THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE
[Sidenote: The length of life a subject for natural science.]
At no point are the two ingredients of religion, superstition and moral
truth, more often confused than in the doctrine of immortality, yet in
none are they more clearly distinguishable. Ideal immortality is a
principle revealed to insight; it is seen by observing the eternal
quality of ideas and validities, and the affinity to them native to
reason or the cognitive energy of mind. A future life, on the contrary,
is a matter for faith or presumption; it is a prophetic hypothesis
regarding occult existences. This latter question is scientific and
empirical, and should be treated as such. A man is, forensically
speaking, the same man after the nightly break in his consciousness.
After many changes in his body and after long oblivion, parcels of his
youth may be revived and may come to figure again among the factors in
his action. Similarly, if evidence to that effect were available, we
might establish the resurrection of a given soul in new bodies or its
activity in remote places and times. Evidence of this sort has in fact
always been offered copiously by rumour and superstition. The operation
of departed spirits, like that of the gods, has been recognised in many
a dream, or message, or opportune succour. The Dioscuri and Saint James
the Apostle have appeared—preferably on white horses—in sundry
battles. Spirits duly invoked have repeated forgotten gossip and
revealed the places where crimes had been committed or treasure buried.
More often, perhaps, ghosts have walked the night without any ostensible
or useful purpose, apparently in obedience to some ghastly compulsion
that crept over them in death, as if a hesitating sickle had left them
still hanging to life by one attenuated fibre.
[Sidenote: “Psychical” phenomena.]
The mass of this evidence, ancient and modern, traditional and
statistical, is beneath consideration; the palpitating mood in which it
is gathered and received, even when ostensibly scientific, is such that
gullibility and fiction play a very large part in the report; for it is
not to be assumed that a man, because he speaks in the first person and
addresses a learned society, has lost the primordial faculty of lying.
When due allowance has been made, however, for legend and fraud, there
remains a certain residuum of clairvoyance and telepathy, and an
occasional abnormal obedience of matter to mind which might pass for
magic. There are unmistakable indications that in these regions we touch
lower and more rudimentary faculties. There seems to be, as is quite
natural, a sub-human sensibility in man, wherein ideas are connected
together by bonds so irrational and tenacious that they seem miraculous
to a mind already trained in practical and relevant thinking. This
sub-human sense, far from representing important truths more clearly
than ordinary apprehension can, reduces consciousness again to a tangle
of trivial impressions, shots of uncertain range, as if a skin had not
yet formed over the body. It emerges in tense and disorganised moments.
Its reports are the more trifling the more startingly literal their
veracity. It seems to represent a stratum of life beneath moral or
intellectual functions, and beneath all personality. When proof has been
found that a ghost has actually been seen, proof is required that the
phantom has been rightly recognised and named; and this imputed identity
is never demonstrable and in most cases impossible. So in the magic
cures which from time immemorial have been recorded at shrines of all
religions, and which have been attributed to wonder-workers of every
sect: the one thing certain about them is that they prove neither the
truth of whatever myth is capriciously associated with them, nor the
goodness or voluntary power of the miracle-worker himself. Healer and
medium are alike vehicles for some elemental energy they cannot control,
and which as often as not misses fire; at best they feel a power going
out of them which they themselves undergo, and which radiates from them
like electricity, to work, as chance will have it, good or evil in the
world. The whole operation lies, in so far as it really takes place at
all, on the lowest levels of unintelligence, in a region closely allied
to madness in consciousness and to sporadic organic impulses in the
physical sphere.
[Sidenote: Hypertrophies of sense.]
Among the blind, the retina having lost its function, the rest of the
skin is said to recover its primordial sensitiveness to distance and
light, so that the sightless have a clearer premonition of objects about
them than seeing people could have in the dark. So when reason and the
ordinary processes of sense are in abeyance a certain universal
sensibility seems to return to the soul; influences at other times not
appreciable make then a sensible impression, and automatic reactions may
be run through in response to a stimulus normally quite insufficient.
Now the complexity of nature is prodigious; everything that happens
leaves, like buried cities, almost indelible traces which an eye, by
chance attentive and duly prepared, can manage to read, recovering for a
moment the image of an extinct life. Symbols, illegible to reason, can
thus sometimes read themselves out in trance and madness. Faint vestiges
may be found in matter of forms which it once wore, or which, like a
perfume, impregnated and got lodgment within it. Slight echoes may
suddenly reconstitute themselves in the mind’s silence; and a
half-stunned consciousness may catch brief glimpses of long-lost and
irrelevant things. Real ghosts are such reverberations of the past,
exceeding ordinary imagination and discernment both in vividness and in
fidelity; they may not be explicable without appealing to material
influences subtler than those ordinarily recognised, as they are
obviously not discoverable without some derangement and hypertrophy of
the senses.
