EXISTENCE”
Belief, like any other moving body, follows the path of least resistance,
and this path had led Dr. Gurgoyle to the conviction, real or feigned,
that my father was son to the sun, probably by the moon, and that his
ascent into the sky with an earthly bride was due to the sun’s
interference with the laws of nature. Nevertheless he was looked upon as
more or less of a survival, and was deemed lukewarm, if not heretical, by
those who seemed to be the pillars of the new system.
My father soon found that not even Panky could manipulate his teaching
more freely than the Doctor had done. My father had taught that when a
man was dead there was an end of him, until he should rise again in the
flesh at the last day, to enter into eternity either of happiness or
misery. He had, indeed, often talked of the immortality which some
achieve even in this world; but he had cheapened this, declaring it to be
an unsubstantial mockery, that could give no such comfort in the hour of
death as was unquestionably given by belief in heaven and hell.
Dr. Gurgoyle, however, had an equal horror, on the one hand, of anything
involving resumption of life by the body when it was once dead, and on
the other, of the view that life ended with the change which we call
death. He did not, indeed, pretend that he could do much to take away
the sting from death, nor would he do this if he could, for if men did
not fear death unduly, they would often court it unduly. Death can only
be belauded at the cost of belittling life; but he held that a reasonable
assurance of fair fame after death is a truer consolation to the dying, a
truer comfort to surviving friends, and a more real incentive to good
conduct in this life, than any of the consolations or incentives falsely
fathered upon the Sunchild.
He began by setting aside every saying ascribed, however truly, to my
father, if it made against his views, and by putting his own glosses on
all that he could gloze into an appearance of being in his favour. I
will pass over his attempt to combat the rapidly spreading belief in a
heaven and hell such as we accept, and will only summarise his contention
that, of our two lives--namely, the one we live in our own persons, and
that other life which we live in other people both before our reputed
death and after it--the second is as essential a factor of our complete
life as the first is, and sometimes more so.
Life, he urged, lies not in bodily organs, but in the power to use them,
and in the use that is made of them--that is to say, in the work they do.
As the essence of a factory is not in the building wherein the work is
done, nor yet in the implements used in turning it out, but in the will-
power of the master and in the goods he makes; so the true life of a man
is in his will and work, not in his body. “Those,” he argued, “who make
the life of a man reside within his body, are like one who should mistake
the carpenter’s tool-box for the carpenter.”
He maintained that this had been my father’s teaching, for which my
father heartily trusts that he may be forgiven.
He went on to say that our will-power is not wholly limited to the
working of its own special system of organs, but under certain conditions
can work and be worked upon by other will-powers like itself: so that if,
for example, A’s will-power has got such hold on B’s as to be able,
through B, to work B’s mechanism, what seems to have been B’s action will
in reality have been more A’s than B’s, and this in the same real sense
as though the physical action had been effected through A’s own
mechanical system--A, in fact, will have been living in B. The
universally admitted maxim that he who does this or that by the hand of
an agent does it himself, shews that the foregoing view is only a
roundabout way of stating what common sense treats as a matter of course.
Hence, though A’s individual will-power must be held to cease when the
tools it works with are destroyed or out of gear, yet, so long as any
survivors were so possessed by it while it was still efficient, or,
again, become so impressed by its operation on them through work that he
has left, as to act in obedience to his will-power rather than their own,
A has a certain amount of _bonâ fide_ life still remaining. His
vicarious life is not affected by the dissolution of his body; and in
many cases the sum total of a man’s vicarious action and of its outcome
exceeds to an almost infinite extent the sum total of those actions and
works that were effected through the mechanism of his own physical
organs. In these cases his vicarious life is more truly his life than
any that he lived in his own person.
“True,” continued the Doctor, “while living in his own person, a man
knows, or thinks he knows, what he is doing, whereas we have no reason to
suppose such knowledge on the part of one whose body is already dust; but
the consciousness of the doer has less to do with the livingness of the
deed than people generally admit. We know nothing of the power that sets
our heart beating, nor yet of the beating itself so long as it is normal.
We know nothing of our breathing or of our digestion, of the
all-important work we achieved as embryos, nor of our growth from infancy
to manhood. No one will say that these were not actions of a living
agent, but the more normal, the healthier, and thus the more truly
living, the agent is, the less he will know or have known of his own
action. The part of our bodily life that enters into our consciousness
is very small as compared with that of which we have no consciousness.
What completer proof can we have that livingness consists in deed rather
than in consciousness of deed?
“The foregoing remarks are not intended to apply so much to vicarious
action in virtue, we will say, of a settlement, or testamentary
disposition that cannot be set aside. Such action is apt to be too
unintelligent, too far from variation and quick change to rank as true
vicarious action; indeed it is not rarely found to effect the very
opposite of what the person who made the settlement or will desired. They
are meant to apply to that more intelligent and versatile action
engendered by affectionate remembrance. Nevertheless, even the
compulsory vicarious action taken in consequence of a will, and indeed
the very name “will” itself, shews that though we cannot take either
flesh or money with us, we can leave our will-power behind us in very
efficient operation.
