More detailed consideration of these probabilities may be
ventured. They will not, perhaps, be acknowledged as
probabilities by persons who regard science as a destroyer rather
than a modifier. But such thinkers forget that religious feeling
is something infinitely more profound than dogma; that it
survives all gods and all forms of creed; and that it only widens
and deepens and gathers power with intellectual expansion. That
as mere doctrine religion will ultimately pass away is a
conclusion to which the study of evolution leads; but that
religion as feeling, or even as faith in the unknown power
shaping equally a brain or a constellation, can ever utterly die,
is not at present conceivable. Science wars only upon erroneous
interpretations of phenomena; it only magnifies the cosmic
mystery, and proves that everything, however minute, is
infinitely wonderful and incomprehensible. And it is this
indubitable tendency of science to broaden beliefs and to magnify
cosmic emotion which justifies the supposition that future
modifications of Western religious ideas will be totally unlike
any modifications effected in the past; that the Occidental
conception of Self will orb into something akin to the Oriental
conception of Self; and that all present petty metaphysical
notions of personality and individuality as realities per se will
be annihilated. Already the growing popular comprehension of the
facts of heredity, as science teaches them, indicates the path by
which some, at least, of these modifications will be reached. In
the coming contest over the great question of psychological
evolution, common intelligence will follow Science along the line
of least resistance; and that line will doubtless be the study of
heredity, since the phenomena to be considered, however in
themselves uninterpretable, are familiar to general experience,
and afford partial answers to countless old enigmas. It is thus
quite possible to imagine a coming form of Western religion
supported by the whole power of synthetic philosophy, differing
from Buddhism mainly in the greater exactness of its conceptions,
holding the soul as a composite, and teaching a new spiritual law
resembling the doctrine of karma.
An objection to this idea will, however, immediately present
itself to many minds. Such a modification of belief, it will be
averred, would signify the sudden conquest and transformation of
feelings by ideas. "The world," says Herbert Spencer, "is not
governed by ideas, but by feelings, to which ideas serve only as
guides." How are the notions of a change, such as that supposed,
to be reconciled with common knowledge of existing religious
sentiment in the West, and the force of religious emotionalism?
Were the ideas of pre-existence and of the soul as multiple
really antagonistic to Western religious sentiment, no
satisfactory answer could be made. But are they so antagonistic?
The idea of pre-existence certainly is not; the Occidental mind
is already prepared for it. It is true that the notion of Self as
a composite, destined to dissolution, may seem little better than
the materialistic idea of annihilation,--at least to those still
unable to divest themselves of the old habits of thought.
Nevertheless, impartial reflection will show that there is no
emotional reason for dreading the disintegration of the Ego.
Actually, though unwittingly, it is for this very disintegration
that Christians and Buddhists alike perpetually pray. Who has not
often wished to rid himself of the worse parts of his nature, of
tendencies to folly or to wrong, of impulses to say or do unkind
things,--of all that lower inheritance which still clings about
the higher man, and weighs down his finest aspirations? Yet that
of which we so earnestly desire the separation, the elimination,
the death, is not less surely a part of psychological
inheritance, of veritable Self, than are those younger and larger
faculties which help to the realization of noble ideals. Rather
than an end to be feared, the dissolution of Self is the one
object of all objects to which our efforts should be turned. What
no new philosophy can forbid us to hope is that the best elements
of Self will thrill on to seek loftier affinities, to enter into
grander and yet grander combinations, till the supreme revelation
comes, and we discern, through infinite vision,--through the
vanishing of all Self,--the Absolute Reality.
For while we know that even the so-called elements themselves are
evolving, we have no proof that anything utterly dies. That we
are is the certainty that, we have been and will be. We have
survived countless evolutions, countless universes. We know that
through the Cosmos all is law. No chance decides what units shall
form the planetary core, or what shall feel the sun; what shall
be locked in granite and basalt, or shall multiply in plant and
in animal. So far as reason can venture to infer from analogy,
the cosmical history of every ultimate unit, psychological or
physical, is determined just as surely and as exactly as in the
Buddhist doctrine of karma.