world has ever seen. Out of peace-conditions nations produce their
wars._
CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS IMMORTALITY.
(1915.)
We are frequently told (more especially by those whose profession it is
to preach belief in a revealed religion), that if man be not endowed
with an immortal soul, then the game of life is not worth the candle.
Incidentally we are warned that if the bottom were knocked out of that
belief, morals would go to pieces and humanity would become reprobate.
Now I can imagine a similar sort of claim put forward in other
departments of life for other pursuits which seem to their advocate to
make life more appetising.
I can imagine sportsmen saying that without sport men would cease to
be manly, morals and physique would deteriorate and life be no longer
worth living. I can imagine the butcher saying that without meat, and
the licensed victualler that without beer, men were of all things the
most miserable. I have recently seen advertisements which say that
only by supporting the cinema (made beautiful by the feet of Charlie
Chaplin), can we hope to be victorious in the present war.
The assertion that man cannot do without certain things which, as a
matter of fact, vast numbers of his fellows are constantly doing
without--(and with no very marked set-back as regards health,
efficiency, or general morals)--is a questionable way of forcing home
conviction that these things or beliefs are indispensable. It is quite
possible that beer, meat, the pursuit of game, the personality of
Charlie Chaplin, and a belief in immortality are all alike capable of
giving stimulus to the human soul (especially to those souls which
have come by habit to depend upon them). But it is quite certain that
other human souls have found without them sufficient stimulus to make
life worth living. And though, against that fact, it may be argued
that these unconsciously receive their driving force, their social
and ethical standards, from those whose motive power they reject as
superfluous, and that we, who do not go to see Charlie Chaplin on the
films, are winning this war somewhat circuitously through the powers of
those who do--the argument is hardly a convincing one, since it remains
for ever in the nature of an unproved hypothesis.
But when the majority of those who believe in personal immortality are
asked for the ground of their belief, it generally resolves itself into
this: they have an intense individual conviction that it is so--so
intense that to hold the contrary becomes “unthinkable.” But that
intense, individual conviction, over things we greatly care about, is
a constant phenomenon of the working of the human mind, and is not
limited to belief in a future state. To a convinced Liberal it is
“unthinkable” that he should ever pass into such a state of mental
annihilation as to become a Conservative. To a convinced Conservative
it is unthinkable that he should fall from the grace which guides
him into the slough of Liberalism. It is the same with Protestant or
Catholic, with Socialist, Universalist, or Sectarian: conviction always
presents an adamantine front to opposing forces and arguments--so long
as it lasts.
The same phenomenon constantly occurs in the domain of the amative
passion. The lover (if he be really in love), believes that his love
will last for ever--that nothing can possibly change it; and all the
evidence in the world that lovers of a like faith have too often lived
to see the immortal dream put on mortality, will fail to convince him
(while he is in the toils) that his own love is liable to any such
change as theirs.
The reason is that strongly vitalised forces always carry with them a
sense of permanence.
The vital spark (focused within us by strong conviction or emotion),
is but an individually apprehended part of a great whole: for this
thread of life passing through us has already stretched itself out
over millions of years, and countless atavisms have touched it to
individual ends which were not ours; the will to live has clung to it
by myriads of adhesions, feelers, tentacles, and not by human hands
alone (though our palms still moisten, and our arms fly upward to
the imaginary branch overhead when danger of falling threatens us,
because the instinct of our arboreal ancestry still prevails in us over
reason). And through those atavisms, the struggle to secure survival
for the family, the clan, the race, has left an impress which may
very naturally convey from the general to the individual a sense of
immortality.
For of all these constituent forces the majority knew and thought
very little about death, except in their instinctive and spasmodic
efforts to escape from it; and when at last man began to envisage death
consciously and philosophically, straightway, with all these atavisms
behind him, he belittled it with dreams of a future life.
It was as perfectly natural a thing to do as for the lover to declare
that his love for his mistress was eternal and not merely for a
season, since any lesser statement would fail to convey adequately
the intensity of the force by which he was moved. Moreover, though
in millions of individual cases the statement and the sincere belief
that the love experienced will remain changeless and eternal, are
contradicted by later fact, it is at least true that the passion itself
is an ever-recurring phenomenon of life, and does, by its infinite
recurrence and resurrection in form beyond form through evolving
generations, present to finite minds an aspect of immortality. Just as
the water we drink is an imperishable thing, though after drinking it
we shall thirst again, so is that love, which satisfies the lover’s
soul, a principle of life extending illimitably beyond his own use for
it. And if that be true about love, why should it not be true about
life?
