As a fact, his feelings on
the great problems of immortality were acute, his opinions regarding
them vague and unsettled. He certainly was not an adherent of the
typical belief on this subject; the belief that a man on this earth is a
combination of body and soul, in a state--his sole state--of
'probation'; that, when the body dies and decays, the soul continues to
be the same absolute individual identity; and that it passes into a
condition of eternal and irreversible happiness or misery, according to
the faith entertained or the deeds done in the body. His belief amounted
more nearly to this: That a human soul is a portion of the Universal
Soul, subjected, during its connexion with the body, to all the
illusions, the dreams and nightmares, of sense; and that, after the
death of the body, it continues to be a portion of the Universal Soul,
liberated, from those illusions, and subsisting in some condition which
the human reason is not capable of defining as a state either of
personal consciousness or of absorption. And, so far as the human being
exercised, during the earthly life, the authentic functions of soul,
that same exercise of function continues to be the permanent record of
the soul in the world of mind.
Pages:
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94