Note 3 — THE FORUM (continued 3)

“Emerson refused to dogmatize about what is necessarily obscure at present.”—John Albee, Recollections of Emerson. Emerson wrote in his essay on Experience: “In accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance and is the principal fact in the history of the globe.” This is not far from the point of view of James, Bergson, and, nowadays, Sir Oliver Lodge. If Emerson “refused to dogmatize” about the uncertainties of the future life, he had all the same his nobler convictions. He writes in his Journal: “I know my soul is immortal if it were only by the sublime emotion I taste in reading these lines of Swedenborg: ‘The organical body with which the soul clothes itself is here compared to a garment, because a garment invests the body, and the soul also puts off the body and casts it away as old clothes (exuviæ), when it emigrates by means of death from the natural world into its own spiritual world.’”