THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME
When we survey the past of the earth as science has revealed it to us,
we gain some conceptions which will help us in our judgments as to what
this phenomenon of human life may signify in the future. We are
accustomed to look upon the earth as aged, but these terms are only
relative; and if we compare our own planet with its neighbours in the
solar system, we shall have good reason to suppose that, though the past
of the earth is very prolonged, its future will probably be far more so.
As for life--and we must think not only of human life, but of life as a
planetary phenomenon--that is necessarily much more recent than the
formation even of the earth's crust, the existence of water in the
liquid state being necessary for life in any of its forms. And human
life itself, though the extent of its past duration is seen to be
greater the more deeply we study the records, is yet a relatively recent
thing. The utmost, it appears, that we can assign to our past would be
perhaps six million years, taking our species back to mid-Miocene times.
Doubtless this is a mighty age as compared with the few thousand years
allotted to us in bygone chronologies; but, looked at _sub specie
æternitatis_, and with an eye which is prepared to look forward also,
and especially with relation to what we know and can predict regarding
the sun, these past six million years may reasonably be held to comprise
only the infantine period of man's life.
It is very true that on such estimates as those of Lord Kelvin, and
according to what astronomers and geologists believed not more than
twelve or even eight years ago, regarding the secular cooling of earth
and sun--that, according to these, the time is by no means "unending
long," and we may foresee, not so remotely, the end of the solar heat
and light of which we are the beneficiaries. But the discovery of radium
and the phenomena of radio-activity have profoundly modified these
estimates, justifying, indeed, the acumen of Lord Kelvin, who always
left the way open for reconsideration should a new source of heat and
energy in general be discovered. We know now that, to consider the earth
first, its crust is not self-cooling, or at any rate not self-cooling
only, for it is certainly self-heating. There is an almost embarrassing
amount of radium in the earth's crust, so far as we have examined it; a
quantity, that is to say, so great that if the same proportion were
maintained at deeper levels as at those which we can investigate, the
earth would have to be far hotter than it is. Similar reasoning applies
to the sun. Definite, immediate proof of the presence of radium there is
not forthcoming yet, but that presence is far more than probable,
especially since the existence of solar uranium, the known ancestor of
radium, has been demonstrated. The reckonings of Helmholtz and others,
based upon the supposition that the solar energy is entirely derived
from its gravitational contraction, must be superseded. It would require
but a very small proportion of radium in the solar constitution to
account for all the energy which the centre of our system produces; and,
as we have already seen, the earth is to no small extent its own
sun--its own source of heat. The prospect thus opened out by modern
physical inquiry supports more strongly than ever the conviction that
the life of this world to come will be very prolonged. It is true that
there is always the possibility of accident. Encountering another globe,
our sun would doubtless produce so much heat as to incinerate all
planetary life. But the excessive remoteness of the sun from the nearest
fixed star suggests that the constitution of the stellar universe is
such that an accident of this kind is extremely improbable. As for
comets, the earth's atmosphere has already encountered a comet, even
during the brief period of astronomical observation. This thick overcoat
of ours protects us from the danger of such chances.
What, then, is the record? We are told that the belief in progress is a
malady of youth, which experience and the riper mind will dissipate.
Some such argument from the lips of the disillusioned or the
disidealized has been possible, perhaps, with some measure of
probability, until within our own times. They must now forever hold
their peace. We know as surely as we know the elementary phenomena of
physics or chemistry, that the record of life upon our planet, though
not only a record of progress by any means, has nevertheless included
that to which the name of progress cannot be denied in any possible
definition of the word. For myself, I understand by progress _the
emergence of mind, and its increasing dominance over matter_. Such
categories are, no doubt, unphilosophical in the ultimate sense, but
they are proximately convenient and significant. Now, if progress be
thus defined, we can see for ourselves that life has truly advanced, not
merely in terms of anatomical or physiological--_i. e._ mechanical or
chemical--complexity, but in terms of mind. The facts of nutrition teach
us that the first life upon the earth was vegetable; and though the
vegetable world displays great complexity, and that which, on some
definitions, would be called progress, yet we cannot say that there is
any more mind, any greater differentiation or development of sentience,
in the oak than in the alga. When we turn, however, to the animal
world--which is parasitic, indeed, upon the vegetable world--we find
that in what we may call the main line of ascent there has been, along
with increasing anatomical complexity, the far greater emergence of
mind. In its earliest manifestations, sentience, consciousness, the
psychical in general, and the capacity for it, must be regarded merely
as phenomena of the physical organism; the capacity to feel, as no more
than a property of the living body; and such mind as there is exists for
the body. But, as we may see it, there has been a gradual but infinitely
real turning of the tables, so that, even in a dog, as the lover of that
dog would grant, the loss of limbs and tail, or, indeed, of any portion
of the body not necessary to life, does not mean the loss of the
essential dog--not the loss of that which the lover of the dog loves.
