Part 35 (1/2)
[Sidenote: A solipsistic argument.]
The most lordly and genuine fas.h.i.+on of a.s.serting immortality would be to proclaim one's self an exception to the animal race and to point out that the a.n.a.logy between one's singular self and others is altogether lame and purely conventional. Any proud barbarian, with a tincture of transcendental philosophy, might adopt this tone. ”Creatures that perish,” he might say, ”are and can be nothing but puppets and painted shadows in my mind. My conscious will forbids its own extinction; it scorns to level itself with its own objects and instruments. The world, which I have never known to exist without me, exists by my co-operation and consent; it can never extinguish what lends it being. The death prophetically accepted by weaklings, with such small insight and courage, I mock and altogether defy: it can never touch me.”
Such solipsistic boasts may not have been heard in historic times from the lips of men speaking in their own persons. Language has an irresistible tendency to make thought communistic and ideally transferable to others. It forbids a man to say of himself what it would be ridiculous to hear from another. Now solipsism in another man is a comic thing: and a mind, prompted perhaps by h.e.l.l and heaven to speak solipsistically, is stopped by the laughable echo of its own words, when it remembers its bold sayings. Language, being social, resists a virgin egotism and forbids it to express itself publicly, no matter how well grounded it may be in transcendental logic and in animal instinct.
Social convention is necessarily materialistic, since the beginning of all moral reasonableness consists in taming the transcendental conceit native to a living mind, in attaching it to its body, and bringing the will that thought itself absolute down to the rank of animals and men.
Otherwise no man would acknowledge another's rights or even conceive his existence.
[Sidenote: Absoluteness and immortality transferred to the G.o.ds.]
Primeval solipsism--the philosophy of untamed animal will--has accordingly taken to the usual by-paths and expressed itself openly only in myth or by a speculative abstraction in which the transcendental spirit, for which all the solipsistic privileges were still claimed, was distinguished from the human individual. The G.o.ds, it was said, were immortal; and although on earth spirit must submit to the yoke and service of matter, on whose occasions it must wait, yet there existed in the ether other creatures more normally and gloriously compounded, since their forms served and expressed their minds, which ruled also over the elements and feared no a.s.sault from time. With the advent of this mythology experience and presumption divided their realms; experience was allowed to shape men's notions of vulgar reality, but presumption, which could not be silenced, was allowed to suggest a second sphere, thinly and momentarily veiled to mortal sense, in which the premonitions of will were abundantly realised.
This expedient had the advantage of endowing the world with creatures that really satisfied human aspirations, such as at any moment they might be. The G.o.ds possessed longevity, beauty, magic celerity of movement, leisure, splendour of life, indefinite strength, and practical omniscience. When the G.o.ds were also expressions for natural forces, this function somewhat prejudiced their ideality, and they failed to correspond perfectly to what their wors.h.i.+ppers would have most esteemed; but religious reformers tended to expunge naturalism from theology and to represent the G.o.ds as entirely admirable. The Greek G.o.ds, to be sure, always continued to have genealogies, and the fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality; but other religions, and finally the Greek philosophers themselves, conceived unbegotten G.o.ds, in whom the human rebellion against mutability was expressed absolutely.
Thus a place was found in nature for the constant and perpetual element which crude experience seems to contain or at least to suggest.
Unfortunately the immortal and the human were in this mythology wholly divorced, so that while immortality was vindicated for something in the universe it was emphatically denied to man and to his works.
Contemplation, to be satisfied with this situation, had to be heroically unselfish and resigned; the G.o.ds' greatness and glory had to furnish sufficient solace for all mortal defeats. At the same time all criticism had to be deprecated, for reflection would at once have pointed out that the divine life in question was either a personification of natural processes and thus really in flux and full of oblivion and imperfection, or else a hypostasis of certain mental functions and ideals, which could not really be conceived apart from the natural human life which they informed and from which they had been violently abstracted.
[Sidenote: Or to a divine principle in all beings.]
