Is This Life the “Be-all and End-all?”
To answer that question, or to give my views on the subject as to whether man lives after death or is extinguished as a living being by death, would ordinarily involve a long preliminary discourse; but I think I can give you my views, such as they are, in a few words. Life is sensation, sensibility, the power of feeling. Without sensation there is no life. We feel with our nerves; we see with our eyes; we hear with our ears. Without nerves there would be no feeling, without eyes no seeing, without ears no hearing. These senses, therefore, of feeling, seeing, hearing, exist in combination with certain forms of matter, and cannot exist without such combination. So the mind exists in combination with the matter, brain. Without the brain there can be no mental phenomena, no thinking, no perceiving. These things are palpable; they are truths which may not be disputed. Therefore, if death destroys our nerves, it destroys our power of feeling; if it destroys our eyes, it destroys our power of seeing; if it destroys our ears, it destroys our power of hearing; if it destroys our brain, it destroys our power of thinking and perceiving. The man lies down, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, knowing nothing; he is a corpse. Separated from the brain, the mind cannot act, cannot think, cannot conceive; therefore, if it exists at all, it is the same as if it were dead. In that condition, the mind can no more think or perceive than the dust into which the decomposed nerves have fallen can feel. What follows then? That the man has come to an end, entirely; he is extinguished.—Selected.
So you must equally bear with the comparatively small number of scientists who, within the last three hundred years, have worked out the hypothesis that the soul is not matter, substance, or entity, at all, but simply the continuous action or process of the nervous systems of animals, and especially of the brain of man, in answer to their environment. In a word, the life, soul, spirit, mind, thought, feeling, and consciousness are but varying tones of the music which our nervous systems give out when the world plays upon them—much as the piano answers to the touch of our hands. The music was not in, nor the property of the piano, nor of the hand, but it arises and exists only by reason of the playing-contact of the two. Thus the life or soul is not a property of brain-matter, or of our nerves, nor of the world or its impinging force; but when those world forces by touch, heat, light, electricity and foods do reach so as to act upon the nerves and brain, then comes their reaction, and we call that reaction feeling, life, soul, thought, reason, etc., through all of the varying music of consciousness, whether exhibited by a child, a savage, a Newton or a Goethe.—Anon.