From F. C. S. Schiller’s Riddles of the Sphinx
§ 1. At length we have come to the last of the great questions of life, viz., that of our Future. And in a way this is the most important of all questions. For the Past is irrevocable, the Present more or less calculable and provided for, but the whither of man is a mystery which each one of us will have to solve in his own proper person. Death must be experienced by all, and experienced alone, and may have to be experienced at any moment. It requires, therefore, unusual strength of soul or recklessness to ignore this ever-present problem of our future. Hence the question, of how to live in order to die well, has always seemed a question of primary importance to all who had any care of their future.
And yet mankind has always displayed a curious dread of really coming to close quarters with this question. It has always been hedged round with unreasoning awe and vague obscurities of mystic language. Whether it was believed that life continued or passed away, both parties have always shrunk from saying so in plain words, and treating their beliefs as facts. To this day the question of our future life or annihilation has remained a subject for violent prejudices and fierce animosities, for insensate hopes and fears, for declamations and denunciations, for confident assertions on either side of meaningless or ambiguous sophisms—for anything, in fact, rather than for calm consideration and dispassionate inquiry. Nothing, indeed, presents a more curious study in human psychology than the reckless violence with which both the adherents and the opponents of traditional doctrines concerning man’s future have resented any attempts to approach the subject in the serious spirit of scientific philosophy. In times now happily past orthodoxy has been equally severe upon those who believed too little and too much, and burnt all misbelievers, whether atheists or magicians, at the same stake. In the future it seems possible that the lunatic asylums will be charged with the function of preventing inquiry into this question. But just at present the conflicting orthodoxies of science and religion are, by a rare felicity of the times, so nearly balanced that a philosophical investigation seems comparatively safe. And the first point such an investigation would have to consider is the reason for such an irrational attitude of men. Half the world profess to believe in a highly sensational and stimulating account of their future life. But its effect upon their conduct is disproportionately small. Insanity due to the fear of Hell contributes only a comparatively small quota to our madhouses. The hope of Heaven does not inspire to superhuman virtue. Of most cultivated Christians it may be safely said that their belief in Hell is practically a very faint and unimportant factor in their life, and that in Heaven fainter still. And they shrink with genuine reluctance, not fully accounted for by their latent consciousness of the difficulties of their beliefs, from all reasoning calculated to make them realize them.
The Other half of the world is convinced that a future life is unprovable, if not impossible, and often prepared to argue this thesis at length. But it is even more reluctant to bring its a priori arguments to the test of practical experiment. And why should both parties agree in objecting to treat the subject like any other, as a question of supreme practical interest, to be settled by reasoning and investigation? Such conduct naturally raises doubts about the sincerity of men’s professions of interest in the subject. In fact, it would not, in spite of the apparent paradox, perhaps be too much to say that a final establishment of the reality of a future life would prove highly inconvenient to all parties, and this inconvenience is the real reason of men’s dislike to its investigation. The generality of men do not care enough about their future to welcome a belief which would make it really necessary to look far ahead, and they do not want to care about it.1 So it is extremely convenient to leave the future life in the realm of vague speculation, to be believed when desired, and to be disregarded when belief would suggest unpleasant reflections, in order to avoid regarding it as a fact to be steadily and consistently kept in sight. For a fact is something which must be faced, even though it may be very unpleasant to do so, but an opinion may be manipulated so as to suit the exigencies of the occasion.
§ 2. But this disregard of the future is often not only admitted but defended, on the ground that over anxiety about the future is by no means to be recommended, and that a belief in another life is apt to lead to a neglect of this. Now, though it must be admitted that such excess of concern is possible, it is by no means probable that it will ever constitute a serious danger. The immediate pressure of the present makes such overpowering demands upon our attention that there is no real ground for the fear that men can ever to any extent become oblivious of the importance of this world, and least of all will they do so if they have rationally investigated the question of a future life. It is the fancy eschatologies which are uncritically accepted that do the mischief, and no rational doctrine which regards the future life as a natural continuation of the present is in the least likely to lead to an antagonism between the claims of the present and the future, different in kind or much greater in degree than that which already exists between the different sections of our life on earth (cp. ch. iv. § 7).
And so, although it is not possible that the question of a future life should ever be an absorbing and permanent occupation of the mind in the heyday of youth and in the vigor of life, while death seems a distant cloud on the horizon of reality, it must yet be regarded as a salutary and appropriate occupation in the leisure of declining years. For it is the only interest which can prevent the degeneration of the moral and intellectual nature in old age. Without it, when the active work of life is done, men become slothful. If they have nothing further to look forward to, there is no reason for employing their activities: the game is played out and they lag superfluous on the stage; the battle of life is over as far as they are concerned, and they must leave its conduct to more vigorous hands. They have become useless and intrinsically unimportant, unprofitable burdens of the ground at the best, or obstacles that obstruct the path of fitter men. And this feeling is both bitter and embittering; they relax too soon their efforts to preserve their powers of mind, and cling with demoralizing tenacity to whatever fragments of their former glories they can lay hold of. And so they become both intellectually torpid and morally exacting, and frequently cynical, with a cynicism which has lost even the consciousness of the ideals it controverts.
And all these demoralizing effects of a disbelief in their future are, it should be observed, quite independent of the emotional stimuli of hopes and fears. If men believed in a future life from which they neither hoped nor feared anything sensational, it would yet be a most salutary belief. For it would provide old age with an aim, and redeem it from the undignified futility it so often displays at present. And hence it would be of the greatest service not only to the individual but also to society, as tending to raise its moral and intellectual tone. Nothing would act as a more powerful tonic to improve the whole moral and spiritual condition of mankind than a belief which would induce men to realize more vividly the solemnity of the Issues involved in human life.
Thus there are two advantages, at the very least, in the belief in a future life, which no other doctrine can offer; the motive it alone supplies for continuing the activity of life to the last, and the sense it engenders that life is not a fleeting, senseless, play of feverish appetites, to be hastily glutted with whatsoever pleasures each passing moment can afford, but must be consecrated to higher and more permanent aims, to activities which, it may be, will enrich us with a serener contentment even here, and certainly will prove an inexhaustible source of abiding bliss hereafter. And these advantages are a sufficient reason, alike on personal and on social grounds, for inclining favorably towards this belief. But there are other reasons, no less forcible and more obvious.
One need not necessarily be violently enamored of one’s own life, or cherish any abject desire for personal continuance, in order to feel that if the chapter of life is definitely closed by death, despair is the end of all its glories. For to assert that death is the end of all beings, is to renounce the ideal of happiness (ch. iv. §§ 5-17), to admit that adaptation is impossible, and that the end of effort must be failure. And it is to poison the whole of life with this bitter consciousness. And further, it is finally to renounce the faith in the rationality of things, which could hardly be reasserted against so wanton a waste of energy as would be involved in the destruction of characters and attainments it required so much patient toil and effort to acquire. A good and wise man dies, and his goodness and his wisdom, his incalculable powers to shape the course of things for good, are wasted and destroyed. In the light of such a fact, we should have to put the worst construction alike upon the waste and the parsimony of nature elsewhere. They will both appear inexplicable freaks of a senseless constitution of things.
Hence we must reject the extremes on either side; we must refuse, not only to be terrified by maddening fears, to be intoxicated by unwarranted hopes, but also to be cajoled by a disingenuous rhetoric, which would persuade us of the superior dignity of unqualified negation. But if we preserve an attitude of critical moderation, there is little fear that reason will so far play us false as to commit us to any extravagant or unacceptable conclusions.
§ 3. But before we consider what reasons may be urged for or against the belief in immortality, we must examine with what reason that belief is sometimes based upon facts which would render all argument superfluous by directly establishing the existence of a future life.
It is one of the chief advantages of the assertors of a future life that they can bring forward direct evidence in its favor, whereas the doubts of their opponents must be inferential, and there can be no such thing as direct evidence against it. The ghost of Lord Lyttelton, in the famous story, might admonish his friend that his doubts were unfounded, but not even an Irishman could return to us with the assurance that there was no future life. If, therefore, the allegations that the dead do return are worthy of belief, if we can regard the tales of ghosts and spirits as scientifically adequate, they evidently settle the question.
Nor is there anything intrinsically absurd or impossible about this conception, or any reason to reject such stories, because of our preconceived notions, or on the ground of a misuse of the word supernatural. It is useless to assert that the supernatural is impossible, for if these stories are true, the facts to which they testify ipso facto cease to be supernatural. The inference to be drawn from these phenomena would simply be that we were mistaken in thinking that the change of death produced an absolute severance between us and the dead, and that there was no connection at all between our world and theirs. But if such intercourse is a fact, it is also possible and natural, and the laws and conditions thereof would be as capable of being determined as anything else. And it would surely be the most ridiculous of prejudices, or the most indefensible of lingering superstitions, to refuse to investigate scientifically so interesting a subject, on the ground that the evidence did not accord with our preconceptions as to what was appropriate and permissible conduct for the departed. What shall be said of the mental condition of those who assure us with one breath that they do not believe in the existence of spirits, but are quite sure that spiritism is false because spirits would never behave in the manner represented?
