This force or nature is the sufficient reason for the changes of the soul, Meier notes. Thus, as long as the soul exists, this nature acts, and this acting can be witnessed in the various ways its accidental features change. These changes are what the life of the soul consists of. As long as the soul exists, then, it lives, or the soul and its life are intrinsically entwined to one another. Meier adds the clarification that it is only the sensuous life he is speaking of and thus the only thing that needs to be proven is this sensuous life of the soul.
Meier follows the Wolffian tradition in stating that simple things like the soul cannot be taken apart, but they can only be destroyed through a complete annihilation, whereby nothing remains of the simple thing that does not exist anymore. Since the soul is a finite thing, it changes and can even fail to exist. Thus, Meier concludes, it is possible that it will be annihilated or that it dies after its death. Indeed, thinking the soul necessarily exists would be tantamount to equating it with God.
Now, Meier admits, this argument determines the mortality of the soul only in itself or in abstraction. To determine whether the soul will truly die or not requires determining whether there are any actual causes that would annihilate it. Meier notes that if the soul is annihilated, it must be annihilated by some substance and its force, which has to be one of three kinds: the soul itself, some other finite substance and its force or God with their infinite power.
Meier quickly concludes that the soul cannot annihilate itself: if the soul is to do something, it must exist, excluding the possibility of the soul being annihilated when it acts. For a somewhat similar reason, Meier insists, a soul cannot be annihilated by other finite things. This proposition Meier bases on the general fact that when a finite thing acts on another finite thing, the other thing acts also in the same measure back to the original thing. This means that if a finite thing would annihilate another, this other thing would at the same time have to exist and act on the first thing, making the annihilation impossible.
The only option left is then that God might annihilate the soul. Meier notes that God should be able to do everything that is in itself possible, which implies that God must also be able to kill the soul. Of course, he adds, God might not choose to do so. Still, he thinks, we cannot really know what God has chosen about this matter. Following the common assumptions of the Wolffian tradition, Meier thinks that God has chosen to actualise the best possible world. Since we haven’t died yet, we cannot know by experience whether our soul will continue to live after it. Then again, if we wanted to demonstrate this future life without relying on experience, we would have to show that it is a necessary ingredient of the best possible world. Such a demonstration, in Meier's opinion, would require going through all the events of the actual world, which clearly exceeds our capacities.
Meier has concluded the main task of this chapter: he has shown we cannot be certain that God won’t destroy us and thus our immortality cannot be demonstrated. Then again, he adds, we also cannot demonstrate that immortality would be contradictory. Meier goes even so far as to argue that materialism is not incompatible with the immortality of the soul. Of course, he immediately adds, if the soul were just another name for the body or some part of it, like the brain, it would die at the same time as the body dies. Then again, materialism is compatible with the position that the soul is something different from the body, just as long as it will be material, for instance, an atom or a combination of atoms. As an atom, the soul could very well be immortal, and even if the soul were a combination of atoms, it might be such that it cannot be broken apart like ordinary matter.
As a conclusion of this chapter, Meier goes through a list of supposed proofs for the immortality of soul, showing all to be lacking. I shall go through these proofs and Meier’s criticism of them very quickly:
- Simplicity justifies immortality; Meier notes that this assumption ignores the possibility of God annihilating the soul
- Our drive for eternal life justifies immortality; Meir insists that even if we had such an innate drive, this would by itself justify immortality just as poorly as our sexual drive would prove we will have sex at some point
- Shared conviction of all nations justifies immortality; Meier notes that before Copernicus we could have with similar grounds said that the Sun truly rotates the Earth
- Failure of arguments against immortality justifies immortality; Meier thinks that this argument is as convincing as if he would say that the Moon must have telepathetic denizens, because we cannot prove it wrong.