Already, that which is not to be seen or handled has become the more
real. In ourselves, it is a capital truth, which asceticism, old or new,
perverted or sane, has always recognized, that the mind is the man, and
must be master, and the body the servant. Yet, historically, this
creature, who by the self means not the body, but, as he thinks, its
inhabitant, is historically and lineally developed--is also, indeed,
developed as an individual--from an organism in which anything to be
called psychical is but an apparently accidental attribute, to be
discerned only on close examination. This emergence of mind is progress;
and this, notwithstanding the sneers of those who do not love the word
or the light, has occurred. Its history is written indelibly in the
rocks. And, as we shall argue, this is the supreme lesson of
evolution--that progress is possible, because progress has occurred.
Assuredly we should never use this word "progress" without reminding
ourselves of the cardinal distinction that exists between two forms that
it may manifest. There is a progress which consists in and depends upon
an advance in the constitution of the living individual; and, so far as
we are more mental and less physical than the men who have left us such
relics as the Neanderthal skull, in so far we exemplify this kind of
progress. But, on the other hand, we can claim progress as compared with
even the Greeks in some respects, though there is no evidence whatever
that, so far as the individual is concerned, there is any natural,
inherent, organic progress. But we know more. Our school-boys know more
than Aristotle. We stand upon Greek shoulders. This is traditional
progress--something outside the germ-plasm; a thing dependent upon our
great human faculty of speech.
That, surely, is why the word infantine was rightly used in our first
paragraph. For we may ask why, if man be millions of years old, any
record of progress should be a matter of only a few thousand
years--perhaps not more than fifteen or twenty. The answer, I believe,
is that traditional progress depends upon the possibility of tradition.
Now speech, apart from writing, involves the possibility of tradition
from generation to generation, and I am very sure that "Man before
speech" is a myth; the more we learn of the anthropoid apes the surer we
may be of that. But, after all, the possibilities of progress dependent
upon aural memory are sadly limited; not only because it is easy to
forget, but because it is also conspicuously easy to distort, as a
familiar round-game testifies. The greatest of all the epochs in human
history was that which saw the genesis of written speech. I believe that
hundreds of thousands, nay millions, of preceding years were
substantially sterile just because the educational acquirements of
individuals could be transmitted to their children neither in the
germ-plasm (for we know such transmission to be impossible), nor outside
the germ-plasm, by means of writing. The invention of written language
accounts, then, we may suppose, for the otherwise incomprehensible
disparity between the blank record of long ages, and the great
achievement of recent history--an achievement none the less striking if
we remember that the historical epoch includes a thousand years of
darkness. Thus, as was said at the Royal Institution in 1907, when
discussing the nature of progress, we may argue in a new sense that the
historians have made history: it is the possibility of recording that
has given us something to record.
Now, it is in terms of this latter kind of progress that our duty to the
past, as we conceive it, may be defined. And in its terms also must we
define the grounds of our veneration for the past. None of us invented
language, spoken or written; nor yet numbers, nor the wheel, nor much
else. We see further than our ancestors because we stand upon their
shoulders, and, as Coleridge hinted, this may be so even though we be
dwarfs and they were giants. Some of us see this. How can we fail to do
so? And the past becomes in our eyes a very real thing, to which we are
so greatly indebted that we should even live for it. But there is a
great danger, dependent upon a great error, here. Let us consider what
is our right attitude towards the past. We are its children and its
heirs. We are infinitely indebted to it. We must love and venerate that
which was lovable and venerable in it. But are we to live for it?
If we could imagine ourselves coming from afar and contemplating the
sequence of universal phenomena now for the first time, we should
realize that the past, though real, because it was once real, is yet a
fleeting aspect of change, and, in a very real sense also, _is_ not.
Nor, indeed, _is_ the future; but it will be. We cannot alter, we cannot
benefit, we cannot serve the past, because it is not and will not be.
