carried past the door at which we had intended to stop, or continue to
read aloud, unobservantly of the sense of words, or otherwise betray
that we are buried deep in one absorbing thought; it is not, in the
first case, that our automaton has unwontedly borne us along, or in the
second, that we are not permitting it to take a partial holiday, for
it is our automaton that serves our commonest daily needs; but only
that we have, in the first case, forgotten to arrest its movements in
due time, and in the second, have not thought it worth while to do so;
for when decrepitude overtakes us, and our automaton, sharing in the
misfortune, toils wearily along, or requires intense purposiveness for
special brain-accomplishment, ideation can no longer afford to give to
it its former liberty, but dwells in concentration on a single action;
unless, indeed, when that still lower grade is reached, when the
automatic man is almost all that remains, and ideation but the fitful
glow that may start to futile movement the once efficient mechanism
of the human frame. By easy stages, receptivity and communicability,
ever lowering in degree, in quantity, and in quality, may dwindle
to a single point, and movement be but faint automatic habit; the
former high being now occupying the opposite extreme from rapid
thought-transmission and receipt, and bodily response to ideation, upon
the basis of life's whole energised experience.
Max Dessoir remarks, in a passage shortly following the one already
quoted at length:
"Closer investigation teaches further, that in dreams, states
of intoxication, in somnambulistic and epileptic attacks,
not only does a consciousness different from the normal
consciousness rule, but that also between successive periods
memory-links of greater or less stability are wont to form."
As to the greater or less closeness, as well as greater or less
stability, of the memory-links to which Max Dessoir refers, there
can be no dispute; but it is demonstrable that sleeping and waking
consciousness of both kinds exactly correspond. The difference
observable in waking and dream thought-evolution does not chiefly
relate to modified consciousness, but to modified conscientiousness;
the defect in both being the necessary consequence of temporary
abeyance of normal co-ordination between the nerve-centres.
Determinately directed thought, which is necessarily waking thought,
proceeds upon the basis of memorabilia that are the cash in hand
of the kind of currency that is temporarily available for logical
transactions; while in sleep, conscious cerebration only partially
controls its treasures, and often regretfully sees them squandered
before its face. Determinately directed thought is necessarily derived
from the will, unless one believes with Lord Kames, that thought
preserves unbroken heredity; in which case the ego becomes only the
witness through life of pure automatism—a position which is easily
refuted. The will directs the thought upon the basis of cognate
memorabilia, be the channels many or few, by means of semi-synchronous,
rotative attention.
The great lapse of time during which the action of subconsciousness may
remain unrevealed until, through unconscious cerebration, it reaches
self-consciousness, through the medium of recognition of a particular
event as of actual occurrence, and how, finally, this recognition,
as true, of a particular event, may be restricted for a while to the
condition of sleep, and after a long period of incubation at last rise
to waking knowledge, is so admirably exemplified by an experience of my
own that I here put it on record.
About five years ago I had a dream of a landscape, where there were
rocky escarpments partially covered with trees, with a plain as
foreground, upon which a carriage drew up to take me home after a
day's topographical surveying. Both in dreaming and upon awaking I was
vividly impressed with the idea that the place was one in which the
topography remained to be finished by me. But when awake, I fruitlessly
went over in memory all parts of the coast where I had ever executed
topographical surveys, and where by any chance, at any time, I could
have left unfinished anything that I was in duty bound to finish. Some
time elapsed, and I had the same dream again. Coming at once to the
conclusion that, if I should dream it a third time, I should be told
(as I should be, if I mentioned it at the second to any indifferent
person) that I had dreamed that I dreamed it, I at once described in
detail to a member of my family the landscape, the rocks, the trees,
the plain, and the coming of the carriage, and requested that all
these be memorised. Some months again passed, and the dream in all its
vividness recurred, and was repeated to the same person, agreeing as
to its details with those introduced in the recital of the preceding
ones.
I never had from the first a doubt that the dream had a foundation in
some one concrete fact, but from the lapse of time without a solution
of it being afforded, I was all but hopeless that its subject-matter
would ever rise into the sphere of full waking knowledge. However, at
moderate intervals I dreamt it again and again, each time simply saying
to my confidant, "I have had that dream again," and at length, without
any special effort directed to its solution, that which had heretofore
eluded all efforts to explain, was presented solved.
