Chapter XIII · Recapitulation.

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 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 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 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 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 been found as naïve 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 presupposes also the law of evolution we have endeavored to make clear, namely, that beings endowed with common wants and existing in similar surroundings and conditions cannot develop, except by the upbuilding of an organism, and thus entering as organic members in an individual of higher order than themselves. From these premises we might have deduced our theory of death and resurrection and yet the whole process would still have seemed mysterious and inexplicable but for the work of our great predecessor, Christofer Jacob Boström, that Plato of the North, so often misunderstood by his contemporaries, or at least more known on account of certain possible deficiencies in his system than because of its imperishable merits.

Idealism and materialism have hitherto stood as two absolutely incompatible contrasts and the fierce battle that continuously rages, even in our days, between the two world-conceptions can, according to common notions, only be brought to an end through the complete defeat of one of the parties. We have endeavored to show that both these philosophies have common deficiencies, but that each of them possesses an essential part of truth. We cannot deny idealism the merit of having looked far deeper into the nature of things and phenomena. While admitting this we cannot be blind to the fact that this philosophy has left at least one fact of nearly overwhelming importance totally unexplained. If it be true that the soul is the essential part of man and is that to which alone immortality is granted, how then shall we account for the fact that the soul’s evolution, properly the one principal object of man, must stand aside for the body to such an extent that the body utilizes, if not all yet at least the largest part of man’s time and energy? To materialism this reply is given, but then again this philosophy has been unable to answer all those questions which idealism alone could satisfactorily explain.

Now at last we understand the reason for these contradictions. The two world-conceptions suffer the same essential deficiency of having overlooked the fact that the body contains a spiritual organism, of the same importance to man’s future life as to his present. In the theory here proposed materialism in a purified form melts into idealism, which latter thus receives the supplement it hitherto has lacked as a universal, satisfactory world-explanation. We have barely outlined this new, organic idealism and have treated it somewhat more extensively only with reference to death and resurrection. But also on this point our work, as all human effort, is only piecemeal labor. As soon as we have advanced one step, other entirely new questions arise. We already discern boundless expanses of problems in the same direction and shall here point out one example. The organic changes, characterizing old age and preceding the so-called natural death, are comparatively well studied and known. But in spite of this, natural science is unable to tell us the underlying cause in the inner nature of the organism, and it is even admitted that we know no reason why the process should not follow an entirely opposite course. From our point of view man has an individual content larger than that included in the successive moments of time, and death should normally enter with the translation of the last cell-generation. It is true that as civilization advances man’s lifetime is constantly increasing, so that we may look forward to a time when most men will die a natural death. But if we meet a premature death, as is now generally the case, can this, and other disturbing interruptions in the natural process, afterwards be repaired? Let us hope that this is possible, but a decisive answer we cannot give. Our conviction is that God does not interfere to help man either in the transition itself or in a future life in any other way than he does here in time. Certainly the clerical orthodoxy has rightly understood the divine guidance in its teaching of God’s general providence, comprising the whole creation, His special providence in regard to mankind, and His most particular providence, limited to the faithful; that is, to those that let themselves be governed by the divine will. Critical experience has never discovered any exterior, occasional interference, which moreover is utterly impossible. God is present and active in the eternal and unchangeable laws of nature and spirit. Sin and punishment, virtue and reward, are connected with each other as reason and conclusion, cause and effect. Man is himself the cause of his acts and they bring their inevitable consequences. The man therefore who consciously and purposely distorts his own natural evolution or that of others stands before himself and before his fellow men burdened with a terrible responsibility.