Our besetting tendency as individuals is to live for our own pasts, more
especially as we grow old; to become retrospective, to cease to look
forward, even to dedicate what remains to us of life to the service of
what is not at all. In this respect, as in so many others, we are less
wise than children. We will not let the dead bury its dead. This is also
the tendency of all institutions. Even if there were founded an
Institute of the Future, dedicated to the life of this world to come,
after only one generation its administrators would be consulting the
interests of the past, turning to the service of the name and the memory
of their founder, though it was for the future that he lived. Throughout
all our social institutions we can perceive this same worship of what no
longer is at the cost of the most real of all real things, which is the
life of the generation that is and the generations that are to be.
Everywhere the price for this idolatry is exacted. The perpetual image
of it is Lot's wife, who, looking backwards upon that from which she had
escaped, was turned into a pillar of salt. Nature may or may not have a
purpose, and exhibit designs for that purpose; she may or may not, in
philosophical language, be teleological. Man is and must be
teleological. We must live for the morrow, for what will be, whether as
individuals or as a nation, or our ways are the ways of death. This is
looked upon as a human failing--that man never is, but always to be
blest; that man is never satisfied, that he will not rest content with
present achievement.
Well, it is stated of our first cousin, once removed, the orang-outang,
that in the adult state he is aroused only for the snatching of food,
and then "relapses into repose." His reach does not exceed his grasp,
and one need not preach contentment to him. But we, the latest and
highest products of the struggle for existence, we are strugglers by
constitution; and when we relapse into repose we degenerate. Only on
condition of living for the morrow can we remain human. Put a sound limb
on crutches and you paralyze it; wear smoked glasses and your eyes
become intolerant of light, or wear glasses that make the muscle of
accommodation superfluous and it atrophies; take pepsin and hydrochloric
acid and the stomach will become incapable of producing them; cease to
chew and your teeth decay; let the newspaper prepare your mental food as
the cook cuts up your physical food, and you will become incapable of
thought--that is, of mental mastication and digestion. It is above all
things imperative to strive, to have a goal, to seek it on our own legs,
to cry for the moon rather than for nothing at all. And Nature teaches
us unequivocally that our purpose is ever onward--
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until we die.
It is to go, and not to get, that is the glory. To be content is to have
no ideal beyond the real; we were better dead and nourishing grass. It
is part of the whole structure of life, as we can read it, whether in
the animal or in the vegetable world, but pre-eminently in ourselves,
that the very body of the individual is constructed as for purpose; nay
more, as for the purposes of the future. Every little baby girl that is
born into the world bears upon her soft surface signs and portents--not
merely promise, but the promise of provision--for the life of the world
to come. At her very birth she teaches us that she is not created for
self alone, but for what will be. Running through the whole body--and
this the more markedly the higher the type of life--we find organs,
tissues, functions, co-ordinations existing not for the present, but for
the life of the world to come. When, some day, the social organism is as
rightly constructed as the body of any woman, or even, in some measure,
of any man, when it is similarly dedicated to the real future, and as
resolutely turned away from any worship of what no longer is, then
heaven will be nearer to earth.
It is quite clear that the supreme choice for any individual or
institution or nation is between unborn to-morrow and dead yesterday. No
one who concerns himself in the current political controversies, as, for
instance, that thing of unspeakable shame which is called the "education
question," will doubt that the present and the future are constantly
being sacrificed to the past. It may be that the spirit of a trust is
being grossly violated; but, rather than infringe the letter of it, the
life of to-day and to-morrow must suffer: thus do the worshippers of
dead yesterday--the most lethal idol before which fond humanity ever
prostrated itself.
If it be our duty to do--not "as though to breathe were life"--and if
nature indicates the future as that which we are to serve, what evidence
have we, or what likelihood, that such service is worth our while? Of
course, such a question as this may be answered in some such terms as
those of the further question, What has posterity done for us? And it is
interesting, perhaps, to consider that, so far as we can judge the
attitude of our ancestors towards ourselves, their chief interest in us
seems to have been as to what we should think of them--"What will
posterity say?" They left their records, as we leave our records, for
posterity to discover. With singular lack of judgment, as I think, we
bury examples of our newspapers for posterity to discover: these are
amongst the things which I should rather not have posterity discover.
