To write a useful essay on immortality has long been one of my
ambitions, and, as regards the views in that essay, my faith and my
reason alike have so far brought me to this thesis: _Whatever is real is
immortal_.[5] "A most meagre contribution to the subject," I hear some
one exclaim. But is it so very meagre after all? "A most gloomy
contribution," says another, "for evil, and above all death, are real."
But is it so gloomy? Remember, not even death can be real alone.
Possibly, too, the meagreness will seem less and the gloom will be
illuminated if the need of the real being also the ideal, is brought to
mind. That the real must be ideal, that the world must be so [p.235]
constituted that the law of whatever is good will prevail in it, has
been a faith manifested among all men and expressed through history in
countless ways. True, no particular experience ever satisfies it. Not
even the particular things we adjudge to be best are adequate to it, and
the things we think evil, the suffering and the hardships of all kinds,
the always tragic death and the too often offensive life, seem its
eternal rebuke. Yet the faith remains, and you and I and all others are
forever calling out to it. Our very doubts are its altars; our honest,
rational thoughts, as they are uttered, are prayers; perhaps the only
prayers to which we have any right.
So the real, which must be also the ideal, is immortal; and this, quite
apart from any particular questions about the body or the soul, makes a
world to live in and to hope in, whatever happens. Of body and soul,
too, it says something. These, in just so far as they are real, are
immortal, and any real relation between them is immortal also, for the
conclusive test of immortality is just reality, reality here and now.
Whatever is real in your life or in mine, whatever reality our present
personality may possess, be it physical or spiritual, be it both or
neither of these, that and only that is immortal. That and only that,
however, let it be said again, is now or never. The most serious error,
so it seems to me, in all the controversy about immortality, is the
notion, or the superstition, that something that is real now can pass
away, or that something real in the future is not real, not freely real
now. With this error corrected, of course at the expense of certain
attempts to bind reality to [p.236] something that is visible, if not to
the natural eye, at least to the eye of the mind, man has nothing to
fear. Reality will hold him to itself, will support whatever truly
inheres in his friendships or his family ties, in his best hopes or in
his personal conceits, for ever and ever. Reality can never betray what
it has ever harboured.
And the whole trend of thinking in this book has been to make the
reality here spoken of a most hospitable harbour. So innate to all
experience is the spirit of truth, the principle of veracity, that life
can have no absolute illusions. True, life also can have no positive
knowledge final and exact, so that all things definitely manifest are
only relatively true or real. All things definitely manifest, whether to
the consciousness that looks without or that looks within, are mixedly
true or false, real or unreal. But just this impossibility, now so
familiar to us, at once of absolute illusion and of absolute knowledge,
is, as said so often, a condition of _the_ true and _the_ real, and it
means in this place that nothing which is ever defined, which is ever
hypostasized or apotheosized, which in any way is erected into a thing
or nature quite by itself, possessing determined or determinable
qualities, can ever be said to be either mortal or immortal, since it
must be as truly one as the other. It must be significantly, but never
purely and exclusively either. Not this hand of mine nor that picture on
the wall, not this body which, so to speak, I seem to wear, nor that
soul, which you or I imagine to be in the body and more or less loosely
connected with the body, is unqualifiedly immortal. Nor yet [p.237] is
any of these unqualifiedly mortal. Still, again, there is immortality,
and an infinitely hospitable immortality, which the hand and the whole
body and the soul, be it yours or be it mine, all have a place and a
part in. There is immortality, and, besides those things that were just
named, divinity is also immortal. But even a God dies, this being just
one of the things that make him God. Any man, then, or any being, or any
thing, may say, "I am immortal." No one, however--to speak now only in
words directly applicable to man--may say, "My body is immortal," nor
even, "My soul is immortal," if, so speaking, he means only what he
seems to say. Body and soul alike, if two separate things, are _both_ of
them at once living and dying. They are equally mortal or immortal, for
only so, as two things, can they belong to the real self. Can parts, be
they two or many more, ever be unmixedly what the whole is? There is
immortality, then, yet nothing, not the body nor the soul, is wholly or
selfishly immortal. Reflect, to take an illustration from the practice,
if not from the conscious thinking of men, how through the centuries of
the dualistic view of human nature, the saving, or the losing, of the
separate soul has been a keen human interest, and how the separate body,
living, has been neglected and despised, and, dead, has been cherished
and honoured. Yes, man's immortality is deeper, and it is more
hospitable, than any distinction, be this invidious on one side or on
the other or be it not, between the physical and the spiritual. Even in
the case of the spiritual, _the_ cannot be _a_.