And yet this evidence, probably the vastest body of unsystematized testimony in the world, varying in value from the merest hearsay to the carefully recorded experience of the ablest and most competent men, is persistently put beyond the pale of science, and the isolated attempts to investigate it systematically have met with nothing but discouragement from the general public. The experience, e.g., of the Society for Psychical Research would afford a most curious commentary on the sincerity of men’s supposed interest in a future life. Surely, if men had cared to have the question settled, they would not have allowed these phenomena to remain in doubt and perplexity from age to age, as a standing challenge to science and a standing reflection upon their desire for truth. We spend thousands of pounds on discovering the color of the mud at the bottom of the sea, and do not grudge even the lives of brave men in exploring the North Pole—although there is obviously not the remotest prospect of establishing, a trade in Manchester calicos with the Eskimos and polar bears—but we would not pay a penny, nor sacrifice the silliest scruple of a selfish reticence, to determine whether it is true that our dead do not pass wholly beyond our ken. And yet, with a tithe of the attention and study that has often been devoted to the most trivial and unworthy objects, the real nature of these “psychical” phenomena might have been explored—had it suited men to arrive at certainty on the subject.
But in any case our course is clear: as men of science we may deplore the apathy of mankind, as philosophers we must recognize that the present condition of the subject prevents us from treating these phenomena as admitted facts, on which it is possible to base inferences.
And from a philosophic point of view they possess in any case two defects. The first is that they are presented to us as mere facts. Now facts, we are apt to think, are mighty things, and able to force their way into all minds by sheer weight. But nothing could be more mistaken: a mere fact is a very feeble thing, and the minds of most men are fortresses which cannot be captured by a single assault, fortresses impenetrable to the most obvious fact, unless it can open up a correspondence with some of the prejudices within, and enter by a gate which their treasonable support betrays to the besieger. Or, to drop metaphor, the mind will either not receive, or gradually eject and obliterate elements which it cannot assimilate, which it cannot harmonize with the rest of the mental furniture, be they facts ten times over, and the occupation of the mind by facts is extremely precarious until reasons for them have been given which will reconcile them with the other constituents of the mind. Now the facts alleged are of a very startling character and run sharply counter to many old-established prejudices of most men, who are simply upset by them, shocked and perplexed, but quite unable to believe ‘’facts” which do not seem to fit into any reasonable scheme of things. Hence the assertion of facts does not dispense with the necessity of giving reasons.
And secondly, the facts are not in themselves adequate: they prove a future life, indeed, but not immortality.2
§ 4. It would be impossible, therefore, to avoid making the question of immortality one of reasoning, even if the reasoning should be as insufficient as that of the ordinary arguments on either side. And certainly we shall soon discover that most of these arguments are worthy of their origins in the prejudices of men, i.e., inconclusive and of little value. We must not expect then to find that the arguments in favor of a future life, whether based on authority or on reason, are either conclusive or secure.
To take, first, the most popular of these arguments, that which claims to base itself on the Christian religion. We shall find that though the traditions of the Christian Church apparently support the doctrine of a future life, its assurances are anything but explicit, and we must be easy to satisfy if we are content to accept them as conclusive. For it would be difficult to devise any eschatology more obscure, fragmentary and ambiguous than that of the traditional religion, or one which so ingeniously combines the defects of raising insoluble difficulties, and of yet leaving us without answer upon the most critical points.
The end and the origin of the soul are alike shrouded in perplexities which religious dogma makes no serious attempt to dispel. For instance, what happens to the soul after death? Does it sleep or is it judged? if it sleeps,—and to judge from the inscriptions of our graveyards this may claim to be the accepted view,—is not this an admission of the possibility of its annihilation at least for a season? And if for a time, why not for ever? Or if it is judged, what are the relations of this preliminary judgment to the Last Judgment?
Or, again, whence does the soul come? Does it exist before the body, is it derived from the souls or the bodies of its parents, or created ad hoc by the Deity? is Pre-existence, Traducianism, or Creationism the orthodox doctrine? The first theory, although we shall see that it is the only one on which any rational eschatology can be or has been based, is difficult, and has not been very prominent in religious thought, but the other two are alike impossible and offensive. And it would be difficult to decide which supposition was more offensive, whether that the manufacture of immortal spirits should be a privilege directly delegated to the chance passions of a male and a female, or that they should have the power at pleasure to call forth the creative energy of God. And however well the former theory may have agreed with the speculative views of the early Church, it would be well-nigh impossible now-a-days to distinguish it from materialism. And if the progress of science has rendered Traducianism untenable, has not the progress of moral insight done the same for Creationism? For it surely cannot explain the different dispositions and faculties of different souls by the varying excellence of the Creator’s work, nor make the creation of souls with unequal endowments compatible with divine justice, even if it be supposed that the naturally inferior souls are judged by a more lenient standard. For how can a soul that has led the best life possible under very unfavorable conditions, has been, e.g., a good Fuegian, be adjudged worthy of heaven? if our life on earth has any educational value as a preparation for Heaven, the Fuegian would be utterly unfitted for any heavenly life, which could only make him supremely miserable; if it has not, he (and every one else) would have to be fitted for it by a miraculous fiat of the Deity. But in this case, what is the use of earth-life, and why should not everybody be at once transmuted into an angel or devil, according as it pleased God to predestinate him? Does it convey an ennobling view of God’s action to call in the aid of needless miracle in order to make good the original injustice of an unjustifiable inequality, and is it well to save the divine justice at the expense of the spiritual value of life?
From these and similar difficulties it will be seen that it is not merely the mania for making “concessions to science” that has more than once prompted “liberal” divines to undertake the proof that a belief in a future life was not an essential part of Christianity. And, indeed, they may be admitted to have established that there is no logical necessity for this doctrine within the system of the traditional religion, nor even any explicit affirmation of the continuance of all individuals. On the contrary, the Scriptures contain many passages which implicitly and explicitly deny it, and compare man to “the beasts that perish.” And the positive assertions of Scripture are all inconclusive. Thus, e.g., no conclusion evidently can be drawn from the resurrection of Christ. For it is impossible to argue from the bodily resurrection of a divine being to the continuance of the soul of ordinary men. If there is one thing certain, it is that our future life can not be similar to the resurrection and ascension into a super-terrestrial sphere of the terrestrial body of Christ. Whatever else we do when we die, we leave our bodies in our sepulchres. Nor need the specific promises of Heaven or Hell made to individuals in special cases be held to establish a universal rule.
Thus it appears that the traditional religion not only does not give us any serviceable information, concerning any future life, but does not even secure us our fancied heritage of Heaven or of Hell. And once this is realized, it surely becomes evident that it cannot be accepted in any sense as conclusive of the matter under discussion.
§ 5. We may consider next two closely allied grounds for the belief in a future life, viz., its assertion on the ground of its practical or moral necessity, or of its being a postulate of feeling. These are probably the favorite bases for the hope of immortality among those who cherish it, but neither of them is conclusive.
It does indeed at first sound a persuasive and attractive line of argument to say that there can be no retribution of good and evil if there is no future life, and that the belief in it is therefore a practical necessity, if there is to be any reason or justice in the order of things.
But what if the constitution of things admit neither of reason nor of justice, and hence be unable to recognize any such moral necessity? What if things be inherently irrational and perverse? That all should come right in the end is an assumption we can by no means make as a matter of course, but only with the utmost difficulty (cp. ch. v. § 2), and until it is established the argument from moral necessity is simply arguing in a circle. And even when it is admitted, as in a sense we have admitted it (§ 2, s.f), it can never be admitted as an independent and substantive argument. It must always result from a general view of the world, which has previously established its rationality. And this is precisely what most of those that make use of this plea neglect to do. They make an appeal to moral necessity, although their systems have left no room for morality, for the distinction of Good and Evil. If, as is the case in the pantheism of the infinite (ch.x. §10), or in the atheism of Buddhism, the distinction of Good and Evil is merely phenomenal and really unmeaning, we have no business to expect from the All any perception of the “moral necessity” of bestowing a future life upon us.
Again, the assertion of a future life as a postulate of feeling seems to require something like universality in the feeling. But not only have we been led to observe phenomena (§§ 2 and 3), which throw considerable doubt on the genuineness of the alleged desire for immortality, but the history of Hinduism shows that under certain circumstances the prospect of the continuation of life may actually come to be pretty universally regarded with horror and detestation, and that the loss of personal existence by absorption into the Absolute may become the highest object of desire. Nor can human nature be utterly different in the West; and if among us the desire for annihilation is less prominent, it is not because it is there less reasonable. For surely it must indicate a deplorable lack either of imagination or of real belief. If men who admit that if there is a future life they have merited the severest punishment—and there must be many such—can prefer the torments of eternal damnation to the cessation of life. Not only, therefore, does the argument from feeling involve the somewhat dubious thesis that men desire continuance at any price, but it also has first to posit the rationality of things. The constitution of things must not be so wantonly perverse as to baulk us of the satisfaction of our desires.
