The Library of Health.

IN THREE VOLUMES.

By CHARLES BRODIE PATTERSON.

A series of essays in popular form on Advanced Thought subjects, giving special attention to questions bearing upon individual happiness, harmony, and health. Excellent books for beginners in the New Metaphysics.

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“Ages may roll on, our very dust be dissolved, the earth shriveled like a scroll; but round and round the circle of eternity rolls the wheel of lifeimperishable, unceasing. And as the earth from the sun, so immortality drinks happiness from virtue, which is the smile upon the face of God."Bulwer.

However lost at times in the depths of skepticism and negation, the feeling of immortality never wholly at any time, or in any aspect, ceases to stir in the innermost recesses of the human heart. It may have disappeared from the outer consciousness, and man may fiercely deny any belief and interest in his own immortality; nevertheless, the seed for its growth is hid in his bosom, and will sprout whenever opportunities permit. Yet it may rest inactive for ages and leave whole generations apparently untouched by its genius. Its presence or absence in the active consciousness of man, however, forms an index to the depth of his philosophy. Whenever the soul directs its energies toward the inner, the deeper processes of human nature, the feeling of immortality rises into activity, while if directed toward mere temporal pursuits and gratifications, however refined, this feeling will gradually be found to withdraw from the active sphere of consciousness, followed by its subsequent disappearance into the inner depths of being. The real and enduring work of human intelligence is not to be measured in terms of intellectual adroitness or speculative daring,-be it in

art, science, or philosophy,—but in the moral virility of character in the outer, and depth of feeling in the inner, life; hence the seeming anomaly of a people so highly intellectual and mentally vigorous as the Greeks and Romans, yet being without any firm conviction concerning an after-life.

The towering exceptions of one or two Grecian philosophers, who in their discourses and writings really gave evidence of a pronounced faith in an immortal soul, rather tend to prove than to disprove the truth of this statement. "There is only one thing that men look upon as incredible," says Cebes to Socrates, in Plato's famous dialogue on the "Immortality of the Soul," "viz., what you advanced of the soul. For almost everybody fancies that when the soul parts from the body it is no more; it dies along with it; in the very minute of parting it vanishes like a vapor, or smoke, which flies off and disperses, and has no existence." This would indicate the general state of belief of the Greeks at the time of Plato, and faith in the inner realities of life did certainly not gain in strength in afterdays. A friend of Cicero who had studied Plato testifies to the unfamiliarity of the Roman mind with the idea of immortality by telling of his inability to turn the Platonic view into conviction and belief: "As long as I hold his discourse in my hand I believe in his argument, but the moment I lay the volume aside the belief parts with it."

The Grecian philosophy, notwithstanding its dazzling excursions in the realm of thought and imagination, its refinements in culture and ethics, and its ideality and inventive genius in art, did not, with one or two exceptions, pass beyond the limits of the experimental and speculative. As a system of metaphysics, the Grecian philosophy dealt more with the spectacular and descriptive phases of life than with the experiences accruing from living and becoming it. The great difference between the true mystic and the metaphysician of the schools consists in this-that the former lives the life while the latter merely describes it; the former derives his light from noumenal

perceiving (intuition), the latter from speculations based on observations through sense-perception; the former is what he relates, the latter observes what he describes; the former is a seer, the latter is a philosopher.

Gauged largely by phenomena, the ancients focused their whole soul-force on the objective plane, which they made resemble a "heaven" as much as possible. Olympus was a materialized heaven; the gods performed the rôles of more or less accomplished men and women-not without superb virtues nor debasing weaknesses. Failing to find the subjective or soul side of human nature, the knowledge and practical realization of which give rise to the mystic, the philosophies of Greece and Rome as a whole had no positive views of human life and destiny. For certainty and faith can only arise from actual experience, and faith in the immortality of the soul is possible only to him that realizes himself as a soul, and in the possession of qualities the very nature and scope of which make his individual immortality a necessity.

What, again, might have been taught in the ancient mysteries on the subject of immortality cannot be considered as an element of their popular philosophy. In the writings and discourses of the philosophers, immortality was always treated vaguely and with uncertainty. Epictetus exhorts his disciples to cultivate their souls for temporal, not for eternal, purposes. The grandest thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor-philosopher, form an embellishment to the majesty of death, while ignoring an after-life, and agree with Socrates "that death, so far from being terrible to true philosophers—it is their whole business to die." The lucidity of this purplerobed thinker turns into uncertainty and vagueness as to what may follow after the soul has passed the portal of death.

Cicero, Plinius, Scipio, Seneca, Lucianos, and others whom we are taught to love and admire, are equally silent or uncertain about the mystic "beyond." The maxims contained in their philosophy were stamped by an invincible virtue in life

and a stoical indifference in death. But beyond death they did not venture to extend their inquiries. "Immortality," said Lucianos, "is for the gods, not for men;" and the general hopelessness of the ancients' view of an after-life has had no more striking and melancholic expression than in the conception of an ill-fated Niobe, vainly trying to shield her children from the invisible, though death-dealing, arrows of Apollo.

What gave to the Christian faith its inner force and conquering power would more likely be found in its firm, positive declaration of a belief in the immortality of the soul than in any of its other doctrines. For the feeling of immortality is native to the soul, though for a time it may remain slumbering and silent-smothered by the grosser interests of existence. A semi-conscious wish-a half-realized longing for a continuation of life after death-lingers over most of the thoughts and maxims of antiquity. The people wished for certainty and faith, not mere speculations, and when the convultionists of early Christianity, with a resistless fervor of boundless conviction and faith, announced that immortality was a fact in human nature, the great exodus from Olympus began. The barbarism of Christian enthusiasm conquered the refinements of ancient philosophy just by virtue of this faith. A fresh impulse was thus imparted to the world; a new hope was bequeathed to spiritually devitalized minds, and the dazzling certainty of a continuation of existence after death gave to individual life a new meaning, a new inducement to live-and to live in virtue.

But the Christian interpretation of immortality, as given by the fathers of the early Church, did not unfold the real, inner sense and meaning of the doctrine. The promises held out by these interpreters could not possibly be fulfilled. They postulated eternal felicities beyond the clouds, but did not accord the individual sufficient time to earn them. To be able not only to enjoy, but even to endure, such an immortality as the one promised-a life of unceasing altruism and virtue, un