Wolffian philosophy employed the metaphysical argument, that the soul is immortal, because indissoluble by reason of its simplicity. But even the simple might die out of itself, and the soul is not abstractly simple in itself, but a unity of many powers. Further, we ought not to overlook the high worth and spiritual relations of man; for with what right can creatures of limited worth lay claim to immortality, or what would the immortality of atoms signify? Hence, more consideration is due to the proof from the illimitableness of human capacities, from the perfectibility of man. The institution of these capacities would be aimless, unless they attained what they are meant to do, which is not the case in this earthly life." But the argument is often stated as if aims of infinite worth were not realized in the present life, whereas life would not be lived in vain, if the consciousness of eternity shone forth, or the flame of holy love was felt, but once. The aim lies not only at the close. An immortality, emptying the present life of all meaning for the purpose of establishing the necessity of a future life, is worthless. Rationalism laid special stress on the doctrine of immortality, but committed the fault of remitting us to a progressus in infinitum, a progress without definite aim, whereas objects which are ends in themselves are found even in the present life. Another argument starts from the world-idea, for which every individual is of value. No doubt, for the world-whole every single personality, with all it possesses, is indispensable. Were but one lacking, a gap would be left in the whole. But this can only be maintained, provided the individuals possess spiritual import, or so far as they attain to personality in the strict sense.—The juridical argument demands immortality in the interest of equality between worth and wellbeing, absent on earth. But neither have the ungodly real prosperity on earth; nor do the good demand of God's justice reward for their virtue.-Finally, the reason borrowed from love, which longs after reunion, cannot be accepted as convincing. The craving for immortality on this ground is no doubt widely spread in modern days, but it is marked by much sickly sentimentality. Those who in this earthly life, when they are together, forswear love, speak often of reunion, as if they had saved their love for the future life.

The mutual relations of individuals in the future cannot be judged by subjective wishes, but by the objective principle of God's kingdom. The supreme blessing hoped for by our forefathers from immortality, was rather the immediate presence of God and Christ. The more concrete form of reunion was secondary to the kingdom of Christ, to His triumphant Church, and the desires of natural love were subordinated to contentment with whatever order the kingdom of God may bring with it, the restoration of former relations occupying but a secondary place. Again and again must it be asserted that nothing but the divine import of life makes life worth living. Christianity alone securing this import of life, it is at once evident that outside its pale no certainty of immortality was possible, but merely vague hope and presentiment.

4. The POSITIVE dogma to be held is, that the human soul is not like mere natural beings perishable, but by its very idea imperishable. Finite life may die either through succumbing to external hostile forces, or through living out its powers. But no force of nature reaches to the spirit. Nature may at present demand from man his body, but not his spirit, which is the aim and goal of nature. Nor can the soul be the author of its own death; for the attempt at annihilation would be again an act of self-exertion, and thus again an act of self-affirmation. And, finally, the soul could only die out of itself, on the supposition of its being merely nature; but the human spirit is not an object of mere finite worth, but capable of possessing, and destined to possess, eternal worth in itself, and with respect to the whole, not, indeed, on the ground of its being a microcosm, a peculiar synthesis of the universe, but on the ground of every human soul being destined for communion with God. Finite life may die by living out its powers; but in the heart of man as spirit eternity is planted, and united with God, whose will is to communicate life, he possesses unending life. The fount of the divine Spirit is unfathomable and inexhaustible. Seeing therefore that in man, as long as he is man, there is receptiveness for this life-divine, truly immortal, superior to time and temporal laws-we are warranted in holding, that the soul could only perish if either man could ever cease to be 1 Eccles. iii. 11.

man, or God could cease in His communicableness to sustain relations, not merely negative, to receptiveness for him such as his love desires. Accordingly, everything depends on the communication of the divine life to man being assured. This is only secured to Christians through Christ. Here, therefore, it is sufficient to have recognised the possibility of the soul's immortality and its destination for this. The doctrine of actual immortality falls to the second part of Dogmatics, to which also belongs the restoration or consummation of the personality in a corporeal respect, of which, likewise, apart from Christianity, there is no certain knowledge.

§ 43.-A first Human Pair and their Perpetuation.

The Biblical theory of one human pair, in whom the human species was constituted by creative act, answers to the requirements of reason, as well as to our consciousness of God and of the genus.

The conservation of the species

is effected in accordance with the universal law of living creatures through secondary causalities, individuals of the species, or reproduction. Nevertheless, the origination of new human individuals can be viewed as a conserving of the species only under one aspect, each one of the three theories-Creationism, Pre-existentianism, Traducianism-representing an element belonging to a complete account of the origination of human beings. But the plurality, characterizing our species, is the requisite condition of the community which is the theatre of God's world-ruling love, and also its organ.