But this is no right outlook upon the future. It is not a question of
what posterity can do for us. Posterity is here within us. The life of
the world to come is in our keeping. We carry it about with us in all
our goings and comings. It is at the mercy of what we eat and drink, at
the mercy of the diseases we contract. Its fate is involved when we fall
in love with each other, or out of love with each other; it is we
ourselves. Just as the father who perhaps is losing his own hair may
like to see how pleasantly his children's hair is growing, and finds
consolation therein; just as, indeed, all the hopes of the parent
become gradually transferred from self to that further self, those
further selves, which his children are, so we are to look upon the
future as our continuing self. To ask, What has posterity done for us?
should be looked upon as if one should say, What have my children done
for me? The parallel is indeed a very close one: and it is pointed out
by the fine sentence from Herbert Spencer, which should be known to all
of us--"A transfigured sentiment of parenthood regards with solicitude
not child and grandchild only, but the generations to come
hereafter--fathers of the future, creating and providing for their
remote children."
We may grant that there is no money in posterity. The germ-plasm has
infinite possibilities; but, so long as it remains germ-plasm, it can
write no cheques in our favour. If you serve the present, the present
will pay; posterity does not pay. If you write a "Merry Widow," the
present will pay; if you write an "Unfinished Symphony," you will be
dust ere it is performed. If you create that which will last forever,
but which makes no appeal to the transient tastes of the moment, you may
starve and die and rot, because the future, for which you work, cannot
reward you. Life is so constructed that only in our own day, and not
always now, is the mother--even Nature's own supreme organ of the
future--rewarded for her maternal sacrifice. Nature does not trouble
about the fate of the present, because she is always pressing on and
pressing on towards something more, higher, better. The present, the
individual, are but the organs of her purpose. We are to look upon
ourselves as ends in ourselves; but we are also means towards ends which
we can only dimly conceive, but towards which we may rightly work, and
the service of which, though by no means freedom in the ordinary sense,
is yet of that higher kind, that perfect freedom, which consists in the
development of all the higher attributes of our nature. For it is in our
nature to work and to feel and to live for the life that will be. That,
as I say, is because living creatures are so constructed.
Huxley said that if the present level of human life were to show no
rising in the future, he should welcome the kindly comet that should
sweep the whole thing away. None of us is content with things as they
are. If we are, better were it for us to be nourishing the grass and
serving the things that will be in that way, if we cannot in any other.
What promise, then, have we that things as they will be are worth
working for? We live now in an age to which there has been revealed the
fact of organic evolution. From the fire-mist, from the mud, from the
merely brutal, there have been evolved--such is the worth of Nature's
womb--there have been evolved intelligence and love, sacrifice, ideals;
splendours which no splendour to come can utterly dim. These things are
in the power of Nature. This is what "dead matter" can mother. So much
the worse for our contemptible conceptions of matter, and That of which
matter is the manifestation. But if it be that from the slime, by
natural processes, there can grow a St. Francis, surely our dim notions
of the potencies of Nature must be exalted. The forces that have
erected us from the worm, are they necessarily exhausted or exhaustible?
Who will dare to set limits to the promise of Nature's womb? I mean, in
a word, that the history of evolution is a warrant for the idea that we
ourselves, even erected men and women, are but stages to what may be
higher. We look with contempt upon the apes, but time must have been
when "simian" would have been as proud an adjective as "human" is
to-day: and human may become superhuman.
Many passages might be quoted to show that our expectation of future
progress is well based, and I will content myself with a single excerpt
from the final page of the masterpiece of which all the civilized world
was lately celebrating the jubilee. Says Darwin: "Hence we may look with
some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural
selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal
and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection."
The quotation will suffice to remind us that, if we are to serve the
life of the world to come in the surest way, we must become Eugenists,
accepting and applying to human life Nature's great principle of the
selection of worth for parenthood and the rejection of unworth. We must
modify and adapt our conceptions of education thereto. We must make
parenthood the most responsible thing in life. We must teach the
girl--aye, and the boy too--that the body is holy, for it is the temple
of life to come. We must perceive in our most imperious instincts
Nature's care for the future, and must humanize and sanctify them by
conscious recognition of their purpose, and by provident co-operation
with Nature towards her supreme end. We could spare from education,
perhaps, those fictions concerning the past which are sometimes called
history, were they replaced by a knowledge of our own nature and
constitution as instruments of the future.