And even granting this, and granting, as we may perhaps do, that the desire for immortality has played an important and beneficial part in furthering the progress of the world, we are not yet assured of a personal immortality. It may be that our feelings are not destined to utter disappointment in their ultimate form, but that we were yet mistaken as to the real drift of our present desires. It may be that what would really satisfy them will be attained, and yet prove something considerably different from what we now desire.
Yet we may concede to this plea a certain amount of truth. It would truly be an outrage upon our conviction of the rationality of things if a feeling so deep-seated should prove groundless, if a feeling which has played so important and increasingly important a part in the Evolution of the world should not stand in some essential relation to the aim of the world-process.
§ 6. And lastly, all arguments drawn from the simplicity and unity of the soul are dangerous and fallacious (cp. ch. ii. §§ 20, 21). They rest upon an untenable dualism which inevitably raises insoluble questions as to the relations of body and soul, and the nature of the bond which connects them. For such dualism lends countenance to the idea that the connection between body and soul is extraneous and mechanical, that each might exist without the other, and yet be what it is. It is incompatible with the view which we have seen to be the only intelligible account of matter, and the only adequate reply to materialism (cp. ch. ix. §§ 26-28), viz., that matter exists only for spirits, and that the soul is the soul of a particular body, the internal reflex of a spiritual interaction of which the body is the external expression. And as in this dualism the body is the obvious and visible partner, whereas the soul is neither, there is an easy transition to a denial of the invisible soul and the crassest materialism.
And the dualism of body and soul is not only physically incompetent to account for the facts, but also, to a hardly less degree, psychologically. The conditioning of certain activities of the soul by the body is so manifest and irresistible, that a distinction between the ‘’bodily feelings,” engendered in the soul by its connection with the body, and its own proper feelings, must be made, even though the unity and simplicity of the soul is thereby sacrificed. The bodily feelings are then regarded as transitory, and produce the distinction between the mortal and immortal “parts of the soul,” and this distinction destroys the human personality. For, with any strictness and consistency, more and more of our psychical activities must be extruded from the immortal part of the soul, until it is suddenly discovered that all our activities are indelibly stamped with the impress of mortality, and the “immortal part” is left as an empty shell from which all content has been extracted, which has no feeling that any one ever feels or is capable of feeling, and is nothing the continuance of which human feeling can possibly desire. And then the last step is inevitable: as all the attributes which express the individuality of the soul have been abstracted from, nothing remains to distinguish one person’s soul from that of another; and so the immortal part is declared to be the Universal Soul, in which all the individual souls partake and which is one and the same for all. And whereas the personal individual souls are transitory, the impersonal Universal Soul is eternal: as a principle of metaphysics the unity of Soul is after a fashion maintained, even while personal immortality is declared a delusion. Such is the doctrine of immortality which is the genuine and logical outcome of every dualistic view of the relations of body and soul, and the history of philosophy shows that it may be read into, or developed out of, every dualistic system.3 But whatever its philosophic merits, and as to these what has been said about Pantheism will mutatis mutandis be applicable, it is pretty clear that the eternity of Universal Soul is not what men bargained for, nor anything that men desire, or perhaps ought to desire; it may or may not be an excellent doctrine philosophically, but it will hardly do duty instead of a personal immortality.
§ 7. And the arguments against the possibility of a future life are equally inconclusive.
The most popular of these is also the most worthless; for the different forms of materialism are fatal only to the mistaken dualism which regards body and soul as separable entitles. They do not touch the Idealist view which refutes the materialist inference from the facts by the reply that the connection of “body” and ‘’soul” is at least as well explained by regarding Matter as a phase of the content of Spirit as vice versa (cp. ch. ix. § 28).
§ 8. And idealism also enables us to see the inconclusiveness of the phenomena of death, which form a silent but continual protest against the belief in a future life, all the more forcible because it appeals to some of our deepest feelings at times when our powers to resist the impression are weakest.
He would indeed be a strangely constituted man who did not in the presence of his beloved dead feel the unanswerable impressiveness of death, the utter and irretrievable severance which its agency effected. And no argument or consolation can get over the fact that whether or not the dead continue to exist, they are lost to the survivors, and that the ties which bound them to their earthly environment are broken. For whatever mysteries the future may hold in store, no future meeting, no recognition even, can resume the thread or restore the sweetness of the human relations death has severed, or assure us that under conditions wholly different the charm of human relationships will be renewed.
Though, therefore, we must thus renounce whatever hopes we may have based on impure and imperfect relations rather than upon the highest and purest of spiritual sympathies, we must yet resist the impression of this spurious self-evidence of the finality of death, and reassert against the impulses of agonized feeling that the apparent need not be the real. And thus we may come to realize that our view of death is necessarily imperfect and one sided. For we contemplate it only from the point of view of the survivors, never from that of the dying. We have not the least idea of what death means to those that die. To us it is a catastrophic change, whereby a complex of phenomenal appearances, which we call the body of the dead, ceases to suggest to us the presence of the ulterior existence which we called his spirit. But this does not prove, nor even tend to prove, that the spirit of the dead has ceased to exist. It merely shows that he has ceased to form part of our little world, to interact, at least in the way in which we had been accustomed, with our spirits. But it is at least as probable that this result is to be ascribed to his having been promoted or removed, as to his having been destroyed.
And for such suppositions nature offers us manifold analogies. It would be a change similar to that whereby a being which had lived the earlier stages of its life in the water, by a sudden change in its organization, took to living in the air, and this we know is the case with many insects. Hence it was not by a mistaken fancy that the butterfly was at all times regarded as the type of immortality. For the analogy is really fairly complete: in both cases there occurs an apparently catastrophic change in the mode of life, a breach in the continuity of existence, a passing into a new environment with very different functions and conditions. And in both cases also there is left behind an empty shell to deride the fears of those who cannot understand that identity can be preserved through all the transformations of metamorphosis. To judge by the first appearance of the cast-off slough, we should deem the change, of which we see the symbol, to have been that of death, and yet we now know that it indicates a fresh phase of life. Is it then so bold a conjecture that by the time when we know as much of the spiritual aspects of existence as we now do of the physical, the dead body may seem a shell as empty as the chrysalis from which the butterfly has flown, and as sure a token of release into a wider sphere of life?
But, it may be urged, is there not the great difficulty that the chrysalis is empty, while the organization of the dead body remains intact, and that we can trace the development of the butterfly in the chrysalis, while we cannot see how the spirit is prepared for its new life, as its old body gets worn out with age: the change in the one case only seems catastrophic, in the other it really is.
Such objections owe their undeniable plausibility to the deficiencies of our knowledge and the gross-ness of our perceptions. But for these there might be some hope of our understanding that from a spiritual point of view the dead body is really just as empty as the chrysalis, a meaningless mass of machinery, from which the motive force has been withdrawn; but as its emptiness is spiritual, and not visible and palpable, we fail to see the parallelism.
And so again it might be, if we lived more wisely, that the body would not be outworn before the spirit wearied of its life on earth, or before it had prepared for itself a spiritual tenement, with which, at the summons of the angel of death, it would soar aloft as gladly as the butterfly.
But yet again, it may be asked, if death is but change, why should the complex of phenomena we call the body be left behind to decay and to pollute a world from which the spirit has departed? But what would such critics have? Would they prefer that men at death should silently vanish away, and be dissolved into air like ghosts? Would this be a more satisfactory mode of effecting one’s exit? And does not, after all, the objection on the ground of the decay of the body rest upon a misconception? There is no reason why the body should not be preserved: death, as we now know, has nothing to do with the decay of the body. For decay is a phenomenon of life, not of death, of the life of the micro-organisms that live upon the bodies of the dead. And is there not a certain symbolic fitness in the persistence for a season of the body in the phenomenal world in which the spirit worked, and which its action will affect as long as that world remains? it forms, as it were, a symbol of a spiritual agency whose spiritual development has taken other forms, and left this shell behind in its advance to higher phases of existence.
There is no reason, therefore, why we should take the phenomenon of death as conclusive of the matter, or regard it as inconsistent with the conception of a spiritual process of purification by means of the gradations of existence. For if such be the essential meaning of the world-process, it is evident that no indefinite stay can be made in any one stage, and indeed none could permanently meet the spiritual requirements. It is, moreover, pretty obvious in our case that long life is by no means an unmixed blessing: for by an intelligent mind the lessons of life are soon learnt, and while the social environment remains what it is, the experience of a protracted life is apt only to engender a conviction that all is humbug, a cynical disbelief in all ideals and the possibility of realizing them.
