IDEAL IMMORTALITY
[Sidenote: Olympian immortality the first ideal.]
In order to give the will to live frank and direct satisfaction, it
would have been necessary to solve the problem of perpetual motion in
the animal body, as nature has approximately solved it in the solar
system. Nutrition should have continually repaired all waste, so that
the cycle of youth and age might have repeated itself yearly in every
individual, like summer and winter on the earth. Nor are some hints of
such an equilibrium altogether wanting. Convalescence, sudden good
fortune, a belated love, and even the April sunshine or morning air,
bring about a certain rejuvenescence in man prophetic of what is not
ideally impossible—perpetuity and constant reinforcement in his vital
powers. Had nature furnished the elixir of life, or could art have
discovered it, the whole face of human society would have been changed.
The earth once full, no more children would have been begotten and
parental instincts would have been atrophied for want of function. All
men would have been contemporaries and, having all time before them for
travel and experiment, would have allied themselves eventually with what
was most congenial to them and would have come to be bound only by free
and friendly ties. They would all have been well known and would have
acted perpetually in their ultimate and true character, like the
immortal gods. One might have loved fixity, like Hestia, and another
motion, like Hermes; a third might have been untiring in the plastic
arts, like Hephæstus, or, like Apollo, in music; while the infinite
realms of mathematics and philosophy would have lain open to spirits of
a quality not represented in Homer’s pantheon.
That man’s primary and most satisfying ideal is something of this sort
is clear in itself, and attested by mythology; for the great use of the
gods is that they interpret the human heart to us, and help us, while we
conceive them, to discover our inmost ambition and, while we emulate
them, to pursue it. Christian fancy, because of its ascetic meagreness
and fear of life, has not known how to fill out the picture of heaven
and has left it mystical and vague; but whatever paradise it has
ventured to imagine has been modelled on the same primary ideal. It has
represented a society of eternal beings among which there was no
marriage nor giving in marriage and where each found his congenial
mansion and that perfected activity which brings inward peace.
After this easy fashion were death and birth conquered in the myths,
which truly interpreted the will to live according to its primary
intention, but in reality such direct satisfaction was impossible. A
total defeat, on the other hand, would have extinguished the will itself
and obliterated every human impulse seeking expression. Man’s existence
is proof enough that nature was not altogether unpropitious, but
offered, in an unlooked-for direction, some thoroughfare to the soul.
Roundabout imperfect methods were discovered by which something at least
of what was craved might be secured. The individual perished, yet not
without having segregated and detached a certain portion of himself
capable of developing a second body and mind. The potentialities of this
seminal portion, having been liberated long after the parent body had
begun to feel the shock of the world, could reach full expression after
the parent body had begun to decay; and the offspring needed not itself
to succumb before it had launched a third generation. A cyclical life or
arrested death, a continual motion by little successive explosions,
could thus establish itself and could repeat from generation to
generation a process not unlike nutrition; only that, while in nutrition
the individual form remains and the inner substance is renewed
insensibly, in reproduction the form is renewed openly and the inner
substance is insensibly continuous.
[Sidenote: Its indirect attainment by reproduction.]
Reproduction seems, from the will’s point of view, a marvellous
expedient involving a curious mixture of failure and success. The
individual, who alone is the seat and principle of will, is thereby
sacrificed, so that reproduction is no response to his original hopes
and aspirations; yet in a double way he is enticed and persuaded to be
almost satisfied: first, in that so like a counterfeit of himself
actually survives, a creature to which all his ideal interests may be
transmitted; and secondly, because a new and as it were a rival aim is
now insinuated into his spirit. For the impulse toward reproduction has
now become no less powerful, even if less constant, than the impulse
toward nutrition; in other words, the will to live finds itself in the
uncongenial yet inevitable company of the will to have an heir.
Reproduction thus partly entertains the desire to be immortal by giving
it a vicarious fulfilment, and partly cancels it by adding an impulse
and joy which, when you think of it, accepts mortality. For love,
whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and
prompts a man to give his life for his friends. In thus losing his life
gladly he in a sense finds it anew, since it has now become a part of
his function and ideal to yield his place to others and to live
afterwards only in them. While the primitive and animal side of him may
continue to cling to existence at all hazards and to find the thought of
extinction intolerable, his reason and finer imagination will build a
new ideal on reality better understood, and be content that the future
he looks to should be enjoyed by others. When we consider such a natural
transformation and discipline of the will, when we catch even a slight
glimpse of nature’s resources and mysteries, how thin and verbal those
belated hopes must seem which would elude death and abolish sacrifice!