[Sidenote: These possibilities affect physical existence only.]
That such subtler influences should exist is entirely consonant with
reason and experience; but only a hankering tenderness for superstition,
a failure to appreciate the function both of religion and of science,
can lead to reverence for such oracular gibberish as these influences
provoke. The world is weary of experimenting with magic. In utter
seriousness and with immense solemnity whole races have given themselves
up to exploiting these shabby mysteries; and while a new survey of the
facts, in the light of natural science and psychology, is certainly not
superfluous, it can be expected to lead to nothing but a more detailed
and conscientious description of natural processes. The thought of
employing such investigations to save at the last moment religious
doctrines founded on moral ideas is a pathetic blunder; the obscene
supernatural has nothing to do with rational religion. If it were
discovered that wretched echoes of a past life could be actually heard
by putting one’s ear long enough to a tomb, and if (_per impossibile_)
those echoes could be legitimately attributed to another mind, and to
the very mind, indeed, whose former body was interred there, a
melancholy chapter would indeed be added to man’s earthly fortunes,
since it would appear that even after death he retained, under certain
conditions, a fatal attachment to his dead body and to the other
material instruments of his earthly life. Obviously such a discovery
would teach us more about dying than about immortality; the truths
disclosed, since they would be disclosed by experiment and observation,
would be psycho-physical truths, implying nothing about what a truly
disembodied life might be, if one were attainable; for a disembodied
life could by no possibility betray itself in spectres, rumblings, and
spasms. Actual thunders from Sinai and an actual discovery of two stone
tables would have been utterly irrelevant to the moral authority of the
ten commandments or to the existence of a truly supreme being. No less
irrelevant to a supramundane immortality is the length of time during
which human spirits may be condemned to operate on earth after their
bodies are quiet. In other words, spectral survivals would at most
enlarge our conception of the soul’s physical basis, spreading out the
area of its manifestations; they could not possibly, seeing the
survivals are physical, reveal the disembodied existence of the soul.
[Sidenote: Moral grounds for the doctrine. The necessary assumption of a
future.]
Such a disembodied existence, removed by its nature from the sphere of
empirical evidence, might nevertheless be actual, and grounds of a moral
or metaphysical type might be sought for postulating its reality. Life
and the will to live are at bottom identical. Experience itself is
transitive and can hardly arise apart from a forward effort and
prophetic apprehension by which adjustments are made to a future
unmistakably foreseen. This premonition, by which action seeks to
justify and explain itself to reflection, may be analysed into a group
of memories and sensations of movement, generating ideal expectations
which might easily be disappointed; but scepticism about the future can
hardly be maintained in the heat of action. A postulate acted on is an
act of genuine and dogmatic faith. I not only postulate a morrow when I
prepare for it, but ingenuously and heartily believe that the morrow
will come. This faith does not amount to certitude; I may confess, if
challenged, that before to-morrow I and the world and time itself might
conceivably come to an end together; but that idle possibility, so long
as it does not slacken action, will not disturb belief. Every moment of
life accordingly trusts that life will continue; and this prophetic
interpretation of action, so long as action lasts, amounts to continual
faith in futurity.
[Sidenote: An assumption no evidence.]
A sophist might easily transform this psychological necessity into a
dazzling proof of immortality. To believe anything, he might say, is to
be active; but action involves faith in a future and in the fruits of
action; and as no living moment can be without this confidence, belief
in extinction would be self-contradictory and at no moment a possible
belief. The question, however, is not whether every given moment has or
has not a specious future before it to which it looks forward, but
whether the realisation of such foresight, a realisation which during
waking life is roughly usual, is incapable of failing. Now expectation,
never without its requisite antecedents and natural necessity, often
lacks fulfilment, and never finds its fulfilment entire; so that the
necessity of a postulate gives no warrant for its verification.
Expectation and action are constantly suspended together; and what
happens whenever thought loses itself or stumbles, what happens whenever
in its shifts it forgets its former objects, might well happen at
crucial times to that train of intentions which we call a particular
life or the life of humanity. The prophecy involved in action is not
insignificant, but it is notoriously fallible and depends for its
fulfilment on external conditions. The question accordingly really is
whether a man expecting to live for ever or one expecting to die in his
time has the more representative and trustworthy notion of the future.