§ 9. Such considerations may tend to counteract the overwhelming impressiveness of the fact of death, but they only demonstrate the possibility of a future life. And moreover, though death makes the strongest appeal to our feelings, the doctrine of a future life involves a difficulty far more serious in the eyes of reason. This difficulty arises out of the impossibility of fixing the point at which immortality begins, either in the beginning of the individual’s life or in that of the race. It seems so utterly impossible to attribute an immortal, or indeed any sort of consciousness, to the material rudiments of our individual existence; and the modern doctrine of the descent of man makes it almost as impossible to do so in the case of the race. The union of two minute particles of Matter is the historical origin, at all events, of all conscious beings; and at what point in the historical development can we introduce a transition from the material existence of the germs, which exists only for consciousness, to the spiritual existence of an immortal consciousness?4 Or again. If all living beings have been propagated from living protoplasm, and if man is but the highest of the animals, but does not differ from them in kind, how can we, in the infinite gradations of spiritual evolution, draw a line anywhere to separate men or animals who possess immortal souls from those that do not? it would seem that they must all be treated alike; either all animals are immortal or none. And yet, while some might welcome a belief in the immortality of the higher animals, e.g. of dogs, how could any one admit the immortality of an amoeba? And even if our generosity rose to the absurd pitch of admitting it, how could we carry this belief into practice? how should we discern the immortality of beings which possess so little individuality? is every leaf or cell of a tree, and every segment of a zoophyte—In short, every part of an organism which under favorable conditions is capable of independent existence—an immortal individual? if so, can we multiply immortal souls by dividing a jellyfish? Surely, when once the question is definitely raised that we must be just as immortal as the germs and protoplasms from which we sprang, the answer our reason must give is that immortality is a foolish dream.
§ 10. It is to be feared that reflections like these present almost insuperable obstacles to the belief in a future life in modern minds. But if they can be answered, their very difficulty would make the answer the more satisfactory. Yet no attempt at answering the difficulty can be successful which does not realize where its real point lies. Its essence lies in the fact that whereas consciousness and the conscious life of spiritual beings is a matter of degree, it seems impossible to admit degrees of immortality. It seems as though a being must either have a future life or not, must either be immortal or perish utterly. But if the lowest passes into the highest forms of consciousness by a continuous development, it is nowhere possible to draw a line of demarcation, and to assert the immortality of man without admitting that of the amoeba.
To assert the continuance of spiritual beings, therefore, it would be requisite to assert gradations of immortality. We must somehow distinguish between the case of the embryo and the adult, between the highest man and the lowest animal. We must, in short, discover degrees in a spiritual evolution corresponding to the degrees of the physical evolution.
§ 11. Now, though these postulates may at first sight appear strange and impossible, yet if we discard ancient prejudices, they will not perhaps prove incapable of fulfillment. We require, in the first place, a careful analysis of the conditions on which a future life depends.
To have a real meaning, immortality must be personal immortality; i.e., it must involve in some sort the persistence of the “I” which in this life thinks, and feels, and wills. It must preserve our personal identity, i.e., there must be continuity of consciousness between the Self of this life and of the next. The Buddhist doctrine of “Karma,” of a person who is the resultant of one’s actions, but does not share any part of one’s consciousness, is a miserable compromise between the desires to deny the eternity of personal suffering (for to Buddhism to exist is to suffer), and to retain the moral stimulus of a belief in a future life. But it falls between two stools, and does not satisfy the conditions of a genuine future life. For it is impossible to regard the person who inherits one’s Karma as identical with oneself, or to feel a responsible interest in his fate. His connection with the man whose Karma moulds his character and predestines his circumstances seems purely arbitrary, and due to a tyrannous constitution of things whose procedures we are not called upon to endorse.
And, to a less degree, the same defect of failing adequately to preserve the sense of personal identity in its doctrines of the future life, is observable also in the current religious eschatology, and is probably one of the chief reasons of its practical ineffectiveness. We are led to think of the breach in continuity as too absolute, and feel little real concern in the angel or demon whom the catastrophe of our death produces in another world.
If, then, a future life without self-identity is a meaningless mockery, let us inquire on what self-identity depends. And the answer seems plain that it primarily depends on nothing else than memory. It is only by means of memory that we can identify ourselves with our past; it is only by memory that we can hope to enjoy the fruits of present efforts in the future. If every morning on awaking we had forgotten all that we ever did, if all the feelings, thoughts, hopes, fears and aspirations of yesterday’s self had perished overnight, we should soon cease to regard tomorrow’s self as a personage in whom it was possible to take any rational interest, or for whose future it was necessary or possible to provide. We take an interest in our own future, because we believe that we can forecast the feelings of the future self, because we believe that the future self which enjoys the fruits of our labours will be conscious of its past, because, in a word, its welfare is organically connected with that of our present self. Thus, to all intents and purposes, self identity, and with it immortality, depend on memory.
§ 12. But memory is a matter of degree. Here, then, we have the key to a theory of immortality which will admit of graduation. If we can conceive a future life, the reality of which depends on memory, it will admit of less or more. And if, as seems natural, the extent to which the events of life are remembered depends largely on the intensity of spiritual activity they implied, it follows that the higher and intenser consciousness was during life, the greater the intensity of future consciousness. Hence the amoeba or the embryo, with their infinitesimal consciousness, will possess only an infinitesimal memory of their past after death. And this for a twofold reason: not only must the impress life produces upon so rudimentary a consciousness generate only a very faint memory, but the contents also of life will present little that is capable of persisting and worthy of being retained. Thus the lowest phases of spiritual existence will have nothing to remember, and hardly any means of remembering it. We cannot, therefore, ascribe to them any vivid or enduring consciousness of their past lives, and yet need not deny it altogether. They have a future life, but it is rudimentary.
This view will open up to us an alternative to utter extinction or fully conscious immortality, and we shall no longer be haunted with that nightmare of orthodoxy, the vision of “little children, a span long, crawling in hell.” But by a self-acting arrangement the condition of consciousness hereafter will accurately correspond to its attainments here. Just in proportion as we have developed our spiritual powers here will be our spiritual future. Those who have lived the life of beasts here, a dull and brutish life that was redeemed by no effort to illumine the soul by spiritual enlightenment, will be rewarded as “the beasts that perish.” They will retain little of what they were, their future life will be brief and faint. On the other hand, we need not hesitate to attribute to the faithful dog, whom the strength of pure affection for his master has lifted far above the spiritual level of his race, at least as much immortality as to the brutal savage, whose life has been ennobled by no high thoughts and redeemed by no elevating feeling.5 Those, again, whose activities have been devoted to the commission of evil deeds, that burn their impress on the soul, will be haunted by their torturing memory. Those who have trained and habituated themselves to high and noble activities, who have disposed their thoughts towards truths which are permanent and their affections towards relations which are enduring, will rise to life everlasting, and will have actions worthy of memory to look back upon. The cup of Circe, the debasing draught of forgetfulness, which turns men into beasts, and renders them oblivious of their divine destiny, will pass from them. And they will be capable of remembering their past life, glad to retrace the record of great and noble deeds and lofty aspirations, the promise of a spiritual progress they have since nobly fulfilled. Nor will the memory of the past fade until it pleases them to forget it in the ecstasy of still sublimer activities. Thus each of us will be the master and maker of his own self and of his own immortality, and his future life will be such as he has deserved.
§ 13. But it may be objected that memory does not last for ever, and that hence a future life depending on it would endure but for a season. And the fact that this and several other objections might be brought against the views we have hinted at, should admonish us of the necessity of dropping the negative method of criticizing inconclusive arguments, and proceeding at length to a connected account of a positive doctrine. It may be a salutary and necessary discipline to begin at the beginning as it appears to us, to start with the obvious difficulties which a subject presents to our first attack; but after such efforts have cleared the ground, we must learn to discover the real root of the matter, and discuss it in its logical and not in its historical order. Hence it is necessary to supplement the results of critical discussion of perplexities by a systematic exposition, beginning with a statement of the ultimate positive ground of the doctrine of immortality.
§ 14. The only absolutely secure basis either for the assertion or for the denial of immortality must be metaphysical. It is only the all-devouring One of Monism which can make the permanent existence of the Many impossible; it is only the plurality of ultimate existences which can ultimately make it possible. The ultimate self-existence of spirits, the doctrine that existences are many, spirits uncreated, uncaused, that are and ever have been and can never cease to be, is the only metaphysical ground for asserting the immortality of the individual. And this metaphysical ground’ we have secured by the preference given to Pluralism over Monism (ch. x. § 21-23), and by our account of the Transcendental Ego as the reconciliation of idealism and science and as the explanation of the material world (ch. ix. §§ 22, 24, 26-31).
Now what is the bearing of our metaphysics on the question before us? it follows necessarily and at once from the pluralistic answer given to the ultimate question of ontology that the ultimate existences are eternal and immortal, and this assertion also applies to the Transcendental Egos that underlie our phenomenal selves. In some sense, therefore —to the extent to which we are to be identified with ultimate existences and transcendental Egos— it is absolutely certain that we are immortal. And further, as the whole world-process is a process taking place in the interaction between the Egos and the Deity, the different stages of material evolution must correspond to different phases of that spiritual interaction. Parallel, therefore, to the physical evolution, there runs a spiritual evolution, related to it as meaning and motive to outward and visible manifestation. And there is no reason why this process should not be the development, not of Spirit in general, but of particular spirits, why a single Ego should not pass through the succession of organisms and developments of consciousness, from the amoeba to man, and from man to perfection. This gives, as it were, the spiritual interpretation of the descent of man from the beasts, and at the same time assures him of his due and proportionate share in the immortality of the ultimate spirit.