Such puerile dreams not only miss the whole pathos of human life, but
ignore those specifically mortal virtues which might console us for not
being so radiantly divine as we may at first have thought ourselves.
Nature, in denying us perennial youth, has at least invited us to become
unselfish and noble.
A first shift in aspiration, a capacity for radical altruism, thus
supervenes upon the lust to live and accompanies parental and social
interests. The new ideal, however, can never entirely obliterate the old
and primary one, because the initial functions which the old Adam
exclusively represented remain imbedded in the new life, and are its
physical basis. If the nutritive soul ceased to operate, the
reproductive soul could never arise; to be altruistic we must first be,
and spiritual interests can never abolish or cancel the material
existence on which they are grafted. The consequence is that death, even
when circumvented by reproduction and relieved by surviving impersonal
interests, remains an essential evil. It may be accepted as inevitable,
and the goods its intrusion leaves standing may be heartily appreciated
and pursued; but something pathetic and incomplete will always attach to
a life that looks to its own termination.
The effort of physical existence is not to accomplish anything definite
but merely to persist for ever. The will has its first law of motion,
corresponding to that of matter; its initial tendency is to continue to
operate in the given direction and in the given manner. Inertia is, in
this sense, the essence of vitality. To be driven from that perpetual
course is somehow to be checked, and an external and hostile force is
required to change a habit or an instinct as much as to deflect a star.
Indeed, nutrition itself, hunting, feeding, and digestion, are forced
activities, and the basis of passions not altogether congenial nor
ideal. Hunger is an incipient faintness and agony, and an animal that
needs to hunt, gnaw, and digest is no immortal, free, or essentially
victorious creature. His will is already driven into by-paths and
expedients; his primitive beatific vision has to be interrupted by
remedial action to restore it for a while, since otherwise it would
obviously degenerate rapidly through all stages of distress until its
total extinction.
[Sidenote: Moral acceptance of this compromise.]
The tasks thus imposed upon the protoplasmic will raise it, we may say,
to a higher level; to hunt is better sport, and more enlightening, than
to lie imbibing sunshine and air; and to eat is, we may well think, a
more positive and specific pleasure than merely to be. Such judgments,
however, show a human bias. They arise from incapacity to throw off
acquired organs. Those necessities which have led to the forms of life
which we happen to exemplify, and in terms of which our virtues are
necessarily expressed, seem to us, in retrospect, happy necessities,
since without them our conventional goods would not have come to appeal
to us. These conventional goods, however, are only compromises with
evil, and the will would never have taken to pursuing them if it had not
been dislodged and beaten back from its primary aims. Even food is, for
this reason, no absolute blessing; it is only the first and most
necessary of comforts, of restorations, of truces and reprieves in that
battle with death in which an ultimate defeat is too plainly inevitable;
for the pitcher that goes often to the well is at last broken, and a
creature that is forced to resist his inward collapse by adventitious
aids will some day find that these aids have failed him, and that inward
dissolution has become, for some mechanical reason, quite irresistible.
It is therefore not only the lazy or mystical will that chafes at the
need of material supports and deprecates anxieties about the morrow; the
most conventional and passionate mind, when it attains any refinement,
confesses the essential servitude involved in such preoccupations by
concealing or ignoring them as much as may be. We study to eat as if we
were not ravenous, to win as if we were willing to lose, and to treat
personal wants in general as merely compulsory and uninteresting
matters. Why dwell, we say to ourselves, on our stammerings and
failures? The intent is all, and the bungling circumlocutions we may be
driven to should be courteously ignored, like a stammerer’s troubles,
when once our meaning has been conveyed.
Even animal passions are, in this way, after-thoughts and expedients,
and although in a brutal age they seem to make up the whole of life,
later it appears that they would be gladly enough outgrown, did the
material situation permit it. Intellectual life returns, in its freedom,
to the attitude proper to primitive will, except that through the new
machinery underlying reason a more stable equilibrium has been
established with external forces, and the freedom originally absolute
has become relative to certain underlying adjustments, adjustments which
may be ignored but cannot be abandoned with impunity. Original action,
as seen in the vegetable, is purely spontaneous. On the animal level
instrumental action is added and chiefly attended to, so that the
creature, without knowing what it lives for, finds attractive tasks and
a sort of glory in the chase, in love, and in labour. In the Life of
Reason this instrumental activity is retained, for it is a necessary
basis for human prosperity and power, but the value of life is again
sought in the supervening free activity which that adjustment to
physical forces, or dominion over them, has made possible on a larger
scale. Every free activity would gladly persist for ever; and if any be
found that involves and aims at its own arrest or transformation, that
activity is thereby proved to be instrumental and servile, imposed from
without and not ideal.
