upon any hour when we could eternalise it, except at the undesirable
death-hour, so it is the same in reference to intellect, love, and
morality. There are no two days in life when we are the same. As
to intellect we have little before adult life is reached, and most
people have little after fifty or sixty years. It is proverbial
that no one changes his opinion after that age, but lives on old
prejudices and ideas. The mental powers get into ruts and habits, true
reason being abrogated. As to love we laugh at our fickleness, and
our habits and ideals of friendship get sordid as each year strips
off the freedom and expansiveness of youth and the dear cold ghost
of self is more exclusively worshipped. And our ethical standards
change with each day's passing. We have at every hour to clutch
ourselves by the throat and cry, "Stay! Who art thou?" And lo! while
we ask our protean self the question, we have become another. We seek
perpetuity of existence for something ever becoming other. We seek
personal identity after death, but we have no personal identity before
death: how then can we have it afterward? Do you not see that what
makes you recognisable, different from other individuals, and what
would make personal immortality possible depends upon the accidents
of organisation,—depends firstly upon the bodily peculiarity, and
secondly upon imperfections of mind that you do not wish to perpetuate?
Twins sometimes wear a knot of ribbon as a signal whereby their friends
may recognise them. Our faces and bodies are but such little symbols
or signals that our souls have hung out for the day. Divest your best
friend of his body and would you recognise him? Have you ever thought
how the photograph of your friend's soul would look? If bodily form
and imperfections make up the most of what we call individuality it
becomes evident that in casting off imperfection we become less narrow,
less individual. As you become freed from the cramping littleness of
self-love and the bonds of self-gratification, as you rise into the
life of the spirit, you find yourself less individual. One fitted for
a true heaven would not care for the old immortality. What is good
to carry over into the future life is not so much personal identity
as personal non-identity, not so much the imperfections that make
us individuals as the perfections that free us from individualism.
We must lose our life to find it. We have overestimated the value
of individuality. Self-consciousness has become hypertrophied, and
the summum bonum of life is held to be the preservation of a little
puckered-up individuality. This over-development of individualism is
doubtless due to the fierce struggle man has had to elevate himself out
of savagery. It has been possible only through excessive carefulness
and love of the ego. The struggle for existence is now taking on
class and corporate characteristics so that the common weal is an
ideal quite as much as individual satisfaction and safety. Hence
the exaggeration of personality may now return to something like a
healthy normalism. As a natural outgrowth and consequence of this
over-development of the individual consciousness, there came the absurd
attempt to carry over into the after-life the same sort of existence
that had been developed here,—consisting in a neglect of the actual
world of one's descendants, an ignoring of death that ends the body
and products of organisation, and a failure to see that a future life
after death must be a life of the spirit, of perfections, and of the
common life, not of peculiarities and imperfections. If this seems an
aery height and a too rare air it argues against your preparation for
the only desirable as well as the only possible kind of immortality.
It argues against you just in the same way that your horror of death
does. It is only participation in the divine life of the spirit that
can see death as right and good. Death comes to shatter our baseless
trust in the evanescent physical and teach us dependence upon the
everlasting spiritual. They dread death whose life is of the physical
type. God never gave to man a greater blessing, after life itself,
than death, and nothing more strikingly proves the divine government
of the world than the certainty of its coming to us all. If death is
your enemy, life is not your friend. The brutal attempt to ignore the
fact, the belief that the body with its pack of heathenish appetites
and needs could push through death and come out fresh and renewed
on the other side is the very insanity of individualism and the
intoxication of materialism. The mourning, shudder, gloom, and horror
of death,—God-sent if anything is—is practical pessimism and reckless
atheism. Death's one lesson is that we must love and cultivate what he
cannot touch. One who has lived a life of kindness and spirituality
has no horror of death, and to him it has little mystery. But to him
whose divinity has been self and whose religion the worship of his
physiological senses, death must be the ugliest of enemies who is to
rob him of his all. Did you ever notice how life is plastic and free
when first fashioning for itself a body? "All heaven lies about us in
our infancy." In youth we are unselfish, aspiring, and noble. As the
years go by the power of the organisation, the material grows, and
limits more and more the freedom of the spirit. Frankenstein turns upon
its maker. With age men get narrow, cold, calculating; women snakey,
scheming, cruel. The soul finds itself more and more the slave instead
of the master, and by and by when the slavery becomes unendurable, it
takes flight, and this you call death. It is the body's reward for
insubordination. I think we deserve little sympathy for dying. Most of
us have well-merited death before it comes—I speak, of course only
of the death of those in life's afternoon. Few keep the young life
pliant and free beyond the age of fifty. If people could see that
life is the maker and moulder of organisation, and if they would seek
immortality upon earth, I believe men might come to live a hundred
years. Trees learn to live thousands of years, but they keep youth,
and spring, and trust, and love, forever nestling with the birds among
the rejuvenescent leaves of spring. We die not because the body is
weak, but because it has become too strong. We die because there is no
real continuance and strength in anything but the non-physical, and
we have trusted in the physical. Matter without free life is inert,
moved only from without: the dead body is simply matter without life.
