BOOKS.

DEATH AND ITS MYSTERY.* [FIRST NOTICE.] M. FLAXIIARION'S book, though by no means an epoch-making work, is full of sincerity and feeling. What is even more important in view of its subject, it is inspired with an intense desire to approach its great theme in the scientific spirit—that is, to rest upon reason and turn upon the poles of proof. Therefore, in spite of certain weaknesses in argument, it affords a useful opportunity for discussing some of tho great issues with which it is concerned. Its touch of mysticism is to m-', at any rate, not repellent but attractive. The book is a counter-attack, and a very successful one, upon the pure

materialists. It begins, indeed, with some very effective general chapters which are devoted to the destruction of the arguments of those who believe, or think themselves compelled to believe, that thought, consciousness, and all we call the things of the spirit, are really the motiveless phenomena of unconscious automatism. According to them the brain secretes thoughts, and so volitional acts, as the liver secretes bile. The machine, in a word, runs by itself till it runs down.

To make use of another analogy, of which I must admit myself

fond, the materialists in effect contend that a human being is not a piano with an individual player, but a musical box which somebody, or more probably nobody, wound up. It is true that it plays tunes and can vary them, but this is only accident. The tunes are no more a matter of will than the wind in the pines, the, ripple of the stream, or the thunder of the sea. To me it seems much more reasonable to suppose that the tunes show intention, purpose, and volition, and are only explicable if we presume a player. Sometimes the airs are bad, some- times good. Sometimes, again, the music is jangled and out of tune, or is mere noise. But why should we assume, because nothing but hideous rattlings can be got out of the piano, as in the case of madness, that there is no player, or when the tunes suddenly stop and no more sound can be got from it, as in the case of death, that there never was a player ?

Is it not as reasonable, or rather more reasonable, to assume, as we do in real life, that the reason we can get no sound, or only get noise out of the piano, is that theinstrument has broken down from age or injury and is no longer capable of responding to the player's touch ? Why assume that the player dies when his instrument dies ? The brain, no doubt, is a material thing. It is the piano, and the tunes appear to be produced by it, but in reality they are the work of the player.

Though he does not use this analogy, that is roughly M.

Flammarion's argument. But he goes further and argues that, apart from his contentions aimed to cut away the buttresses of materialism there is something in us which can be subjected to scientific analysis and scientific proof, but which is, never- theless, non-material. To return to my metaphor once more, the soul uses the brain as the piano-player uses the piano as long as the brain is capable of being played upon. But the soul is not a part of the brain or irrevocably tied to it. Under certain conditions the soul may manifest itself as a conscious entity when the brain, as the autopsy shows, has become a mere purulent jelly. Thought, consciousness, and will are facts which point to a player. It is true that they do not afford us absolute proof that the destruction of the instrument does not involve the death of the player, but, on the other hand, the 'destruction of the body and the mortification of the brain

• Death and Es Mystery : Before Death. Proofs (Vas Existence of the Soul. By Elammarion. Translated by B. B. Brooks. London : -Fisher Unwin. ;10s. &I. net.)

do not prove that the power which once set the brain in motion cannot find a new instrument on which to operate.

Here is one of M. Flammarion's many statements of the different facets of his view:— "It is important, from the very beginning of this discussion, for us not to be easily satisfied with words. What is matter ? According to general opinion, it is what is perceived by our senses, what can be seen, touched, weighed. Very well ! the following pages are to prove that there is in man something besides what can be seen, touched, and weighed ; that there exists in the human being an element independent of the material senses, a personal mental principle, which thinks, wills, acts, which manifests itself at a distance, which sees without eyes, hears without ears, discovers the future before it exists, and reveals unknown facts. To suppose that this psychic element—invisible, intangible, and imponderable—is an essential faculty of the brain, is to make a declaration without proof ; and it is a self-contradictory form of reasoning, as if one said that salt could produce sugar or that fish could become inhabitants of terra What we wish to show here is that actual observation itself, the observation of the facts of experience, prove that the human being is not only a material body endowed with various essential faculties, but also a psychic body endowed with different faculties from those of the animal organism. And by ' actual observation ' we mean that wo shall use no other method than that of Littre, Taine, Le Dantec, and 'other professors of materialism, and that we shall repudiate the grotesque doctrines of oral arguments, mere wanderings from the subject. How was it possible that eminent thinkers such as Comte, Littrd, Bertholot were able to imagine that reality is bounded by the circle of our sense impressions, which are so limited and so imperfect ? A fish might well believe that nothing existed outside of water ; a dog which made a classification of canine sense impressions would classify them according to odour and not according to sight, as a man would do ' • a carrier-pigeon would be especially aware of the sense of direction, an ant of the sense of touch in his antennae, etc. The spirit overrules the body ; the atoms do not govern, they are goyerned. The same reasoning can be applied to the entire universe, to the worlds that gravitate in space, to vegetables and animals. The leaf of the tree is formed, an egg that hatches is formed. This formation, itself, is of the intellect in its nature."

