claim is now made. Cases are reported, with much parade of scientific
language and method, and those who reject the stories with contemptuous
incredulity are accused of mere prejudice. Nevertheless, I cannot help
being convinced that if communications between the dead and the living
were part of the nature of things, they would have been established long
ago beyond cavil. For there are few things which men have wished more
eagerly to believe. It is no doubt just possible that among the
vibrations of the fundamental ingredients of our world--those attenuated
forms of matter which are said to be not even 'material,' there may be
some which act as vehicles for psychical interchange. If such psychic
waves exist, the discovery is wholly in favour of materialism. It would
tend to rehabilitate those notions of spirit as the most rarefied form
of matter--an ultra-gaseous condition of it--which Stoicism and the
Christian Stoic Tertullian postulated. The meaning of 'God is Spirit'
could not be understood till this insidious residue of materialism had
been got rid of. It is a retrograde theory which we are asked to
re-examine and perhaps accept. The moment we are asked to accept
'scientific evidence' for spiritual truth, the alleged spiritual truth
becomes for us neither spiritual nor true. It is degraded into an event
in the phenomenal world, and when so degraded it cannot be
substantiated. Psychical research is trying to prove that eternal values
are temporal facts, which they can never be.
The case for necromancy is no better if we leave 'scientific proof'
alone, and appeal to the relativist metaphysics of the psychological
school. Intercourse with the dead is, we are told, a real psychical
experience, and we need not worry ourselves with the question whether it
has any 'objective truth.' But we cannot allow psychology to have the
last word in determining the truth or falsehood of religious or
spiritual experience. The extravagant claims of this science to take the
place of philosophy must be abated.
Psychology is the science which describes mental states, as physical
science describes the behaviour of matter in motion. Both are abstract
sciences. Physical science treats nature as the totality of things
conceived of as independent of any subject; psychology treats inner
experience as independent of any object. Both are outside any idea of
value, though it is needless to say that the votaries of both sciences
trespass habitually, and often unconsciously. Both are dualisms with one
side ignored or suppressed. When psychology meddles with ontological
problems--when, for instance it denies the existence of an Absolute, or
says that reality cannot be known--it is taking too much upon itself,
and has fallen into the same error as the materialism of the last
century. On such questions as the immortality of the soul it must remain
silent.
Faith in human immortality stands or falls with the belief in _absolute
values_. The interest of consciousness, as Professor Pringle-Pattison
has said in his admirable Gifford Lectures, lies in the ideal values of
which it is the bearer, not in its mere existence as a more refined kind
of fact. Idealism is most satisfactorily defined as the interpretation
of the world according to a scale of value, or, in Plato's phrase, by
the Idea of the Good. The highest values in this scale are absolute,
eternal, and super-individual, and lower values are assigned their place
in virtue of their correspondence to or participation in these absolute
values. I agree with Münsterberg that the conditional and subjective
values of the pragmatist have no meaning unless we have acknowledged
beforehand the independent value of truth. If the proof of the merely
individual significance of truth has itself only individual importance,
it cannot claim any general meaning. If, on the other hand, it demands
to be taken as generally valid, the possibility of a general truth is
acknowledged from the start. If this one exception is granted, the whole
illusory universe of relativism is overthrown. To deny any thought which
is more than relative is to deprive even scepticism itself of the
presuppositions on which it rests. The logical sceptic has no _ego_ to
doubt with. 'Every doubt of absolute values destroys itself. As thought
it contradicts itself; as doubt it denies itself; as belief it despairs
of itself.' It is not necessary or desirable to follow Münsterberg in
identifying valuation with will. He talks of the will judging; but the
will cannot judge. In contemplating existence we use our will to fix our
attention, and then try conscientiously to prevent it from influencing
the verdict. But this illegitimate use of the word 'will' does not
impair the force of the argument for absolute values.