[Sidenote: Even vicarious immortality intrinsically impossible.]
Not only is man’s original effort aimed at living for ever in his own
person, but, even if he could renounce that desire, the dream of being
represented perpetually by posterity is no less doomed. Reproduction,
like nutrition, is a device not ultimately successful. If extinction
does not defeat it, evolution will. Doubtless the fertility of whatever
substance may have produced us will not be exhausted in this single
effort; a potentiality that has once proved efficacious and been
actualised in life, though it should sleep, will in time revive again.
In some form and after no matter what intervals, nature may be expected
always to possess consciousness. But beyond this planet and apart from
the human race, experience is too little imaginable to be interesting.
No definite plan or ideal of ours can find its realisation except in
ourselves. Accordingly, a vicarious physical immortality always remains
an unsatisfactory issue; what is thus to be preserved is but a
counterfeit of our being, and even that counterfeit is confronted by
omens of a total extinction more or less remote. A note of failure and
melancholy must always dominate in the struggle against natural death.
[Sidenote: Intellectual victory over change.]
This defeat is not really problematical, or to be eluded by reviving
ill-digested hopes resting entirely on ignorance, an ignorance which
these hopes will wish to make eternal. We need not wait for our total
death to experience dying; we need not borrow from observation of
others’ demise a prophecy of our own extinction. Every moment
celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor; and the
possession of memory, by which we somehow survive in representation, is
the most unmistakable proof that we are perishing in reality. In
endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly
unimaginable to the unflective creation, the truth of mortality.
Everything moves in the midst of death, because it indeed _moves_; but
it falls into the pit unawares and by its own action unmakes and
disestablishes itself, until a wonderful visionary faculty is added, so
that a ghost remains of what has perished to reveal that lapse and at
the same time in a certain sense to neutralise it. The more we reflect,
the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated
we shall be by the experience of death; yet, without our knowing it,
perhaps, this very conviction and experience will have raised us, in a
way, above mortality. That was a heroic and divine oracle which, in
informing us of our decay, made us partners of the gods’ eternity, and
by giving us knowledge poured into us, to that extent, the serenity and
balm of truth. As it is memory that enables us to feel that we are dying
and to know that everything actual is in flux, so it is memory that
opens to us an ideal immortality, unacceptable and meaningless to the
old Adam, but genuine in its own way and undeniably true. It is an
immortality in representation—a representation which envisages things
in their truth as they have in their own day possessed themselves in
reality. It is no subterfuge or superstitious effrontery, called to
disguise or throw off the lessons of experience; on the contrary, it is
experience itself, reflection itself, and knowledge of mortality. Memory
does not reprieve or postpone the changes which it registers, nor does
it itself possess a permanent duration; it is, if possible, less stable
and more mobile than primary sensation. It is, in point of existence,
only an internal and complex kind of sensibility. But in intent and by
its significance it plunges to the depths of time; it looks still on the
departed and bears witness to the truth that, though absent from this
part of experience, and incapable of returning to life, they
nevertheless existed once in their own right, were as living and actual
as experience is to-day, and still help to make up, in company with all
past, present, and future mortals, the filling and value of the world.
[Sidenote: The glory of it.]
As the pathos and heroism of life consists in accepting as an
opportunity the fate that makes our own death, partial or total,
serviceable to others, so the glory of life consists in accepting the
knowledge of natural death as an opportunity to live in the spirit. The
sacrifice, the self-surrender, remains real; for, though the
compensation is real, too, and at moments, perhaps, apparently
overwhelming, it is always incomplete and leaves beneath an incurable
sorrow. Yet life can never contradict its basis or reach satisfactions
essentially excluded by its own conditions. Progress lies in moving
forward from the given situation, and satisfying as well as may be the
interests that exist. And if some initial demand has proved hopeless,
there is the greater reason for cultivating other sources of
satisfaction, possibly more abundant and lasting. Now, reflection is a
vital function; memory and imagination have to the full the rhythm and
force of life. But these faculties, in envisaging the past or the ideal,
envisage the eternal, and the man in whose mind they predominate is to
that extent detached in his affections from the world of flux, from
himself, and from his personal destiny. This detachment will not make
him infinitely long-lived, nor absolutely happy, but it may render him
intelligent and just, and may open to him all intellectual pleasures and
all human sympathies.
