from ours, are at least limited and modified by the being’s own power of comprehension. If, however, these beings show manifestations of life that we understand, we must conclude that their spiritual or mental life is correspondingly active.
Such a position we occupy with regard to the beings called cells. From the result of their activities we conclude that they, like men, are endowed with aspirations capable of the highest conceivable evolution. What economic necessities are to man, the arterial blood is to the cell. The blood is an artificial product which nature no more gives to the cell than it gives clothes, food, houses and the like to man. Nature provides the raw material and cell and man alike must learn how to adapt it for the necessities of life. This operation, however, involves great difficulties. All such artificial products stand in inverse proportion to the power of the individual. The more perfect they are the more impossible it is for the individual to produce them. Only as citizens in a community, that is, through organization, are the individuals able to produce such products as exceed their isolated forces.
Although we cannot comprehend the inner life of the cell, nor the world in which it dwells, we are able to judge, from the wonderful perfectness of the organisms built by cells, that they have reached in their world and measured by their power a higher state of development than man. It is not only possible but highly probable that the human individuals will sometime build an organism of the same perfectness, but as yet they have not done so. The cells have long ago passed the stage of organization that characterizes human society at present.
From the fact that the first purpose of every organic structure is to serve the individuals of which it is composed, it follows that nobody, except these same individuals, can build the organism in question. Independently the cells build the human body here in time and they must do the same in the future life. The organism cannot exist in other surroundings than those for which its organs are adapted. But this adaptation can only be effected by the individuals that form the building material of the organs, because the organs just express their relations to the world in which they exist. Thus it follows of necessity that man’s resurrection or transition from one world to another must be identical with the dying cells’ upbuilding of that organism which man shall possess in a future life. Any other form of resurrection is neither possible nor conceivable. It is further confirmed by the relation that exists between the soul and the cells. This relationship, as we intend to show, is such that the soul receives its entire individuality, all its forces and faculties, from the cell-organism, the previous resurrection of which therefore is an indispensable condition for man’s own rise to another life.
If the mass of a body is living the body itself is alive. The whole receives its qualities from its elementary components. The organism itself is a living being. From the point of view of the building material the organism is a society composed of independently living individuals; from the point of view of the whole again it is a living individual of higher order than the individuals that form its social side. Man is a cell in the social body, but is himself composed of lower individuals, which again consist of more primary units.
Man, considered as being possessed of a body, is an individual composed of lower individuals.
We now ask the question: What is the relation between the higher individual and the lower ones? This is only another and more exact form of the question: What is the relation between the soul and the body? Because, what is the body and what is the soul? The body is the sum of the lower individuals, or, in other words, it is the organized mass of cells. The soul, as the feeling, thinking and willing principle, is the real spiritual unity in this mass, or just what we denote by the word man, or the higher individual. To ask, what is the relationship between the higher individual and its lower constituents is therefore the same as to ask, what is the relation between the soul and the cells? Take away the latter, and there is nothing left of the body. The cells mean here everything, and it is to them consequently that the soul can be thought to stand in relation.
Formerly the problem was to explain how soul and body as two substantially different entities were related to each other. They had then nothing in common, nothing to encourage an interaction. If now the relation holds between the soul and the cells we have at least commensurable quantities to deal with.
So far all is well. But now other difficulties arise. We can and must ask, how an interaction is possible between the soul and the cells even if they are formally, according to their inner nature, kindred beings? In other respects they are not so separated and different that a spiritual intercourse is inconceivable. As inaccessible as is the inner life of the cell to man, so incontiguous is the spiritual life of man to the cell. These beings are so widely separated that they cannot possibly communicate directly with each other, and yet in order to establish a mental or spiritual interrelationship, such communication is just what is necessary.
