Upon the question whether Humanity is, after all, to cast in its lot
with the grass that withers and the beasts that perish, the whole
foregoing argument has a bearing that is by no means remote or
far-fetched. It is not likely that we shall ever succeed in making the
immortality of the soul a matter of scientific demonstration, for we
lack the requisite data. It must ever remain an affair of religion
rather than of science. In other words, it must remain one of that class
of questions upon which I may not expect to convince my neighbour, while
at the same time I may entertain a reasonable conviction of my own upon
the subject.[16] In the domain of cerebral physiology the question might
be debated forever without a result. The only thing which cerebral
physiology tells us, when studied with the aid of molecular physics, is
against the materialist, so far as it goes. It tells us that, during the
present life, although thought and feeling are always manifested in
connection with a peculiar form of matter, yet by no possibility can
thought and feeling be in any sense the products of matter. Nothing
could be more grossly unscientific than the famous remark of Cabanis,
that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. It is not
even correct to say that thought goes on in the brain. What goes on in
the brain is an amazingly complex series of molecular movements, with
which thought and feeling are in some unknown way correlated, not as
effects or as causes, but as concomitants. So much is clear, but
cerebral physiology says nothing about another life. Indeed, why should
it? The last place in the world to which I should go for information
about a state of things in which thought and feeling can exist in the
absence of a cerebrum would be cerebral physiology!

The materialistic assumption that there is no such state of things, and
that the life of the soul accordingly ends with the life of the body, is
perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known