Chapter XIV: The Persistence of Energy

Is it not reassuring to know that we cannot get out of the universe--that whatever is real about us cannot be destroyed, but can only suffer change? All the elements that enter into my body must persist; they always have persisted through all the vicissitudes of astronomic and geologic time. We are as sure of that as we are sure of anything, and we are sure that they will continue in some form to exist. We believe it without proof. Our scientific faith carries us over this gulf--our faith in the oneness and integrity of the universe. Is there anything real, in the same sense, in what we call our minds or souls? Huxley was convinced that consciousness was as real as matter and energy, and must persist like them--persist in other persons who follow us; but how about our individual selves? And how about consciousness when the race of man becomes extinct? We can only take refuge in the thought that consciousness will dawn and continue in other worlds through all time, or rather endless time, since the all of a thing implies limits. Equally to make consciousness coeval with matter and energy, we must think of it as having existed in other worlds throughout an endless and beginningless past. But my consciousness and your consciousness are bound up with certain combinations of matter which we know are unstable--in fact, are the result, in a sense, of their instability, their ceaseless change.

In the final change, which we call death, what happens to consciousness? When we try to think of it in terms of our actual experience with tangible bodies, we think of it as gone out, non-existent, as truly so as is the flame of the candle when we blow it out, or as is the star form of the snowflake when it is melted. Does it help us any to think of the soul, or consciousness, in terms of the imponderable bodies--light, electricity, radio-activity? Do all these wireless messages that go forth into the air, go on forever? Do these impulses reach the farthest stars, and still persist? Do our thoughts persist upon the ether? Here, in this room, here in this air that you may inclose with your two hands, are vibrating wireless messages from far and near, though we are not able to detect them. Here also the ether may be tremulous with the thoughts of our friends on the other side of the globe, yes, and with the thoughts of our friends who have ceased to live, as we know life. The ether of space may still be vibrating with the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle, of Moses and Solomon.

Do we impress ourselves momentarily upon the ether around us, and is this what the mediums and the clairvoyants recover? Is the persistence of our thoughts upon the ether the secret of the mind-reader’s art, and of all the marvelous things disclosed by psychic research? Is this the only immortality, the immortality of the endless persistence of vibrations from our brains? Or must we think of our personalities as disembodied and drifting about as separate entities in the great Nowhere?

Though a dreamer and an idealist, I am only truly interested in a natural explanation of things--an explanation that is in harmony with our experiences in this world. The so-called supernatural explanation does not interest me at all. We cannot grasp it and bring it to the test of reason and experience. It is like a bridge with one or more spans missing--only faith can carry us over, and faith that has nothing to stand upon cannot really carry us over. It travels in a circle, and leaves us where it found us.

Energy is certainly one of the realities of the cosmos, though we may not be able to form a concept of it as we do of matter. We cannot visualize it. We know it only through its effects upon tangible bodies. Why may there not be a principle of life or vitality as real as is energy--another form of energy which we can know only through its effects upon matter; inseparably bound up with matter as energy is; not with all matter, but with a limited amount of matter, as is magnetism--a peculiar form of force or energy, dependent for its manifestations upon well-defined conditions and reaching its highest manifestations in the mind or consciousness of man. Spirit, as we name it, is only a word which stands for no verifiable reality--something separable from matter and independent of it. What victims we are of words! When we get a name for a thing we are persuaded the thing exists. The vital process is inseparable from the physical processes; it supplements or controls them, but is more than they are. Life is not a spirit, but a form of energy potential in matter, and developed and active when the conditions are right. A living body is moved by a new force just as truly as a piece of magnetized steel is moved by a new force, or as truly as a new force streams through the telegraph-wires--a transformation of other forces, and behaving in a new way, and producing new results. There is nothing new under the sun; all are made of one stuff; but there are endless transformations and permutations of this one stuff, and one of them is the phenomenon of life, or vitality.

Electricity is not matter, but it is the most unmistakable and ubiquitous form of energy known to us. The human mind is a phenomenon of matter; how related to the electro-magnetic world we know not, but undoubtedly in some way bound up with it.

To discuss the soul or attempt to interpret it in terms of these mundane forces will, of course, offend the so-called spiritualists. So long have we been taught to look upon the soul as belonging to another world, another order of things from that of the body. Whitman says that soul and body are one, and leaves his puzzled reader to solve the riddle as best he can. Heaven and earth are one in the same sense--there is nothing alien or irreconcilable between them. The flower and its stalk, the perfume and the root, are one in the same sense. The mind resides in the gray matter of the brain, and depends upon the food we eat as truly as does the body.

When we discuss these questions in terms of our religious training we reach far different conclusions, or, rather, we start with far different conclusions; but how can we relate these conclusions to the concrete facts as we know them?

There is enough that is verifiable in clairvoyance and mind-reading and mental healing to convince us that we are immersed in a world of subtle forces that ordinarily we wot not of; that in some way a process of give and take between us and these things is constantly going on, and that our relation to them is at least one form or suggestion of our immortality. We are a part of the wave of energy that sweeps through the cosmos, as truly as the drops of the sea hold and convey the tidal impulse. We know, or think we know, the sources of this tidal impulse, but the attraction between earth and moon and sun is reciprocal--a give-and-take process--and is only a phase of the sum total (if the Infinite can be said to have a sum total) of the energy of the cosmos.

The magnet and magnetism are one. If you melt or pulverize the magnet, you dissipate, but do not destroy the magnetism. The clouds come and go; now we see them, and then there is only blue sky where they were. Change, but not destruction. When the thunder-cloud disperses, where are its terrible bolts? Withdrawn, probably, or redistributed into the inmost recesses of matter or of the ether. The energy of the human brain and body cannot be destroyed by death, only changed. If consciousness is a force, then it, too, must persist. It seems, in some way, the equivalent of the force of the body, at least one of its phenomena. But is it anything more than the analogue of the light which the electric spark emits, and which is light only to the eye? Consciousness is such only to itself; it cannot be seen or felt or known by other consciousnesses. What we know about the consciousnesses of others, we know through our own.

In the presence of the death of our friends no doubt this is a cheerless and depressing kind of philosophy, but in the pursuit of truth, if we are sincere, we do not seek to administer to, or to warm and cheer our human affections. Our seriousness will be measured by the extent to which we put all these things behind us. Heroic self-denial finds a field here as well as in the struggles of life. We do not want to cheer ourselves with illusions, no matter how welcome they are. “All’s right with the world.” The laws of life and death are as they should be. The laws of matter and force are as they should be; and if death ends my consciousness, still is death good. I have had life on those terms, and somewhere, somehow, the course of nature is justified. I shall not be imprisoned in that grave where you are to bury my body. I shall be diffused in great Nature, in the soil, in the air, in the sunshine, in the hearts of those who love me, in all the living and flowing currents of the world, though I may never again in my entirety be embodied in a single human being. My elements and my forces go back into the original sources out of which they came, and these sources are perennial in this vast, wonderful, divine cosmos.

XIV

SOUNDINGS