There is accordingly an escape from death open to man; one not found by
circumventing nature, but by making use of her own expedients in
circumventing her imperfections. Memory, nay, perception itself, is a
first stage in this escape, which coincides with the acquisition and
possession of reason. When the meaning of successive perceptions is
recovered with the last of them, when a survey is made of objects whose
constitutive sensations first arose independently, this synthetic moment
contains an object raised above time on a pedestal of reflection, a
thought indefeasibly true in its ideal deliverance, though of course
fleeting in its psychic existence. Existence is essentially temporal
and life foredoomed to be mortal, since its basis is a process and an
opposition; it floats in the stream of time, never to return, never to
be recovered or repossessed. But ever since substance became at some
sensitive point intelligent and reflective, ever since time made room
and pause for memory, for history, for the consciousness of time, a god,
as it were, became incarnate in mortality and some vision of truth, some
self-forgetful satisfaction, became a heritage that moment could
transmit to moment and man to man. This heritage is humanity itself, the
presence of immortal reason in creatures that perish. Apprehension,
which makes man so like a god, makes him in one respect immortal; it
quickens his numbered moments with a vision of what never dies, the
truth of those moments and their inalienable values.
[Sidenote: Reason makes man’s divinity.]
To participate in this vision is to participate at once in humanity and
in divinity, since all other makes bonds are material and perishable,
but the bond between two thoughts that have grasped the same truth, of
two instants that have caught the same beauty, is a spiritual and
imperishable bond. It is imperishable simply because it is ideal and
resident merely in import and intent. The two thoughts, the two
instants, remain existentially different; were they not two they could
not come from different quarters to unite in one meaning and to behold
one object in distinct and conspiring acts of apprehension. Being
independent in existence, they can be united by the identity of their
burden, by the common worship, so to speak, of the same god. Were this
ideal goal itself an existence, it would be incapable of uniting
anything; for the same gulf which separated the two original minds would
open between them and their common object. But being, as it is, purely
ideal, it can become the meeting-ground of intelligences and render
their union ideally eternal. Among the physical instruments of thought
there may be rivalry and impact—the two thinkers may compete and
clash—but this is because each seeks his own physical survival and does
not love the truth stripped of its accidental associations and
provincial accent. Doctors disagree in so far as they are not truly
doctors, but, as Plato would say, seek, like sophists and wage-earners,
to circumvent and defeat one another. The conflict is physical and can
extend to the subject-matter only in so far as this is tainted by
individual prejudice and not wholly lifted from the sensuous to the
intellectual plane. In the ether there are no winds of doctrine. The
intellect, being the organ and source of the divine, is divine and
single; if there were many sorts of intellect, many principles of
perspective, they would fix and create incomparable and irrelevant
worlds. Reason is one in that it gravitates toward an object, called
truth, which could not have the function it has, of being a focus for
mental activities, if it were not one in reference to the operations
which converge upon it.
This unity in truth, as in reason, is of course functional only, not
physical or existential. The heats of thought and the thinkers are
innumerable; indefinite, too, the variations to which their endowment
and habits may be subjected. But the condition of spiritual communion or
ideal relevance in these intelligences is their possession of a method
and grammar essentially identical. Language, for example, is significant
in proportion to the constancy in meaning which words and locutions
preserve in a speaker’s mind at various times, or in the minds of
various persons. This constancy is never absolute. Therefore language is
never wholly significant, never exhaustively intelligible. There is
always mud in the well, if we have drawn up enough water. Yet in
peaceful rivers, though they flow, there is an appreciable degree of
translucency. So, from moment to moment, and from man to man, there is
an appreciable element of unanimity, of constancy and congruity of
intent. On this abstract and perfectly identical function science rests
together with every rational formation.
[Sidenote: and his immortality.]
