Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill The Deeper Issues of the Debate HE new prophetic mood to which reference has been made has already begun to utter itself in the clearer appreciation of the deeper issues of the grand debate. The problem is, of course, the permanence of the human personality, the continuance of the soul after death, in the possession of memory, reason, and self-conscious life. But this problem states itself as never before. It is no longer, as with the ancient world, a question of more or less of sensuous existence ; nor, as with times that in comparison may be termed recent, a matter relating mainly to the gratification or disappointment of human desire. It is a duel between two contrasted philosophies of man's existence, between universal reason and its opposite,between a noble optimism and an absolute pessimism. Are man's rational world and God's at heart coincident and concordant ? Is the sphere in which human beings live, and which they seek to bring under the forms of reasonable thought and lofty mortality, a harmonious part of the universe ? Are the realms of the human and the Infinite capable of reconciliation, or are they in hopeless hostility ? These are the issues involved. The question of the immorality of man is nothing less than the question of the reality of man's world, its integrity and worth for the universe. And this means simply the ultimate reasonableness or unreasonableness, the intelligence or brutality, of the Power that is responsible for our existence. The debate thus involves, at the outset, the life of reason, the reality of thought, the existence of an intelligible universe. This planet is surrounded by the stellar spaces, and the denial of immortality may be figured by the thought that the sky constitutes a fixedbarrier, a wall inside of which men live and th...