If we survey the stages of evolution through which humanity hitherto has passed, we find that all peoples, from prehistoric times up to our own days, have believed in a spiritual body which is essential to the soul in a future life. Is humanity then mistaken in this universal manifestation of religious intuition? On this question we need no longer remain uncertain, no longer believe; we know that man possesses such a spiritual body. For many years, even centuries, this has been a fully demonstrated fact, which may be directly observed, and which also has been the subject of scientific research. But what do we mean by spiritual body? The term conveys something of[27] a dim and vague, and at the same time unmistakable suggestion which characterizes all we comprehend by our emotional faculties. Spiritual body means what the words say, a spirituality derived from, or belonging to, the body. But as no spirituality exists which is not individualized or is not a quality of a living being, this spiritual body must be identical with either one single unit or with a multitude of living units. One single unit it cannot be, because this unity would then be identical with the soul, while on the contrary, the spiritual body should be independent, existing per se. It remains then a multitude of spiritual units, which is precisely what natural science has proved to be the case, and these units in man’s spiritual body are identical with the living cells.
Before the discovery of the cell, our knowledge of the human body was confined to such phenomena as could be observed with the naked eye. The organism from that standpoint was necessarily[28] a unit of members and organs whose functions, and even coarser anatomic structure, were beyond any accurate investigation. The elementary parts of the organic tissues cannot, of course, be observed in this stage. They appear first under the microscope and it is therefore with the discovery of this epoch-making instrument that the science of organisms enters into a new era.
Toward the end of the seventeenth century, Malpighi and Grew found that organic tissues, placed under the microscope, did not consist of homogeneous substance as they appear to the naked eye, but of small particles separated from each other, which particles have been called cells. But although the cells were discovered, their real importance was far from being understood, or even surmised. This was no doubt the reason for the small interest given to the cell during the eighteenth century, and the small progress cytology made during this whole period.
[29]
From 1670 to 1830, or more than a century and a half, the cell was known mainly as a saccate body, resembling a hollow tube, and became the subject of more or less wild speculations. A wider interest for the substance and nature of the cell was evoked in the beginning of the nineteenth century by the works of Brisseau de Mirbel, Treviranus, Moldenhaver and several others. Many different parts began to be distinguished within the cells, such as membrane, protoplasm, chlorophyll, etc. These parts were later found to be as many organs in the cell performing different functions, which are at present to some extent defined. The cell previously considered as a saccate body proved to constitute a being endowed with organs, a living organism.
According to modern cytology, the cell is a living individual; an elementary organism. Although these beings are so exceedingly minute that the naked eye can observe them only in combinations of thousands and millions,[30] yet each and every one of them not only possesses individual life, but also the organs necessary for sustaining individual existence. Innumerable quantities of such tiny beings build up the organisms of plants and animals. As human individuals form the building material of the body of a community, so the cells form the building material of the bodies of plants and animals. Since the cells bear the same relation to plants and animals as human individuals to a community, every plant and animal then may be considered as a community, a cell-state, where the cells are the citizens.
Every organism, therefore, is a community, and vice versa, every community is an organism. So far as we have knowledge of the organisms they are all similar in this respect. Plants and animals are communities of individually living cells in the same sense as nations and states are communities of human beings. The individuals in these different communities are of different kinds and[31] degrees of development, but the composition of the organic edifice is in all essential features exactly the same. The differences are literally only apparent, being due as they are to the different aspect they present to our observation.
While we at first apprehend animals and plants as units, not seeing the individual cells by which they are composed, we, in the national organisms, on the contrary, first perceive the cells themselves—the human individuals—but are unable to grasp the nations as individually living organisms. On the one hand we see directly only the social side, on the other, only the organic.
If there are beings observing the human community as we see plants and animals, they would comprehend society as a unit composed of different trades and industries, but not as composed of men, who are the building material in these members. If such postulated observers made an invention corresponding to our microscope, they[32] would be surprised to find the social organism composed of human individuals, which fact would seem just as mystical to them as the cells seemed at first to us. So far as we have derived from experience a knowledge of organic structure, it reveals itself to us as an individual composed of more primitive and elementary individuals. These elementary units of lower kind and order might consequently be called a spiritual body in a literal sense.
From the point of view of the elementary constituent, each organism is a community, a unit of similar, independently living, individuals; from the point of view of the organs and of the whole, this community itself is a living individual of higher potency and may in its turn enter as an elementary organism in a spiritual body of still higher power, and so on, in a geometric series. Man enters into the social organism, but is himself composed of cell-organisms, which in turn consist of more primary units.
[33]
Organic structure shows everywhere the same general qualities, the same fundamental features. Each higher and more complex organism repeats in a more perfect way and in a higher potency exactly the same general forms of organization as its elementary constituents have shown in their own sphere. Hence the surprising similarity in the structure of the organisms. When we know one we know all. This would, of course, be neither possible nor conceivable if the spiritual bodies, which form their corporal structure, did not possess corresponding similar fundamental qualities.
In what relationship do these cells stand to man? Do they enter into his being as essential or only as incidental constituents? In other words, does man act as organ for the cells and the cells as organs for man only here in time; or, such existence being for the present postulated, is their union extended even to a future existence? This question is of extraordinary importance because[34] it may entirely change our conception of death. With this question settled, we should be in possession of a fact from which we could draw reliable conclusions, and this fact is briefly as follows: Within each living being a continuous renovation takes place, a successive replacing of the individuals which belong to that being’s spiritual body. Human beings constitute, as already pointed out, the cells or the spiritual body, in an organism of a higher order, viz., of humanity. In this organism, an incessant renewal takes place, as we know, inasmuch as new generations continuously succeed each other. The same is the case with man’s own spiritual body. As the human generations in the social body, so the cell-generations in man’s body replace each other while the man, himself, all the time, remains the identical individual. The same holds good in regard to the cytoplasm, or the lower units that build up the cells. Everywhere we meet with the same phenomenon of renewal[35] and everywhere with the same identity of the complex individual. This latter originates, develops, and passes away with a lifetime that bears a certain proportion to its complexity. While man counts his existence and development in years, the evolution of society is reckoned in hundreds and thousands of years. The cells in their turn have a lifetime measured in days, and the units forming the cytoplasm possess an individual existence perhaps lasting but a few minutes or seconds.
The circulation in the body, therefore, is not confined to the material particles but comprises the spiritual body, the living units, as well. Now, the question is: What is the relationship between man living in time and these dying and unborn generations of cells, that form his body? Can we show that these living units, this spiritual body, is as necessary for man in a future existence as here in time? Then death must evidently be something else, something infinitely more than we have[36] hitherto imagined or surmised. The point is to investigate what is mortal in man and what is immortal, and on this problem we will now proceed to concentrate our whole attention.