The uncomfortableness of the dream, it is to be borne in mind, lay in
the impression, although contradicted by memory, that I had neglected
to finish some piece of topography which it was my duty to finish.
Hence the direction of self-conscious thought towards its solution had
always been wrong. There was no piece of work of any kind that I had
ever neglected to finish. There was, however, a piece of topographical
work, which, when I was about to finish it, I was prevented from
completing by orders taking me away from the locality to another
far distant. The whole tract originally intended to be executed in
topography was of about one hundred square miles, a tract of much
geological as well as topographical interest, over a portion of which
I had been accompanied two or three times by Prof. James D. Dana, who
was deeply interested in the execution of the topography, on account
of his development from it of the minute geological characteristics of
the region. At one boundary of the area mentioned there was a ridge
and summit of some nine hundred feet in height, densely covered with
a stunted growth of trees. How to get the contours of this ridge by
some original plan I had been obliged in advance to settle in my mind,
for on the ridge itself nothing could, on account of the dense growth,
be seen for any great distance, and over it no roads passed. I had
concluded to have simultaneous horizontal and vertical angles taken to
staffs, from a line of foot-hills lying parallel with the ridge, when
I was ordered to Florida to make there a survey. This was succeeded by
surveys in other far-distant localities during successive years. Not,
however, as it appears, until seven years after leaving the locality
intimately described, did the first dream related to it take place, and
not until rather more than two years thereafter did its repetitions
cease with its solution. I said to my confidant when, about three years
ago, that solution was reached, "I shall never have that dream again,"
and it has never since appeared; as why should it, the mystery with
which the uncoördinated ego struggled being solved?
We can readily comprehend, from such an experience as this, how it has
been possible, as we have learned from well authenticated cases, for a
person to lead two somewhat independent thought-lives. What, however,
is clearly shown by it is the possibility, for it has been proved,
of subconscious record remaining for years dormant, proceeding at
last through unconscious cerebration to reach conscious cerebration,
but even then conscious cerebration only during sleep, until finally
conscious cerebration of waking moments being reached, the judgment
seat of co-ordinated faculties, the dream departs, no longer abusing
the curtained sleeper, nor ghost-like rising to disturb his waking
self-consciousness.
R. MEADE BACHE.
IMMORTALITY.
If you sit down in the quiet of your own room and calmly ask yourself
what it is in reference to a life after death that you really desire
and what you may reasonably expect, you will probably be surprised to
find what a blank your mind is upon the subject. I doubt if you will
find that you inwardly desire it, in the same manner, for example, that
you desire wealth, or fame, or beauty. You have grown up in the belief
that it is right to desire and believe, but that, you know, is quite a
different affair from actual yearning.
Nearly every one puts the thought aside as beyond solution. One
says, "My thinking will not change the fact nor my longing bring it
about. The duty of the passing day is all I can fulfil." Under this
cover of postponed examination the world has grown as indifferent to
the question as it was formerly engrossed by it. Fear of offending
delicate sensibilities and established beliefs keeps the doubter and
modifier silent; whilst the extreme of the omnivorous believer is set
over against the out-and-out denier. But the great majority of people
are neither believers nor disbelievers, but indifferentists—slowly
settling toward an agnostic non-committalism that is destructive of all
intellectual and moral earnestness.
It is my conviction that this abrogation of curiosity and examination
is a most culpable and dangerous fact. If we live after death it is
of tremendous importance; if we do not it is of no less vital import,
and the belief, the disbelief, or the evasion is of the most constant
influence, unconsciously, subtly, upon every thought and act of every
day's living.
Suppose now we divest ourselves of the creeps and shudders usually
accompanying a discussion of death and immortality, and fearlessly test
the common dogma with a little analysis in the light of scientific
research and reason. Let us suppose you are a believer: what is it you
believe? You desire: what is it you desire, and how far is your desire
feasible? You are convinced: but what is the truth? If possible, in
what way and to what extent is a future life possible? If attainable,
by whom and by what means? Moreover, the _kind_ of belief makes all the
difference in the world. I have read somewhere about an African chief
who killed his wife's lover, and was defeated at last by his wife's
unswerving belief in immortality, she committing suicide in order to
join her lover. But the chief was equal to the emergency and he in
turn killed himself in order to follow the pair and break up their
tête-à-têtes in the other world! It all depends upon what you propose
doing with a future life after you get it. You might just as well be
digging clams on this earth as "singing Hosannas around the throne" in
heaven.
