Not only is the desire for personal immortality non-universal, but human imagination has not always succeeded in making a future state sufficiently attractive to kindle desire for it. The primitive barbarian, for example, far from rejoicing in the prospect of a life to come shuddered as he thought of his approaching earthly end, reluctant as he was to exchange the familiar joys of the warm and sunny earth for the unknown climate and companionship of another world. If Professor Max Müller's conception of Nirvana be correct, then whole races of Buddhists anticipate ultimate annihilation as the goal of life and welcome it as the culmination of that long series of rebirths to which they believe they are destined. And without the pale of Buddhism are thousands who, for one reason or another, have no desire for immortality, preferring annihilation to any resumption of life after death, Achilles, as we have seen, contemplating post-mortem conditions, declared that he would prefer the most menial earthly occupation to kingship over the dead. General Grant, reflecting upon the Christian picture of Heaven, drawn from the New Testament Apocalypse, expressed his abhorrence of the prospect of perpetual psalm singing and harp playing, a prospect to him as dreary and distressing as that of the ancient Greek anticipating Hades. To base belief in a future life on an alleged instinctive desire for it is thus as unwarrantable as to found it on the alleged universality of the belief. 3. Intuition, the transcendental foundation. Turn we now to the third in the group of minor foundations, one which has been peculiarly identified with the so-called transcendentalists, represented in England notably by Addison, Coleridge, Max Müller; in the United States by Theodore Parker, Alcott, Emerson and not without its representatives to-day. Man, they say, cannot live by intellect alone, intuition must be recognized. Man's spirit is a greater thing than his intellect. Prove, if you will, that his intuition has no just title to be consulted; e pur si muove, witness the vogue of Bergson, Eucken and Maeterlinck. According to the intuitionists, or transcendentalists, man is in possession of a "primary faculty" transcending reason and experience, making him immediately cognizant of spiritual realities; hence their name. God, immortality, duty, according to transcendentalism, are "facts of consciousness," part and parcel of the human mind, truths wrought into the very structure of the human soul and wholly independent of experience, testimony or demonstration. Knowledge of God's existence and of immortality is "an intuition of reason, depending primarily on no argument whatever; not on reasoning, but on Reason. It comes spontaneously. The belief always precedes the proof, intuition giving the thing to be reasoned about." Corresponding to this view of Parker we have the statement of Max Müller: "There is a faculty in man coördinate with sense and reason, the faculty of perceiving the infinite; Vernunft as contrasted with Verstand (reason) and Sinne (sense). It is the faculty of faith, restricted to those objects which cannot be supplied by the evidence of the senses or by the evidence of reason, a power independent of sense and reason, while alone able to overcome both reason and sense." 2 With the aid of this "third faculty" transcendentalism rescued the cardinal doctrines of religion, God, and immortality, from death. The philosophy of sensation, heralded by Locke, with this motto, 1 Parker: "Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion,” pp. 21, 22. 2 Müller: "Science of Religion," pp. 13-15. "Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu," furnished no warrant for the belief in the soul's survival of death, because immortality is not demonstrable to the senses. But by taking the doctrine out from the field of sense-experience and making it an integral element in the constitution of the mind itself, transcendentalism rescued it from its dangerous position and placed it where it seemed permanently safe. Arguments to prove the reality of immortality were now no more in order than were arguments to prove the reality of beauty or the worth of love. With Addison, intuitionists have . felt their immortality o'ersweep All time, all change, all fears And peal like the eternal thunders of the deep Man thou shalt never die. Redolent as are the writings of Emerson with faith in a future life, we argument in support of it. search in vain for Not a single paper in the whole series of his "Dial" was devoted to debate of the subject. It was too deep, too elemental to be discussed. It was assumed, it was "known"-beyond cavil or question. And whereas the objections of materialism did not in the least disturb the transcendentalists, the traditional arguments of orthodox Christians, based on Church authority, or on scriptural revelation, were repudiated as stumbling blocks in the way of spiritual faith because they diverted attention from the witness of the soul, the testimony of the "inner light." Holding that the "intuition of reason" is synonymous with "revelation from God," that the function of this special "third faculty" is to receive the "revelation," the intuitionist simply elevated the ideas of God, immortality, and duty above the reach of legitimate doubt and examination. For him they were too sacred to be tested or scrutinized by the discursive reason or "understanding"; rather were they to be accepted by it unreservedly and submissively. To demand credentials for the validity of these great ideas, to wish to subject them to the test by which science sifts truth from error, is, in the estimation of the transcendentalist, the arch impiety and proof of a perverted religious nature. Let the claims of the Pope, the Bible, the Church, the Christ, be freely investigated; but not these ultimate religious ideas. To exercise independent, unfettered thought upon them is to be guilty of "irreligion" of "ethico-religious unsoundness." Small wonder, then, that intui |