Now, valuation arranges experience in a different manner from natural
science. The attributes of reality, in our world of values, are
Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. And we assert that we have as good reason
to claim objective reality for these Ideas as for anything in the world
revealed to our senses. 'All claims on man's behalf,' says Professor
Pringle-Pattison, 'must be based on the objectivity of the values
revealed in his experience, and brokenly realised there. Man does not
make values any more than he makes reality.' Our contention is that the
world of values, which forms the content of idealistic thought and
aspiration, is the real world; and in this world we find our own
immortality.
But there could be no greater error than to leave the two worlds, or the
two 'judgments,' that of existence and that of value, contrasted with
each other, or treated as unrelated in our experience. A value-judgment
which is not also a judgment of existence is in the air; it is the
baseless fabric of a vision. Existence is itself a value, and an
ingredient in every valuation; that which has no existence has no value.
And, on the other side, it is a delusion to suppose that any science can
dispense with valuation. Even mathematics admits that there is a right
and a wrong way of solving a problem, though by confining itself to
quantitative measurements it can assert no more than a hypothetical
reality for its world. It is quite certain that we can think of no
existing world without valuation.
'The ultimate identity of existence and value is the venture of faith to
which mysticism and speculative idealism are committed.'[93] It is
indeed the presupposition of all philosophy and all religion; without
this faith there can, properly speaking, be no belief in God. But the
difference between naturalism and idealism may, I think, be better
stated otherwise than by emphasising the contrast between existence and
value, which it is impossible for either side to maintain. Naturalism
seeks to interpret the world by investigation of origins; idealism by
investigation of ends. The one finds the explanation of evolution in
that from which it started, the other in that to which it tends. The one
explains the higher by the lower; the other the lower by the higher.
This is a plain issue; either the world shows a teleology or it does
not. If it does, the philosophy based on the inorganic sciences is
wrong. And the attempt to explain the higher by the lower becomes
mischievous or impossible when we pass from one _order_ to another. In
speaking of different 'orders,' we do not commit ourselves to any sudden
breaks or leaps in evolution. The organic may be linked to the
inorganic, soul to the lower forms of life, spirit to soul. But whether
the 'scale of perfection' is a ladder or an inclined plane, new
categories are necessary as we ascend it. And unless we admit an inner
teleology as a determining factor in growth, many facts even in
physiology are hard to explain.
If the basis of our faith in the world-order is the conviction that the
Ideas of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are fully real and fully
operative, we must try to form some clear notion of what these Ideas
mean, and how they are related to each other. The goal of Truth, as an
absolute value, is unity, which in the outer world means harmony, in the
intercourse of spirit with spirit, love; and in the inner world, peace
or happiness. The goal of Goodness as an absolute value is the
realisation of the ought-to-be in victorious moral effort. Beauty is the
self-recognition of creative Spirit in its own works; it is the
expression of Nature's own deepest character. Beauty gives neither
information nor advice; but it satisfies a part of our nature which is
not less Divine than that which pays homage to Truth and Goodness.
Now, these absolute values are supra-temporal. If the soul were in time,
no value could arise; for time is always hurling its own products into
nothingness, and the present is an unextended point, dividing an unreal
past from an unreal future. The soul is not in time; time is rather in
the soul. Values are eternal and indestructible. When Plotinus says that
'nothing that really _is_ can ever perish' (hapolehitai ohyden thôn
hontôn), and when Höffding says that 'no value perishes out of the
world,' they are saying the same thing. In so far as we can identify
ourselves in thought and mind with the absolute values, we are sure of
our immortality.
But it will be said that in the first place this promise of immortality
carries with it no guarantee of survival in time, and in the second
place that it offers us, at last, only an impersonal immortality. Let us
take these two objections in turn, though they are in reality closely
connected.
We must not regard time as an external, inhuman, unconscious process.
Time is the frame of soul-life; outside this it has no existence. The
entire cosmic process is the life-frame of the universal Soul, the
Divine Logos. With this life we are vitally connected, however brief and
unimportant the span and the task of an individual career may seem to
us. If my particular life-meaning passes out of activity, it will be
because the larger life, to which I belong, no longer needs that form of
expression. My death, like my birth, will have a teleological
justification, to which my supra-temporal self will consent. When a good
man's work in this world is done, when he is able to say, without
forgetting his many failures, 'I have finished the work that Thou gavest
me to do,' surely his last word will be, 'Lord, now lettest Thou Thy
servant depart in peace'; not, 'Grant that I may flit for a while over
my former home, and hear what is happening to my country and my family.'