§ 15. But though the plurality of ultimate existence affords the only safe and sure ground for metaphysical immortality, it is too remote from the phenomena of our world to be at once appealed to in settling the nature of our future life. It is necessary to make out the connection of the metaphysical with the physical, and it is just on the subject of this connection that considerable variety of doctrine might prevail. We may admit without derogating from the substantial truth of our principles, that our data are as yet too inadequate for us to regard speculations concerning the connection of our present selves with the ultimate spirits as more than probable guesses, to be ratified or modified by the course of future discovery. Hence, though, it may be laid down generally that the ultimate spirits manifest themselves in the phenomenal, it is yet necessary to ask what is the relation of such an eternal spirit to its successive phases, which form our phenomenal existences, and in what sense can these be said to have a future life? Upon the answer to this question it will depend whether we can continue to speak of our future life in any ordinary sense.
Now, that the insufficiency of our data renders the question a difficult one, it would be affectation to deny. And the reflection that with a little more knowledge the greatest obscurities would seem plain and self-evident fails also to assist our fainting imagination. But we may perhaps convey some idea of the facts by the aid of a simile.
If the world-process aims at impressing the divine image upon the hard metal of the Ego, then each phenomenal life may be supposed to stamp some faint impression on its substance. And as the impressions are multiplied, they gradually mould the Ego into the required shape, and each successive impress, working upon material already more completely fitted into shape, produces a more definite impression of itself, and also fashions more definitely that which it impresses. As the material comes nearer to its final shape its resistance becomes less,, and each impress produces fewer features which must. be erased as divergent from the ideal. Or, in other words, the spiritual value of the lower stages of consciousness is small; they produce their effect only by their repetition and multiplication. But as the higher grades of individuality are reached, the spiritual significance of a single phenomenal life is intensified, and it leaves a more enduring mark, upon the nature of the spirit. If, therefore, we ask in what sense the phenomenal phases of the spirit’s, development persist and continue, we must answer generally, that they persist as factors in the development. The future lives of the spirit are the resultant of its past. But the individual impress of a single life persists only in so far as it has coincided with the course of spiritual development. So, too, the impressions produced by single blows upon a coin persist only in so far as their shape coincided with that to be ultimately (produced; the individual divergences and eccentricities of a single impress are obliterated by their multiplication. Thus in a way, the good, i.e., the action in the line of upward development, would be immortal, however humble the sphere in which it was enacted: the good character would persist even when it was absorbed and included in a higher stage of development, for such development would only be the natural and necessary development of the highest aspirations of the lower life.
And this mode of spiritual progression is not an arbitrary conjecture of our fancy concerning a transcendent sphere of which we know nothing; it is the law of all life even now. It is the law whereby all organisms take up and assimilate what they can utilize, i.e., what serves their purposes, and reject what they cannot; it is the law whereby the world-process preserves what promotes its purpose, viz., the good, and dissolves the rest away. And this law may be traced throughout all individual and social progress. To be impressed by any experience requires the previous attainment of a certain correspondence between the agent and the patient; to be persistent, the impression must be not only congenial to the nature impressed, but consonant with the line of its development. A lasting impression, in other words, is one which is important to us, not only for a moment but for the course of our history; if it runs counter to our nature and our history, its influence is rapidly obliterated. And so with events that had little intrinsic importance, i.e., little spiritual significance, they are forgotten and their effect is evanescent. For memory is not indiscriminate: it selects what is significant and thus preserves it: and yet again all the experience that moulds the character, though it may be forgotten, has not wholly perished, for it persists in the resultant habits. And what is true of impressions is true also of persons and of actions; in social progress also it is emphatically not true that “” the evil that men do lives after them.” Like a polluted stream, the course of history runs itself clear of the errors and crimes of the unconscious or unwilling human instruments of the divine purpose: the blindness and perversity of its champions cannot stop the progress of a good cause. On the other hand, it is vain to struggle against the spirit of the ages and the necessities of evolution; neither virtue nor genius can prop a falling cause. Christianity triumphed in spite of the murder of Hypatia.; but Demosthenes could not save Athens, nor Hannibal Carthage, and Cato could not recall the ghost of Roman freedom by the blood of his self-sacrifice. Force may effect reactions that run counter to the course of things, but they soon pass away, and leave no trace behind. How much remained of the constitution of Sulla, or of the restored rule of the Bourbons, twenty years after its institution?
Thus all the elements of the lower phases of life that are capable of development are transformed into the higher, and the continuous thread of consciousness is never broken. And this continuity of the phases, of consciousness is really sufficient to secure also the identity of the self, for though self-identity depend on memory, it is not necessary that the memory should be perfect. It is not necessary that we should remember all we did ten years ago in order to feel ourselves the same persons now as then, nor need we expect to remember all we feel now, in order to identify ourselves with ourselves ten years hence. The continuity of the chain of consciousness suffices to constitute the identity, even though from any given point the remoter links have passed out of sight; and hence a future life may in a sense be ascribed to all conscious beings.
Nevertheless it is not until the higher stages of individuality and spiritual development are reached that the phenomenal self of any single life, i.e., the memory of its past, can be supposed to form a predominant, or even an important, factor in the total or final consciousness of the Ego, or one that can display any great permanence. The lower phases of Evolution do not generate sufficient psychical energy to attain to any considerable degree of immortality. For as we saw (§ 12), the continuance of life depends on memory, and memory on the intensity of the impression thoughts and feelings make upon the soul, and on the whole the capacity to receive impressions corresponds to the degree of spiritual development.
But how does all this apply to man? Shall we assert that man has reached a sufficient height of spiritual evolution so that the human soul, the phenomenal self of our earth-life, persists as human? Certainly man has in many cases shown such capacity for thoughts more than human, for a “love that is stronger than death,” that it would seem monstrous to deny him the intensity of consciousness which substantially preserves his personality. And yet, when we look upon the sordid lives of others, whose outlook is limited to the grossest features of this world, we cannot but feel that the persistence of their personalities would be only an obstacle to the development of their spirit. And so it will perhaps seem a probable compromise to make the aspirations of the soul, ie., the fitness of the phenomenal self to adapt itself to the conditions of a higher spiritual life, the test of immortality, and to suppose that the desire of continuance, whether widely or exceptionally felt, affords a fairly adequate measure of personal survival. We need not suppose that personal immortality will be forced on those whose phenomenal self has not desired it nor prepared itself to survive death, and who make no effort to preserve the memory of their past, nor yet that those should be baulked who have really and intensely desired it. And for these latter the practical outcome of this doctrine cannot be formulated more truly and more concisely than in the maxim of Aristotle, [Greek text]6 bidding them “as far as possible to lead the life of immortality” on earth, ie., to live constantly in communion with the ideal, and in co-operation with the aim of the world’s evolution.
§ 16. Such are the outlines of a theory of immortality which would meet the main difficulties of the subject, and explain how a future life can admit of gradations proportioned to the grades and conditions of consciousness. But our account would be incomplete if it did nothing to elucidate several points not yet touched upon. The easiest misconception, e.g., to fall into would be that of regarding the Ego as a reality different from the self. It has already been remarked, and must here be emphasized again, that the Ego is not a second and alien consciousness concurrent with and distinct from the selves (cp. ch. ix. § 22). The self or selves (ch. ix. § 23) are simply the actually conscious part of the Ego, which represents the potentialities of their development on the one hand and their primary and pre-cosmic condition on the other. The Ego is both the basis of the development and its end, but within the process the selves alone are real. For as will be shown in the next chapter, both the pre-cosmic basis and the post-cosmic end, though necessarily implied in and inferred from the cosmic process, belong to a radically different order of things from our present world of Becoming, and the Ego does not as such enter into the cosmos. Even if, therefore, we adopted a supposition which may perhaps commend itself from a moral point of view, that after death, in the intervals, as it were, of its incarnations, the Ego recovered a fuller consciousness and the memory of all its past lives, these lucid intervals, though they might produce great moral effects, would not in themselves form part of the phenomenal development, and the latter would appear to be continuous from phase to phase of phenomenal consciousness.
§ 17. Secondly, we must consider some of the objections likely to be made to a doctrine involving the pre-existence of the soul, although no apology should really be needed. For no rational argument in favor of immortality can be devised that will not tell as strongly in favor of the pre-existence as of the post-existence of the soul, and this has been fully recognized by all rational defenders of immortality from the time of Plato downwards. It would in fact, as we saw in § 4, be hard to defend the only alternative theories of Traducianism and Creationism without a high degree of either moral obliquity or intellectual obtuseness.