The same function is the seat of human immortality. Reason lifts a
larger or smaller element in each man to the plane of ideality according
as reason more or less thoroughly leavens and permeates the lump. No man
is wholly immortal, as no philosophy is wholly true and no language
wholly intelligible; but only in so far as intelligible is a language a
language rather than a noise, only in so far as true is a philosophy
more than a vent for cerebral humours, and only in so far as a man is
rational and immortal is he a man and not a sensorium.
It is hard to convince people that they have such a gift as
intelligence. If they perceive its animal basis they cannot conceive its
ideal affinities or understand what is meant by calling it divine; if
they perceive its ideality and see the immortal essences that swim into
its ken, they hotly deny that it is an animal faculty, and invent
ultramundane places and bodiless persons in which it is to reside; as if
those celestial substances could be, in respect to thought, any less
material than matter or, in respect to vision and life, any less
instrumental than bodily organs. It never occurs to them that if nature
has added intelligence to animal life it is because they belong
together. Intelligence is a natural emanation of vitality. If eternity
could exist otherwise than as a vision in time, eternity would have no
meaning for men in the world, while the world, men, and time would have
no vocation or status in eternity. The travail of existence would be
without excuse, without issue or consummation, while the conceptions of
truth and of perfection would be without application to experience, pure
dreams about things preternatural and unreal, vacantly conceived, and
illogically supposed to have something to do with living issues. But
truth and perfection, for the very reason that they are not problematic
existences but inherent ideals, cannot be banished from discourse.
Experience may lose any of its data; it cannot lose, while it endures,
the terms with which it operates in becoming experience. Now, truth is
relevant to every opinion which looks to truth for its standard, and
perfection is envisaged in every cry for relief, in every effort at
betterment. Opinions, volitions, and passionate refusals fill human
life. So that when the existence of truth is denied, truth is given the
only status which it ever required—it is conceived.
[Sidenote: It is the locus of all truths.]
Nor can any better defense be found for the denial that nature and her
life have a status in eternity. This statement may not be understood,
but if grasped at all it will not be questioned. By having a status in
eternity is not meant being parts of an eternal existence, petrified or
congealed into something real but motionless. What is meant is only that
whatever exists in time, when bathed in the light of reflection,
acquires an indelible character and discloses irreversible relations;
every fact, in being recognised, takes its place in the universe of
discourse, in that ideal sphere of truth which is the common and
unchanging standard for all assertions. Language, science, art,
religion, and all ambitious dreams are compacted of ideas. Life is as
much a mosaic of notions as the firmament is of stars; and these ideal
and transpersonal objects, bridging time, fixing standards, establishing
values, constituting the natural rewards of all living, are the very
furniture of eternity, the goals and playthings of that reason which is
an instinct in the heart as vital and spontaneous as any other. Or
rather, perhaps, reason is a supervening instinct by which all other
instincts are interpreted, just as the _sensus communis_ or
transcendental unity of psychology is a faculty by which all perceptions
are brought face to face and compared. So that immortality is not a
privilege reserved for a part only of experience, but rather a relation
pervading every part in varying measure. We may, in leaving the subject,
mark the degrees and phases of this idealisation.
[Sidenote: Epicurean immortality, through the truth of existence.]
Animal sensation is related to eternity only by the truth that it has
taken place. The fact, fleeting as it is, is registered in ideal history
and no inventory of the world’s riches, no true confession of its
crimes, would ever be complete that ignored that incident. This
indefeasible character in experience makes a first sort of ideal
immortality, one on which those rational philosophers like to dwell who
have not speculation enough to feel quite certain of any other. It was a
consolation to the Epicurean to remember that, however brief and
uncertain might be his tenure of delight, the past was safe and the
present sure. “He lives happy,” says Horace, “and master over himself,
who can say daily, I have lived. To-morrow let Jove cover the sky with
black clouds or flood it with sunshine; he shall not thereby render
vain what lies behind, he shall not delete and make never to have
existed what once the hour has brought in its flight.” Such
self-concentration and hugging of the facts has no power to improve
them; it gives to pleasure and pain an impartial eternity, and rather
tends to intrench in sensuous and selfish satisfactions a mind that has
lost faith in reason and that deliberately ignores the difference in
scope and dignity which exists among various pursuits. Yet the
reflection is staunch and in its way heroic; it meets a vague and feeble
aspiration, that looks to the infinite, with a just rebuke; it points to
real satisfactions, experienced successes, and asks us to be content
with the fulfilment of our own wills. If you have seen the world, if you
have played your game and won it, what more would you ask for? If you
have tasted the sweets of existence, you should be satisfied; if the
experience has been bitter, you should be glad that it comes to an end.
