I here make no concessions whatever to the skeptic. He shall be treated as so far behind the times that he can safely be ignored.

But when it comes to the problem of the nature of a future life the question is very different. We may have evidence that personal consciousness survives and yet have very inadequate evidence regarding to the conditions under which it continues its existence. What we know of its bodily associations does not afford any clear indication of what it shall be apart from them. We have to assume that, if consciousness survives at all, it may do so in at least three possible conditions. (1) As a function of an “astral" or Pauline spiritual body, the Epicurean "ethereal" organism. (2) As a functional stream in the Absolute, as it may be now supposed to be in this life. (3) As a functional stream in connection with some point of force or atom. Any one of these is conceivable, and when it is freed from the body, we must seek evidence of which it is. Very few people, however, will understand any of these conceptions, unless they are acquainted with the philosophic points of view which they summarize. The first is the Pantheistic or monistic, the second the Epicurean, Christian, and Theosophic, and the third the Cartesian as developed in the philosophy of Leibnitz and Boscovitch. Now it would take too much space to discuss these systems here and they would either be unintelligible to the layman when discussed, or would have no interest to him, if intelligible, since it is something else that he seeks than summarized conditions of survival.

The proper way to clear up the matter is to ascertain what people expect or want in the case and then see if their view is rational. The philosopher and the layman are usually wide apart and the latter has no understanding of the former, while the former, if he understands the latter, has little patience with him. But whatever the layman may wish or think, and

whether it be right or wrong, he determines the way the problem has to be discussed.

To the uneducated mind the very phrases "future world,” “life after death," "immortality" are likely to convey a misconception of the problem. "World," "life," and any term referring to existence are construable to most people only in terms of normal experience and that is sensation. Few have done enough thinking to make themselves independent of sensory ideas in what they believe of things either here or hereafter. A "world" is a physical thing perceived by the senses, and even if we go so far as to represent it as immaterial, we are perpetually imagining it in the forms of sense perception. Life is appreciable as a place for the enjoyment of sensation, and any attempt to represent its conditions as non-sensory is to take all its attractions from us. Heaven, for the majority of the race, is a world of unimpeded and insatiable sensation. To say that a future life has no resemblance to this life and that it is an abstract stream of consciousness is to rob it of all its real interest, and the average man would consider such an existence, perhaps, as the worst possible sort of hell. We are so accustomed to think in terms of our sense experience and to measure all the joys and pains of existence by sensations, that we can hardly imagine any form of existence that would be either intelligible or pleasurable to us, unless it represented what we know and appreciate.

The layman has not been accustomed to analyze his ordinary experience into sensations and inner consciousness. Sensation is the central point of interest, or at least the one fact by which he endeavors to represent what he means by a world, especially when he has to talk about it. States of consciousness going on in one's head and not representable by sensations will have to be found and appreciated by each man himself. But sensations can be talked about and easily made

intelligible. Hence all language about a future life for those who have done no philosophic thinking conveys ideas that they interpret in terms of their sensory life. They expect the future existence to be like this; not necessarily like it in its pains and struggles, but like it in its appearance, as they construe it to the imagination, and with unlimited sources of happiness, and this usually without work. An examination of all the popular religions and their conceptions of the after life will show how they clothed it in sensuous imagery. They were only reflecting the more or less necessary habits of mind in which we all live. We may use the term "spiritual” all we like, the majority of mankind, when it refers to a future life, conceive it as a place which repeats the conceptions of the earthly life in all its essential aspects except what they would call the physical. The pearly gates and golden streets of Revelation illustrate this. That is, they think of it as a world of light and form and as a complete replica of the physical world. They take Milton and Dante realistically. When they use the term for any mental experience, they mean to exclude sensation from it, and most probably refer to what the psychologist would classify as the emotions, the elations of the human mind in which they feel happiest. I usually find these to represent the idea of the spiritual so far as it is an earthly experience. The distinction is that between the sensations and the emotions. But in application to another life it is conceived as a place duplicating at least the forms of the present existence.

Now it is not my purpose in thus stating the matter to controvert it nor to approve of it. I am only calling attention to the limitations under which most people think in this subject. The most philosophical are not wholly exempt from them. They cannot talk about anything to others except in terms of sensory symbols. An advanced civilization may have refined them, but

each individual in the course of his education must pass through the process of refining these conceptions and a slow process it is. All our common and clear knowledge is expressible only in sensory imagery. We can indicate the meaning of terms in the last analysis only by pointing to the physical objects which they denote, and if our experiences associated with them are also common we may seize the connected meaning of things in that way. An object may become a symbol of a feeling and so language may grow to express nonsensuous mental states to those who have passed through the experience of them and their association with the sensory object. Thus to the savage, religion may be only fear of his fetish or the supposed deity in it. The word would have no other meaning for him. But if he advanced to the highest stage of civilization, it might mean a more refined mental attitude and would not be directed to a physical object at all, but to some supersensible reality which he would not fear but reverence. The term would thus denote an experience which the savage might not have, but which the civilized man would understand from its association with the whole group of ideas that have grown up in connection with all the problems of philosophy and theology. It thus becomes, not the sensuous objects that he has in mind when he speaks and thinks of the spiritual, but the states of mind which his development has associated with them, though he may still use the same old words for denominating them.

The antagonism between the reflective and the unreflective mind is this. The reflective mind tries to think of things as having some sort of existence apart from the way sensation represents them. The unreflective mind accepts his sensations as correctly reporting the nature of things. The reflective mind, for example, when it looks at a lamp thinks that the sensation is a subjective product of his own mind reacting against

undulations of light which have no resemblance to the lamp, and hence that he does not really see the lamp itself or "in itself," to employ a familiar phrase of philosophers. He supposes, or at least thinks he supposes, that the real lamp is different from its appearance and that the mind is the important factor in making that appearance. The object or lamp is not known beyond that apparition, to use a term that helps to distinguish between appearance and reality.

On the other hand, the unreflective mind draws no such distinctions. It assumes that we see things as they are. The lamp is seen and the sensation or mind has nothing to do with making it what it is or appears to be. It does not have to think the lamp away, so to speak, in order to understand the situation. It does not even reckon with sensation. It becomes a reflective mind the moment that it admits that there is a sensation as a means of knowing the lamp. It may not even suppose there is a sensation or any peculiar process for knowing that the lamp is there. It is the object that interests it and this is seen as it is. A distinction between the lamp and the appearance is not drawn and in fact the "appearance" is not recognized as a factor in the problem. The situation is not analyzed by it into separate elements; namely, the lamp, undulations of light, impression on the retina, molecular action in the nerves transmitted to brain centers, reaction at these centers, sensation, perception, judgment, etc. These are the products of the reflective mind and they give rise to the idea that the object "in itself" is not seen, but that the mind produces the appearance and that the lamp per se is not known or perceived. We may have to infer something there as a cause to account for the mind's reaction, but it is not seen as it is.

Now this opposition between the reflective and the unreflective mind has never been wholly set aside. One