And in addition to the somewhat negative merit of being the only possible theory, it is one which has been becoming progressively more credible. In early times, while our earth was regarded as the centre of the universe and the only abode of intelligent beings, the theory of pre-existence and transmigration was liable to be discredited by very homely objections. The limitation of the total number of available souls would either limit, or be refuted by, the increase of population, while their confinement to a single world precluded the idea of anything like a real progress of the individual souls. They had to be reincarnated in our world, until, as the history of the Hindus and Buddhism showed, the doctrine of transmigration, with its endless round of purposeless re-births, became a terror such that men eagerly grasped at the idea of annihilation as a release from the vicissitudes of life. But now the knowledge of the plurality of worlds has relieved the doctrine of the first difficulty, while the theory of the ascent which is strangely nicknamed that of the descent of man, and of the transformations of animals into men, shows that the process of transmigration is not devoid of the elements of progress. Is it not curious, again, that whereas nothing has brought more ridicule upon the belief in metempsychosis than its inference that the souls of men had previously animated the bodies of animals, this very pedigree of the human soul should have been rendered credible and probable by the discoveries of modern science? if the Darwinian theory of descent compels us to assert that the soul of man has been developed out of the souls of animals, what difficulty remains in the supposition that each individual soul has passed through the stages of this same development?
And again, the objection to pre-existence, on the ground of our failure to remember anything about our past lives, has distinctly diminished in cogency. We have learnt too well what a curiously uncertain thing memory is to attach much weight to its disabilities. For, in the first place, the absence of memory may be perfectly accounted for teleologically on grounds of adaptation. The memory of such a past as we should probably have had would have been a most troublesome equipment, a most disabling burden, in the battle of life. For the recollection of our past faults and past failures would, in the present state of our spiritual development, be a most fatal obstacle to the freshness and hopefulness with which we should encounter life’s present problems. Whatever, therefore, may be the case hereafter, it seems clear that the cultivation of a wise forgetfulness was the condition of spiritual progress in the past; a short memory was necessary, if the burden of unbearable knowledge was not to crush our spirit.
Secondly, in the face of the growing evidence of how the right manipulations may revive the memory of what seemed to have perished beyond recovery (cp. ch. ix. § 28 s.f.), it would be rash indeed to assert that the progress of experimental psychology should not, by some as yet undiscovered process, enable us actually to remember our past.
And lastly, it should be observed that whatever the evidential value of our obliviousness of our past lives, it applies equally to the earlier portions of our present life. No one has any but second-hand evidence of the earHer stages of his existence on earth; our belief in our birth rests upon testimony, and is confirmed by inference; we believe the tales of our entry into the world, because we perceive that we must have come into it somehow. And the inference as to our pre-existence is of a precisely similar kind, though, it may be, of inferior certainty (cp. ch. X. § 29). So also we believe the testimony of our reason as to our past existence, because there is no other mode of accounting for our present existence; we believe in pre-existence, because it is the only reasonable inference from the observed facts.
§ 18. But there remains one very real and serious objection to our eschatology, as to all theories of pre-existence, and indeed to all belief in a future life. This is the conflict between it and the conception of heredity. If our parents fashion our bodies for us, and if our souls are the souls of our particular bodies, how can the immortal spirit enter them from without? if our character and circumstances are the inherited results of the past action of our parents, how can they be the result of the past action of our Ego, and the reward of conduct in a previous life?
The difficulty is a real one, and must not be trifled with or evaded. It will not do to deny the fact of heredity, and still less to limit its scope by distinguishing that part of the soul which is inherited from that which pre-exists. The one device would display only our scientific ignorance, the other our metaphysical incompetence (cp. § 6).
But perhaps, we may say, the dilemma in which the objection seeks to place us is a false one, and the alternatives of “either fashioned by our parents or by our spirit” are not so exclusive as they might at first sight appear. For why should we not be fashioned both by our parents and by our own past, in different ways? The possibility of this solution appears at first somewhat of a mystery, but we ought by this time to have acquired a sufficient distrust of pseudo-mysteries not to jump at the conclusion that any difficulty we can formulate is beyond the bounds of the human reason.
For, admitting the general doctrine that the character of the offspring is inherited from the parents, we may raise the question of what determines the particular mixture which constitutes a particular character. The parents possess an indefinite number of potentialities that may possibly be inherited, and these, again, may be commingled in an indefinite number of ways. But the character actually inherited is a definite combination of these potential qualities, and what determines the way in which it is actually combined? it is not enough to know generally that the parents supply the materials of the new combination; we must know also what arranges the materials in a definite order.
Now if we supposed that this proportion in which the various dispositions of the parents entered into the character of the offspring was really determined by the character of the spiritual entity which the parents were capable of providing with a suitable organism, we should at all events have devised a method which rendered pre-existence compatible with heredity. For there is no apparent break in the chain of natural causes: the whole character of the offspring is inherited from the parents. But as the limits within which heredity is possible are very wide, the spiritual selection is supposed to work within them. And as no direct evidence can ever prove that an indefinite number of other combinations would not have equally well satisfied the conditions of all the physical factors, it is clear that our theory can never be disproved by the facts of heredity. On the contrary, it might perhaps serve to explain some of its most perplexing physical aspects, such as the origination of the so-called “accidental variations” which play so important a part in biological history. At present the variations which produce a man of genius or generate a new species, are to science utterly inexplicable; for that is the meaning of “accidental.” The constitution of the parents no doubt renders them possible, for else they would not occur, but it in no wise explains them. For they are cases which border upon the impossible, and what is wanted is some explanation of how and why these exceptional possibilities are occasionally realized, and how the forces which resist any divergence from the normal combinations are occasionally overcome. And we delude ourselves if we suppose that we have cast any light upon the subject by adducing the parallel of exceptional combinations in the realm of mathematical probabilities. For in throwing dice, e.g., no one combination is in itself any more probable than any other, nor is there any force acting so as to make the succession of 1, 2, 5 any easier than three sixes. It is only because there are so many more of the combinations we call ordinary possible, that they occur more frequently, and no greater energy is required to throw ten sixes in succession than to, throw any other series.
But a case of heredity is totally different. The forces tending to reproduce in the offspring something like the average character of the race must preponderate so enormously, that the resistance to any marked divergence from it must be incalculably great, and increase in geometrical proportion the more marked the divergence becomes. That is to say, it is immensely more difficult to throw the rare combination, not merely because there are so many more of the ordinary ones, but because far more force is required, because the dice are so cogged as to make it nearly impossible. Hence it is useless to appeal to the calculus of probabilities as to a deus ex machina to help us out of the difficulty: we must recognize that every case of variation requires a definite and relatively very powerful force to produce it. But where is this force to come from? Surely not from the physical conditions of generation? For these do not vary greatly in the generation of a genius and of a duffer. And besides, how should minute differences of times and seasons and temperature and manner, etc., have such disproportionate psychical effects?
But let us indulge science in these a priori prejudices, and admit that in some way, not to be further explained, the physical circumstances at the time of generation determine with which out of an indefinite number of possible characters the offspring is to be provided. Even so the question we have raised will only recur in another form, and we must ask what determines generation to take place at the particular moment when it will result in a particular character of the offspring. For here again the field of selection is extremely wide, and it would surely be an immensely impressive fact that a moment’s delay or precipitation may make all the difference, for good and for evil, in the natural endowment of the offspring.
So we must, from the strictly physical point of view, answer, that the circumstances which determine at which out of all possible moments generation shall take place, depend on another set of ulterior circumstances. And if the questioner pertinaciously inquires again on what these circumstances in their turn depend, he must be told, on another set of circumstances, and these again on another, and so on indefinitely, until we realize that we have unwittingly launched forth into an infinite regress of causes, which deludes us with a semblance of explanation, but baffles all attempts to arrive at a real and final answer. And then, if we have the courage really to think out the question, and do not give up the pursuit of truth faintheartedly as soon as our imagination wearies and our attention is relaxed, the perception may begin to dawn upon us that physical causation in the phenomenal sphere is not, perhaps, the only, nor ultimately the most satisfactory, mode of explaining a fact.
§ 19. It is quite possible for the same event to be conditioned in two different ways, teleologically and historically, by a reason as well as by what we somewhat ambiguously call a cause. And. It is only human inconsistency which sees any difficulty in this. For. It is nothing but inconsistency, to limit teleological causation by reasons to conscious human action, and to refuse to extend. It to all things, i.e., to deny the complete parallelism of the processes of nature and of our minds, while we yet assert their partial parallelism by asserting the existence of physical causation. For the assertion of the reality of causation assumes this similarity of mind and nature to some extent; and if we must assume it in some form to make science possible, why should we not assume it in its complete form, and thereby do away with the difficulties in which our inconsistent assumptions involve us? if cause is a category of the human mind which we attribute to nature, why should we not, while we are about it, attribute it in its complete form as the final cause, in which it is no longer a category which refutes itself? There may be some ground for objecting to final causes from a thoroughly skeptical point of view, which does not admit that the world of appearances is commensurate with our thought (cp. ch. iii. § n); but from the standpoint of science, which admits this assumption, such an objection surely strains at gnats while swallowing camels (cp. ch. vii. § 6).