The question, so stated, cannot be solved by an appeal to evidence,
which is necessarily all on one side, but only by criticising the value
of evidence as against instinct and hope, and by ascertaining the
relative status which assumption and observation have in experience.
The transcendental compulsion under which action labours of envisaging a
future, and the animal instinct that clings to life and flees from death
as the most dreadful of evils are the real grounds why immortality seems
initially natural and good. Confidence in living for ever is anterior to
the discovery that all men are mortal and to the discovery that the
thinker is himself a man. These discoveries flatly contradict that
confidence, in the form in which it originally presents itself, and all
doctrines of immortality which adult philosophy can entertain are more
or less subterfuges and after-thoughts by which the observed fact of
mortality and the native inconceivability of death are more or less
clumsily reconciled.
[Sidenote: A solipsistic argument.]
The most lordly and genuine fashion of asserting immortality would be to
proclaim one’s self an exception to the animal race and to point out
that the analogy 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 hell 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 gods.]
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 gods, 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 assault 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 gods possessed longevity, beauty, magic celerity of
movement, leisure, splendour of life, indefinite strength, and practical
omniscience. When the gods were also expressions for natural forces,
this function somewhat prejudiced their ideality, and they failed to
correspond perfectly to what their worshippers would have most
esteemed; but religious reformers tended to expunge naturalism from
theology and to represent the gods as entirely admirable. The Greek
gods, 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
gods, 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 gods’ 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 distinguishing them in essence. _Cur Deus Homo_ 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,
impassible; 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
gods 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 assertion, 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 entity 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 assert
a future life. Their failure drives us to a consideration of indirect
attempts to establish an unobservable but real immortality through
revelation and dogma. Such an immortality would follow on transmigration
or resurrection, and would be assigned to a supernatural sphere, a
second empirical world present to the soul after death, where her
fortunes would not be really conceivable without a reconstituted 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 constituted if it is to satisfy this
demand, and how long need it last? It would evidently have to go on in
an environment closely analogous 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 passed 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 circumstances 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 superstitions 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 nobleness 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: Ignoble 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 hell 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 hell may have
frightened a few villains into omitting a crime is perhaps credible;
but the embarrassed 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 substitute 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.]
To turn these moral questions, however, into arguments for a physical
speculation, like that about human longevity, resurrection, or
metempsychosis, a hybrid principle is required: thus, even if we have
answered those moral questions in the conventional way and satisfied
ourselves that personal immortality is a postulate of ethics, we cannot
infer that immortality therefore exists unless we import into the
argument a tremendous optimistic postulate, to the effect that what is
requisite for moral rationality must in every instance be realised in
experience.
Such an optimistic postulate, however, as the reader must have
repeatedly observed, is made not only despite all experience but in
ignorance of the conditions under which alone ideals are framed and
retain their significance. Every ideal expresses individual and specific
tendencies, proper at some moment to some natural creature; every ideal
therefore has for its basis a part only of the dynamic world, so that
its fulfilment is problematical and altogether adventitious to its
existence and authority. To decide whether an ideal can be or will be
fulfilled we must examine the physical relation between such organic
forces as that ideal expresses and the environment in which those forces
operate; we may then perceive how far a realisation of the given aims is
possible, how far it must fail, and how far the aims in question, by a
shift in their natural basis, will lapse and yield to others, possibly
more capable of execution and more stable in the world. The question of
success is a question of physics. To say that an ideal will be
inevitably fulfilled simply because it is an ideal is to say something
gratuitous and foolish. Pretence cannot in the end avail against
experience.
[Sidenote: Transition to ideality.]
Nevertheless, it is important to define ideals even before their
realisation is known to be possible, because they constitute one of the
two factors whose interaction and adjustment is moral life, factors
which are complementary and diverse in function and may be independently
ascertained. The value of existences is wholly borrowed from their
ideality, without direct consideration of their fate, while the
existence of ideals is wholly determined by natural forces, without
direct relation to their fulfilment. Existence and ideal value can
therefore be initially felt and observed apart, although of course a
complete description would lay bare physical necessity in the ideals
entertained and inevitable ideal harmonies among the facts discovered.
Human life, lying as it does in the midst of a larger process, will
surely not be without some congruity with the universe. Every creature
lends potential values to a world in which it can satisfy some at least
of its demands and learn, perhaps, to modify the others. Happiness is
always a natural and an essentially possible thing, and a total despair,
since it ignores those goods which are attainable, can express only a
partial experience. But before considering in what ways a disciplined
soul might make its peace with reality, we may consider what an
undisciplined soul in the first instance desires; and from this
starting-point we may trace her chastening and education, observing the
ideal compensations which may console her for lost illusions.