The soldier and the mechanic have been mentioned [p.238] as types of
personal individuality appropriate respectively to the medieval and the
modern period, to the period of the "universal individual," on the one
hand, and of unity realized, not through a type, but through the working
together of different individuals, on the other. The type was of another
world; the living unity is here and now in this. For the mechanic, then,
death is not what the soldier has found it, and immortality is different
too. But how fully to describe the difference, and how above all really
to appraise it, I do not clearly know. Perhaps there is not enough of
the poetic in my nature. The soldier, as the political historian or as
the philosopher sees him, has had his appreciative poets, but the
mechanic has been little sung. The mechanic's death, however, and the
life following it, afford a theme that some poet of the future, let me
hope, will be able to do justice to. The soldier leaves this for another
world, by his violent death only fulfilling his extreme subjection here.
The mechanic, somewhat like the tools which he employs, actually
continues with the always productive life of this world, by his death,
natural rather than violent, even contributing to, as well as sharing
in, what is produced. Not less than the soldier's is his after-life an
appropriate fulfilment of his earthly career; each gains through death
the natural reward of his life's service. But though I find myself so
unable to say what I would, to express either in prose or in poetry all
that I seem to feel, there is just one thought that I must try to
articulate, and that will certainly assist the understanding of the
difference between the two deaths or the two after-lives.
[p.239] Soldiers are companionable, of course, but they live less in and
with each other than in and with the will which they serve or than in
and with the separate world which at any moment may suddenly take them
to itself. Their lives, accordingly, or their deaths, are aloof from
each other, and are brought together only through their common
subjection or their common destiny, through something which is without.
But the mechanic is social in his own nature, in his own right. The very
reality, too, of the world in which he works is, as in so many ways we
have seen, maintained only by a divided labour. It is, then, a reality,
or a labour, that bridges the chasm between one man's life and
another's, as well as between all separate lives and the unity of all
life. It makes the many lives "parallel" and harmonious--nay, it makes
them actively and vitally sympathetic. Not, as is certainly true, at the
expense of any one's real individuality, for each man has his place and
his part, real and immortal, and not one falls unnoticed or unguarded to
the ground; but, nevertheless, whatever all have and do, they have and
do together. They live-and-die together. There is, in a word, but one
death, as well as but one life, the life or the death, which all share,
and which accordingly is definitely and specifically nowhere and
nobody's. And in the light of this supreme unity, while any live, none
can be merely dead, or while any die, none can be merely alive or living
to themselves or their time alone. And, living and dying together, in
and with each other, all are parties to the immortality of what is real.
So, again, there is immortality for mankind--the [p.240] immortality of
him whom I have called the mechanic. There is immortality, mine and
yours and ours. We die, but not as dies the soldier, who leaves this
life for another quite apart, securing there a companionship denied him
here; we die a death that is never death alone, and we die as we live,
in a companionship that is real now and throughout all time.
Furthermore, our death is always, or always may be, self-denial, and
self-denial, too, in its supreme moment, the moment of its greatest
achievement, but our self-denial is also very different from that of the
soldier.
There is immortality, then, but what results has all that has now been
said for the interpretation of history, for our feelings about the life
and death of our fellows, and for the relevant doctrines of
Christianity?[6]
We commonly think of history as the passing of persons, nations, and
civilizations. Men come and go, but history goes on for ever. To be
sure, history accumulates, as if its gifts from humanity, innumerable
treasures, books, relics, institutions, buildings, machinery and the
like, but the donors, as we are wont to think, are lost to it, remaining
as ideal influences perhaps, but not as vitally active in the life they
once assisted. This common view, however, must now seem wrong. The past
must ever persist in the present, and not as an aside in some other
world, nor yet as merely so much ideal influence, but vitally as a party
to the present. Those that were must also live now. Have we their
literature? Yes, and their consciousness [p.241] too. Their
institutions? And also their life. Their achievements? And their power
and will. Altogether too fanciful, some one thinks; but give it meaning
from what has been said here especially about individuality. In the real
world there can be but one life and one death, and we individuals,
whatever our century, divide the labour of them both. Even our present
life and consciousness and our will must be said to belong, in return,
to those who have gone before; for it is wrong, it must be wrong, to
think of the life of the past and the life of the present as two lives,
as independent and perhaps even different in kind. Not those that are
now gone once lived and we live, but they and we are living, they in us,
and we with them; they in the world of our life, not in a world yonder
and apart. They live in us, to suggest a simple analogy, that is perhaps
more than a mere analogy, very much as our own past selves, our infancy
and our youth, are alive with us and in us to-day. If a physical
scientist can see the same force in the military weapons and engines of
ancient times that he sees in those of our own time, if a sociologist
can find the same social phenomena then and now, may not the historian
regard the older life in general and the newer life as not less
intimate? Did different winds blow in 1492 from those that blow to-day?