The soul and the cells must have something in common that is of a purely spiritual nature. As the spiritual always is a comprehending substance with nothing but comprehensions as its content, the something common to both must consequently have the form of common comprehensions. Not all comprehensions, however, incite to activity and a smaller number yet call forth a co-operation of independently living individuals. But, obviously, the perceptions that concern us now must be of the latter kind. The comprehensions in general that induce a being to activity we call wants or appetites. In its desires a being conceives its own ego in want of one thing or other. The feeling of discomfort, accompanying the want, naturally causes the endeavor to satisfy the want through a corresponding effort. The incitement to activity then is purely spiritual. Are the soul of man and the cells subject to such common needs, requiring their co-operation? If so, at least their wants or appetites cannot be wholly congruous. Such are only to be found in entirely similar beings. But different wants are satisfied in different ways; each requires a carefully adapted form of activity. All direct, immediate co-operation of the soul and the cells is therefore impossible. Only man with man, or cell with cell, can co-operate in the primary sense of the word.
But an indirect working alliance is not yet precluded. Though themselves different, the two beings may comprehend wants identical in substance, but not in form. The formal discrepancy would require not only different modes of satisfying the need, but also different kinds of activity; but the common substance might yet under certain conditions so unite and interlink the different labors, that the result would show a mutual co-operation.
We shall presently see that the soul and the cells are so united with each other that the connecting link is the organism per se. From the point of view of the cells the organism, with its different members and organs, was nothing but the collective expressions of individual wants. Now man comprehends as his needs only the wants of the organs; in other words, the collective wants of the cells are the individual wants of the soul. Experience teaches us that the soul has no direct comprehension of the cells, but only of their organic unions. To prove this it may be sufficient to point out that before the discovery of the microscope, man knew absolutely nothing of the existence of these beings, much less that they were the all-governing forces in his own body. But also in other ways we may ascertain that the comprehending power of the soul does not reach beyond the organs. This is apparent from the different significance the physiological processes have for the soul and for the cells. If we consider the most important of them all, our nutrition, and ask ourselves for whom the nourishment is really intended, we find that it is for the cells and for the cells alone.
The food benefits the soul only if it is utilized by the cells. But the nourishment that the soul craves does not satisfy the cells. Hunger and satisfaction are not even simultaneous in both, at least not as regards the same food. As a rule, the soul comprehends hunger when the cells are satisfied and vice versa. The soul’s hunger ceases the moment suitable food in sufficient quantity is introduced in the stomach. But this does not help the cells. Because, if the food remained in the stomach, to the satisfaction of the soul, the cells would soon die of starvation. The nourishment in the stomach is of the same importance to the cells as the provisions stored in the warehouse of the community are to the human individuals. These also would die from hunger if they let the victuals remain in the stores. The people must undertake to distribute, prepare and consume the food. Similarly the cells would starve to death unless they prepared the food in their common storage to suit their wants. The nourishment must be transformed into blood through the whole complicated process we call digestion. When this is done, the cells are able to satisfy their craving, and simultaneously a new hunger-feeling arises in the soul. Although it is the same food that satisfies both parties, it is the same food administered in different forms, at a different time, and in a different mode. We are concerned with dissimilar beings possessed of wants at once different and yet most intimately associated.
The connection is not difficult to understand. When the soul comprehends the need of the stomach, it is the collective want of the cells that comes to expression as the individual want of the soul. The different needs receive in different form an identical substance and this fact is obviously the connecting link between the soul and the cells. We might without difficulty carry out the same reasoning in regard to respiration and all the other physiological processes of the body.
From what we have said it is evident that the soul and the cells employ the body differently; but for the sake of clearness this ought perhaps to be further accentuated. The difference may be thus expressed: The soul acts with the members and organs of the body as units, whereas the cells perform the work of the organs as individuals. It would be easy to explain what this implies if we could point to similar conditions in human society. But no exactly similar institutions exist there, at least not to the same extent. They would exist if the ideal socialistic state was realized. The cells in their sphere have carried through a communism of the most rigid form. Their social organs then do not work at the cell-individual’s own initiative, but only upon the command of the central power and under its guidance and control. But even in the present organization of mankind, we find a few organs which offer a suggestive comparison. Especially is this the case with the defensive organ of society, the standing army, which is entirely under the control of the central power and acts only upon its command and under its control.
As to its composition the army is a mass of independently living individuals, co-operating so as to form an organic whole. All the work this unit performs is done by the thousands of soldiers of which it is composed. If the government decides to use this organ, that is if it declares war, we know that it leads, arranges and controls the army as one unit. It is not concerned with the soldiers as individuals, but only as organized masses.