It is not the blacksmith's arm that is strong: without nerve-force it
cannot raise an ounce, cannot raise itself. Whence the nerve-force?
From the ganglionic gray cells of the spinal cord and brain. And whence
these little gray cells? The dear stupid physiologist has now reached
his limit, and you can confidently answer for him that it was Life
created these things, Life that existed before muscles, nerves, and
cells, and that slowly fashioned them; Life, an order of existence
in no imaginable way analogous to, or to be confounded with matter
or mechanics. There is in the history of thought no more ludicrous
and dismal failure than the attempt to explain life in terms of
mechanics. The hope of the materialist that science would prove his
prejudice is torn to tatters. The children of the spirit are amazed
at the bat-blind inability to see the fact,—to see that life is more
certain and enduring than matter, soul than sense. The organs of the
body are changed, diseased, die; the body itself dies; generations
of bodies die, but like a containing cord of silk, on which all the
glittering beads of flesh are strung, there is the soul, the life,
ever the same, persisting unchanged through all change, giving unity
to diversity, moulding, making, discarding, choosing, healing, working
to far-away ends with blind, and dead, and obstinate materials. You
love the flesh over-much and jealous life says to you, "Take it then,
this so loved and wondrous flesh; me you have not loved,"—and lo! the
dead body, useless, decaying, lies before you. Let no materialistic
misreading of science hoodwink you into any blurring of the outlines
between matter and life.[78] The two are as far apart as heaven and
earth, are as dissimilar as thought can conceive,—perhaps in a final
analysis, are the only two things of the universe. There is no fact
of science showing the faintest warrant for confounding the two. Even
Huxley calls materialism the most baseless of all dogmas. It will
probably be found that there is but one element, of which all others
are duplications and combinations, atoms being but centres of force.
But life is irresolvable into any form of matter or mechanical energy.
It is not only unthinkable that matter could originate life, but it
is demonstrably absurd. No scientist to-day believes in spontaneous
generation. _Omne vivum ex vivo_ is an axiom. The plant has no nervous
system and yet has every physiological function possessed by the human
body. It has contractility, irritability, respiration, anabolism,
catabolism, and reproductivity,—that is, it has spontaneous movement,
it responds to stimulation, it breathes, it assimilates, it excretes,
it begets its like,—and physiologically this is all you can do. Nay,
more than this, even a drop of the jelly-like protoplasm that makes
up the basis of all cell-structures, animal or vegetable, has also
all of these qualities or powers.[79] There are bundles of wholly
structureless, unorganised jelly that exhibit these capacities in a
wonderful degree. There is, for instance, _Hydra viridis_, that has
no eyes and yet sees, no brain or nerves and yet lies in wait for
prey, pursues and fights, or flees from danger. Turned inside out it
lives and digests its food as well as before. It holds live worms
down with an improvised arm when they try to get out of its stomach.
Any part reproduces all. Cut off the bottom of its stomach and it
goes on eating, quite untroubled by the little accident,—and so
on. A great, wise, blind man has defined evolution, or life, as the
integration of matter and the dissipation of motion during which the
matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite
coherent heterogeneity, and during which the motion undergoes a
parallel transformation. Some one else improved upon this by saying
that it was "a change from a no-howish, untalkaboutable all-alikeness,
to a some-howish and in general talkaboutable not-all-alikeness, by
continuous something-elsifications and all-togetherations." Schelling
said that life was the tendency to individuation. But the crystal or
the planet shows that, and they are not living. As the hand cannot
grasp itself, neither can life define itself. All definitions I have
seen miss the essential and primal characteristics of spontaneous
movement. But all definitions begin by begging the question,—assuming
the thing explained. The truth is that there is no definition or
explanation possible. The dualism of matter and life must be accepted.
There is no monism can bridge the gulf between mechanics and life.
Inorganic matter with its inherent forces and laws cannot be conceived
as ever coming into or as passing out of existence. From all eternity
it was as it is, and so it will remain. The physical universe shows
no hint of design, no glimpse of freedom, no trace of intelligence,
no suggestion of a maker or God. It has no power of choice, no
spontaneous motion. But the merest speck of living matter is utterly
and absolutely different. It may have eyes or no eyes, and yet it
sees, ears or not and yet it hears, nerves or not and yet it feels
and reacts, brain or not and yet it thinks and plans, and acts in
accordance with intellectual resolves. The dead body of your child is
most inconceivably different from the living body of an hour ago. The
one fundamental mystery of the explainable world is why life seeks
objectification in material forms, and why it seeks it with such
vehemence and ardor. Life seems to bite at matter as if with famishing
hunger. One wonders if from some other planet life is being suddenly
starved out or banished by some catastrophe, and as a consequence
there is thence an over-emigration of the hungry Huns upon our earth.
