The theory we have here advanced may naturally seem startling; for what could be more foreign to common conceptions than the assertion that science today gives us full evidence of a death and a resurrection that commence during our life in time? Considering this, it may be appropriate to recapitulate the salient points in our line of thought. From prehistoric times up to our own days all people at all stages of evolution have to a man been convinced that the body in some way and in some form contains an imperishable and essential part which man cannot do without in a future life. With this intuitive and purely instinctive faith as a basis, the steps in the following historical evolution[189] become fully natural and logical consequences.
It is not to be wondered at that this eternal part should at first sight be considered identical with the material body. Therefore it was also natural that a cult of the dead would be the stage where all people begin. Man sees however that death as a matter of fact separates the immortal soul from that body which the soul cannot dispense with. The separation cannot be complete because the ties cannot be severed. The soul then is attached to the body even after death. Consequently it must be the duty of the surviving to provide the body of the deceased with a dwelling as good and suitable as possible and also with the provisions that the body needs.
A man could not, however, find such a condition satisfactory for any length of time, and the thought of death gnaws and torments him. Shall the soul never regain possession of the body without which even the glories of[190] heaven are pale and shadowy? The doctrine of the bodily resurrection on the day of judgment must be the next great progress in our philosophy of life.
But unusually gifted persons, bent towards idealism, had already felt instinctively that it was not the exterior, material covering that was indispensable to the soul. Man possessed also another, a spiritual body which the soul could immediately transfer to another life. We gain a glimpse of the vividness of this intuition in large groups of men, when we remember that the survivors even sought to annihilate the material body by the flames of the pyre in order to liberate the deceased from his earthly ties. The great masses of the population could not rise to this ideal conception, and we therefore find the two fundamental ideas prevailing side by side.
Here the two first epochs in man’s history end. They show us the intimate connection between religious conceptions[191] and man’s understanding of the exterior world in which he lives and acts. The following stage commences logically with the great advancement of the natural sciences. Chemistry partly lifts the veil that hides the innermost nature of matter, and at the dawn of the new science the old ideas concerning the nature of the body disappear like the shadows of night at the rising of the sun.
A bodily resurrection on doomsday is impossible because every dead body sooner or later arises and takes part in the circulation of matter, so that on the day of judgment it might be found that the same materials had entered over and over again into the composition of a variety of human bodies. It is also a fact that man changes his material clothing several times even during his earthly life. But the belief in the essential value of the body is too deeply rooted to give away entirely and so we meet it again in the modern materialism which perhaps may be said[192] to emphasize the significance of the body even more than the cult of the dead did in ancient time.
But while materialism claims as its own the consequences of the revolutionary work of chemistry, biology lays the firm foundation for a new and higher development of religious conceptions. Biology discovers and proves the existence of that spiritual body which humanity has surmised since prehistoric times. It is to this extraordinarily important fact that we desired to call attention. We have endeavored to draw its consequences only as regards the cell-generations which successively rise and die in the human body as in human society. Now when it can be shown that these dying generations are eternal and imperishable parts of man’s own nature, the conception of death and resurrection we have here advanced must be the only possible one. The hitherto common ideas regarding the translation of man to another world have upon closer study[193] been found as na?ve as they are unnatural, because any such direct transposition of man’s entity is impossible and unthinkable.
But however simple and scientifically natural the theory here proposed, it could not have appeared at a much earlier date. It requires not only the results of modern cytology but also the widening of the idea of immortality which natural science suggests and overwhelmingly proves. It............