Exactly analogous is the relation between the soul and the organs, composed of cells, in man’s organism. Here also the cell-individuals perform the work of the different organs. The soul is not concerned with the cells as individuals. It governs, guides and superintends the movements of the members as elements; that is, commands the cells as organic masses.
We now consider the following facts established. The soul and the cells are different beings with different wants. They do not feel or comprehend in the same way and can therefore not have immediate perceptions of each other. However true this is on one side it is on the other just as certain that they are so intimately connected as to form the same organism through the medium of which they feel their mutual wants and therefore must have some comprehension of each other. This strange and, as it may seem, contradictory relation depends on the fact that the union between the soul and the cells does not extend to their whole entity. We have seen that the soul comprehended only the collective not the individual wants of the cells. Within certain defined limits therefore they have a common substance that causes their marvelous co-operation through the body.
To understand and explain this coöperation we must make clear how the soul and the cells in their innermost nature are united. And we shall learn this by going to the bottom of the meaning of the expression that a common substance so governs their relationship that the collective wants of the cells become the individual wants of the soul.
How then are the soul and the cells intrinsically connected?
The answer may be derived in two ways. We might take both the subjective and the objective side of the wants as our point of view. If we first consider the subjective side the relationship between the soul and the cells may be stated as follows:
We have previously pointed out that in its wants a living being perceives its own ego as related to something else. This is an axiom that needs no demonstration. If now the soul comprehends the collective wants of the cells as its own, this can only mean that the soul comprehends that part of the cells’ inner nature which expresses itself as their collective wants, as a part of its own ego. Again the cells within the same limits on their part comprehend the soul’s inner nature as belonging to their own individuality. The connection within these limits is so intimate that they cannot comprehend themselves without at the same time comprehending each other. The soul must consequently perceive the body as its own body because the same wants that cause the cells to upbuild the soul also belong to the soul’s own entity. On the other hand the soul in conceiving itself cannot comprehend the cells as such because the identity is not extended to their whole individuality.
When a being conceives the wants of somebody else as its own wants it is at the same time directly influenced by the other. Thus the soul and the cells act upon each other throughout the body. A will of the soul takes with natural necessity the form of a common impulse upon the cells bringing them into action in the will’s direction. If the soul, for instance, wishes to move an arm or a hand, a collective want is simultaneously created in the cells that form the organ in question to execute that movement.
We arrive at the same result by considering the fact that the different wants of the soul and of the cells are identical in substance. The same substance cannot enter into and define different beings unless they themselves enter in and define each other. As now both parties comprehend wants identical in substance, the soul must necessarily belong to the cells so that it is the ground for their collective wants. But these wants were the cell-individual’s higher wants, manifested in the organization of the body. The soul therefore is potentially present in the cells in the form of their higher wants and is consequently developed along with the upbuilding of the body. Only when this is ready is the soul’s entity developed. The soul must then comprehend the organism as its particular body when conscious of its own ego, but the cells do not enter into the soul’s entity as individuals and are therefore not present as such in man’s consciousness.
For this organic co-operation the soul and the cells need no language, no signs to communicate with each other. It is not even necessary that they are aware of each other’s existence. It is sufficient that each party comprehends its own wants and acts for their satisfaction according to its own nature. If they do this their co-operation through the body receives a simple and at the same time complete explanation.
But however natural this interaction is, it is nevertheless a wonder above all wonders. The world that exists to the soul does not exist to the cells, and vice versa. They have an entirely different conception of the realm in which they live. They have different apprehensions, feelings and wants and perform accordingly different functions. But in spite of this they are, as we have seen, within certain limits so intimately connected that these different comprehensions and labors are interlinked with each other, regulating each other as accurately as the wheels in a clock.
From the relationship existing between the soul and the cells it appears that the former cannot live a life independent of the latter. The soul receives its entire individuality, all its qualities, forces, and faculties, through the organism built by the cells, which therefore must exist before the soul can exist as the real unity in the organism. This does not mean that the soul is an empty form void of independent substance. Even before the cells have combined into an organic unit the soul is potentially present in them in the form of the wants that force them to upbuild the organism, and this organism is that of the soul, not that of the cells, of which each possesses its individual organism.