Before we proceed to the proofs, yet another passage may be cited to show what M. Flammarion is about—i.e., what he sets forth to prove. The passage might be headed, indeed, with Cromwell's words, " The mind is the man," an expression which, by the way, in all probability Cromwell was quoting from some- body else, though from whom does not appear. Perhaps some reader of the Spectator can say who was the first person—pro- bably a Greek—to use this admirable, if somewhat obvious, aphorism.

" If we analyze the human body and its natural functions we cannot fail to recognize that despite all the charms it can offer to our senses, it is, on the whole, when we consider only its substance, a rather vulgar object. Its true nobility lies in its spirit, its feeling, its intelligence, in its veneration for art and science ; and the value of a man does not lie in his body, so short-lived, so changeable, so frail, but in his soul, which reveals itself, even in this life, as blessed with the faculty of enduring eternally. Moreover, this body is not an inert mass, an automaton ; it is a living organism. But the construction of a being, a man, an animal, or a plant, is the witness of the existence of a constructive force, of a mind in nature, of an intellectual principle that governs the atoms and is not of them. If there were only material molecules, devoid of direction, the world would not go on, some sort of chaos would have existed indefinitely, without mathematical laws, and the Cosmos would not have been ruled by order."

In connexion with this passage I must deal with one other point in the anti-materialist controversy. Some modern thinkers say that we must be careful not to make too rigid a division between matter and spirit. It is probable, they contend, that each has some of the qualities of the other. In a word, matter is not purely dead, and spirit is not purely immaterial. M. I". ammarion, curiously enough, comes near this in the following passage :— " We have finally reached the point of admitting the unity of force and the unity of substance. Everything is dynamism. Cosmic dynamism rules the worlds. Newton gave it the name of attraction. But this interpretation is insufficient. If there were nothing but attraction in the universe, the stars would form only one mass, for it would have brought them together long ago, in the beginning of time; there is something else, there is movement. Vital dynamism governs all beings : in man as he has evolved, psychic dynamism is constantly associated with vital dynamism. At bottom all these dynamisms are one : it is the spirit in nature, deaf and blind as far as we are concerned, in the immaterial world, and even in the instinct of animals, unconscious in the majority of human works, conscious in a small number. In Uranie (1888), I wrote : What we call matter vanishes just as scientific analysis believes it is about to grasp it. We ffnd force is the dynamic element, the mainstay of the universe. and the essential principle behind, all forms. The human being has the soul as its essential principle. The universe is an intelligent Principle that we can not understand.' In Les Forces naturelles inconnues (1906), I wrote : Psychic manifestations confirm what we have learned elsewhere, that the purely mechanical explanation of the universe is insufficient and that there is something else in the universe than this pretended matter. It is not matter which governs the world : it is a psychic and dynamic element.' Since the time when these lines were written, the progress of psychic observations has super- abundantly confirmed them. A mental power rules silently and all-powerfully over the instincts of insects, assuring their existence and their perpetuation, as it rules over the birth of a bird and the evolution of the superior animals, including man himself. It is this sort of dynamism which leads the caterpillar to become a formless pulp in the chrysalis, and afterward a butterfly. It is this that from the organism of cottain media brings forth a substance which changes into organs that are real, though they live for but a short space— a dynamism instantaneously creating transitory materialize- Hons. Let us assert it : the universe is dynamic. An invisible thinking force governs worlds and atoms. Matter obeys. The analysis of things reveals, everywhere, the action of an invisible spirit. This universal spirit is in everything, governing each atom, each molecule, though they themselves are impalpable, imponderable, infinitely small, invisible, and constitute by their dynamic aggregation visible things and living creatures ; and this spirit is indestructible and eternal. Materialism is an erroneous doctrine, incomplete and insufficient, which explains nothing to our entire satisfaction. To admit only matter endowed with certain essential qualities, is an hypothesis that does not bear analysis. The Positivists are mistaken, there exist positive ' proofs that the hypothesis of matter dominating and governing everything through its essential qualities is beside the truth. They have not divined the dynamic intelligence which animates living creatures and even things."

M. Flammarion thus concludes that materialism is " only a theory of the appearance of things, is only the outer surface of things that have not been analyzed." It is, he continues, " through the experimental method itself that we are going to prove the weakness of materialism."

As I have hinted before, AL Flammarion, when he comes to marshalling his evidence, is not so satisfactory as when he is dealing with the abstract side of the problem. That, perhaps, was to be expected from an astronomer. A man accustomed to deal with things so great and so magnificent as the starry heavens might well find it tiresome to play the lawyer's part in analyzing minutely proofs resting on human evidence. By this I mean that he does not always seem to give their due weight to such considerations as the unconscious misrepresentations of facts or, again, to the distinction between pure observation and that which looks like observation, but is

(To be continued.)