For surely (put it thus), when across limited vision a thread passes,
of which the eye can see neither the beginning nor the end, and
when upon that thread, for the time being, the limited life hangs
all its hopes, is it not quite natural for that clinging life to
identify itself, through the closeness of its momentary contact,
with the spiritually apprehended whole, and to identify with that
concept of a general continuity its own present degree of individual
consciousness. Moreover, in a world governed by cause and effect, it
can hardly be predicated that the results either of love or hatred,
individually indulged, are not, or may not be illimitable, even though
the individual spirit be not there to preside consciously over their
extended operations.
When, therefore, so much is true, when so many elements which pass
through our lives have (by association), links and connections which
to finite minds seem infinite, they may well impress us (by reason of
the close identification established between us and them for the time
being) with a sense that our own individual share and apprehension of
them are addressed also to a universal goal.
“Universal,” for surely mere continuity--a stretching out of length
without corresponding breadth--ought not to be the limit of our
claim. Yet it is significant that, in their demand for personal
immortality, so many thinkers have found sufficient satisfaction in
the idea of an extended survival through time into eternity, without
making a corresponding demand for extension into unity through space.
They are willing, that is to say, to put up for all eternity with
those limitations of personality which they enjoy--the relations of
_meum_ and _tuum_ upon which the possessive life of the senses is
based, but not with those limitations (the prospect of which they do
not enjoy), the termination of those same relationships imposed by
death. It seems rather a one-sided way of doing things--this narrowing
of the claim in a two-dimensional direction (one might almost say
in a one-dimensional), yet it has been very generally done--I shall
presently hope to show why--and most of our Western theology has built
up our future hopes for us entirely on those lines. Personality,
the sort of personality we have learned to enjoy, is based upon
limitations. Abolish limitations in your conception of future life, and
for the majority of those pious minds which now clamour for it as their
due you abolish personality also; it is swallowed up not in death but
in a life from which the individual power to focus and to enjoy has
disappeared.
It is true that there has now begun, in modern socialistic
Christianity, a yeasting of desire for an all round, or expansive,
as well as a forward, or extensive personality after death; that an
all-embracing and not merely an all-surviving consciousness is more
and more predicated for the full satisfaction of man’s spiritual need.
But that was by no means the form of moral hunger which permeated
primitive or mediæval Christianity, and sufficed, we are to suppose,
to keep poor human nature from that depravity into which it will fall
if belief in personal immortality is surrendered. Oregon, as we know,
looked forward to finding in the nether groans of the damned a full
completion of the orchestral harmonies of Heaven; and in the whole
conception of immortality as it has illumined the path of the Church
from its beginning down to quite modern times, individualism has been
rampant. On that basis, so long as it satisfied his moral conscience,
man did great things with it, making it shine as a great light by the
unflinching witness which he bore to its efficacy through suffering and
through martyrdom.
It is probably true that an individualistic form to the doctrine was
then, and always will be, necessary to attract those whose lives have
been run from a highly individualised standpoint; and that, for them,
death-bed consolation would hardly be achieved in the presentation of
a doctrine so defined as to threaten annihilation to all the fetish
worship and social values of the past.
“God would think twice,” said a courtly French Abbé of the seventeenth
century to a King’s mistress who, upon her death-bed, was seized by
spiritual qualms--“God would think twice before damning a lady of your
quality.” And no one who holds by class-distinctions really wishes to
find in the New Jerusalem any abolition of that respect for persons
or prejudices which has, in this world, been the main ground on which
their self-esteem and their estimate of personality have been based.
To them the most “unthinkable” proposition would be not the contraction
of the future world to narrower and more select limits than those of
the one they know, but a future world conducted on any code of morals
which had not their own entire approval and sanction.
We are told that the late Queen Victoria looked forward with very
great interest to a future meeting with the Hebrew patriarchs, with
Abraham, Moses, and Elijah, but hoped to be excused from any personal
acquaintance with King David on account of his affair with Bathsheba.
And when we realise how very often the hope of Heaven is really a
species of self-love and self-applause, conditional on Heaven being
what we ourselves want it to be, one is led to wonder whether the real
condition for entry into that state of bliss may not prove to be the
precise opposite, and whether the disciplinary motto upon its portal
may not be those mystic words, hitherto attributed to another place,
“All hope abandon ye who enter here.” That, after all, is only a more
emphatic way of stating what Christ Himself laid down as the path by
which man should attain; that only those namely who were ready to
lose life should find it. And I rather question whether our Christian
individualists have, up till now, been honestly prepared to “lose life”
in the full sense, without condition or reserve, and whether, (if they
have not), they have yet attained the spiritual standpoint necessary to
bring them within the terms of the promise.