§ 20. And it would be ridiculous affectation to assert that we are not perfectly familiar with several such instances of double causation. Our daily life supplies abundant examples of actions which are physically caused by one set of persons and teleologically by another. The man who publishes a report of the discovery of fabulously rich gold mines, with the purpose of attracting immigrants, is at least as truly the cause of the resulting “rush” as the leg-muscles of the gold diggers. And so everything in the nature of a plan, plot, or device for influencing the action of others implies agents who consciously or unconsciously give effect to the purposes of others. But the phenomenon can be studied most clearly and unmistakably in posthypnotic suggestions. It is suggested to a hypnotized subject that he is to do a certain action on awaking: when he awakes, he has no memory of the suggestion, but executes the order, if it be not one palpably absurd and repugnant to his habits, without the slightest suspicion that. It has been in any way determined by any extraneous cause: on the contrary, if inquiries are made, he will even proceed to give reasons for doing what he did, which would satisfy every one who was not aware of the real cause of the action in the hypnotic suggestion.7 And such examples should make us realize, however much we may struggle against the admission, that our causes are always reasons8 and must be so from the constitution of our minds, and that with a moderate amount of ingenuity a great variety of reasons can be given for any action. It is therefore a mere superstition to suppose that we ever arrive at the knowledge of a physical cause so absolute that it does not admit of an alternative. Hence, as soon as any considerable interests are involved, it will always be possible to support them with a show of reason, and the only error of such reasonings often is that they are esteemed mutually exclusive.
And it is not merely in the phenomena of daily life and of psychical science that we are familiar with the reality of double causation, but no less in the religious doctrine of an over-ruling Providence, i.e., of an agency which shapes the course of natural causation in accordance with a preconceived purpose.
But the philosophic truth which underlies all these facts and all these beliefs is one and the same—that of the ultimate supremacy of the final cause. It is this superiority of the final cause which preserves the conception of causation from self-refutation, and which can alone give a real explanation of the world-process. For it is only as the gradual realization of some pre-existent purpose that the process has any real meaning.
§ 21. These considerations open up several ways in which pre-existence is compatible with heredity.
In the first place, as the ultimate explanation of everything is teleological, i.e relative to the end of the world-process, the parents must be in the last resort held to transmit certain qualities to their offspring in order to further the development of the pre-existent spirits. For the parents are such as they are, their parents are such as they are, and so on, everything is such as it is, until the metaphysical or first cause of the world-process is reached, which is also its final cause, and acts in a certain way in order to promote that process.
And secondly, it is possible to conceive that just as the hypnotic operator can affect the will of his subjects without their knowledge, so the spiritual entity influences the parents so to fashion the organism of the offspring as is required by its nature and its needs.
Thus the assertions that we are descended from angels and ascended from beasts, that we are, (a) phases in the development of ultimate spiritual entities, (b) the resultants of the historical development of our ancestors, do not clash, for they formulate the process from different points of view. And not only do they not clash, but they supplement each other: they are both of them, in their own way, valid and indispensable. The second statement, will continue to be the most serviceable for most of the ordinary purposes of life, and in the view of a physical science which, is not concerned to raise the question of the ultimate nature of things and the final meaning of its own assertions. But the first will be the truest and completest, because metaphysical statement, and that most expressive of the highest aspirations of our moral nature. And it will enable us not merely to accept heredity as a fact, but also to understand it, to give a rational interpretation of the part it plays in the scheme of things.
§ 22. For when heredity is considered, not in abstract isolation as a scientific fact, but in its connection with the totality of things, it will be found to be only an extreme manifestation or illustration of the metaphysical principle of the solidarity of things.
This principle, of which the highest generalization of physics, the all-sustaining force of gravity, forms one of the lowest instances, may be traced in its manifold applications throughout the sphere of sociology. The present throughout depends on the past, alike in the case of the social organism collectively and of its members individually. We inherit the institutions, the material and intellectual products of the labours of our ancestors collectively, just as surely as we inherit their bodies individually, and posterity in its turn will inherit the conditions of life such as we have made them. And perhaps the spiritual inheritance of the social environment is hardly less important than the physical heritage which is directly transmitted. And thus the significance and raison d’étre of heredity would lie in its emphasizing in the most impressive way, in a way that none can fail to feel, this solidarity of all living beings, this continuity of the world-process, and in forcing us to realize what we saw in chapter viii. is the great law of that process, viz., that the individual must be developed in and by a social medium, and is in every way dependent on it, dependent on it for his very existence in the world. But though we regard the teleological significance of heredity to be its assertion of the solidarity of the spiritual universe, this is no reason why we should deny that there may also be spiritual affinities of a special and personal nature, underlying and inspiring the physical fact of relationship. For it seems probable that the grouping of men in their social environment is as little accidental and devoid of spiritual significance as the whole process of that environment, and if so, our relationship to our family, nation, race, etc., points to more intimate spiritual connections than those which exist with beings who are excluded from these ties. The ties of kindred and our whole position in the social world, we may be sure, result from the hidden action of spiritual affinities, and are as little the work of lawless chance as the grouping of the stellar spheres in obedience to the attractions of the physical universe.
§ 23. And this hint of closer and more exclusive spiritual connections may serve to introduce the subject of the last difficulty in the relation of the Ego to the phenomenal self which it will be necessary to discuss. We recognized in chapter viii. (§ 14) that the idea of individuality was scarce distinguishable in the lowest grades of being, and that even in man it was far from being completely realized (ch. viii. § 18). We admitted further, in § 9 of this chapter, that the indistinctness of individuality, especially in the lower organisms, was a serious obstacle to the attribution of immortality to them. Hence the question presents itself whether a single Ego corresponds to each quasi-individual, or whether several phenomenal organisms may not be the concurrent manifestations of the same Ego?
The answer given to this question is not of course a matter affecting ultimate metaphysical principles, and it would be quite admissible to answer it by a non liquet from a scientific point of view, but it yet seems preferable on aesthetic grounds to deny that in beings with a scarcely developed consciousness an ultimate spirit need correspond to each phenomenal quasi-individual. And the analogy of the “secondary selves” within ourselves (cp. ch. viii. § 18) will enable us to understand how several relatively-separate streams of consciousness can co-exist within the same entity, and how unsafe it is to argue from temporary exclusiveness to ultimate distinctness. We may hold, then, that the individual cells of a tree or the individual polypes of a zoophyte are the “secondary selves” of the lower organisms; nor need the fact that they possess distinct physical organizations and are under the proper conditions capable of spatially separate existence, perplex us when we reflect that Space was not found on analysis to be an ultimate reality (ch. ix. § 10).
It is more interesting to consider to what extent this equivalence of a plurality of phenomenal existence to a single ultimate existence may be traced in human beings. That it affords a plausible explanation of the perplexing phenomena of multiplex personality has been already mentioned (ch. viii. § 18, ix. § 23).
§ 24. And perhaps we may discover indications tending towards the same conclusion in the deepest and most momentous distinction of the social life, the distinction of Sex.
Sex is in itself a mark of imperfect individuality, for neither men nor women are sufficient for themselves or complete representatives, either physically or spiritually, of humanity. A distinction, therefore, whereby the unity of the human spirit is rent in twain by the antithesis of contrary polarities, presents a problem well worthy of the deepest philosophic thought, and one which physiological explanations do little to elucidate. Historically, Sex is a differentiation of digestion (cp. ch. iv. § 12), but even a biologist will sometimes find it hard to regard it historically. Hence it has, at all times and from the most various principles, seemed to men, from Plato down to the late Mr. Laurence Oliphant, that in the fact of Sex they were face to face with the traces of a disruption of the original unity of the human spirit, or, as we might perhaps amend it, of a unity not yet attained.
But the significance of Sex and the metaphysics of Love form a subject too large and too contentious for an essay like ours, and our discussion of it is only intended to elucidate its relations to the doctrines we have propounded, and not to contain a full and scientific account of the matter. It may be that the distinction of sex will pass away in a higher stage in the evolution of spirit than the present, even as it came into being at a lower, and that in the kingdom of heaven there will be no marrying or giving in marriage. It may be that the feelings themselves afford the surest evidence of the lack of unity in their longing for union, and that the desire of perfect love of transcending its self and “at one with that it loves in one undivided Being blending”9 is the metaphysical ideal of which vulgar passion is but a feeble reflexion and caricature. It may be that this desire for the merging of one personality in another (Verschmelzungs-sehnsucht, as v. Hartmann calls it) is the specific differentia which, by the consentaneous testimony of poets and philosophers, distinguishes love from other forms of affection, and that it is the emotional impulse which foreshadows the formation of coalesced existences of a higher order than our present partial and imperfect selves. It may be that there is truth in such speculations, and even that they explain points which would otherwise have remained obscure, such as, e.g., the great development of romantic love at the very time when the growth of reason might have been supposed to render its stimulus even more unnecessary than it is among animals and savages for the maintenance of the race, and to make its essential illusion, the fusion of two spirits into one, seem more of an impossibility. On all these points there will be great differences of opinion, arising largely from the facts that most people feel even more confusedly than they think, that they mean very different things by the term love, and that love is generally, and perhaps necessarily, a very mixed feeling (including very often, e.g., an element of that aesthetic feeling which in its purity manifests itself as the worship of the Beautiful); but it will hardly be profitable here to combat the objections which easily suggest themselves, and which make up by their obviousness for what they may be lacking in profundity. Thus to dismiss the philosophy of love by saying that “they shall be one flesh” and that this is the whole meaning of the desire to be one spirit, is to appeal to a coarsely physical method of explanation, which is as good as explanations of the higher by the lower usually are (cp. ch. vi. § 3); but it should at this point be unnecessary to show in detail why it is misleading.