But if the soul is potentially present in the cells it is only through them that it can arise to a higher life. We have already shown in another connection that a direct transposition would be useless and meaningless. Endowed with his present organs adapted to earthly conditions, a man suddenly translated into the glories of a higher world would with seeing eyes yet see nothing, with hearing ears hear nothing and with feeling senses would feel nothing. To comprehend what there exists and happens, man’s own organism must have undergone a corresponding radical transformation. He must have new, more perfect senses, higher spiritual and bodily faculties, differing from his present as far as the objects in this higher world differ from those on earth. This transfigured body can only be organized by the same beings that built it here in time. The soul is inseparably united with these beings and is where they are.
Here in time man commences with a cell and with a cell he must begin in a future life. This first cell with which man enters his next form of existence cannot logically be any other than the first dying cell-individual. As no atom, so no elementary unit of the living spiritual body is annihilated. Viewed from our present existence death cannot mean anything to the departed cell-generations but the cessation of life and activity in the world responsive to our senses. In reality they rise to a higher evolution under different conditions and this evolution must be identical with the upbuilding of the glorified body man shall possess in a future life.
This form of death and resurrection, natural because it is founded on the idea and nature of the organism, is common to all living beings and must so be, as they are all built according to the same general plan and therefore essentially subject to the same evolutionary processes. The birth and death of the lower individuals in whole generations is known to be a universal phenomenon in every organism and we will now endeavor shortly to explain this process.
If the soul enters as a real part in every individual cell, it does not belong differently to the first generation than to the last or to the whole series of intermediary generations. But here in time man lives only in the generation existing at the present moment. The generations that in the past successively formed the spiritual substance of his body have already gone out of time and those that are coming have not yet made their entrance. Man’s entity is thus split or distributed upon a series of successively existing moments, each of which contains only a certain limited part of the organism, and the latter has therefore in reality a far broader extent than is seen at present.
But time confines and restricts man not only in this, but in all respects. To take another example, we know that man possesses a multitude of different faculties and talents. But in time he cannot utilize them all. As a member of society he devotes himself to a certain trade or profession. Now there are thousands of different possible activities and therefore thousands of different talents that every man might develop but never can, simply for lack of time. Time is not even sufficient to fully develop one human talent in one definite direction. Man has at his disposal only the present moment, and in each moment he can only think one thought, perform one act, satisfy one need. It is said that man should develop all his faculties evenly, but so long as he lives in time this is an impossibility. As a matter of fact man can only live this life piecemeal, and in this time-existence proper we have the explanation of the fact that man distributes his body over a series of cell-generations.
The law of the indestructibility of matter and energy is valid also in the ideal world and this necessarily since it is a demand of thought itself.[3] Applied to spiritual substance, which can exist only in the form of living individuals, the law may be expressed, “All living beings are immortal.” If therefore the cell-generations that in the past composed man’s organism can no more be annihilated than the future generations can be created from nothing, this implies that man has an individual existence not only after but before his entrance into this world. If such be the case we must be able to derive and explain our earthly life from this pre-existence. Can it now be shown that man’s conditions in his pre-existence are such that he needs and must go through an evolution in time? In that case history may perhaps give us a hint how to answer the question, or would this pre-existence be an entirely new thought? By no means. Pre-existence is and must be a fundamental idea in all religions because they all suppose that man emanated from God through an original act of creation. That the Christian religion especially has this basic idea Victor Rydberg has fully demonstrated in a treatise entitled “Man’s Pre-existence.”
But although we may say that all religions teach a pre-existence we do not mean that this idea has been or even could have been rightly understood. We might expect just the contrary, as pre-existence is connected with the common conception that man’s soul as well as the material world was once created in time, in which case pre-existence can only mean an existence extending very far back in time. There was a time when God existed but not man, which latter, as being created, must have an existence separate from God even if he may in other respects be called His image.
This form of belief in pre-existence shows the same shortcomings and is subject to the same objections as the whole orthodox theory of creation. As we can and must ask how a perfect God could create an imperfect, that is, an evolutionary world, we might also ask, why was man created with the necessity for an evolution in time when he never could develop anything but what God had implanted potentially in his being? Instead of explaining evolution this theory only makes it so much the more mysterious.