Another expedient was accordingly found, especially by mystics and critical philosophers, for uniting the mortal and immortal in existence while still distinguis.h.i.+ng them in essence. _Cur Deus h.o.m.o_ might be said to be the theme of all such speculations. Plato had already found the eternal in the form which the temporal puts on, or, if the phrase be preferred, had seen in the temporal and existential nothing but an individuated case of the ideal. The soul was immortal, unbegotten, impa.s.sible; the bodies it successively inhabited and the experience it gathered served merely to bring out its nature with greater or less completeness. To somewhat the same effect the German transcendentalists identified and distinguished the private and the universal spirit. What lived in each man and in each moment was the Absolute--for nothing else could really exist--and the expression which the Absolute there took on was but a transitional phase of its total self-expression, which, could it be grasped in its totality, would no longer seem subject to contradiction and flux. An immortal agent therefore went through an infinite series of acts, each transitory and relative to the others, but all possessed of inalienable reality and eternal significance. In such formulations the divorce was avoided between the intellectual and the sensuous factor in experience--a divorce which the myth about immortal G.o.ds and mortal men had introduced. On the other hand existential immortality was abandoned; only an ideal permanence, only significance, was allowed to any finite being, and the better or future world of which ancient poets had dreamt, Olympus, and every other heaven, was altogether abolished. There was an eternal universe where everything was transitory and a single immortal spirit at no two moments the same. The world of idealism realised no particular ideal, and least of all the ideal of a natural and personal immunity from death.
[Sidenote: In neither case is the individual immortal.]
First, then, a man may refuse to admit that he must die at all; then, abashed at the arrogance of that a.s.sertion, he may consider the immortal life of other creatures, like the earth and stars, which seem subject to no extinction, and he may ascribe to these a perpetual consciousness and personality. Finally, confessing the fabulous character of those deities, he may distinguish an immortal agent or principle within himself, identify it with the inner principle of all other beings, and contrast it with its varying and conditioned expressions. But scarcely is this abstraction attained when he must perceive its worthlessness, since the natural life, the concrete aims, and the personal career which immortality was intended to save from dissolution are wholly alien to a nominal ent.i.ty which endures through all change, however fundamental, and cohabits with every nature, however hostile and odious to humanity.
If immortality is to be genuine, what is immortal must be something definite, and if this immortality is to concern life and not mere significance or ideal definition, that which endures must be an individual creature with a fixed nucleus of habits and demands, so that its persistence may contain progress and achievement.
Herewith we may dismiss the more direct attempts to conceive and a.s.sert a future life. Their failure drives us to a consideration of indirect attempts to establish an un.o.bservable but real immortality through revelation and dogma. Such an immortality would follow on transmigration or resurrection, and would be a.s.signed to a supernatural sphere, a second empirical world present to the soul after death, where her fortunes would not be really conceivable without a reconst.i.tuted body and a new material environment.
[Sidenote: Possible forms of survival.]
Many a man dies too soon and some are born in the wrong age or station.
Could these persons drink at the fountain of youth at least once more they might do themselves fuller justice and cut a better figure at last in the universe. Most people think they have stuff in them for greater things than time suffers them to perform. To imagine a second career is a pleasing antidote for ill-fortune; the poor soul wants another chance.
But how should a future life be const.i.tuted if it is to satisfy this demand, and how long need it last? It would evidently have to go on in an environment closely a.n.a.logous to earth; I could not, for instance, write in another world the epics which the necessity of earning my living may have stifled here, did that other world contain no time, no heroic struggles, or no metrical language. Nor is it clear that my epics, to be perfect, would need to be quite endless. If what is foiled in me is really poetic genius and not simply a tendency toward perpetual motion, it would not help me if in heaven, in lieu of my dreamt-of epics, I were allowed to beget several robust children. In a word, if hereafter I am to be the same man improved I must find myself in the same world corrected. Were I transformed into a cherub or transported into a timeless ecstasy, it is hard to see in what sense I should continue to exist. Those results might be interesting in themselves and might enrich the universe; they would not prolong my life nor retrieve my disasters.