Of course, as we have seen, there is a primary demand in man which death
and mutation contradict flatly, so that no summons to cease can ever be
obeyed with complete willingness. Even the suicide trembles and the
ascetic feels the stings of the flesh. It is the part of philosophy,
however, to pass over those natural repugnances and overlay them with as
much countervailing rationality as can find lodgment in a particular
mind. The Epicurean, having abandoned politics and religion and being
afraid of any far-reaching ambition, applied philosophy honestly enough
to what remained. Simple and healthy pleasures are the reward of simple
and healthy pursuits; to chafe against them because they are limited is
to import a foreign and disruptive element into the case; a healthy
hunger has its limit, and its satisfaction reaches a natural term.
Philosophy, far from alienating us from those values, should teach us to
see their perfection and to maintain them in our ideal. In other words,
the happy filling of a single hour is so much gained for the universe at
large, and to find joy and sufficiency in the flying moment is perhaps
the only means open to us for increasing the glory of eternity.
[Sidenote: Logical immortality, through objects of thought.]
Moving events, while remaining enshrined in this fashion in their
permanent setting, may contain other and less external relations to the
immutable. They may represent it. If the pleasures of sense are not
cancelled when they cease, but continue to satisfy reason in that they
once satisfied natural desires, much more will the pleasures of
reflection retain their worth, when we consider that what they aspired
to and reached was no momentary physical equilibrium but a permanent
truth. As Archimedes, measuring the hypothenuse, was lost to events,
being engaged in an event of much greater transcendence, so art and
science interrupt the sense for change by engrossing attention in its
issues and its laws. Old age often turns pious to look away from ruins
to some world where youth endures and where what ought to have been is
not overtaken by decay before it has quite come to maturity. Lost in
such abstract contemplations, the mind is weaned from mortal concerns.
It forgets for a few moments a world in which it has so little more to
do and so much, perhaps, still to suffer. As a sensation of pure light
would not be distinguishable from light itself, so a contemplation of
things not implicating time in their structure becomes, so far as its
own deliverance goes, a timeless existence. Unconsciousness of temporal
conditions and of the very flight of time makes the thinker sink for a
moment into identity with timeless objects. And so immortality, in a
second ideal sense, touches the mind.
[Sidenote: Ethical immortality, through types of excellence.]
The transitive phases of consciousness, however, have themselves a
reference to eternal things. They yield a generous enthusiasm and love
of good which is richer in consolation than either Epicurean
self-concentration or mathematical ecstasy. Events are more interesting
than the terms we abstract from them, and the forward movement of the
will is something more intimately real than is the catalogue of our past
experiences. Now the forward movement of the will is an avenue to the
eternal. What would you have? What is the goal of your endeavour? It
must be some success, the establishment of some order, the expression of
some experience. These points once reached, we are not left merely with
the satisfaction of abstract success or the consciousness of ideal
immortality. Being natural goals, these ideals are related to natural
functions. Their attainment does not exhaust but merely liberates, in
this instance, the function concerned, and so marks the perpetual point
of reference common to that function in all its fluctuations. Every
attainment of perfection in an art—as for instance in government—makes
a return to perfection easier for posterity, since there remains an
enlightening example, together with faculties predisposed by discipline
to recover their ancient virtue. The better a man evokes and realises
the ideal the more he leads the life that all others, in proportion to
their worth, will seek to live after him, and the more he helps them to
live in that nobler fashion. His presence in the society of immortals
thus becomes, so to speak, more pervasive. He not only vanquishes time,
by his own rationality, living now in the eternal, but he continually
lives again in all rational beings.
Since the ideal has this perpetual pertinence to mortal struggles, he
who lives in the ideal and leaves it expressed in society or in art
enjoys a double immortality. The eternal has absorbed him while he
lived, and when he is dead his influence brings others to the same
absorption, making them, through that ideal identity with the best in
him, reincarnations and perennial seats of all in him which he could
rationally hope to rescue from destruction. He can say, without any
subterfuge or desire to delude himself, that he shall not wholly die;
for he will have a better notion than the vulgar of what constitutes his
being. By becoming the spectator and confessor of his own death and of
universal mutation, he will have identified himself with what is
spiritual in all spirits and masterful in all apprehension; and so
conceiving himself, he may truly feel and know that he is eternal.