Besides this conception, however, the religious intuition has surmised that the connection between God and man is profoundly deeper and more intimate. Man does not have an existence separate from God. This intuitive thought, intensified in highly religious souls, has led them to preach, that man possesses a life in God; is part of His own being, is a living member in His perfect organism. If this be true, why, again, must man go through an evolution? Is he not as unchangeable as God Himself?
It is the perennial honor of Sweden’s greatest philosopher, Christofer Jacob Boström, to have satisfactorily explained the extremely difficult and complicated question with which our last chapter concluded. He has shown that man, exactly on the supposition that he is an eternal part of God’s being, requires and must go through an evolution in time. According to Boström, religious intuition has found the truth that man is an eternal idea in God, a living member in His organism. But Boström has also understood and considered the difference implied in thinking of man as a member in God’s organism and in thinking of this member as living its independent life. In the former case man possesses the same qualities as God; in the latter, these qualities with corresponding limitations.
For an illustration of how all limited beings are incorporated in an absolute personality, Boström likes to fall back on the numerical system. Spiritual beings form a series, as it were, of lower and higher entities, where the latter contain the former pretty much as higher numbers contain the smaller. Boström distinguishes between positive and negative attributes, and means by the former those attributes without which the being cannot be thought, and which it therefore in one sense contains. So for instance in the number ten, all the previous numbers are positive attributes because ten cannot be thought without them, which, however, does not imply identity with either of the lower numbers. On the other hand all the following numbers are negative attributes to the number ten because this may well be thought without them. It contains them only if it is considered as one point in the numerical system, in which case it has them all as attributes. Thus, still referring to the number ten, this may be considered complete within itself without considering the higher numbers, whereas if we wish to comprehend it fully we must see it as a link in the numerical system. Ten would not be the half of twenty without the latter, and so on. The existence of the higher is after all required for that of the lower as fully as the existence of the lower is necessary to that of the higher.
Because each entity is higher according as it has a larger number of the rest as its positive and a smaller number as its negative attributes, it follows that the highest entity, or Deity, has no negative attributes but only positive ones, which of course is the true meaning of the expression that God is the most perfect being.
As a lower being is more perfectly defined when considered included in a higher, this fact must be the reason why all finite, rational beings in their evolution try to assert themselves in the higher beings, up to the highest, by whom they finally obtain their full scope and in whom only they live their complete life.
But if Boström had lived to study the modern cytology he would have found a more adequate comparison within man’s organism, and one that perhaps in several respects would have modified his conception of the world of divine ideas.
God is related to man as man is, not to the cell, but to the lower units of which the cell is composed. Between God and man there is at least one other organism that we know of, namely humanity. But if we overlook this and for simplicity’s sake imagine the relationship as that of man to cell it should be evident from what has been previously said that man is and must be something else to God than he is to himself.
To God he is what the cell is to man, a living part in His organism, and in this capacity he possesses all the perfect qualities of that organism. Living his independent life, man is in the same position as the cell in his own being, when the cell is thought of as living the life it is confined to by its less perfect organism.
Although limited to that life the cell may literally be said to be man’s image—but an image of a very singular kind. The cell does not reproduce man’s traits as does a photograph or a statue, but within its lower realm it mirrors the fundamental qualities of the original on a very reduced scale.
These limitations can not be conceived by the cell as such because they are natural to it and belong to its entity. The cell is and must feel itself as perfect in its realm as man in his. Only if the cell could compare its conditions with man’s, these limitations would be apparent to it, and such a comparison the cell really undertakes within certain limits. Into each feeling of want enters a comparison between the possessed and the desired. In the higher wants, then, that drive the cells to upbuild man’s organism we have a manifestation of such a comparing power of the cell. Experience shows that the cell may live in a veritable natural state, but it is also, because of the presence of the soul in its innermost being, capable of a high culture for the development of which it receives constant impulses and stimulations from the soul.