We may leave it to our misguided necromancers to describe the adventures
of the disembodied ghost--
'Quo cursu deserta petiverit, et quibus ante
Infelix sua tecta supervolitaverit alis.'
The most respectable motive which leads men to desire a continuance of
active participation in the affairs of time is that which Tennyson
expresses in the often-quoted line, 'Give her the wages of going on, and
not to die.' We may feel that we have it in us to do more for God and
our fellow-men than we shall be able to accomplish in this life, even if
it be prolonged to old age. Is not this a desire which we may prefer as
a claim? And in any case, it is admitted that time is the form of the
will. Are we to have no more will after death? Further, is our probation
over when we die? What is to be the fate of that large majority who, so
far as we can see, are equally undeserving of heaven and of hell? To
these questions no answer is possible, because we are confronted with a
blank wall of ignorance. We do not know whether there will be any future
probation. We do not know whether Robert Browning's expectation of
'other tasks in other lives, God willing,' will be fulfilled.
'And I shall thereupon
Take rest, ere I be gone
Once more on my adventure brave and new.'
The question here raised is whether there is such a thing as
reincarnation. This belief, so widely held at all times by eminent
thinkers, and sanctioned by some of the higher religions, cannot be
dismissed as obsolete or impossible. But if it is put in the form, 'Will
the same self live again on earth under different conditions?' it may be
that no answer can be given, not only because we do not know, but
because the question itself is meaningless. The psycho-physical organism
which was born at a certain date and which will die on another date is
compacted of idiosyncrasies, inherited and acquired, which seem to be
inseparable from its history as born of certain parents and living under
certain conditions. It is not easy to say what part of such an organism
could be said to maintain its identity, if it were housed in another
body and set down in another time and place, when all recollection of a
previous state has been (as we must admit) cut off. The only continuity,
it seems to me, would be that of the racial self, if there is such a
thing, or of the directing intelligence and will of the higher Power
which sends human beings into the world to perform their allotted tasks.
The second objection, which, as I have said, is closely connected with
the first, is that idealism offers us a merely impersonal immortality.
But what is personality? The notion of a world of spiritual atoms,
'_solida pollentia simplicitate_,' as Lucretius says, seems to be
attractive to some minds. There are thinkers of repute who even picture
the Deity as the constitutional President of a _collegium_ of souls.
This kind of pluralism is of course fundamentally incompatible with the
presuppositions of my paper. The idea of the 'self' seems to me to be an
arbitrary fixation of our average state of mind, a half-way house which
belongs to no order of real existence. The conception of an abstract ego
seems to involve three assumptions, none of which is true. The first is
that there is a sharp line separating subject from object and from other
subjects. The second is that the subject, thus sundered from the object,
remains identical through time. The third is that this indiscerptible
entity is in some mysterious way both myself and my property. In
opposition to the first, I maintain that the foci of consciousness flow
freely into each other even on the psychical plane, while in the eternal
world there are probably no barriers at all. In opposition to the
second, it is certain that the empirical self is by no means identical
throughout, and that the spiritual life, in which we may be said to
attain real personality for the first time, is only 'ours' potentially.
In opposition to the third, I repeat that the question whether it is
'my' soul that will live in the eternal world seems to have no meaning
at all. In philosophy as in religion, we had better follow the advice of
the Theologia Germanica and banish, as far as possible, the words 'me
and mine' from our vocabulary. For personality is not something given to
start with. It does not belong to the world of claims and counter-claims
in which we chiefly live. We must be willing to lose our soul on this
level of experience, before we can find it unto life eternal.
