On such a view the riddle of the universe becomes a riddle without a meaning.  Why, then, are we any more called upon to throw away our belief in the permanence of the spiritual element in Man than we are called upon to throw away our belief in the constancy of Nature?  When questioned as to the ground of our irresistible belief that like causes must always be followed by like effects, Mr. Mill’s answer was that it is the result of an induction coextensive with the whole of our experience; Mr. Spencer’s answer was that it is a postulate which we make in every act of experience;[20] but the authors of the “Unseen Universe,” slightly varying the form of statement, called it a supreme act of faith,—­the expression of a trust in God, that He will not “put us to permanent intellectual confusion.”  Now the more thoroughly we comprehend that process of evolution by which things have come to be what they are, the more we are likely to feel that to deny the everlasting persistence of the spiritual element in Man is to rob the whole process of its meaning.  It goes far toward putting us to permanent intellectual confusion, and I do not see that any one has as yet alleged, or is ever likely to allege, a sufficient reason for our accepting so dire an alternative.

For my own part, therefore, I believe in the immortality of the soul, not in the sense in which I accept the demonstrable truths of science, but as a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God’s work.  Such a belief, relating to regions quite inaccessible to experience, cannot of course be clothed in terms of definite and tangible meaning.  For the experience which alone can give us such terms we must await that solemn day which is to overtake us all.  The belief can be most quickly defined by its negation, as the refusal to believe that this world is all.  The materialist holds that when you have described the whole universe of phenomena of which we can become cognizant under the conditions of the present life, then the whole story is told.  It seems to me, on the contrary, that the whole story is not thus told.  I feel the omnipresence of mystery in such wise as to make it far easier for me to adopt the view of Euripides, that what we call death may be but the dawning of true knowledge and of true life.  The greatest philosopher of modern times, the master and teacher of all who shall study the process of evolution for many a day to come, holds that the conscious soul is not the product of a collocation of material particles, but is in the deepest sense a divine effluence.  According to Mr. Spencer, the divine energy which is manifested throughout the knowable universe is the same energy that wells up in us as consciousness.  Speaking for myself, I can see no insuperable difficulty in the notion that at some period in the evolution of Humanity this divine spark may have acquired sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the wreck of material forms and endure forever.  Such a crowning wonder seems to me no more than the fit climax to a creative work that has been ineffably beautiful and marvellous in all its myriad stages.