that anyone has as
yet alleged, or is ever likely to allege, a sufficient reason for our
accepting so dire an alternative.[5]

If belief in the soul's persistence must always be an act of faith, it
is for the evolutionist an act of reasonable faith, based on his
experience of the rationality, and what has been called the integrity,
of the cosmos.

(3) Of the hostility of physical science to belief in life beyond the
grave it is perhaps sufficient to say that the somewhat dogmatic
attitude of denial which flourished in certain scientific circles
somewhere about a quarter of a century ago has to-day made room for a
very different temper, at once more sympathetic and more willing to
acknowledge {232} that a belief is not necessarily disproved because
the methods of the chemical or biological laboratory fail to
substantiate it. As for the crude proposition that the brain secretes
thought as the liver secretes bile, and that the life of the soul must
cease with that of the body, this was characterised by the eminent
thinker whom we quoted a moment ago as "perhaps the most colossal
instance of baseless assumption that is known to the history of
philosophy." Admitting that to every state of consciousness, to every
minutest transition in our thoughts, there corresponds a cerebral
change, it is yet nothing less than a childish blunder to confound
correspondence with causality. The materialist has positively no good
ground for stating that cerebral changes are the _causes_ of the mental
states corresponding to them; indeed, the contrary proposition is far
more inherently probable, since it is spirit, and not matter, that
"possesses the power of purpose," and may therefore be regarded as the
final cause of matter.[6] When Professor Haeckel urges that "the
various functions of the soul are bound up with certain special parts
of the brain," and cease when the latter are destroyed, the reply is
quite simple: _non sequitur_. He has apparently forgotten his own
warning against the "dangerous error" of a "one-sided over-estimation
of experience." [7] {233} The utmost that experience can prove is that
the brain is the transmitting apparatus for flashing forth and making
intelligible the messages of the soul, and that, when this apparatus
breaks down, further transmission of messages becomes impossible; but
no experience can prove that when the instrument is destroyed, the soul
which used it for purposes of communication and self