Personality is a teleological fact; it is here in the making, elsewhere
in fact and power. So in the case of our friends. The man whom we love
is not the changing psycho-physical organism; it is the Christ in him
that we love, the perfect man who is struggling into existence in his
life and growth. If we ask what a man is, the answer may be either, 'He
is what he loves,' or 'He is what he is worth.' The two are not very
different. Thus I cannot agree with Keyserling, who in criticising this
type of thought (with which, none the less, he has great sympathy) says
that 'mysticism, whether it likes it or not, ends in an impersonal
immortality.' For impersonality is a purely negative conception, like
timelessness. What is negated in 'timelessness' is not the reality of
the present, but the unreality of the past and future. So the
'impersonality' which is here (not without warrant from the mystics
themselves) said to belong to eternal life is really the liberation of
the idea of personality. Personality is allowed to expand as far as it
can, and only so can it come into its own. When Keyserling adds, 'The
instinct of immortality really affirms that the individual is not
ultimate,' I entirely agree with him.
The question, however, is not whether in heaven the circumference of the
soul's life is indefinitely enlarged, but whether the centre remains.
These centres are centres of consciousness; and consciousness apparently
belongs to the world of will. It comes into existence when the will has
some work to do. It is not conterminous with life; there is a life which
is below consciousness, and there may be a life above consciousness, or
what we mean by consciousness. We must remind ourselves that we are
using a spatial metaphor when we speak of a centre of consciousness, and
a temporal one when we ask about a continuing state of consciousness;
and space and time do not belong to the eternal world. The question
therefore needs to be transformed before any answer can be given to it.
Spiritual life, we are justified in saying, must have a richness of
content; it is, potentially at least, all embracing. But this
enhancement of life is exhibited not only in extension but in intensity.
Eternal life is no diffusion or dilution of personality, but its
consummation. It seems certain that in such a state of existence
individuality must be maintained. If every life in this world represents
an unique purpose in the Divine mind, and if the end or meaning of
soul-life, though striven for in time, has both its source and its
achievement in eternity, this, the value and reality of the individual
life, must remain as a distinct fact in the spiritual world.
We are sometimes inclined to think, with a natural regret, that the
conditions of life in the eternal world are so utterly unlike those of
the world which we know, that we must either leave our mental picture of
that life in the barest outline, or fill it in with the colours which we
know on earth, but which, as we are well aware, cannot portray truly the
life of blessed spirits. To some extent this is true; and whereas a bare
and colourless sketch of the richest of all facts is as far from the
truth as possible, we may allow ourselves to fill in the picture as best
we can, if we remember the risks which we run in doing so. There are,
it seems to me, two chief risks in allowing our imagination to create
images of the bliss of heaven. One is that the eternal world, thus drawn
and painted with the forms and colours of earth, takes substance in our
minds as a second physical world, either supposed to exist somewhere in
space, or expected to come into existence somewhen in time. This is the
heaven of popular religion; and being a geographical or historical
expression, it is open to attacks which cannot be met. Hence in the
minds of many persons the whole fact of human immortality seems to
belong to dreamland. The other danger is that, since a geographical and
historical heaven is found to have no actuality, the hope of eternal
life, with all that the spiritual world contains, should be relegated to
the sphere of the 'ideal.' This seems to be the position of Höffding,
and is quite clearly the view of thinkers like Santayana. They accept
the dualism of value and existence, and place the highest hopes of
humanity in a world which has value only and no existence. This seems to
me to be offering mankind a stone for bread. Martineau's protest against
this philosophy is surely justified:
'Amid all the sickly talk about "ideals," it is well to
remember that as long as they are a mere self-painting of
the yearning spirit, they have no more solidity than
floating air-bubbles, gay in the sunshine and broken by the
passing wind. You do not so much as touch the threshold of
religion, so long as you are detained by the phantoms of
your thought; the very gate of entrance to religion, the
moment of its new birth, is the discovery that your gleaming
ideal is the everlasting real.'[94]
But though our knowledge of the eternal world is much less than we could
desire, it is much greater than many thinkers allow. We are by no means
shut off from realisation and possession of the eternal values while we
live here. We are not confined to local and temporal experience. We know
what Truth and Beauty mean, not only for ourselves but for all souls
throughout the universe, and for God Himself. Above all, we know what
Love means. Now Love, which is the realisation in experience of
spiritual existence, has an unique value as a hierophant of the highest
mysteries. And Love guarantees personality, for it needs what has been
called _otherness_. In all love there must be a subject and an object,
and a bond between them which transcends without annulling their
separateness. What this means for personal immortality has been seen by
many great minds. As an example I will quote from Plotinus' picture of
life in the spiritual world. This writer is certainly not inclined to
overestimate the claims of separate individuality, and he is under no
obligation to make his doctrine conform to the dogmas of any creed.