Fichte, Anthropologie. Hugh Miller, Footprints Classification. Mivarts,

Lotze, Mikrokosmus, III. 87-123. Alex. v. Humboldt, Kosmos, vol. ii. of the Creator. Agassiz, Essay on Man and Ape; Evolution and its Consequences; Lessons of Nature, 1876. Dawson, Nature and the Bible. Reusch, Bibel u. Natur. M'Cosh, Christianity and Positivism, and his Report at the Ev. Alliance, 1873, and the Pan-Presbyterian Council, Edin. 1878. De Quatrefages, Théories transformistes et évolutionistes.

Zöckler, Essay in the Jahrb. für deutsche Theologie, vol. vi., 1861, "On the Question of Species in its Theological Bearing, with special reference to the Theories of Agassiz and Darwin," pp. 659-714; vol. vii., 1862, pp. 166–169. The same, Die einheitliche Abstammung des Menschen-geschlechts, vol. viii., pp. 51-91; cf. his Essay, vol. ix., pp. 688-759, "On the Theistic Idea of Creation." The same, Theologie u. Naturwissenschaft, vol. ii., 1879, pp. 737-755 (in this work modern literature on the subject is very fully quoted). F. Pfaff, Schöpfungsgeschichte, ed. ii. 1877; Die Entstehung der Welt u. die Naturgesetze, 1876. Ebrard, Die Anfänge des Menschengeschlechts, 1876; and his Apologetik. Schultz, Schöpfungsgeschichte, 1865. R. Schmid, Die Darwinschen Theorien u. ihre Stellung zur Philosophie, Religion u. Moral, 1876.

2

1. The Biblical doctrine of the origin of the human race from a first human pair1 created by God has been combated in two ways. First (and this was long the usual form of contention on the part of its opponents), the variety of human races was regarded as too great for them to be comprehended under unity of species (or genus). Reliance was placed not only upon difference in bodily organization, but also upon difference in spiritual characteristics, especially upon the assertion that there are tribes showing no trace of religion. The further the examination into the differences advanced, the greater became the number of human species which it was supposed necessary to assume, whether recourse was had for their explanation to the supposition of different, ascending acts of creation, or to their collateral origination in different places.3 In any case, it was thought, the descent of all men from an original unity had to be given up and regarded as incompatible with the actual condition of things.—But not only did this view encounter opposition from philosophers, historians, and philologists, who described the application of the idea of different

1 Gen. i. and ii.; Acts xvii. 26-28; cf. Rom. v. 12 ff.

2 On the authority of accounts of travels, which certainly were greatly modified by subsequent inquirers, Schelling accepted the notion of tribes destitute of religion. Others explained the facts on which this notion is based by depravation, and attribute them to a process of degeneracy. So especially Dawson.

3 British students reckoned as many as 150 human species; see Zöckler, Theol. u. Naturwissenschaft, II. 771. To the class of those who assumed different, ascending acts of creation belongs Peyrerius with his Præadamitæ; in the same way Schelling.

species to man as inadmissible, and referred to the strong historical traces of a genealogical interconnection of humanity, but the physical sciences themselves, since the diffusion of modern evolution-doctrines, have taken quite an opposite direction. The idea of a single, causal, genealogical interconnection has for some time been so powerful, that physical research is busily engaged in the effort to resolve all specific differences of all living beings into mere varieties, and from one or some few primitive forms to derive everything organic in a genealogical line from plants to man, whether higher and higher structures are supposed to have arisen by transmutation in a purely mechanical process,1 or an inner evolution-principle is conceived to be at work.2 Evolutionists of the latter school are better able to leave room for a teleological conception of the world and for divine influence than the champions of an exclusively mechanical theory, inasmuch as in the beginnings of creation they are able to suppose spiritual potentialities implanted, which issue forth at the right time, and are from the first specifically distinct from the merely physical. The more thoughtful, however, confess the countless gaps opposed by experience to a rigidly applied doctrine of the genealogical derivation of life in its diverse forms. In the same way they confess that to such questions as, How did the first cell arise ? How did organisms arise on our planet at all? science has still to give an answer, since neither from history nor experiment do we learn anything as to the origin of living

1 So the stricter school of Darwin, who, however, to natural selection, the result of the struggle for existence, which preserved the more perfect and rejected the imperfect, subsequently added other organizing principles not of a merely mechanical nature, like fitness and "sexual selection æsthetically influenced by colours." In the animal world, from which man is derived, Darwin discovers already rudiments of morality and religion, but refuses to derive the rudiments of the organic and living from the inorganic, and therefore at least still leaves a place for the first beginning of God's creative activity. In the interest of a single evolution - doctrine for mankind he also assumes, in opposition to polygenistic theories, not merely one centre of creation for the earliest men (Africa), but has also nothing to object to the descent from one pair of the earliest representatives of the human race, assumed by Lyell, Huxley, Wallace, and others. Zöckler, p. 774. 2 So especially those influenced by Schelling's Naturphilosophie.

3 See above, p. 43, respecting R. Schmid, Die Darwinschen Theorien. Similarly J. B. Baltzer, and Kuhl; Frohschammer, Snell, K. Ch. Planck, C. G. Carus, Fr. de Rougemont. The earth is not seldom represented as an animated being, a kind of world-soul. Zöckler, pp. 704-710.