subconsciously at work within us, colouring our actions and directing
us on right ethical lines. But if it be a subconscious direction
which thus works in us for righteousness, it may equally be to a
subconscious end. The subconscious impulse may merely be guiding us to
a subconscious realisation which would not at all satisfy the advocates
of conscious immortality after death. What works subconsciously can in
all probability find satisfaction in a subconscious reward. The chemic
processes of the stomach and of the blood, for instance, are largely
subconscious in their operation; and their needs may be subconsciously
appeased without the brain being told anything about it through the
usual intermediaries of taste and mastication. We have a preference for
a conscious performance of the functions of life which we have always
been accustomed to perform consciously; but a very large proportion of
our life-functions work themselves out subconsciously and independently
of our will. Our hearts beat, our blood circulates, our nails grow,
our stomachs digest, our wounds heal, whether we tell them to or no,
and yet we are quite happy about them. We do not consider (because
they operate by a volition of which we are unaware), that therefore we
carry about with us a body of death from which our conscious ego must
needs shrink in disgust--a dead heart, dead stomach, dead blood--that
the unconsciousness which accompanies health is a state nearer to
annihilation, and so less to be desired, than the pains accompanying
functional disturbances.
When those things happen--functional disturbances--we are conscious
of something more immediately relating to death than to life: it is
because of local mortification that we become so much aware of things
which our immortal part helps us to use unconsciously and without
thought. Virtue itself, when engrained, tends to become instinctive and
subconscious instead of an effort.
There is quite as much evidence, therefore, in our own bodies that
unconsciousness is the real gate to immortal life, and the condition
toward which all that is best and highest in us is seeking, as of the
contrary teaching that increased self-consciousness is man’s final
goal. In the functional working of our own bodies an enormous amount of
self-consciousness has been eliminated, and we do not for our happiness
or self-realisation wish it restored to us; whole tracts and areas are
immune from it, or only make a spasmodic grab at our consciousness when
things go ill with them. “If you go on doing that,” they say, when
you misuse them, “we will make you know that we are here.” And so you
become conscious of them: but that doesn’t make you happier. Yet in a
sort of way, I suppose, a man would realise himself more completely if
he had sciatica all over him, and could count up his nerves, and tell
all his bones by the aches and pains attaching to them.
Now it is easy enough for a man to say (I think it was H. M. Stanley,
the explorer, who did say so) that he would rather endure torment for
all eternity than accept a state of annihilation. In thus protesting
he is talking through his hat of something too far beyond human
experience for the mind to realise. Toothache he has probably always
found bearable, because he knew that in course of time it would end. On
the other hand, sound dreamless sleep is probably not less bearable to
him because during that sleep he has not a ghost of a notion that he
will ever wake up again. He is carried, that is to say, every day of
his life while in health, into a state closely resembling annihilation
of consciousness, in which such annihilation has no terrors for him
at all; he accepts it as a comfortable part of existence, and goes to
it with delight when his faculties are tired. Its attractions for him
would naturally be less while all his senses were alert and fresh.
But the waking man is not the whole man; the subconscious life,
acquiescent to imposed conditions, occupies by far the larger part
of him. He can, therefore, only predicate the inclinations of his
waking hours; in sleep he may revert to a very strong affinity for that
annihilation of self-conscious life against which, in his waking hours,
he protests his dread.
And now a further word of comfort for those moral teachers who assure
us that if once we let go the idea of personal immortality, with its
accompanying implications of eternal reward or punishment, the conduct
of the human race is bound to degenerate, and that man’s only logical
motto will then be, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we
die.”
To refute that deduction we have but to remember that sociology is a
thing of ancestry and evolution, and has committed us to a weight of
facts against which precept and theory are powerless. We have only
to look back into Nature to see how persistently (without, one must
suppose, any promise of future reward after death) a contrary instinct
emerges from the establishment of the social bond in nest and herd and
hive. And why--if that emerging instinct leads on, in man’s reasoned
estimation, to foolishness--why do we so specially admire the communal
life of ant and bee, and incline sometimes to wonder whether (behind so
marvellous an order of altruistic energy) there be not concealed more
and not less of spiritual apprehension than in the more individualistic
forms of insect and animal life? And why, on the contrary, has the
wise cuckoo become a sort of byword for the singular economy with which
it has disentangled its life from care or responsibility?
