All this, I think, supports the notion that whatever, if anything, is in store for us beyond this life, it would be a self-destructive scheme of things (or Scheme of Things, if you prefer) that would throw the future life into farther competition with our interests here, at least before we are farther evolved here.  Looking at history by and large, we children have not generally been trusted with edge tools until we had grown to some sort of capacity to handle them.  If the Mesopotamians or Egyptians or Greeks or Romans had had gunpowder, it looks as if they would have blown most of themselves and each other out of existence, and the rest back into primitive savagery, and stayed there until the use of gunpowder became one of the lost arts.  But the new knowledge of evolution has given the modern world a new intellectual interest; and the new altruism, a new moral one.  The reasons for doing one’s best in this life, and doing it actively, are so much stronger and clearer than they were when so many good people could fall into asceticism and other-worldliness, that perhaps we are now fit to be trusted with proofs of an after life.  It is very suggestive that these apparent proofs came contemporaneously with the new knowledge tending to make them safe; and equally suggestive that it is when we have begun to suffer from certain breakdowns in religion, that we have been provided with new material for bracing it up.

At the opposite extreme, it also is suggestive that these new indications that our present life is a petty thing beside a future one, have come just when modern science has so increased our control over material nature that we are in peculiar danger of having our interest in higher things buried beneath material interests, and enervated by over-indulgence in material delights.

If it be true that, roughly speaking, we are not entrusted with dangerous things before we are evolved to the point where we can keep their danger within bounds, the fact that we have not until very lately, if yet, been entrusted with any verification of the dream of the survival of bodily death, would seem to confer upon the spiritistic interpretation of the recent apparent verifications, a pragmatic sanction—­an accidental embryo pun over which the historic student is welcome to a smile, and which, since the preceding clause was written, I have seen used in all seriousness by Professor Giddings.  Conclusive or not, that “sanction” is certainly an addition to the arguments that existed before, including the general argument from evolution.  And, so far as the phenomena go to establish the spiritistic hypothesis, surely they are not to be lightly regarded because as yet they do not establish it more conclusively.

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When during the last century science bowled down the old supports of the belief in immortality, there grew up a tendency to regard that belief as an evidence of ignorance, narrowness, and incapacity to face the music.  May not disregard of the possible new supports be rapidly becoming an evidence of the same characteristics?