Philosophy And The Soul

In Dr. Lloyd's paper on "Material Conditions as a Basis of Spiritual Possibility," before the Philosophical club, Wednesday evening, the doctor contended that "all spiritual or real possibility depended upon material conditions." This deals a death blow to the soul to whose owner it will be a great loss. Many people have banked heavily on the supposition that they owned Corporation stock in the city, "not made with hands," with lts gates of emerald, its walls of jasper and its streets paved with the single standard, now as scarce in the U. S. treasury as the grace of God in the heart of Philosophy. It would appear from the doctor's reasoning that death ends tnesoul. No soul, no consciousness. No consciousness, no use in rearing brownstone air castles in the New Jerusalem, and speculators in such property would make money by exchanging deeds of it for earthly tax titles. If the doctor's doctrine is true many devout people have fooled away a vast amount of piety and cash for naught. It is also a hard blow on the hypocrite -.vho not from goodness but to bribe the Almighty, has put up liberally for the cause of religión and deathless dehght in the world without taxes and democratie defeats. Nobody should pity him, however, for he is not an honest, cheerful giver, but one who is trying to win his way into heaven on a "bobtail rlush,"and it isn't the right way. Such a person is no loss to this world and would be no gain to the next, even though Dr. Lloyd's theory did not knock him eternally cold at death. He is as "a whited sepulchre" that is "f uil of all manner of uncleanliness and dead men's bones." Let him rest at death, in the awful endless silence of anihilation. There is another class with souls too small to enjoy happiness or suffer misery. These are a plusminus quantity whose souls, if they ever got to heaven would cut no more figure than a tadpole in Lake Erie. Kut as for the good, the generous, the benevolent, the man with religión in his heart - no matter as to his creed - heaven will be the worse for being unpeopled with them. Sotne advantages, however, go along with Dr Loyd's theory. The fires of Gehenna will burn no souls if there are no souls to burn and there will be no reincarnation of a soul, dead, to become a teacher of isms and theisms that strain credualty, wrench reason and make candidates for Kalamazoo. The doctor says: "All things with which we are surrounded, together with ourselves, are one." This of course includes ',;the fellow with his best girl wound around him. The doctor says the philosophers' laws are, first, "What is, is," and second, 'What is not is that which is not," which recalls Lincoln 's answer to a triend who had been seized of the infirmity of imagining him sel f a poet. He read a sample to the president and asked what he thought of it. "VVell,'' replied Lincoln, "to a man who likesthat sort of thing, I should say that is just about the sort of thing he would like."