In the same sense man may be said to be the image of God. Living in the world and the natural state, to which he is confined by his relatively imperfect organism, man has the qualities of God with corresponding limitations. But even in this state he feels the spirit of God present in him because he is an original part of God’s own organism. In his conscience and in his religious feeling man not only comprehends distinctly the presence of God in his inner being but constantly receives also impulses, incitements and inspirations to develop that perfect life and heavenly kingdom, of which he is called by his high origin and divine birth to become a citizen.
What the conscience and the religious feelings are to the will, the logical laws of thinking are to the reason, and in the latter, man finds God as immediately present as in the former. Indeed, logical laws are the form in which God himself exists.
Because of God’s presence in the eternal laws of our thinking, man is able to appraise himself and his condition with an absolute measure, and can in this way obtain a certain knowledge of God’s world and of his perfect qualities. He has only to abstract all wants and limitations from such qualities as have a positive content, because lack of want is perfectness. We shall now undertake such a valuation with respect to man’s need of evolution here in time, which quality, as all the others, can be explained and understood only through its connection with the corresponding quality in the absolute being.
It is as natural to God to be without an origin and an evolution as it is to man to have them, and we might therefore ask how man in this respect can have anything in common with God, a condition which, as we remember, was indispensable for any comparison whatever. To make this point clear we may express ourselves in a more familiar way. We might speak of time and existence in time, instead of origin and evolution, as the latter are only forms of time.
Is there then a moment in time that has a corresponding meaning for God and the limitations of which we must abstract in order to understand God’s quality of being eternal? It is by analyzing the relation between time and eternity that we hope to receive an answer to the question why man must undergo an evolution in time.
The most conspicuous want in all that exists in time is its lack of duration; everything has a beginning and an end. With this lack of duration a corresponding lack of reality follows. The real is real, only as long as it lasts or only in the present moment. Everything past has ceased to exist and is therefore no longer real, and the future is unreal because it has not entered the present.
The real in time is identical with the present, which therefore must be the moment most like eternity and the limitations of which we have to remove.
First of all, the present in time suffers the want of ceasing and sinking back into the past, into unreality. We can overcome this only by raising everything past from its grave, so to speak, and drawing it simultaneously into the present. To the eternally present, nothing past, ending or ceasing can exist.
On the other hand the present in time suffers the same want in the opposite direction, inasmuch as everything future is excluded therefrom and this future growing reality must therefore be drawn into the eternal. Neither past nor future can exist to God; He lives life undividedly, without limitations, and needs not, as man, plot out his existence in a series of moments. Eternity then is not identical with unending time; it is a different form of existence, related to time as the perfect to the imperfect.
Difficult as it is to explain what eternity implies as the perfect form of existence, it is no less difficult to comprehend the infinite wealth of content that such a form includes. We will therefore give a few brief suggestions in this direction.
How poor in content is everything present to man, and likewise how defective and unsatisfactory is his whole life here in time. As a matter of fact we can in each moment only think one thought, perform one act, satisfy one want. We read a book and we are only conscious of one line or one sentence at a time. We listen to a musical creation or admire an exhibition of art, and we only hear a few harmonies, or see a few details of one picture, more distinctly at the time, and so on. How much richer would not our life be if we could think the book from beginning to end at once, hear the harmony of the entire oratorio, now focus the beauties in smallest details of the whole picture-gallery to one point. It even dazzles our spiritual eye if we enlarge the range of such a rich intuition to encompass not only our nearest environments but our whole earth or possibly our entire solar system, and yet we have only taken one step on a road that has no end. Our solar system is only an insignificant point among those innumerable worlds that form the Milky Way, beyond which the astronomers surmise the existence of other hosts of stars without limit. If we now could share in life at every point in this infinity of worlds, would then our conception of the content of eternity be exact? By no means. We must include in this present moment everything that has happened on these worlds since the dawn of time and similarly all that will occur in the millenniums to come. Is the eternal measure now full and overflowing? By no means. Above us and below us there are beings to whom other universes exist as infinite in all directions as our own. All these infinities of infinities must be drawn into eternity, but then, surely, the measure must be full. By no means. We have all this time moved within the realm of phenomena, that is to say, in the finite world; all this is only a faint shadow of the wealth that eternity contains. God lives in a light that no man hath seen nor yet can see.
