may entertain a reasonable conviction of my own upon the subject.[16] In the domain of cerebral physiology the question might be debated forever without a result.  The only thing which cerebral physiology tells us, when studied with the aid of molecular physics, is against the materialist, so far as it goes.  It tells us that, during the present life, although thought and feeling are always manifested in connection with a peculiar form of matter, yet by no possibility can thought and feeling be in any sense the products of matter.  Nothing could be more grossly unscientific than the famous remark of Cabanis, that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.  It is not even correct to say that thought goes on in the brain.  What goes on in the brain is an amazingly complex series of molecular movements, with which thought and feeling are in some unknown way correlated, not as effects or as causes, but as concomitants.  So much is clear, but cerebral physiology says nothing about another life.  Indeed, why should it?  The last place in the world to which I should go for information about a state of things in which thought and feeling can exist in the absence of a cerebrum would be cerebral physiology!

The materialistic assumption that there is no such state of things, and that the life of the soul accordingly ends with the life of the body, is perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known to the history of philosophy.  No evidence for it can be alleged beyond the familiar fact that during the present life we know Soul only in its association with Body, and therefore cannot discover disembodied soul without dying ourselves.  This fact must always prevent us from obtaining direct evidence for the belief in the soul’s survival.  But a negative presumption is not created by the absence of proof in cases where, in the nature of things, proof is inaccessible.[17] With his illegitimate hypothesis of annihilation, the materialist transgresses the bounds of experience quite as widely as the poet who sings of the New Jerusalem with its river of life and its streets of gold.  Scientifically speaking, there is not a particle of evidence for either view.

But when we desist from the futile attempt to introduce scientific demonstration into a region which confessedly transcends human experience, and when we consider the question upon broad grounds of moral probability, I have no doubt that men will continue in the future, as in the past, to cherish the faith in a life beyond the grave.  In past times the disbelief in the soul’s immortality has always accompanied that kind of philosophy which, under whatever name, has regarded Humanity as merely a local incident in an endless and aimless series of cosmical changes.  As a general rule, people who have come to take such a view of the position of Man in the universe have ceased to believe in a future life.  On the other hand, he who regards Man as the consummate fruition