Do you believe in or fervently desire what, with splendid bravery and
_abandon_ the old creed called "the resurrection of the body"? Terrible
counter-queries arise: At what age in your life would you choose as
best representing the ideal body for your resurrection? Would you
prefer your body as it was when you were a child, when youthful, when
mature, or when old? Moreover, it is changing every minute, this body.
It is estimated that something like five million blood-corpuscles
die every second of your life. Even the two or three pounds of
minerals in one's bones are only a little more permanently fixed. All
component parts are undergoing change every instant: they soon become
grass, grain, or tree, passing again into others' bodies, and so on
forever. Is it the form and feature you desire to preserve and not the
constituent particles? But form and feature change every day or year,
and are as impossible to fix as the atoms themselves. Indeed, is not
the whole matter put beyond choice by the evident fact that unless by
the fiat of an extramundane deity the only moment possible to fix the
bodily form in the mould of eternity would be the death-moment? And
yet this were the most undesirable of all seasons, since at that hour
the body is in the weakest, most useless, and most wretched condition
of all the hours it has served us. Supposing therefore, that you are
so in love with your own body that you would wish to call it into
life again and for forever, we see at once that no moment or phase of
development could be chosen, except perhaps the dying moment, the least
desirable of all, and that the particles of one's body have served
their turn in myriad other bodies each having an equally valid claim to
his "property." Besides this the absurdity of the whole is emphasised
by the crushing fact that all the organic matter of the world has been
used over and over for bodies and the earth has not enough hydrocarbons
to fit out again with bodies a small fraction of the souls that have
lived upon it. Doubtless the combined weight of all the organic bodies
that have lived on the earth would be many times the total weight
of the globe including its minerals, elements, and gases. It may be
frankly admitted that no bodily resurrection is possible.
And it is as certainly undesirable. The old dogma was the crudest
materialism, wholly unworthy of the credence of those who pretended to
believe that God was a spirit, and that they were his children. The
belief in bodily resurrection was a natural concomitant of the age
of sensualism before the mind and spirit had risen to their modern
heritage. The desire for such a resurrection stamps the person with
a self-confessed imperfection of mental and moral development. The
impossibility of such a resurrection is one of many proofs that life
is no sensualist at heart and that ideality is the final outcome, the
trend of actuality. Nature compels us to take wings though the sluggish
Psyche lingers lovingly in the pretty little cocoon of materiality she
has built about herself.
Is it perhaps your understanding, reason, or intellect that you
desire to perpetuate forever? Frankly, now, are you so in love with
your mental outfit? In your more modest and sane hours are you not
sadly conscious how very imperfect it is? While we are young and very
conceited we may be filled with self-satisfaction and trust in our own
judgment, but as the years drag by, we, looking back over the past,
grow more and more conscious that our intellect is not to be trusted.
Think of the interminable series of blunders of which your life is the
record! How poorly you have misjudged people and circumstances! How
your reason has fooled you many times and again! How many illusions and
delusions you have lived through! With what sad clearness you now see
your former stupidities, and with what blindness you fail to see your
present ones! Looking about you, you find others equally as gifted as
yourself holding your opinions as loathsome. Looking above you, you
see the most intellectual and the most educated diametrically opposed
in their opinions of God, man, and nature. Two great men, two brothers
learned and trained in dialectic and logic, soon grow apart. One
becomes a cardinal of the Romish church, accepting papal infallibility
and a thousand such absurdities, the other as firmly convinced that
the fallacies of the English church are God's gospel. Looking below
you, you see the great mass of men wrecking their minds and lives
upon a thousand outrageous beliefs and prejudices. There is no sadder
spectacle in the world than this that the people love error. But each
one with imperturbable conceit is convinced that he sees better and
plainer than another. Every partisan democrat or republican has no
sort of doubt that he is right about every financial or governmental
measure, though he has never studied finance, history, or political
economy five minutes. He does not dream that he is a dupe of the lousy
politicians and of his own _lack_ of intellect. All history is a tangle
of such poverty-stricken intellection. One can but be amazed at the
proneness of everybody to see things and do things every way but the
right way. And this is the kind of a mental equipment you would stamp
with the seal of eternity!
Possibly you may protest that it is a more perfect and purified
intellect that you wish. Ah, yes, but that would not be your intellect.