Was it a different sun that shone in 500 B.C.: from that which shone in
A.D. 500, or which shines, or tries to shine, to-day? We do not deny
that the animal nature is still alive in us as well as around us,
although at the same time we suppose it to belong to a very early period
in our development. Why, then, should we exclude what is [p.242] so much
more recent? Because it is too distinctly human to be so robbed of its
temporal independence, of its own date and place? That is certainly a
strange reason in view of the fact that men have insisted on erecting,
in their minds, for the human nature that has passed away, a place which
is altogether timeless and eternal. Why not dignify human nature, then,
by making it, and all that it bears, eternal in its own natural life,
not in a sphere that is unnatural? It is sheer materialism, in letter or
in spirit, either to entomb the historic past, as some would, in books
and monuments of all sorts, or, as others would, to lay it aside in a
so-called immaterial world. Who does either of these things forgets how
the books are written and how the monuments are erected, and how in
general the things of the past come to be. The future is always a party
to whatever is done. The men who have ever achieved anything have always
been, in their character and in their work, as if made by the future,
"ahead of their times." An uncanny phrase, unless one can think of the
deeds and men of any time as in a vital unity with the deeds and men of
all times. A man is great only as he identifies himself with some social
force, with some actual movement of his day, fulfilling it out of a long
past, bringing it to focus and so making it definite and manifest, and
as the life around him which gave him birth, adopts his will and repeats
his achievement. History has many cases of human societies repeating in
their lives as a whole the careers of great men. Only it is not
repetition exactly; it is resurrection and continuation. Great men make
history, but they make it only because they [p.243] are alive in it
before their birth and survive in it, in its doing and in its thinking,
after they die.[7] Would history be even thinkable without such
continuity? Could we honestly call it history? What good American to-day
is not, convinced that he has a share in what Washington and Lincoln
accomplished years ago, and also--and this one may, or may not,
regret--in the doings of Benedict Arnold and Booth? And, to put a very
practical question, would it not be well if in the popular consciousness
great men, good and bad, were really identified with history instead of
being treated as fixtures outside of it? Make them separate fixtures and
you make them oracles, the spirits of quite another world, with which
the demagogue, as if a medium, can excite the people; but identify them
in a vital way with history and they must grow with it, speaking quite
as much out of the present conditions as out of the past. Hero-worship
is too often idolatry, and for my part the literalism of it is only
"spiritualism" trying to be respectable. Every extravagance, of course,
has to have its lawful or conventionally respectable expression.
But what, now, of friendship and family ties? Can we view these in the
same light? I think we would; I think we can; I think we must. True, it
is easier to speak in this large, "philosophical" way of history and of
the men who have had part in it, inventing and effectively using the
machinery that has enabled its progress, than of such matters as
friendship and [p.244] family. In these latter matters the heart more
than the mind is addressed. Still, the relations of friendship and
kinship are not themselves born, nor do they die and all friends abroad
and kin at home live and move and have their being only in these. Does
it destroy or even weaken the meaning or the reality of friendship to
have it said that the relation is as universal as particular or local,
and as eternal as temporal? Is a relationship worth less than any one of
its manifestations? Why, the universality of the relationship gives
meaning or reality to any manifestation. Friendship, then, or kinship,
for this person or that, cannot be separated from the experience in
general. Separate it, and one's friends or kin surely do die, remaining
after death, like the characters of the older history, as only ideal
"influences," or as unearthly spirits that sometimes idly chatter. But
in reality, friendship, or kinship, is one, not merely many, all of its
members labouring together for, and forever surviving in, what it truly
is. The friends, then, or the kin that lived, live still. In others
about us? Yes; and in ourselves too; or rather in the relation of man to
man or in the unity of all that lives. Not literally in others, then,
although the meaning intended was a genuine one, nor yet literally in
ourselves, for nothing crudely like transmigration of souls is in my
mind, but--to repeat--in the living relationship of friends or kin.
There is indeed a truth in transmigration, as also in other related
notions; witness all the facts of inheritance, of historical succession
or continuity, of social growth and personal character, of evolution;
but it is the truth, or is near to [p.245] the truth, of a reality that
is conserved even in its changing. The soldier of the past, let me say,
at his death was "translated," but the mechanic of to-day is transmuted.