In this light, in this perfectness, man is a part of the divine entity. This life in God’s eternal consciousness is man’s primary and original existence. Only in a secondary meaning is he a self-existent personality and is then no more identical with God than the cell is with man.
Man as an entity for himself must have the natural limitations of the part. Conceived by God man is eternal in the divine sense, but conceived by himself man’s eternal life is clothed in the limitations we call time. The eternal is a constant present without beginning or end, without past or future. What is present to man must suffer these limitations; in other words, man must be born, must go through an evolution, or what is the same, become to himself what he has been eternally to God. In this respect man’s relation to God may be compared to the relation of a newborn child to its earthly father. To him the nature and scope of the child is perfectly clear, but the child is unconscious of it and must awaken to an understanding thereof, that is to say, must become to itself what it already is to its father.
Living beings form a continuous series in the absolute organism. This series is such that the higher beings form the conditions and supports of the lower. This connection must be entirely reversed during evolution itself, which naturally proceeds from the lower to the higher. In time therefore the generation and development of the lower beings must precede that of the higher. We have also seen that the evolution of the former is identical with the upbuilding of the organisms of the latter, and we understand now that the whole process must essentially follow the course which, as we have previously shown, it does in fact, actually take.
It is further the inherent idea of time that man’s eternal entity cannot appear whole and undivided. He must plot it out along a series of successive moments which make room for only one cell-generation at a time. As the cell’s entity again has a less comprehensive content than man’s, its lifetime must be correspondingly shorter.
The theory we have here advanced may naturally seem startling; for what could be more foreign to common conceptions than the assertion that science today gives us full evidence of a death and a resurrection that commence during our life in time? Considering this, it may be appropriate to recapitulate the salient points in our line of thought.
From prehistoric times up to our own days all people at all stages of evolution have to a man been convinced that the body in some way and in some form contains an imperishable and essential part which man cannot do without in a future life. With this intuitive and purely instinctive faith as a basis, the steps in the following historical evolution become fully natural and logical consequences.
It is not to be wondered at that this eternal part should at first sight be considered identical with the material body. Therefore it was also natural that a cult of the dead would be the stage where all people begin. Man sees however that death as a matter of fact separates the immortal soul from that body which the soul cannot dispense with. The separation cannot be complete because the ties cannot be severed. The soul then is attached to the body even after death. Consequently it must be the duty of the surviving to provide the body of the deceased with a dwelling as good and suitable as possible and also with the provisions that the body needs.
A man could not, however, find such a condition satisfactory for any length of time, and the thought of death gnaws and torments him. Shall the soul never regain possession of the body without which even the glories of heaven are pale and shadowy? The doctrine of the bodily resurrection on the day of judgment must be the next great progress in our philosophy of life.
But unusually gifted persons, bent towards idealism, had already felt instinctively that it was not the exterior, material covering that was indispensable to the soul. Man possessed also another, a spiritual body which the soul could immediately transfer to another life. We gain a glimpse of the vividness of this intuition in large groups of men, when we remember that the survivors even sought to annihilate the material body by the flames of the pyre in order to liberate the deceased from his earthly ties. The great masses of the population could not rise to this ideal conception, and we therefore find the two fundamental ideas prevailing side by side.
Here the two first epochs in man’s history end. They show us the intimate connection between religious conceptions and man’s understanding of the exterior world in which he lives and acts. The following stage commences logically with the great advancement of the natural sciences. Chemistry partly lifts the veil that hides the innermost nature of matter, and at the dawn of the new science the old ideas concerning the nature of the body disappear like the shadows of night at the rising of the sun.
A bodily resurrection on doomsday is impossible because every dead body sooner or later arises and takes part in the circulation of matter, so that on the day of judgment it might be found that the same materials had entered over and over again into the composition of a variety of human bodies. It is also a fact that man changes his material clothing several times even during his earthly life. But the belief in the essential value of the body is too deeply rooted to give away entirely and so we meet it again in the modern materialism which perhaps may be said to emphasize the significance of the body even more than the cult of the dead did in ancient time.
