Life Everlasting

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Fiske John. Life Everlasting

NOTE

THE INGERSOLL LECTURESHIP

LIFE EVERLASTING

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First. In carrying out the wishes of my late beloved father, George Goldthwait Ingersoll, as declared by him in his last will and testament, I give and bequeath to Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., where my late father was graduated, and which he always held in love and honor, the sum of Five thousand dollars ($5,000) as a fund for the establishment of a Lectureship on a plan somewhat similar to that of the Dudleian lecture, that is – one lecture to be delivered each year, on any convenient day between the last day of May and the first day of December, on this subject, "the Immortality of Man," said lecture not to form a part of the usual college course, nor to be delivered by any Professor or Tutor as part of his usual routine of instruction, though any such Professor or Tutor may be appointed to such service. The choice of said lecturer is not to be limited to any one religious denomination, nor to any one profession, but may be that of either clergyman or layman, the appointment to take place at least six months before the delivery of said lecture. The above sum to be safely invested and three fourths of the annual interest thereof to be paid to the lecturer for his services and the remaining fourth to be expended in the publishment and gratuitous distribution of the lecture, a copy of which is always to be furnished by the lecturer for such purpose. The same lecture to be named and known as "the Ingersoll lecture on the Immortality of Man."

It is almost impossible to preserve in a translation the peculiar charm of these lines, but a friend of mine in one of the pleasant student days of forty years ago produced this happy and fitting paraphrase: —

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We have now to consider this supreme poetic achievement of man – his belief in his own Immortality – in the light of our modern studies of evolution; we must notice some distinctions between its earlier and later stages, and briefly examine some of the objections which have been alleged in the name of science against the validity of the belief.

Here, as in all departments of the efflorescence of the human mind, the beginnings were lowly, and necessarily so. Nothing very lofty or far-reaching could be expected from the kind of brain that was encased in the Neanderthal skull. Among existing savages there are tribes concerning which travellers have doubted whether they possess ideas that can properly be called religious. But wherever untutored humanity exists we find the conception of a world of ghosts more or less distinctly elaborated; the thronging simulacra of departed tribesmen linger near their accustomed haunts, keenly sensitive to favour or neglect, and quick to punish all infractions of the rules which the stern exigencies of life in the wilderness have prescribed for the conduct of the tribe. This crude primeval ghost-world is thus already closely associated with the ethical side of life, and out of this association have grown some of the most colossal governing agencies by which the development of human society has been influenced. It is therefore not without reason that modern students of anthropology devote so much time to animism and fetishism and other crude workings of that savage intelligence of which the primeval ghost-world is a product.

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