So far I have dealt with the doctrine of immortality as presented to us
from the individualistic basis alone. But, in some form or another, the
doctrine of immortality belongs to many religions and schools (indeed,
one might almost say to all) and has, therefore, most varied and even
contradictory meanings attached to it. In some schools, as we have
seen, it sets great store on the survival of the individual; in others
individuality is held to be of small account--a diminishing rather than
a persistent factor in the ultimate ends of life viewed as a whole.
I remember in that connection discussing with the late Father George
Tyrrell, in the days before Rome’s excommunication fell on him, the
divergent views as to immortality of Christianity and Buddhism; and
at that time he held that the superiority of the Christian faith
lay in its insistence on the personal immortality, conscious and
self-contained, of every human being. Some years later, a month before
his death, we discussed the matter again; and I asked him then, in what
degree, if at all, his view as to personal immortality had changed.
His answer gave me a curious instance of those scientific analogies by
which Modernism has been seeking to deliver the Roman Church from its
mediæval entanglements.
“In the main,” he said, “I have only changed in my apprehension of what
‘personality’ really is. Just as one may find in an hysterical subject
five or six pseudo-personalities which reveal themselves in turn, each
one of which is a character quite separately and consistently defined,
but not one of them (however completely in possession for the time) a
real person, so it seems to me must we regard all those limitations
of ‘personality’ which find expression in individual form. There is
only one true personality, and that is Christ; anything less than the
one all-embracing whole is but a simulacrum, concealing rather than
revealing the true substance and form.”
I cannot pretend to give his actual words, but I believe that I have
accurately stated the sense of them; and you will see, I think, that
they go a long way toward the adaptation of the Christian to the
Buddhistic standpoint. That tendency, I believe, we shall find more
and more at work in the Christian Church as time goes on--not merely
because by such a definition the doctrine will be better able to hold
its own against the inroads of science--but because it gives also a
better response to that socialising genius of the human race which
is coming more and more to demand a perfect unity as the ultimate
expression of good.
That, then, we shall probably find to be the future tendency of
idealism. There remains, of course, the Rationalistic school of
thought, by which the possibility of individual or personal survival
after death is from first to last either absolutely denied or very
severely discountenanced as an idea based upon wholly insufficient
evidence.
Nevertheless, in some form or another, immortality, conscious or
unconscious, personal or impersonal, is accepted by all schools alike;
the scientific law of the conservation of energy being one form of it
which human reason would now find it very difficult to deny.
Let us for one moment apply that law to our own individual lives and
consciousness.
Has life convinced us that we are all self-contained persons? Through
social contact we have undergone many changes, many damages, and
many repairs. Parts of us have gone to other people, parts of other
people have come, to us. We have shed and have absorbed quite as much
spiritually as materially; and though through our material changes we
retain a certain likeness, so that friends meeting us after a seven
years’ absence recognise us again in bodies no particle of which have
they ever seen before; and though similarly we can recognise our
inner selves across wider intervals of time, have we any reason to
suppose that our identity is more fixed in the spiritual substance
than in the material? For myself, I hope not. May one not prefer the
idea of interchange between life and life, to the notion that one is
to remain for ever fixed and self-possessed--a thing apart? The more
we are compounded of other lives, the more we have contributed to
the lives of others--the more can we recognise our entrance into the
only eternal life that we can demonstrably be sure about, or that can
(so it must seem to many of us), be sensibly desired or deserved. Is
Eternal Bliss, in the individual sense, a more tolerable doctrine than
eternal Hell-fire? Though, indeed, this latter may be but a scientific
statement of fact perverted and made foolish by the theologians.