The latter word may be stranger and harsher in sound than the former,
but there is truly less violence and more honour in its meaning. So,
again, friends and kin that ever lived, live still. Friendship and
fatherhood and motherhood and all the relations of kin, nay, all the
relations of life, that make our individuality real, that make it
personal, that make it social, that make, it natural, have been from the
beginning, live now, and must survive forever, and by their survival
hold for the present and the future life all who have ever been. Where
would faith go, and where worth and responsibility, if birth really
created and death destroyed, or if birth were a coming from no one knows
where, from a realm unlike and apart, and death the return? Birth cannot
create or introduce; it can only express, revealing and realizing. Death
cannot destroy or "translate"; it can be only fulfilment at a crisis.
The mere wordiness of a philosopher! Possibly. And yet Christianity has
very nearly implied, if indeed it has not actually said, and said or
implied again and again, exactly the same thing. To science, I know, we
are peculiarly indebted for the conception of the organism, or the
organic, which enables us to bring together the universal and the
individual, the eternal and the temporal, the omnipresent and the local,
without losing the worth or the reality of either, and of course--for so
they would not be together--without erecting separate quarters, or
worlds, for their [p.246] occupation; but, when all is said, science has
only applied at large the very special and personal doctrines of
Christianity, and has therein helped Christianity to a better
consciousness of itself. The Resurrection, the Immaculate Conception,
the Divinity, the Immediacy of the Kingdom, the Sacrifice, and the
Brotherhood of Man are doctrines which one and all testify quite
directly that our real individuality, our real being, lies not in a
separate existence of any sort, here or hereafter, but in the abiding
relations of the actual life now. In these the Christ resides, the
always living Christ. What else can the following mean? "In as much as
ye have done it unto one of these, my brethren, even these least ye have
done it unto me." And again: "For whosoever shall do the will of my
father which is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and
mother." The living Christ, one of the dogmas of our day, is more than a
fancy and more than a dogma, and for no one so truly as the scientist,
the evolutionist. Christ was too great, too deep-lying, too far-reaching
in human history not to be more. The letter of Christianity, we are
often told, has got to go, but it is quite as true that the real letter
of Christianity has got to stay, has yet to come: the real letter, I
say, not the parody of a mere physical appearance and reappearance
nearly two thousand years ago. If Christ was really not born as men are
born, if he did not really die, if truly he still lives in and with our
lives to-day, if Christianity honestly means the brotherhood of humanity
and the divinity of man, then simply the Christ was more than a pagan's
messenger from another world, and [p.247] more than the creature of a
single moment in history or a single place; also he reveals to us more
in ourselves than any of these things, and instead of resorting to such
notions as parthenogenesis and trance to explain the birth and the
resurrection, we must rather recognize in him, and in ourselves, an
individuality that has, not in spite of, but because of, birth and
death, a share in, a place and a part in the immortality of what is
real. Now I am not a good preacher, plainly, nor am I exactly a
sympathetic theologian, and also I know too well the defects of argument
through scriptural quotation; but I have to hope, as personally I
believe, that in the foregoing paragraph, given in conclusion to the
discussion of immortality in the doubter's world, I have suggested what
at least is not an unchristian appreciation of Christianity.
* * * * *
Our journey in the doubter's world here comes to an end. All things are
real, yet none final. The spiritual and the material in life are
sympathetic even to the point of being vitally at one with each other,
thought being free and practical, and material nature being lawful but
law-free, and mechanical but productively so, and being in her
productiveness definite opportunity, not blind necessity, to human life.
And, the "universal individual" being dead, having returned to the other
world from which he came, all particular individuals have real and
personal shares in the life that is, in the work that is ever to be
done. Living or dying, the individual, as we have found him, is the
mechanic of to-day, not the soldier of yesterday.
[1] The last few sentences seem like a paragraph from some psychologist
of the day. My colleague, Professor W.B. Pillsbury, for example, has
just published a book on the attention, in which appears the following
statement: "It seems that the problem of voluntary activity is largely,
if not entirely, a problem of the attention ... . The processes which
are effective in the control of a man's ideas are _ipso facto_ in the
control of his movements," and this, besides being the current
psychology, is quite in accord with our doubter's vision: "Well thought
is well done." (See _Attention_, chapter ix. London, 1907.)
[2] Chap. VIII., pp. 177 seq.
[3] Chaps. III., IV., V., and VI.
[4] See also an earlier discussion in this book, chap. III., pp. 49 seq.
[5] Two preliminary efforts have already been put in print. See the
Appendix, "A Study of Immortality in Outline," to a book: _Dynamic
Idealism: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Psychology_ (McClurg,
1898). See, secondly, an article: "_Evolution and Immortality_," in the
_Monist_, April, 1900.
[6] Except for a few changes, the next few paragraphs are taken from my
article, "Evolution and Immortality," in the _Monist_, April, 1900.
[7] In a small book, _Citizenship and Salvation, or Greek and Jew_,
published some years ago, I have tried to show this of Socrates and
Christ.
[p.248]