This unconscious motive-force, he said,
is inherent in vegetables as well as in animals, and that in fact it
exists, though relatively of very slow and feeble action, in all matter,
the power being an attribute of all molecules, and even of elemental
atoms. He, however, claimed no originality for any of the views which he
expressed.
"To my consciousness," he said, "the conviction of individual
immortality is so clear that, if I were not perfectly aware of the cause
of their doubt or disbelief, I should wonder at intelligent persons
questioning the fact. Like everything else taught by Christ, that we are
immortal is a fact; and it is not in a billion years that we shall live
again under new conditions, but, as He intimated, 'to-morrow.' And I
surmise that we shall not do so in any absurdly physical way, nor yet in
a manner so deeply abstruse that it would require a logician and a
professional physicist, were it explained, to comprehend it. As with all
that God has given us, we shall find the conditions of the next life
very simple. Educated men--nearly all highly educated men, and
particularly educated theologians--when they touch this subject remind
me of the cuttle-fish. There is nothing around them that is not
perfectly transparent until, by their own act, everything is obscured to
themselves and to their neighbors.
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