For life, after all, is but a form of combustion for ever going on,
and outside of it we know nothing. No doubt the atoms of our being,
whether physical or spiritual, will forever form part of it; but I see
no reason why our spirits should not be as diffused, through proper
elemental changes, as our bodies are now being diffused from day to
day; or why I should repine that I personally shall not always be there
to preside over the operation and find it good. Even if, at the far end
of this earth’s history, everything is again to be reabsorbed in the
heat and light out of which it came, I can trust the suns and planets
to fulfil their mission of progress--or the will of God--quite as well
as, or better than, in my own small sphere I can trust Constitutional
Governments or Established Churches. And since these lesser lights,
in their foolish and providential dealings, do not confound my faith,
neither do the stars in their courses fight against it. Rather do they
confirm me in my sense that even the most acute perceptions with which
human life is endowed fail of themselves to justify me in any claim to
a larger lease of life than can naturally belong to them; for I see in
the universe things far greater than any individual man, doing service
and sustaining the life of countless millions, (which without them
could not live at all), without any prospect of so great a reward.
The eye of the sun itself is blind; and for ever, while it dazzles
us with its light, blind it must remain. Nay, what need has it for
sight at all, if in blindness it be able to fulfil its mission? And
yet implicit within its vast energies, there lies the gift of sight.
For that blind Eye of Heaven taught us to see; our substance came from
it, our eyes were made by it, and without it was not anything made on
earth that was made. And if, by this gift of sight, it has opened to us
so vast a space for our understanding to dwell in--bestowing so huge
a conception of life on this frail vessel of clay--if by so giving
of itself through long aeons of time it has opened to us so much more
than it knows itself, cannot we render back without grudging these
shorter, frailer lives of ours, whose brevity, perhaps, is the very
price required of us for their enjoyment, since without such limits our
far-reaching comprehension of space and its possessions could never
have been gained. Should there be any despair, or any depression in
the thought that from the blind eye of day and from the powers of its
heat was developed the human brain? For if from that apparent Blindness
of our Universe came really the eyes of life by which we perceive all
things, can we not commit our spirits back to its keeping with an
equal trust that what lies ahead will be at least as good as what lies
behind, though we be not there to see it?
But the law of the conservation of energy does not in the least satisfy
the aspirations of those who are out for personal immortality in the
individual sense. To these it seems a grievance that they should have
been called into being for any end not wholly satisfying to that
Ego which is now laying upon their consciousness the weight of its
possessive limitations. This separative quality of the Ego is to them
the whole principle of existence; without it they cannot see life.
To them, life in any less focused or more diffused form would be no
better than annihilation, an obvious setting-back of the evolutionary
process by which creation has led step by step to that degree of
self-consciousness realised in the human race.
Do not these objectors forget not merely how considerable a part of
human nature already moves and has its being on the lines of a diffused
and rather decentralised subconsciousness, but also how largely the
genius of the human race has committed to such conditions of separation
from all possible enjoyment by the Ego, some of the rarest gifts and
highest efforts at self-realisation that the world has ever seen? It
is a condition attaching to all the more permanent forms of expression
in the arts, to everything that man designs and makes for the delight
of the generations that come after. It is a condition willingly
accepted by all who rejoice in their power to throw the influence of
their personalities beyond the material uses of their own present
existence. And in that willingness to lose out of themselves for
future generations--to turn aside from mere physical enjoyment--the
life-forces within them, in that willingness artist, poet, and thinker,
have come far nearer to the finding of life than those who live
indulgently for ends finished by their own absorption thereof.
Now it is the supporters of the individualistic school of thought who
have generally urged that grave moral dangers would befall the human
race were a belief in personal immortality to perish; and it is at
least arguable (by minds that can only see values individually), that
if man is not to be permanently rewarded or punished for his present
and future conduct, he has no reason for conducting himself as a decent
part of the social whole, and that it would be better for him to break
out on entirely individual lines, live a short and merry life, and
throwing all altruistic and ethical considerations to the winds, enjoy
himself as much as he can while the material is to him.
On paper that consideration may seem to hold strong ground; but when it
is put into practice the facts of life are found to be overwhelmingly
against it. For one thing excess and self-indulgence fail to produce
enjoyment, for another the socialising of life by mutual aid tends
quite obviously to the increase of comfort, safety, and happiness. And
where apparently it does not is mainly at that point where rampant
individualism grasps and warps it to its own ends, making the social
organism subserve not the goodwill of the many but the ill-will of the
few.
But the ethical argument about the bad effects of non-belief in
personal immortality has been considerably discounted by the growing
sensitiveness of the modern conscience--more especially among those who
are in a serious sense “free-thinkers”--toward the social ills lying
around us. Generally speaking, our sense of duty toward our neighbour
is much more lively than it was in the mid-Victorian era; but our
conviction of personal immortality is probably far less. The two things
do not go together: the diminution of church attendance in the last
fifty years has not worsened the conditions of labour.