The Pedagogical Seminary Volume 6 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898 edition. Excerpt: ... A GENETIC STUDY OF IMMORTALITY. Gone forever Ever? No--for since our dying race began, Ever, ever, and forever was the leading light of man. --Tennyson.--Locksley Hall. 60 years after. Immortality is not a doctrine of the schools, but a faith of humanity, not based upon metaphysic, nor proved by the logic of a given system of thought, but the utterance of an instinct common to the race, which has made itself heard wherever man has advanced from a religion of nature to a religion of Faith. Philosophy, "however, has made it one of her tenets, so that God, soul, and immortality become inseparably intertwined, and since the days of Plato, every writer, who has essayed to construct a cosmological theory, has had to deal with these three concepts, either making God the life and source and the final goal of all created existences, or with a blow of thought killing the Deity and hypothesizing all cosmic existence as mechanical, and man as the supreme automaton. Between these two extremes lie numerous diversities of thought. It is not in the light of philosophy, nor metaphysics, that the problem shall interest us, but from the standpoint of modern science, and especially that of genetic psychology. Since earliest times the mind of man has occupied itself with the immortality of the soul. In regard to this, we can distinguish two movements, one speculative, and one empirical. The first assumes a substrate for the psychical phenomena, and seeks to prove the immortality of the same; in the second, science methods take possession of the psychological investigation, in order to describe the mental phenomena, and lead them back to their simplest forms, and discover their fundamental laws. Psychology and metaphysics have dissolved partnership. The...