Certain confused and confusion-breeding philosophers in the interests
of a theoretical monism or pantheism pretend to find, or to believe
that the organic is born out of the inorganic, that the physical world
shows evidence of design, that life and mentality were implicate and
latent in pre-existent matter. Yet they will accept the evidence
against spontaneous generation derived from the fact that if you kill
all organic life by intense heat and then exclude life from without you
will never find life to arise. But it is plain that in the condensation
of the dust of space into suns and planets all organic life was killed
in the hottest of all conceivable heat. But as the planets cool, life
appears. It must have come from without, and must therefore be an
universal self-existent power. Why, or how, or whence life comes to us
we do not know now, but the transcendent miracle is ever before our
eyes: infinitely rich and free, life is filling, thrilling, surcharging
every molecule of matter to which with wondrous power and ingenuity it
can gain access. It covers every thousandth of an inch of the earth's
surface, dives into the deepest ocean depths, fills the air as high as
the mountain tops, ever unsatisfied, ever grasping up a million million
renaissant forms, never resting, never baffled. Before this omnipresent
god one stands in rapt amazement and worship. To matter, then, life
first brought, and still ever brings the power of organisation, of
adaptation, of spontaneous energy, and of movement. But when the death
of the organisation takes place, the life that preceded and formed it
is not lessened or affected. When the watch wears out does it prove
that the watchmaker is dead? It is more rational to suppose that the
watchmaker has kept on with his work, that he has made and will make
many more watches, and I therefore judge that the life of each of us,
that existed before our bodies, that formed our bodies, will still form
other bodies after ours. The Oriental doctrine of the transmigration of
souls is not to be accepted in its crude details, but it is doubtless
a great truth. It is more rational and more consonant with what we
know of life, than the theory of wasted life implicate in the barbaric
notion of sending numberless millions of souls to hell to do nothing
but suffer useless pain, and other millions to heaven to suffer (I use
the word advisedly) useless pleasure. Any theory of immortality that
rests upon the assumption of uselessness and waste may be quickly set
aside. Just as matter and force are indestructible, various forms of
force being interchangeable, so it must be with life. There must be a
conservation of life-energy just as rigid, and this truth must remake
and remould the whole conception of immortality. When a mechanical
force disappears in one phase, it at once reappears in another aspect.
So vegetable, animal, and mental life are but different aspects of
life-force, and suffer no loss when transformed one into the other, or
when the body disappears altogether. And as it is the inherent nature
of force never to rest so there is no rest for life. Banishment of life
to a heaven of inaction is as impossible as it is absurd.
[78] Those who think this view is the voice of faith and not
of true science may profitably read a little book that has
come to my notice since writing these pages: _Life Theories
and Religious Thought_, by Lionel S. Beale.
[79] According to the latest scientific researches the
dependence of all organisation upon life is more clearly shown
than ever. My friend Dr. Edmund Montgomery twenty-five years
ago, as a result of extended experiment and research, showed
that the body of animals is not an aggregation of cells,
the force of the whole being derived from the enslaving and
utilising these subordinate organisms, but that the whole
body is a single protoplasmic living connected mass or unit
with functionally specialised parts. That this view is the
scientific view of to-day and that the cell-aggregate theory
is dead may be seen by consulting the article "Zelle," by
Prof. Frommen in _Eulenburg's Real-Encyclopädie der gesammten
Heilkunde_, 1890.
This extension of the law of the conservation of force to things
biologic and psychic is a two-edged sword: it offers conclusive
evidence of the fallacy of the materialist and unbeliever. There is
no annihilation; your life at death not only may not stop but cannot
stop. Life is as inextinguishable as physical force. On the other
hand this sword deals the death blow to two equally shallow fallacies
of believers. Just so sure as it insures the preservation of your
life, of all that is worth preservation, just so sure it denies the
possibility of preserving what was bound up with and produced by
organisation,—that is individuality and personal identity. These
things, if not entirely, are certainly largely the products of your
peculiar physical and physiological organisation. Whatever is born of
the flesh must perish with the flesh; what is born of the spirit shall
inherit eternal life. But the profoundest and most distinguishing
rebuke is given the unscientific, puerile, selfish assumption of
the waste, loss, and uselessness of life involved in the old theory
of heaven and hell. When from a chemical compound you take away and
liberate one element or compound radicle, does it then shoot off into
space, to "flock all by itself" for eternity? By no means! It at once
rushes into a new combination with its nearest neighbor, quickly
picking up again the round of its duty and function. The curious notion
that after having done work in one body, life or souls should at once
rush off to some far-away star, there to sing or howl for eternity was
a childish absurdity. One wonders where even an omnipotent God could
get material for such an amazing manufacture and loss of souls. The
theory also forgot that logic demands that what should live forever in
the future must perforce have lived forever in the past. A rope if it
have one end, must have two ends. What, therefore have our souls been
doing during this past eternity? The truth is that absolutely speaking
there cannot be souls, but only soul. Life is a unit, and indivisible.
