fact of survival. This technical question of accuracy or inaccuracy of Kant's view aside, however, it is certain that the proof of survival would establish a complete consonance between the instincts affecting our ideals and conduct, and the facts of nature. The value of personality as we view it in ethical and social life would be vindicated by scientific evidence and the melancholy outlook which death offers to the materialist would be changed into a rainbow of promise, the dawn of another morning.

It is thus apparent that immortality has ethical implications when other theories of consciousness and its destiny have none. All theories either directly or indirectly favoring materialism or its equivalent, whether called idealism or not, do not satisfy ethical postulates in regard to the values placed upon personality or the ethical impulses in our very conceptions of morality as it requires the future for the realization of its ideals. Man will always place ethics above everything else. Knowledge and art have their value, their utilitarian meaning, determined by their relation to the ends which ethics serve. Any theory which does not imply or conserve these will have difficulty in vindicating itself at the bar of intelligence.

Materialism can sustain no ethics beyond present satisfaction, and if our highest ideals are found in the greater deeps of internal personality, while materialism offers no time for their realization, the belief in survival reconciles the imperative of conscience with the limitations under which the fulfilment of it can be attained in this life. Survival gives us time where materialism does not, and the conflict between duty and our limited possibilities here is fully satisfied in the continuance of our chances for achievement.

I have said immortality is a pivotal belief; that is, supporting in some way a number of other beliefs or maxims of life and conduct. Besides an influence on

the individual life it also has a great significance for social ethics. The interest in it may be largely an egoistic one. It is not always so, for I often meet with those who care little for it for themselves, but they passionately desire it for their friends or those they love. It thus becomes an altruistic instinct. But it probably affects the majority of the race as an egoistic instinct connected with the same general impulse of self-preservation and the prolongation of consciousness. Hence the greater interest of men and women in survival than in the other phenomena of psychic research.

The mysteries of nature evoke less interest than the possibility that life looks into eternity. Assure men of this, and they will listen to its gospel. But its ethical implications do not stop with individual interest. Survival establishes that view of personality which enables us to concentrate emphasis upon the rights of others in the struggle for existence. On the materialistic theory which has only matter and force to determine its ideals personality independent of sense has no existence or value, and the individual would be tempted to sacrifice all other personality to his own. But once establish the fact that personality is permanent and we have the eternal value of our neighbor fixed upon as secure a basis as our own. We may have a center of social interest in others, as well as a position which offers larger hopes to the process of evolution. Man need not stop with the pursuit of self-interest, but will find his salvation in the social affections, precisely as taught in primitive Christianity, and as is more uniformly insisted on in spiritistic communications than any other fact. The contradictions about the nature of the next life are numerous enough to make one pause in accepting anything about it. But there is no variation on the theme of social service and the value of altruistic interests and conduct. The permanence of

personality protects this ideal and offers a stable basis for all social ethics. But it does so, not because of any direct indication of this effect, but because it serves as a standard of value for every individual and enables the ethical teacher to enforce maxims of conduct which would be less effective without survival than with it. All progress by education and reasoning depends upon premises that can force a proper conclusion. The educational influences of the world can do nothing without resorting to reason or discipline. Reason is an appeal to a man's intellect; discipline appeals to his will. Education by reason depends on argument; education by discipline depends on restraints or punishment. Where there is no universal recognition of ethical postulates whatever morality we get-and this is objective morality-depends on the force which the ruler can apply to extort obedience to the law. But where each man recognizes the moral law restraint and discipline may be abolished. In the one system power is the authority and in the other it is reason. latter represents the minimum of social friction.

The

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Now the establishment of the value of personality in the scheme of nature will offer the rational man a leverage on social instincts, if not to create them, certainly to encourage their proper exercise and to protect them by showing that they are a part of the scheme aiming at the permanence of the individual and the eternal place they have in the evolution of man. is not that we can directly infer the system of social ethics from survival or the permanence of personality, but that we can more easily connect this ethics with a stable basis and reinforce them by the fact of that permanence. The brotherhood of man will have a new sanction, one of the sanctions it received in its earlier association in Christianity with the immortality of the soul. Its natural synthesis is that association.

The next matter of interest is the relation of a

future life to the problem of Theism. The present writer thinks that Theism cannot have a basis of any importance without first proving survival after death. The usual course of theologians is to proceed in the reverse order. They try to prove the existence of God and then argue regressively to survival from his character. But I regard this procedure as unfounded and such a change of venue as to create rather than to lay skepticism. Let me make this clear.

It is most interesting to remark that primitive Christianity had no foundation whatever in a philosophy or a theology. The existence of God was not made the logical basis of survival. The New Testament writers did not argue from the intelligence and goodness of God to immortality, but asserted the latter on the ground of certain alleged facts embodied in the story of the resurrection and other psychic experiences. The New Testament is one record of psychic experiences including spiritual healing. Christ taught no system of philosophic theism. He probably emphasized immortality in his teaching much less than ethics. If what was said about it before the story of the resurrection was interpolated by the apostles and disciples, he made as little of it until the end of his life as Confucius. But whether this possibility be true or not, it is certain that belief in the existence of God was not made the condition of believing in survival after death. The ground for this latter belief was a scientific one; namely, an appeal to facts, real or alleged, and theism crept into the system after the age of "miracles" had disappeared and they found a need to protect the doctrine by a comprehensive scheme of the cosmos. When they could not rely any longer on psychic phenomena, they constructed a philosophy which required the existence of a Divine intelligence to explain the cosmos. They applied finally the argument from design to prove the existence of God and then reasoned regressively

to the conclusion that this Divine intelligence would preserve its creatures.

But the circumstance that made this method precarious was the disparity between the conception of God which they held and the evidence for him as defined. God had to be a being of infinite intelligence and power and character to serve as a basis of either certitude or hope about the spiritual outcome for man. But the actual facts of nature gave no assured evidence of this character. All that nature manifested was an interest in organic beings, so far as normal and scientific experience went. The intelligence revealed in such beings was decidely finite and the character of this divine being, if reflected in the frightfully ugly spectacle of nature, offered no encouraging prospect for benevolence. Nature seemed a shambles, and one hesitated to worship the author of such a system. There was no definite assurance in normal experience that personality survived; and unless it did survive, the Divine seemed to be a mockery. There was no superficial evidence that this Divine existed. Nature did not reflect the ideals of theism.

But if it could be proved that nature as a fact actually preserved personality, this showed an order superior to the creation of organic life, and its meaning had to be found in some supersensible or transcendental existence. Find that personality is the permanent fact of human existence and the circumstance will offer a retrogressive argument as to the character of the basis of nature. If it actually sustains what the supposed rationality of the world meant, it would be natural to suppose that this continuity of personal consciousness was some evidence of the tendency of things and reflecting the nature of the process which brought us hither. Theism thus becomes an inference or consequence of immortality rather than immortality a deductive inference from the idea of God.