At Columbia University: A Talk on the Soul

On the afternoon of the 19th of April, 1912, Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání records, 'Abdu'l-Bahá and His party were received at Columbia University on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The Master had been in the United States only nine days. The university had requested His presence.

The reception was held in one of the large lecture halls of Earl Hall, the centre of religious life on the campus. The faculty member presiding — a senior professor whose name Mahmúd does not record — introduced the Master with a brief account of the Bahá'í Faith for the audience and an expression of the university's pleasure at His visit.

The Master rose. He chose a subject the room could not have expected from a Persian sage: the immortality of the soul, set in the proper relation to the modern scientific view of the human person. The talk, of which Mahmúd preserves a careful summary that matches the version later printed in The Promulgation of Universal Peace, turned on a single great metaphor.

Science and religion are the two wings upon which man's intelligence can soar into the heights.

A bird with one wing only, the Master said, cannot fly. So a human being equipped with science alone, without the spiritual sciences that train the heart and direct the will, can master the visible universe but cannot understand the meaning of his own life within it. So a human being equipped with religion alone, without the disciplined study of the natural world, can imagine many things but cannot distinguish his imagination from the truth.

He went on to argue, in the direct and orderly manner that characterised His American addresses, the four traditional proofs of the soul's immortality: that the soul is not the body and is therefore not extinguished with the body's death; that the soul's powers — memory, conscience, imagination, will — are not material and so persist beyond the material substrate; that the universal human intuition of an after-life cannot be accounted for on a purely materialist hypothesis; and that the testimony of the Manifestations of God, taken across the long history of revelation, is consistent on the matter.

Mahmúd records that the audience — students, faculty, the small group of visiting Bahá'ís who had filled the back rows of the hall — listened in unbroken stillness through the talk. The presiding professor, when the Master had finished, observed that the address had been one of the most distinguished he had heard in many years of university gatherings. The Master smiled, thanked the assembly, and took His leave.

The talk would in time be set down as one of the foundational American addresses of the Bahá'í teaching tradition. Its single sentence about the two wings of science and religion has been quoted, since 1912, in countless settings where the Faith has been introduced. The first hearing of it, in the Earl Hall of Columbia University on a spring afternoon, is preserved by Mahmúd in his diary entry of the day.

Paraphrased from Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání (George Ronald, 1998), entry for April 19, 1912; see original for full text.

Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání, M.. (1998). *Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání*. George Ronald.