“This vicarious life (on which I have insisted, I fear at unnecessary
length, for it is so obvious that none can have failed to realise it) is
lived by every one of us before death as well as after it, and is little
less important to us than that of which we are to some extent conscious
in our own persons. A man, we will say, has written a book which
delights or displeases thousands of whom he knows nothing, and who know
nothing of him. The book, we will suppose, has considerable, or at any
rate some influence on the action of these people. Let us suppose the
writer fast asleep while others are enjoying his work, and acting in
consequence of it, perhaps at long distances from him. Which is his
truest life--the one he is leading in them, or that equally unconscious
life residing in his own sleeping body? Can there be a doubt that the
vicarious life is the more efficient?
“Or when we are waking, how powerfully does not the life we are living in
others pain or delight us, according as others think ill or well of us?
How truly do we not recognise it as part of our own existence, and how
great an influence does not the fear of a present hell in men’s bad
thoughts, and the hope of a present heaven in their good ones, influence
our own conduct? Have we not here a true heaven and a true hell, as
compared with the efficiency of which these gross material ones so
falsely engrafted on to the Sunchild’s teaching are but as the flint
implements of a prehistoric race? ‘If a man,’ said the Sunchild, ‘fear
not man, whom he hath seen, neither will he fear God, whom he hath not
seen.’”
My father again assures me that he never said this. Returning to Dr.
Gurgoyle, he continued:--“It may be urged that on a man’s death one of
the great factors of his life is so annihilated that no kind of true life
can be any further conceded to him. For to live is to be influenced, as
well as to influence; and when a man is dead how can he be influenced? He
can haunt, but he cannot any more be haunted. He can come to us, but we
cannot go to him. On ceasing, therefore, to be impressionable, so great
a part of that wherein his life consisted is removed, that no true life
can be conceded to him.
“I do not pretend that a man is as fully alive after his so-called death
as before it. He is not. All I contend for is, that a considerable
amount of efficient life still remains to some of us, and that a little
life remains to all of us, after what we commonly regard as the complete
cessation of life. In answer, then, to those who have just urged that
the destruction of one of the two great factors of life destroys life
altogether, I reply that the same must hold good as regards death.
“If to live is to be influenced and to influence, and if a man cannot be
held as living when he can no longer be influenced, surely to die is to
be no longer able either to influence or be influenced, and a man cannot
be held dead until both these two factors of death are present. If
failure of the power to be influenced vitiates life, presence of the
power to influence vitiates death. And no one will deny that a man can
influence for many a long year after he is vulgarly reputed as dead.
“It seems, then, that there is no such thing as either absolute life
without any alloy of death, nor absolute death without any alloy of life,
until, that is to say, all posthumous power to influence has faded away.
And this, perhaps, is what the Sunchild meant by saying that in the midst
of life we are in death, and so also that in the midst of death we are in
life.
“And there is this, too. No man can influence fully until he can no more
be influenced--that is to say, till after his so-called death. Till
then, his ‘he’ is still unsettled. We know not what other influences may
not be brought to bear upon him that may change the character of the
influence he will exert on ourselves. Therefore, he is not fully living
till he is no longer living. He is an incomplete work, which cannot have
full effect till finished. And as for his vicarious life--which we have
seen to be very real--this can be, and is, influenced by just
appreciation, undue praise or calumny, and is subject, it may be, to
secular vicissitudes of good and evil fortune.
“If this is not true, let us have no more talk about the immortality of
great men and women. The Sunchild was never weary of talking to us (as
we then sometimes thought, a little tediously) about a great poet of that
nation to which it pleased him to feign that he belonged. How plainly
can we not now see that his words were spoken for our learning--for the
enforcement of that true view of heaven and hell on which I am feebly
trying to insist? The poet’s name, he said, was Shakespeare. Whilst he
was alive, very few people understood his greatness; whereas now, after
some three hundred years, he is deemed the greatest poet that the world
has ever known. ‘Can this man,’ he asked, ‘be said to have been truly
born till many a long year after he had been reputed as truly dead? While
he was in the flesh, was he more than a mere embryo growing towards birth
into that life of the world to come in which he now shines so gloriously?
What a small thing was that flesh and blood life, of which he was alone
conscious, as compared with that fleshless life which he lives but knows
not in the lives of millions, and which, had it ever been fully revealed
even to his imagination, we may be sure that he could not have reached?’
“These were the Sunchild’s words, as repeated to me by one of his chosen
friends while he was yet amongst us. Which, then, of this man’s two
lives should we deem best worth having, if we could choose one or other,
but not both? The felt or the unfelt? Who would not go cheerfully to
block or stake if he knew that by doing so he could win such life as this
poet lives, though he also knew that on having won it he could know no
more about it? Does not this prove that in our heart of hearts we deem
an unfelt life, in the heaven of men’s loving thoughts, to be better
worth having than any we can reasonably hope for and still feel?
“And the converse of this is true; many a man has unhesitatingly laid
down his felt life to escape unfelt infamy in the hell of men’s hatred
and contempt. As body is the sacrament, or outward and visible sign, of
mind; so is posterity the sacrament of those who live after death. Each
is the mechanism through which the other becomes effective.
