“What, then, is produced from death?” inquired Socrates of Cebes. “Life,” was the reply. . . . “Can the soul, since it is immortal, be anything else than imperishable The “seed cannot develop unless it is in part consumed,” says Prof. Lecomte; “it is not quickened unless it die,” says St. Paul.
A flower blossoms; then withers and dies. It leaves a fragrance behind, which, long after its delicate petals are but a little dust, still lingers in the air. Our material sense may not be cognizant of it, but it nevertheless exists. Let a note be struck on an instrument, and the faintest sound produces an eternal echo. A disturbance is created on the invisible waves of the shoreless ocean of space, and the vibration is never wholly lost. Its energy being once carried from the world of matter into the immaterial world will live for ever. And man, we are asked to believe, man, the living, thinking, reasoning entity, the indwelling deity of our nature’s crowning masterpiece, will evacuate his casket and be no more! Would the principle of continuity which exists even for the so-called inorganic matter, for a floating atom, be denied to the spirit, whose attributes are consciousness, memory, mind, LOVE! Really, the very idea is preposterous. The more we think and the more we learn, the more difficult it becomes for us to account for the atheism of the scientist. We may readily understand that a man ignorant of the laws of nature, unlearned in either chemistry or physics, may be fatally drawn into materialism through his very ignorance; his incapacity of
Page 115
understanding the philosophy of the exact sciences, or drawing any inference by analogy from the visible to the invisible. A natural-born metaphysician, an ignorant dreamer, may awake abruptly and say to himself: “I dreamed it; I have no tangible proof of that which I imagined; it is all illusion,” etc. But for a man of science, acquainted with the characteristics of the universal energy, to maintain that life is merely a phenomenon of matter, a species of energy, amounts simply to a confession of his own incapability of analyzing and properly understanding the alpha and the omega even of that — matter.
Sincere skepticism as to the immortality of man’s soul is a malady; a malformation of the physical brain, and has existed in every age. As there are infants born with a caul upon their heads, so there are men who are incapable to their last hour of ridding themselves of that kind of caul evidently enveloping their organs of spirituality. But it is quite another feeling which makes them reject the possibility of spiritual and magical phenomena. The true name for that feeling is — vanity. “We can neither produce nor explain it — hence, it does not exist, and moreover, could never have existed.” Such is the irrefutable argument of our present-day philosophers. Some thirty years ago, E. Salverte startled the world of the “credulous” by his work, The Philosophy of Magic. The book claimed to unveil the whole of the miracles of the Bible as well as those of the Pagan sanctuaries. Its resume ran thus: Long ages of observation; a great knowledge (for those days of ignorance) of natural sciences and philosophy; imposture; legerdemain; optics; phantasmagoria; exaggeration. Final and logical conclusion: Thaumaturgists, prophets, magicians, rascals, and knaves; the rest of the world, fools.
Among many other conclusive proofs, the reader can find him offering the following: “The enthusiastic disciples of Iamblichus affirmed that when he prayed, he was raised to the height of ten cubits from the ground; and dupes to the same metaphor, although Christians, have had the simplicity to attribute a similar miracle to St. Clare, and St. Francis of Assisi.”
Hundreds of travellers claimed to have seen fakirs produce the same phenomena, and they were all thought either liars or hallucinated. But it was but yesterday that the same phenomenon was witnessed and endorsed by a well-known scientist; it was produced under test conditions; declared by Mr. Crookes to be genuine, and to be beyond the possibility of an illusion or a trick. And so was it manifested many a time before and attested by numerous witnesses, though the latter are now invariably disbelieved.
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