You want to be made over, made into another person. That would not be
your immortality but that of another. That would imply that it is pure
intellect and perfect, in the abstract, that you are interested in.
Have you shown much interest in that sort of intellect in the past?
If you wish such an immortality of a perfected intellect you must
certainly possess it before it can be made everlasting.
Perhaps, again, you will say that it is the ever-progressive
ever-growing intellect you desire. This is subterfuge. That is not
what you wish but what you would take in default of your first choice.
Lessing said that if God held out to him absolute truth in one hand
and in the other the everlasting search for truth he would choose the
latter. But the condition of everlasting search would be the condition
of everlasting imperfection of intellect. Lessing's choice seems to me
impious.
I therefore conclude, that at heart you do not wish to eternalise your
crude imperfect intellect, and that the sole method of getting an
exalted and perfected intellect is to cultivate it here and now. Have
you in the past obeyed reason and not passion or self-interest? Have
you studied logic, history, and science with a sincere desire to do
your political and social duty, and to free yourself from prejudice,
error, superstition, and conceit? If not why should God suddenly endow
you with a perfect intellect ready-made? Is it God's way in this world,
to give excellencies unasked and unearned? Rest assured he will not do
it at your dying hour. It is no particular merit in you to die; why
should you be rewarded with a new intellect then?
Or, again, you may say that it is not so much your intellect that
you wish to make immortal as it is your emotional nature, affection,
etc. Love and friendship, you complain, are cut off by death and
the tendrils of the heart die because they find nothing to cling to
or rest upon. You would like to renew beyond the grave the love and
sympathy that has made the earth-life endurable, and even beautiful.
Now is this, in very truth, just so? Are you really satisfied with
your devotion and love? Have not your outgoings of the heart been
quite fickle, illogical, selfish, and calculating? Has not your love
and gratitude been often a lively sense of benefits to come? Has your
love to woman not been of the "Kreutzer-Sonata" type, a little better
and more subtly-concealed perhaps, but at heart the same? If you are
a woman have you been seeking to get or to give love, and has your
little affection been but payment for protection and a home? Have you
chosen true and noble friends and been true and noble to them? Has your
charity been but alms-giving without kind sympathy and helpfulness?
Have you as married folk, perhaps, been, as the cant phrase has it,
"devoted to each other," but oblivious of the duty of affection toward
the rest of the world,—grinning examples of _égoisme à deux_? Is your
family a fetich, an enlarged sort of selfishness? Do you at heart care
much for anybody except your own precious self? And a too exclusive
love, even of the purest type may be sin in God's eyes. If you bind all
your affection upon one weak life you risk a precious value upon too
single and narrow an object, and deprive others of the sympathy that
need it more. "Just wrapt up in one," as the sentimental jargon has
it, is often if not always a pleasant way of great sin. Affection may
become morbid—a disease, quite as well as any abuse or exaggeration of
any other characteristic.
I take it that they who are the most satisfied with the strength,
purity, and constancy of their love and emotional nature are precisely
they that have neither actual strength, purity, and constancy
of sentiment, and are thus accurately they that should not have
immortality.
Lastly, if neither body, intellect, nor the affectional nature are
such as you wish made eternal, are you any better contented with your
moral nature? The question at once raises a smile. The feeling of our
own ethical unworthiness has crystallised into the great Christian
dogma of Christ's vicarious sacrifice. In the words of the old hymn,
"Jesus died and paid it all, all the debt I owe." No man hoped to get
to heaven on his own merits. Much of the zeal of religion has consisted
in the joy of the belief that by a sleight-of-hand trick, a big sponge
of forgiveness was wiped over the ethical debit and credit account by
the lachrymose deity, whose occupation, as Heine said, was to forgive.
History is one long monotonous list of man's sins and inhumanities. I
think it probable that you will not urge the ethical aspect; I would
leave that plea aside. We all know that we are very much like a lot
of pigs, each after the most and best corn and the warmest bed. The
amazing immorality of trying to get to heaven on another's merits was
the most brazen example of how little heavenliness there was in the
heaven-hunters and heaven-scalers. Of course the desire for heaven
itself, the desire for one's happiness was immoral when conditioned
upon the misery of others. Nature in this respect is better than man,
denying him his childish materialistic desires and forcing him to wait
for immortality until he can learn to live in the spirit and seek no
selfish heaven.