“I grant that many live but a short time when the breath is out of them.
Few seeds germinate as compared with those that rot or are eaten, and
most of this world’s denizens are little more than still-born as regards
the larger life, while none are immortal to the end of time. But the end
of time is not worth considering; not a few live as many centuries as
either they or we need think about, and surely the world, so far as we
can guess its object, was made rather to be enjoyed than to last. ‘Come
and go’ pervades all things of which we have knowledge, and if there was
any provision made, it seems to have been for a short life and a merry
one, with enough chance of extension beyond the grave to be worth trying
for, rather than for the perpetuity even of the best and noblest.
“Granted, again, that few live after death as long or as fully as they
had hoped to do, while many, when quick, can have had none but the
faintest idea of the immortality that awaited them; it is nevertheless
true that none are so still-born on death as not to enter into a life of
some sort, however short and humble. A short life or a long one can no
more be bargained for in the unseen world than in the seen; as, however,
care on the part of parents can do much for the longer life and greater
well-being of their offspring in this world, so the conduct of that
offspring in this world does much both to secure for itself longer tenure
of life in the next, and to determine whether that life shall be one of
reward or punishment.
“‘Reward or punishment,’ some reader will perhaps exclaim; ‘what mockery,
when the essence of reward and punishment lies in their being felt by
those who have earned them.’ I can do nothing with those who either cry
for the moon, or deny that it has two sides, on the ground that we can
see but one. Here comes in faith, of which the Sunchild said, that
though we can do little with it, we can do nothing without it. Faith
does not consist, as some have falsely urged, in believing things on
insufficient evidence; this is not faith, but faithlessness to all that
we should hold most faithfully. Faith consists in holding that the
instincts of the best men and women are in themselves an evidence which
may not be set aside lightly; and the best men and women have ever held
that death is better than dishonour, and desirable if honour is to be won
thereby.
“It follows, then, that though our conscious flesh and blood life is the
only one that we can fully apprehend, yet we do also indeed move, even
here, in an unseen world, wherein, when our palpable life is ended, we
shall continue to live for a shorter or longer time--reaping roughly,
though not infallibly, much as we have sown. Of this unseen world the
best men and women will be almost as heedless while in the flesh as they
will be when their life in flesh is over; for, as the Sunchild often
said, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven cometh not by observation.’ It will be all
in all to them, and at the same time nothing, for the better people they
are, the less they will think of anything but this present life.
“What an ineffable contradiction in terms have we not here. What a
reversal, is it not, of all this world’s canons, that we should hold even
the best of all that we can know or feel in this life to be a poor thing
as compared with hopes the fulfilment of which we can never either feel
or know. Yet we all hold this, however little we may admit it to
ourselves. For the world at heart despises its own canons.”
I cannot quote further from Dr. Gurgoyle’s pamphlet; suffice it that he
presently dealt with those who say that it is not right of any man to aim
at thrusting himself in among the living when he has had his day. “Let
him die,” say they, “and let die as his fathers before him.” He argued
that as we had a right to pester people till we got ourselves born, so
also we have a right to pester them for extension of life beyond the
grave. Life, whether before the grave or afterwards, is like love--all
reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it. Instinct on such
matters is the older and safer guide; no one, therefore, should seek to
efface himself as regards the next world more than as regards this. If
he is to be effaced, let others efface him; do not let him commit
suicide. Freely we have received; freely, therefore, let us take as much
more as we can get, and let it be a stand-up fight between ourselves and
posterity to see whether it can get rid of us or no. If it can, let it;
if it cannot, it must put up with us. It can better care for itself than
we can for ourselves when the breath is out of us.
Not the least important duty, he continued, of posterity towards itself
lies in passing righteous judgement on the forbears who stand up before
it. They should be allowed the benefit of a doubt, and peccadilloes
should be ignored; but when no doubt exists that a man was engrainedly
mean and cowardly, his reputation must remain in the Purgatory of Time
for a term varying from, say, a hundred to two thousand years. After a
hundred years it may generally come down, though it will still be under a
cloud. After two thousand years it may be mentioned in any society
without holding up of hands in horror. Our sense of moral guilt varies
inversely as the squares of its distance in time and space from
ourselves.
Not so with heroism; this loses no lustre through time and distance. Good
is gold; it is rare, but it will not tarnish. Evil is like dirty
water--plentiful and foul, but it will run itself clear of taint.
The Doctor having thus expatiated on his own opinions concerning heaven
and hell, concluded by tilting at those which all right-minded people
hold among ourselves. I shall adhere to my determination not to
reproduce his arguments; suffice it that though less flippant than those
of the young student whom I have already referred to, they were more
plausible; and though I could easily demolish them, the reader will
probably prefer that I should not set them up for the mere pleasure of
knocking them down. Here, then, I take my leave of good Dr. Gurgoyle and
his pamphlet; neither can I interrupt my story further by saying anything
about the other two pamphlets purchased by my father.