Let us grant even, for the argument, that nothing more is possible than
mankind has yet achieved. There remains the hope that that which human
nature at its best has been capable of may be realized by human nature
at large. In their great moments the great men have seen this. That last
sentence is, indeed, a paraphrase from a remark at the end of Herbert
Spencer's "Ethics." Ruskin--to choose the polar antithesis of the
Spencerian mind--declares that "there are no known limits to the
nobleness of person or mind which the human creature may attain if we
wisely attend to the laws of its birth and training." Wordsworth asks
whether Nature throws any bars across the hope that what one is millions
may be. Take it, then, that nothing more is conceivable in the way of
mathematics than a Newton, or of drama than an Æschylus or a
Shakespeare, or of sacrifice than a Christ. These, then, are types of
what will be. They demonstrate what human nature is capable of. What one
is, why may not millions be? Here is an ideal to work for. Here is
something real to worship, to dedicate a life to. It is not merely that
we can make smoother the paths of future generations--which George
Meredith declared to be the great purpose and duty of our lives--but
that, as Ruskin suggests in the foregoing quotation, we may raise the
inherent quality of those future generations, so that they can make
their own ways smooth and straight and high. It is our business, I
repeat, to conceive of parenthood as the most responsible and sacred
thing in life. True, it now follows, according to physiological law,
upon the satisfaction of certain tendencies of our nature, which in
themselves may be gratified, and even worthily gratified, without
reference to anything but the present; yet these tendencies, commonly
reviled and regarded with contempt--at least overt contempt--exist, like
most of our attributes, for the life of the world to come. And that in
which they may result, the bringing of new human life into the world, is
the most tremendous, as it is the most mysterious, of our possibilities.
The laws of life are such that at any given moment the entire future is
absolutely at the mercy of the present. The laws of life, indeed; one
might have said the law of universal causation. But so it is. There is
no conceivable limit to our responsibility. We act for the moment, we
act for self; but there will be no end to the consequences. When the
stuff of which our bodies are made has passed through a thousand cycles,
the consequences of our brief moments will still be felt. This
dependence of the future upon the present in the world of life is an
almost unrealizable thing. Life could not have persisted upon such
conditions had not Nature from the first, and increasingly up to our own
day (for it is the human infant that is the most helpless, and the
longest helpless), had not Nature, I say, persistently constructed the
individual, in all his or her attributes, as a being whose warrant and
purpose lay yet beyond. We are organs of the race, whether we will or
no. We are made for the future, whether we will, whether we care, or no.
We are only obeying Nature, and therefore in a position to command her,
in dedicating ourselves and our purposes, our customs, our social
structures, to the life of the world to come. We shall be there. Our
purposes and hopes, the flesh and blood of many of us, will be there.
Posterity will be what we make it, as we, alas! are what our ancestors
have made us.
To this increasing purpose there will come, I suppose, an end--an
inscrutable end. Yearly the evidence makes it more probable that in a
sister world we are gazing upon the splendid efforts of purposeful,
intelligent, co-ordinated life to battle against planetary conditions
which threaten it with death by thirst. How long intelligence has
existed upon Mars, if intelligence there be, no one can say; nor yet
what its future will be. It would seem probable that our own fate must
be similar, but it is far removed. And though the Whole may seem wanton,
purposeless, stupid, we are very little folk; we see very dimly; we see
only what we have the capacity to see; and there are more things in
heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of the wisest of
us. So also there are many events in the womb of time which will be
delivered. We are the shapers, the creators, the parents of those
events. The still, small voice of the unborn declares our
responsibility. There may be no reward. What does reward mean? Who
rewards the sun, or the rain, or the oak, or the tigress? But there is
the doing of one's work in the world, the serving of the highest and
most real purpose that may be revealed to us. That is to be oneself, to
fulfil one's destiny, to be a part of the universe, and worthy to be
such a part. And though it be even unworthy for us to suggest that at
least posterity will be grateful to us, such a thought may perhaps
console us a little. At any rate, to those who worship and live for the
past, we may offer this alternative: let them work for what will be.
Perhaps the reward will be as real as any that the worship of what is
not can offer. And, reward or no reward, it is something to have an
ideal, something to believe that earth may become heavenly, and that, in
some real sense which we can dimly perceive, we may be part--must be
part, indeed--of that great day which is in our keeping, and which it is
our privilege to have some share in shaping. Thus we may repeat, and
thrill to repeat, with new meaning, the old but still living words,
_Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi sæculi_--"I look for
the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come."