For this reason a future life is after all best represented by those frankly material ideals which most Christians--being Platonists--are wont to despise. It would be genuine happiness for a Jew to rise again in the flesh and live for ever in Ezekiel's New Jerusalem, with its ceremonial glories and civic order. It would be truly agreeable for any man to sit in well-watered gardens with Mohammed, clad in green silks, drinking delicious sherbets, and transfixed by the gazelle-like glance of some young girl, all innocence and fire. Amid such scenes a man might remain himself and might fulfil hopes that he had actually cherished on earth. He might also find his friends again, which in somewhat generous minds is perhaps the thought that chiefly sustains interest in a posthumous existence. But to recognise his friends a man must find them in their bodies, with their familiar habits, voices, and interests; for it is surely an insult to affection to say that he could find them in an eternal formula expressing their idiosyncrasy. When, however, it is clearly seen that another life, to supplement this one, must closely resemble it, does not the magic of immortality altogether vanish? Is such a reduplication of earthly society at all credible? And the prospect of awakening again among houses and trees, among children and dotards, among wars and rumours of wars, still fettered to one personality and one accidental past, still uncertain of the future, is not this prospect wearisome and deeply repulsive? Having pa.s.sed through these things once and bequeathed them to posterity, is it not time for each soul to rest? The universe doubtless contains all sorts of experiences, better and worse than the human; but it is idle to attribute to a particular man a life divorced from his circ.u.mstances and from his body.
[Sidenote: Arguments from retribution and need of opportunity.]
Dogmas about such a posthumous experience find some shadowy support in various illusions and superst.i.tions that surround death, but they are developed into articulate prophecies chiefly by certain moral demands.
One of these requires rewards and punishments more emphatic and sure than those which conduct meets with in this world. Another requires merely a more favourable and complete opportunity for the soul's development. Considerations like these are pertinent to moral philosophy. It touches the notion of duty whether an exact hedonistic retribution is to be demanded for what is termed merit and guilt: so that without such supernatural remuneration virtue, perhaps, would be discredited and deprived of a motive. It likewise touches the ideality and n.o.bleness of life whether human aims can be realised satisfactorily only in the agent's singular person, so that the fruits of effort would be forth-with missed if the labourer himself should disappear.
[Sidenote: Ign.o.ble temper of both.]
To establish justice in the world and furnish an adequate incentive to virtue was once thought the chief business of a future life. The Hebraic religions somewhat overreached themselves on these points: for the grotesque alternative between h.e.l.l and heaven in the end only aggravated the injustice it was meant to remedy. Life is unjust in that it subordinates individuals to a general mechanical law, and the deeper and longer hold fate has on the soul, the greater that injustice. A perpetual life would be a perpetual subjection to arbitrary power, while a last judgment would be but a last fatality. That h.e.l.l may have frightened a few villains into omitting a crime is perhaps credible; but the embarra.s.sed silence which the churches, in a more sensitive age, prefer to maintain on that wholesome doctrine--once, as they taught, the only rational basis for virtue--shows how their teaching has to follow the independent progress of morals. Nevertheless, persons are not wanting, apparently free from ecclesiastical constraint, who still maintain that the value of life depends on its indefinite prolongation.
By an artifice of reflection they subst.i.tute vanity for reason, and selfish for ingenuous instincts in man. Being apparently interested in nothing but their own careers, they forget that a man may remember how little he counts in the world and suffer that rational knowledge to inspire his purposes. Intense morality has always envisaged earthly goods and evils, and even when a future life has been accepted vaguely, it has never given direction to human will or aims, which at best it could only proclaim more emphatically. It may indeed be said that no man of any depth of soul has made his prolonged existence the touchstone of his enthusiasms. Such an instinct is carnal, and if immortality is to add a higher inspiration to life it must not be an immortality of selfishness. What a despicable creature must a man be, and how sunk below the level of the most barbaric virtue, if he cannot bear to live for his children, for his art, or for country!
[Sidenote: False optimistic postulate involved.]