For information concerning these mysteries we turn to public instructors of our country and Europe, and find that the higher branches of education are controlled by men who teach that man has no soul, or invisible guide. What we call soul action is nothing more than reflex action from brain compound, aroused by external stimuli.

A sample of these teachings can be found in the works of William James, Professor of Psychology in Harvard University of Cambridge, Mass., from where agnostic youths return home from college to sympathize with father and mother, who are so old-fashioned and ignorant as to actually believe they have a soul to save.

In James' works, of about 1400 pages, issued in 1902, which are considered standard in Europe and the United States, we find, Volume 1, Page 348:

"The soul, however, when carefully scrutinized, guarantees no immortality; therefore I feel perfectly free to discard the word soul from the rest of my books. The reader who finds any comfort in the idea of the soul is, however, perfectly free to continue to believe in it."

Volume 2, Page 572: "My own belief is that the question of free will is insoluble."

Page 576: "We can, therefore, leave the free will question out of our account."

Page 108: "The entire nervous system is nothing but a system of paths between a sensory terminous and a muscular glandular."

Page 179: "Every individual cell has its own consciousness, which no other cell knows anything about."

Page 291: "A man's self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body, but his clothes."

Page 296: "Self, not personality, unity or pure ego."

Page 339: "Each pulse of cognitive consciousness, each thought dies away or is replaced."

Page 401: "Thought itself is a thinker."

Page 554: "Let us try as we will to express this cerebral activity in exclusive mechanical terms. I, for one, find it quite impossible—the soul presents nothing herself; and creates nothing."

Page 656: "The retention of the experience (memory) is nothing more or less than the brain paths which associate the experience with the occasion and the recall."

Volume 2, Page 487: "The only ends that follow immediately upon our willing seem to be the movement of our bodies."

Page 495: "Why any state of consciousness should precede a movement we do not know."

Volume 1, Page 64: "The highest centers do probably contain nothing but arrangements for representing impressions and movements, and other arrangements for coupling the activities of these arrangements, which in turn excite others, until at last a motor discharge occurs."

Page 29: "Can we tell precisely in what the feelings of the central active self consists? When I forsake general principles and grapple with particular it is difficult for me to detect any pure spiritual elements at all."

Page 107: "The currents, once in, must find their way out. In getting out they leave their track. The only thing they can do, in short, is to deepen old paths or make new ones, and the whole plasticity of the brain sums itself up in two words, when we call the brain an organ in which currents passing in from the sense organs make paths which do not easily disappear."

The reader will here observe that James refers to motor discharges and brain paths as though he actually believed, or that there was evidence, that such things existed.

All through his works he quotes freely from agnostic and atheistic authors who have been attacking religion for about three hundred years, from which I will copy samples:

Spinoza: "Extension is invisible thought, thought is invisible extension. Man is not free-willed—God neither thinks nor creates."

John Locke: "Whatever any man may know, or reasonably believe in, or even conceive, is dependent on human experience."

David Hume: "Ideas are but weakened copies of impressions."

Herbert Spencer: "No idea or feeling arises save as the result of some physical force expended in producing it."

The teachings of this school of instructors are peculiar, inasmuch as no such ambiguity concerning reason or will power has heretofore been taught at large or sanctioned by any class of instructors in the history of our world. The attempt to shelter under the wing of the ancient Greeks is plainly a misconstruction, for the wise Greek bowed in wonder before unknown cause.

Pythagoras, 582 B. C., used as the base of his arguments transmigration of the soul. One of his expressions was: "The soul is a harmony chained to the body."

Socrates: "Design proves that existence is God."

Aristotle: "Thinking or thought is God Theology—Soul always thinking is immortal."

Thus I might quote from deep thinkers from Zoroaster down to our times. If one feels disposed to study the works of those self-styled liberal exponders from Spinoza to James, they will find their arguments running essentially in the same groove, virtually this: Animals, including men, are not possessed by an invisible guide. That something which discerns between right and wrong and dictates to the body whether it should follow the path of desire or virtue, they absolutely ignore. Because they cannot comprehend the mysteries of the soul, they dwell upon and cling to tangible material effects, actually assuming effect without cause. They disallow that the good Samaritan and the Levite had exactly the same exterior stimuli. They are like the woman at Jacob's well, who could comprehend the well and mountain, but could not comprehend the invisible spring. She awoke when told how her secrets were known, but they awake not, as the result of intention.