But while materialism claims as its own the consequences of the revolutionary work of chemistry, biology lays the firm foundation for a new and higher development of religious conceptions. Biology discovers and proves the existence of that spiritual body which humanity has surmised since prehistoric times. It is to this extraordinarily important fact that we desired to call attention. We have endeavored to draw its consequences only as regards the cell-generations which successively rise and die in the human body as in human society. Now when it can be shown that these dying generations are eternal and imperishable parts of man’s own nature, the conception of death and resurrection we have here advanced must be the only possible one. The hitherto common ideas regarding the translation of man to another world have upon closer study been found as naïve as they are unnatural, because any such direct transposition of man’s entity is impossible and unthinkable.
But however simple and scientifically natural the theory here proposed, it could not have appeared at a much earlier date. It requires not only the results of modern cytology but also the widening of the idea of immortality which natural science suggests and overwhelmingly proves. It presupposes also the law of evolution we have endeavored to make clear, namely, that beings endowed with common wants and existing in similar surroundings and conditions cannot develop, except by the upbuilding of an organism, and thus entering as organic members in an individual of higher order than themselves. From these premises we might have deduced our theory of death and resurrection and yet the whole process would still have seemed mysterious and inexplicable but for the work of our great predecessor, Christofer Jacob Boström, that Plato of the North, so often misunderstood by his contemporaries, or at least more known on account of certain possible deficiencies in his system than because of its imperishable merits.
Idealism and materialism have hitherto stood as two absolutely incompatible contrasts and the fierce battle that continuously rages, even in our days, between the two world-conceptions can, according to common notions, only be brought to an end through the complete defeat of one of the parties. We have endeavored to show that both these philosophies have common deficiencies, but that each of them possesses an essential part of truth. We cannot deny idealism the merit of having looked far deeper into the nature of things and phenomena. While admitting this we cannot be blind to the fact that this philosophy has left at least one fact of nearly overwhelming importance totally unexplained. If it be true that the soul is the essential part of man and is that to which alone immortality is granted, how then shall we account for the fact that the soul’s evolution, properly the one principal object of man, must stand aside for the body to such an extent that the body utilizes, if not all yet at least the largest part of man’s time and energy? To materialism this reply is given, but then again this philosophy has been unable to answer all those questions which idealism alone could satisfactorily explain.
Now at last we understand the reason for these contradictions. The two world-conceptions suffer the same essential deficiency of having overlooked the fact that the body contains a spiritual organism, of the same importance to man’s future life as to his present. In the theory here proposed materialism in a purified form melts into idealism, which latter thus receives the supplement it hitherto has lacked as a universal, satisfactory world-explanation. We have barely outlined this new, organic idealism and have treated it somewhat more extensively only with reference to death and resurrection. But also on this point our work, as all human effort, is only piecemeal labor. As soon as we have advanced one step, other entirely new questions arise. We already discern boundless expanses of problems in the same direction and shall here point out one example. The organic changes, characterizing old age and preceding the so-called natural death, are comparatively well studied and known. But in spite of this, natural science is unable to tell us the underlying cause in the inner nature of the organism, and it is even admitted that we know no reason why the process should not follow an entirely opposite course. From our point of view man has an individual content larger than that included in the successive moments of time, and death should normally enter with the translation of the last cell-generation. It is true that as civilization advances man’s lifetime is constantly increasing, so that we may look forward to a time when most men will die a natural death. But if we meet a premature death, as is now generally the case, can this, and other disturbing interruptions in the natural process, afterwards be repaired? Let us hope that this is possible, but a decisive answer we cannot give. Our conviction is that God does not interfere to help man either in the transition itself or in a future life in any other way than he does here in time. Certainly the clerical orthodoxy has rightly understood the divine guidance in its teaching of God’s general providence, comprising the whole creation, His special providence in regard to mankind, and His most particular providence, limited to the faithful; that is, to those that let themselves be governed by the divine will. Critical experience has never discovered any exterior, occasional interference, which moreover is utterly impossible. God is present and active in the eternal and unchangeable laws of nature and spirit. Sin and punishment, virtue and reward, are connected with each other as reason and conclusion, cause and effect. Man is himself the cause of his acts and they bring their inevitable consequences. The man therefore who consciously and purposely distorts his own natural evolution or that of others stands before himself and before his fellow men burdened with a terrible responsibility.