The essential points for which we must now contend are that such a metaphysic of love will not in any wise affect either the practical value of our doctrine of immortality or the metaphysical principles on which it rests. It does not affect its emotional value, because ex hypothesi the basis of the evidence for the explanation suggested is emotional, and it is our desire for the coalescence of imperfect personalities which makes us think it possible. Hence there is no loss, but gain: whatever we may lose of individual immortality is lost because it is our soul’s desire, is lost because we gain in return a higher good which we desire more intensely than what we sacrifice. And, moreover, it is not even true that the self is lost by being absorbed and growing one with what it loves: it is lost as little as our earth-life is lost by passing into a higher phase of being (§ 15).
And similarly this theory contains nothing that need modify our metaphysics and our view of the world-process, but rather confirms them. We cannot argue from a possible fusion of imperfect into perfect persons to an impossible confusion of all things in the absolute One. We need not therefore abandon our view of the personality or individuality of ultimate existence; indeed, the very fact that human personality is still imperfect is the best testimonial to the value of personality as the ideal (cp. ch. viii. § 19). It is only at first sight that the metaphysic of love can be regarded as conflicting with the universal principle of the development of individuality; for it also aims at completing a personality.
But though such an apparent exception ultimately proves the rule, it must yet be admitted to do so by exceptional means, forming a certain antithesis to the other aspects of the evolution of perfect individuals in a perfect society. For it is undeniable that love in its higher developments is an anti-social force, and that its exclusive attraction contradicts the ideal of a universal harmony of all spirits. Whatever services this passion may have originally rendered in bringing men together, and forming the basis of the social life, it is now antagonistic to the social ideal. A society of lovers would be a ludicrous impossibility; for it is the chief symptom of their condition that they are entirely wrapped up in each other, and that the rest of the world does not exist for them. From the social point of view there is something awe-inspiring and terrible in the madness of a passion which teaches men to forget all other ties, the claims of country, friendship, duty, reason.
And this exclusiveness of the attraction which holds together the human atoms of the sexual dyad becomes particularly clear when we compare love with friendship; i.e., with the feeling which forms the bond of the social union. The charm of friendship lies in the play of difference, in the free intercourse of spirits who preserve their own centres of activity, in agreement amid diversity, in the sympathy of kindred souls which is desired just because. It is the sympathy of others; it aims not at union in the sense of effacement of individuals, but in the sense of harmony; it respects the individuality of the friend, and values it because of its very distinctness. In love, on the other hand, if we have interpreted aright the indications of feelings which dimly prognosticate its inner essence, there is none of this: the union. It desires is absolute, and requires a complete sacrifice of self.
And again, to consider them with respect to their attitude towards extraneous influences: the harmony of friendship resents the intrusion of uncongenial elements, but is not in itself hostile to any widening of its sphere; on the contrary, the natural impulse of a sociable nature is “to be friends with all men,” the ideal of social harmony is all-embracing. And it is not as such prone to jealousy: we wish that our friends should also be friends of one another, and labour to effect this. Love, on the other hand, is distinguished from all the other forms of affection by its exclusiveness; jealousy is part of its essence, and is the repulsion which will not brook the intrusion of any foreign force upon the intimate attraction of the human molecule. A pair of lovers are sufficient for each other; they require no one else, and will not admit others into the intensity of their mutual feelings. Would it not be the height of absurdity to suggest to lovers what is the desire of friends, viz., that they should love the largest possible number and be loved by them? For does not love desire wholly and solely to possess that which it loves, and resent the intrusion of the most solemn social obligations as a desecration of its sacred rights?
§ 25. The above discussion of the metaphysic of love may be taken as in some sort the supplement of the physical treatment which was so conducive to Pessimism (ch. iv. § 17); but whether we regard the subject in its highest or in its lowest aspects, the result is the same. From either point of view. It is a momentous fact; from neither point of view is it the road to happiness or the ideal of life.
It is not fitted to be the ideal of life because it cannot be made to include all existences, because a pair of lovers as the culmination of the world-process would be a conclusion equally bizarre and impossible. We cannot abandon for such amorous fancies the ideal which has been our lode-star in the pursuit of truth, the ideal which first revealed itself to us in the search for an adequate formulation of the world’s process, the ideal of a harmonious interaction of individual existences; for it is an ideal which all our subsequent progress has only confirmed and deepened. The conception of a community of perfect persons was the efficient cause of the wondrous evolution of individual existence (ch. viii. §§ 6-19), the final cause of the material universe (ch. ix. §§ 26-31), and the formal ground of our pluralistic answer to the ultimate questions of ontology (ch. x. § 23). And now it has successfully stood the severest of its tests: in spite of the most powerful objections, it has been shown that there is nothing impossible in the continuance of personality; in spite of our strongest feeling, it has been shown that friendship is a more universal principle than love, that the concord of harmony is a higher ideal than the ecstasy of love.
Thus we have at length reached an eminence whence the eye of faith can clearly discern the features of the Promised Land which this ideal holds out to us; and though we may not enter until the far-distant end of the world’s process, we can already grasp its nature and describe its character, and it is to this completion of our task that the following chapter must be devoted.
- It is gratifying to find this view as to the comparative rarity of real interest in this question, supported by the high authority of Mr. F. W. H. Myers, whose unrivaled experience has caused him to come to substantially the same conclusions about the real feelings of men. (Cp. Proceedings of the Psychical Soc, pt. xvi. P- 339-) ↩︎
- Hence it has been suggested by several authors that ghosts are a sort of semi-material “shells,” containing a few relics of the intelligence of the living, which gradually decay and fade away. And there is something in their recorded conduct which justifies such theories. But of course we have no business as yet to dogmatize in any way upon the subject, and the futility of ghosts, which is certainly sometimes very marked, is explicable in many ways, e.g., if we suppose that their appearance in our world involves what to them also are abnormal conditions, or that they are “dead men’s dreams,” i.e., effects on our minds produced in states analogous to dreaming in our world. ↩︎
- With and without the leave of their authors. Thus Averroes developed his impersonal immortality of the Active Reason (greek text) out of Aristotle’s dualism, with, it must be confessed, considerable support from the vagueness and obscurity of Aristotle’s language, who in this matter was unsuccessfully trying to reconcile conflicting views. Similarly Spinoza’s doctrine does but draw conclusions implied in the dualism of Descartes. And As for Plato, the founder of the philosophic doctrine of immortality, there has been no lack of commentators ready to show that if he had understood his principles as well as they did, he could never have asserted a doctrine so contrary to them as that of a personal immortality, and that his very explicit assertions must be interpreted as figurative expressions designed to mislead the vulgar. And though we may doubt whether deliberately ambiguous language upon so vital an issue is not rather a modern refinement of professional philosophy, alien to the frankness and freedom of the ancients, it must yet be confessed that, owing to his dualism, Plato’s theory of the soul, with its mortal and immortal parts, does not admit of being combined into a consistent and tenable whole. ↩︎
- Cp. Mr. F. H. Bradley’s Logic p. 466, for a forcible and frank discussion of this difficulty. ↩︎
- For, as Goethe well says {Faust, Pt. 2, Act 3 s.f.):—
“ Wer keinen Namen sich ervvarb noch Edles will
Gehort den Elementen an: so fahret hin—
Mit meiner Konigin zu sein verlangt mich heiss;
Nicht nur Verdienst, auch Treue wahrt uns die Person.”
[They that have won no name, nor willed the right,
Dissolve into the elements—so pass away!
But I to follow on my queen do ardently desire;
Not merit only, but attachment, keeps our personality.] ↩︎ - Ar. Eth. Nich. X. vii. S. ↩︎
- The evidence for this is not very abundant, but sufficient. But then experiments have hitherto aimed chiefly at establishing the fact of suggestion, and hence the actions suggested have been intentionally made repugnant to the subject, and such as he clearly would not perform of his own accord. But even though the experiments were specially calculated to arouse suspicion as to their source in the subject’s mind, the absurdity of the suggested action may reach an alarming height without arousing any suspicion of an extraneous origin. Cp. Proc. Psychical Soc, vol. III. p. I. ↩︎
- Cp. Mr. F. H. Bradley’s Logic, Bk III.,.pt. 2, ch. 2. ↩︎
- Fitzgerald’s translation of Jami’s Salaman and Absal. We have quoted from an Oriental, because he is perhaps the least likely to be suspected of taking too idealist a view. ↩︎