With Pantheism likewise I was on my guard against its being lack of
courage, rather than a conviction of its untruth, which held me back
from embracing it. I thought it a true postulate that everything seemed
permeated and sustained by a Reason that had not human aims in front of
it and did not work by human means, a Divine Reason. Nature could only
be understood from its highest forms; the Ideal, which revealed itself
to the world of men at their highest development, was present, in
possibility and intent, in the first germ, in the mist of primeval
creation, before it divided itself into organic and inorganic elements.
The whole of Nature was in its essence Divine, and I felt myself at
heart a worshipper of Nature.
But this same Nature was indifferent to the weal or woe of humans. It
obeyed its own laws regardless of whether men were lost thereby; it
seemed cruel in its callousness; it took care that the species should
be preserved, but the individual was nothing to it.
Now, like all other European children, I had been brought up in the
theory of personal immortality, a theory which, amongst other things,
is one way of expressing the immense importance, the eternal
importance, which is attributed to each individual. The stronger the
feeling of his own _ego_ that the individual has, the more eagerly he
necessarily clings to the belief that he cannot be annihilated. But to
none could the belief be more precious than to a youth who felt his
life pulsate within, as if he had twenty lives in himself and twenty
more to live. It was impossible to me to realise that I could die, and
one evening, about a year later, I astonished my master, Professor
Bröchner, by confessing as much. "Indeed," said Bröchner, "are you
speaking seriously? You cannot realise that you will have to die one
day? How young! You are very different from me, who always have death
before my eyes."
But although my vitality was so strong that I could not imagine my own
death, I knew well enough that my terrestrial life, like all other
men's, would come to an end. But I felt all the more strongly that it
was impossible everything could be at an end then; death could not be a
termination; it could only, as the religions preached and as
eighteenth-century Deism taught, be a moment of transition to a new and
fuller existence. In reward and punishment after death I could not
believe; those were mediaeval conceptions that I had long outgrown. But
the dream of immortality I could not let go. And I endeavoured to hold
it fast by virtue of the doctrine of the impossibility of anything
disappearing. The quantity of matter always remained the same; energy
survived every transformation.
Still, I realised that this could not satisfy one, as far as the form
which we term individuality was concerned. What satisfaction was it to
Alexander that his dust should stop a bung-hole? or to Shakespeare that
Romeo and Juliet were acted in Chicago? So I took refuge in parallels
and images. Who could tell whether the soul, which on earth had been
blind to the nature of the other life, did not, in death, undergo the
operation which opened its eyes? Who could tell whether death were not,
as Sibbern had suggested, to be compared with a birth? Just as the
unborn life in its mother's womb would, if it were conscious, believe
that the revolution of birth meant annihilation, whereas it was for the
first time awakening to a new and infinitely richer life, so it was
perhaps for the soul in the dreaded moment of death....
But when I placed before my master these comparisons and the hopes I
built upon them, they were swept away as meaningless; he pointed out
simply that nothing went to prove a continuation of personality after
death, while on the contrary everything argued against it,--and to this
I could not refuse my assent.
Then I understood that in what I called Pantheism, the immortality of
the individual had no place. And a slow, internal struggle commenced
for renunciation of the importance and value of the individual. I had
many a conversation on this point with my teacher, a man tired of life
and thoroughly resigned.
He always maintained that the desire of the individual for a
continuation of personality was nothing but the outcome of vanity. He
would very often put the question in a comical light. He related the
following anecdote: In summer evenings he used to go for a walk along
the Philosopher's Avenue (now West Rampart Street). Here he had
frequently met, sitting on their benches, four or five old gentlemen
who took their evening ramble at the same time; by degrees they made
each other's acquaintance and got into conversation with one another.
It turned out that the old gentlemen were candle-makers who had retired
from business and now had considerable difficulty in passing their time
away. In reality they were always bored, and they yawned incessantly.
These men had one theme only, to which they always recurred with
enthusiasm--their hope in personal immortality for all eternity. And it
amused Bröchner that they, who in this life did not know how to kill so
much as one Sunday evening, should be so passionately anxious to have a
whole eternity to fill up. His pupil then caught a glimpse himself of
the grotesqueness of wishing to endure for millions of centuries, which
time even then was nothing in comparison with eternity.