'Spirits yonder see themselves in others. For there all
things are transparent, and there is nothing dark or
resisting, but everyone is manifest to everyone internally,
and all things are manifest; for light is manifest to light.
For everyone has all things in himself and sees all things
in another, so that all things are everywhere and all is all
and each is all, and infinite the glory.'[95]
This eternal world is about us and within us while we live here. 'Heaven
is nearer to our souls than the earth is to our bodies.' The world which
we ordinarily think of as real is an arbitrary selection from
experience, corresponding roughly to the average reaction of life upon
the average man. Some values, such as existence, persistence, and
rationality, are assumed to be 'real'; others are relegated to the
'ideal' Under the influence of natural science, special emphasis is laid
on those values with which that science is engaged. But our world
changes with us. It rises as we rise, and falls as we fall. It puts on
immortality as we do. 'Such as men themselves are, such will God appear
to them to be.'[96] Spinoza rightly says that all true knowledge takes
place _sub specie æternitatis_. For the pneymatikost the whole of life
is spiritual, and, as Eucken says, he recognises the whole of the
spiritual life as his own life-being. He learns, as Plotinus declares in
a profound sentence, that 'all things that are Yonder are also Here
below.'
Is it then the conclusion of the whole matter that eternal life is
merely the true reading of temporal life? Is earth, when seen with
purged vision, not merely the shadow of heaven, but heaven itself? If we
could fuse past, present, and future into a _totum simul_, an 'Eternal
Now,' would that be eternity? This I do not believe. A full
understanding of the values of our life in time would indeed give us a
good _picture_ of the eternal world; but that world itself, the abode of
God and of blessed spirits, is a state higher and purer than can be
fully expressed in the order of nature. The _perpetuity_ of natural laws
as they operate through endless ages is only a Platonic 'image' of
eternity. That all values are perpetual is true; but they are something
more than perpetual: they are eternal. These laws are the creative
forces which shape our lives from within; but all the creatures, as St.
Augustine says in a well-known passage, declare their inferiority to
their Creator. 'We are lower than He, for He made us.' Scholastic
theologians interposed an intermediary which they called _ævum_ between
time and eternity. _Ævum_ is perpetuity, which they rightly
distinguished from true eternity. Christianity is philosophically right
in insisting that our true home, our _patria_, is 'not here.' Nor is it
in any place: it is with God,'whose centre is everywhere and His
circumference nowhere.' There remaineth a rest for the people of God,
when their warfare on earth is accomplished.
A Christian must feel that the absence of any clear revelation about a
_future_ state is an indication that we are not meant to make it a
principal subject of our thoughts. On the other hand, the more we think
about the eternal values the happier we shall be. As Spinoza says, 'Love
directed towards the eternal and infinite fills the mind with pure joy,
and is free from all sadness. Wherefore it is greatly to be desired, and
sought after with our whole might.' But he also says, and I think
wisely, that there are few subjects on which the 'free' man will ponder
less often, than on death. The end of life is as right and natural as
its beginning; we must not rebel against the common lot, either for
ourselves or for our friends. We are to live in the present though not
for the present. The two lines of Goethe which Lewis Nettleship was so
fond of quoting convey a valuable lesson:
'Nur we du bist, sei alles, immer kindlich:
So bist du alles, bist unüberwindlich.'