James makes a feeble attempt to prove that matter thinks when he says: "Every individual cell has its own consciousness, which no other cell knows anything about—associated by brain paths."

What profound reasoning; think of it. Betts tells us that there are three thousand million cells, or neurons, in an adult nervous system; then think of the paths leading from one cell to the other. We learn that light, or electricity, would travel around our world eight times in one second; I wonder, if at the same rate of speed, how long it would take an exterior stimulus to cover the distance over one of his brain paths, from cell to cell.

"Oh," but one says, "Richardson, you do not understand James." Allowed, but if a man of my experience does not understand materialism, how is a youth of twenty years expected to understand it?

Man cannot explain memory, but he knows it is the principle in the ego, or soul. To illustrate: In a crowd I overhear a voice. I say to the talker, "I recognize your voice, but I cannot place you." "Think again," he says. Now, I start back over life's trail, listening to voices, one-two-twenty-forty years, then I say, "your name is Edwin Pease." "Yes," he says, "we were boys together fifty years ago."

Did this familiar voice, the true External Stimulus, awaken something which existed, or did it create something in my brain?

James calls this a motor discharge, which we will admit, but he wavers when he says, "Why any state of consciousness should precede a movement we do not know." Then he adds, "The soul presents nothing herself and creates nothing."

Exterior Stimuli, he assumes, awakens the sinews, which in turn cause the body to act. Do not External Stimuli cause the vegetable to act! Go set your little geranium in the south window and see how soon it turns its pretty face to the sun. These acts may receive their origin in the law of inclination, permitted but not emitted, while every act of a sane animal is an exhibition of intention. Exterior Stimuli are individual causes. Intentional response is of invisible individual origin. Reflex action would be nothing but continued Exterior Stimuli.

The invisible actor is the man; see him out on the wings of the soul in the far away Eternity, weighing the stars, predicting their course, calculating their velocity and testing their elements.

See our Edison bottling up the lightning's wild vim and causing it, in its attempt to regain liberty, to serve man silently and safely. Would the Stimuli which cause Edison to invent cause any other man of the same experience and education to evolve the same results? Answer yes, and you expose your weakness. Answer no, and you establish the mysterious, invisible thinking soul.

Materialism is an educational attempt to compel the religious world to prove that which they do not profess to comprehend. Knowledge is the accumulation of past earthly experience. Send a weakling through college and he has obtained knowledge, but he is the same simple Simon.

Wisdom is innate; it consists of individual ability to comprehend. It is peculiar to each self, and cannot be obtained through experience or education.

According to James, self is the body, clothes and surroundings. According to Genesis it is the image of God. Is God an animal? Jesus said to the Samaritan woman: "God is spirit." Is Jesus authority? Man's body, wealth and surroundings are not even his, they are simply under his control for a season. Self is that strange quality which designates one person from another. Memory and self are closely connected. It may be that the soul possesses memory of experience in other worlds, which, like all absent memory, awaits recall.

Sleep represents a mysterious condition of the soul. When the veil of consciousness begins to vanish one enters a sphere which is not controlled by reason, but rather by emotion; which, in dreaming, is often very intense and dictates wildly.

The lower animals are possessed of a soul, but if they have a sense of right and wrong it is undeveloped, in fact, the connecting link between man and beast may be consciousness of wrong.

Faith is an easy couch on which to repose; as a bridge it spans dark rivers of uncertainty, but it requires no faith to believe in the soul.

Even Spinoza must have observed that desire, reason and conscience are under the control of a distant power which can brush them all aside and go on its way, but it does not control memory.

Unconsciousness, whether in sleep or in death, ought not to frighten us. If in sleep it does not impair memory, it does not in death, as they are both simply the veil which shuts off our view.

In short, the soul appears through the body as its organ, giving us a view of its wonder through the flashlight of sensibility, one view at a time and no more.

In some mysterious, incomprehensible way the past travels with the present. Memory, anticipation and dreams are often far more real than when face to face with animal activity.

We cannot comprehend first cause; result is our only guide, but we dimly comprehend the apparent steps from the mineral to the spiritual.

Mineral life is inspiring in that it represents the star-lit Eternity into which we gaze in wonder and contemplate the incessant transformation.

Vegetable life creeps softly after, in obedience to the law of inclination, the roots search in darkness for moisture while the foliage turns to the morning sun in gladness.

Animal life cuts clear from vegetable moorings mysteriously equipped with an invisible guide.