And how?
Once again I must repeat that the longing for the immortality of the
soul, for the permanence, in some form or another, of our personal and
individual consciousness, is as much of the essence of religion as is
the longing that there may be a God. The one does not exist apart from
the other, the reason being that fundamentally they are one and the same
thing. But as soon as we attempt to give a concrete and rational form to
this longing for immortality and permanence, to define it to ourselves,
we encounter even more difficulties than we encountered in our attempt
to rationalize God.
The universal consent of mankind has again been invoked as a means of
justifying this immortal longing for immortality to our own feeble
reason. _Permanere animos arbitratur consensu nationum omnium_, said
Cicero, echoing the opinion of the ancients (_Tuscul. Quaest._, xvi.,
36). But this same recorder of his own feelings confessed that, although
when he read the arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul in
the _Phaedo_ of Plato he was compelled to assent to them, as soon as he
put the book aside and began to revolve the problem in his own mind, all
his previous assent melted away, _assentio omnis illa illabitur_ (cap.
xi., 25). And what happened to Cicero happens to us all, and it happened
likewise to Swedenborg, the most daring visionary of the other world.
Swedenborg admitted that he who discourses of life after death, putting
aside all erudite notions concerning the soul and its mode of union with
the body, believes that after death he shall live in a glorious joy and
vision, as a man among angels; but when he begins to reflect upon the
doctrine of the union of the soul with the body, or upon the
hypothetical opinion concerning the soul, doubts arise in him as to
whether the soul is thus or otherwise, and when these doubts arise, his
former idea is dissipated (_De caelo et inferno_, Sec.
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