The tiniest bit of bioplasm holds and represents all of life. Neither
you nor it are separable from the whole. There may be education and
progressive evolution of life as a whole but there can be no individual
and selfish salvation apart from the salvation of all other souls. The
idea that release from the body at once releases a soul from action,
duty, and the work of life, is an illogicality that could have arisen
in no mind conversant with the demonstrated law of the non-wastage of
force in any work of energy elsewhere. Life is never tired; it is the
body that requires rest not the spirit. The old doctrine of heaven,
an eternity of laziness, was the sigh of the sluggish flesh whipped
to ceaseless work by the unresting life. The desire of heaven was the
desire of eternal death.
This extension of the idea of the non-wastage, the rigid conservation
and interconvertibility of force to things of life, gains a new
significance and grandeur when we consider that whatever proves the
immortality of man proves the immortality of every other animal or
vegetable form. The tree and horse have a soul quite as well as you,
and must live after death quite as surely as you will. It is the
flimsiest of conceits that makes men think they are endowed with a
special sort of soul or divine life, different from that of animals or
plants. Don't flatter yourself. God takes quite the same loving pains
and care in the elimination of a leaf that he does of a brain-cell. Man
is but a small part of the animal world, and the whole animal world
is but a small part of the total life of the globe. Don't despise the
vegetable kingdom: it can do something you cannot do—make living
matter out of mineral substances. You could not live a day without the
food furnished you by "your brothers, the plants." Hence if human life
or souls cannot be sent off into space to do nothing, neither can the
souls of animals and plants. If we are to have our heaven they must
have theirs also. Does not this tangential theory begin to be clumsy
and work with huge creakings and difficulties? It looks like _reductio
ad absurdum_.
Not only is the tangential theory contradictory of all physical
analogies and all known laws, but it is positively immoral. It is but
a refined selfishness. Worldliness is none the less sinful because
it is other-worldliness. If billions of souls could thus be wasted
in an eternity of useless pain or pleasure, could thus, drunken with
individuation, hug their own sweet ghosts for never-ending time—then
were life a farce, the universe a huge meaningless machine for grinding
out waste and useless souls. But if all life, past or future, is one
and indivisible, purposive, educational, then the world becomes full of
meaning and the face of the Father, Life, smiles out at us from every
living thing. The faith of all good men that goodness is at the heart
of things is justified. The Earth becomes our home, that we can love;
our Father ever dwelleth here; we cannot be banished. When we have
finished our task, when our body has worn out, tireless life, of which
we are the children and heirs, gives us here and now other work to do.
To matter, this tremendous cosmical game of incarnation can mean
nothing. We see the dead flesh break up into simpler chemical forms and
the atoms finally spin off unaltered by their flesh-dance, again to be
caught up by the mystic and unseen Master, again to be pressed into
organic forms,—forms that like empty sea-shells only show where life
has been. And so on forever. But to life some educative purpose must be
operative through it all. Life that made eyes must see more than eyes;
life that made brains must know more than brains. There is doubtless
pain and strain; but is there to be no ultimate justification? We may
catch glimpses of reasons. Do we not see an increase both of quantity
and quality of life in geologic times? Is life trying to do away with
death and heredity? Are they but makeshifts, death but a discarding of
too obstinate material? Birth but a retempering and reworking of the
same material? Heredity but the temporary means of passing life and its
experiences onward until death and birth shall be found unnecessary in
a growing command of chemical and physical forces that shall banish old
age out of the world? There is no inherent reason why a body should
grow decrepit. If it can be made to preserve its suppleness for fifty
years why not for a thousand? It may transpire that the dream of an
elixir of life may come true through scientific progress despite the
savage death-blow given it by Brown-Séquard. The more sin, selfishness,
and wrong there is the shorter is the average length of human lives. If
you will look into the rich and awful science of statistics you will
find proof of this in every class of society. When we apply ourselves
to enrich and lengthen our life-time with the same zeal we now use
in killing each other—when the endowments of the world's scientific
schools equal the cost of the world's armies then there will be a very
different life-table found in the insurance-offices.