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 ARGUMENT FOR IMMORTALITY Having considered various facts which seem to make war upon the hope of Immortality, or at least to render the mind reluctant to rest upon that hope, let us now bring together the various facts which point in the opposite direction, and which, while not proofs, whether taken singly or all together, are nevertheless bits of testimony of varied weight, which must be taken into account by those who seek convictions in regard to this momentous matter. First of all, let us turn to Science and ask her what she has to say. It is true that she cannot say anything positively in the way of " Yea " or " Nay," for the reason that Science is limited to the study of the phenomena of experience. All such questions as that of Immortality lie entirely beyond her sphere. No one now on the earth has ever experienced Immortality, and no one is in possession of faculties which are able to take cognizance of disembodied spiritual existences. The nervous system is limited in its powers of receptiveness, and is not able to establish communication with a world in which matter does not play a part. The unseen world is therefore beyond the reach of Science. Spirits do not acknowledge the potency of blowpipes, crucibles, lenses, or retorts. Observation and experiment, the two great instruments of Science, are useless whenone comes to deal with the souls of the dead. This last statement is by some disputed. There are those who will not acknowledge that the dead cannot make themselves known both to our mind and to our senses. They claim that we have no right to limit the powers of the human intellect, that latent capacities lie buried which in most men have never been developed, and that there are good grounds to believe that experimental science will some day have ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.