It is surely very unfair thus to erect the cuckoo into a moral emblem
for reprobation, if it is only doing by instinct, what man would do by
reason and logic were the darkness of his own destiny made clear to him.
And similarly, it is surely disingenuous on our part to exalt as a
moral emblem the instinct of ant and bee to subordinate the life of the
individual to the general--if we deny to ant and bee the immortality
by which alone such altruism can be recompensed; or if we are to
believe that a clearer knowledge of their future lot would cause them
in logic and reason to declare that life on those terms was not worth
living, and that “to eat, drink, and die to-morrow” were better than to
live longer and labour for a vain repetition of lives like their own
indefinitely multiplied. It is ridiculous to impose the moral emblem
unless you grant also the justifying conditions.
Because the bee and the ant live unconscious of their impending doom,
are we, therefore, to regard them as a hoodwinked race, set to labour
at the dictates of the Creative capitalist on terms which contain in
them no adequate reward? Suppose, for a moment, that revelation could
descend upon ants’ nest and hive, and tell these workers that beyond
death the future held for them no store--that their immortality
was the immortality not of individual but of race; and suppose that
thereupon they all struck and went forth to die each singly in their
own way--would that moral emblem impress us, do you think, as a thing
worthy of imitation or of praise?
But why (let us think) is the predication of such an event so
impossible and so grotesque? Is it not because the life, the individual
life of ant or bee is so impregnated with that instinct of communalism
which gives the species its distinctive character, that it is
impossible to sunder them, or to imagine the individual capable (while
in the social _milieu_) of pursuing individual ends alone, after a
following, over millions of years, of life in the communal form. Life,
the thread of life which runs through them, is too much engrained with
communism for separatist principles ever again to prevail.
And surely it is the same with man. Individualism, separatism,
self-obsessionism, though still present in the phenomena of existence,
are more and more subject to qualifications from which they cannot
escape. And even the most evil form of individualism has to be
parasitic or predatory; it cannot exist alone; even against its
will it becomes conditioned by other lives. And the communal sense
of man, implicit within the innumerable forms of life through which
he has evolved, will continue to lay its hold on the parasitic and
the predatory, and will do so quite effectively on the basis of an
evolutionary past, the tendencies of which were established before ever
theological definitions came to give them impulse and strength.
Is it not almost ludicrous to suggest that that communal instinct
will cease to play, if the hope of individual reward after death is
withdrawn from the human race? Will man--because he is nobler than
the beast, because at his best he does things more altruistic, more
self-sacrificing, more self-forgetting, more self-transcending than any
of these--do less nobly because he envisages destiny, which (if he see
it as destiny) he will see as the logical outcome of evolutionary law?
It is possible, it is even probable, that all phases of theological
thought have had their use in giving direction and stimulus to the
human brain; if they have done nothing but stimulate rebellion against
obscurantist authority they have had value of a positive kind. But
we may go even further than this, for “everything possible to be
believed,” says Blake, “is an image of truth.” And under many a
concept, distorted by ignorance or guile, has lain a germ of the true
life which draws man on to communal ends. In time that germ puts off
the husk that seemed once (perhaps in some cases actually was) the
protective armoury through which alone it could survive for the use
of a later day. But though old reasons have been shed, the essential
value has not changed; and often it is less by logic and reason than
by the strong and subtle links of association that we preserve what is
good of past credulities.
The doctrine of conscious immortality, however much belittled by its
appeal to selfish individualism, has done a work for the human race.
It has held the germ of an ideal for unity which is receiving a more
universal interpretation to-day than the earlier theologians would ever
have allowed, or than man, in his then stage of development, could have
thought it worth while to hand on to his intellectual heirs. Perhaps
only because he conceived it in just such a form have its values been
preserved.
I am reminded in this connection of the method by which the wild swine
of the New Forest were taught to obey the voice of the horn by means
of which the swine-herd, called them back each night from their free
roaming in the forest. The way he did it was this. Having first formed
his herd, some four or five hundred strong, he penned them in a narrow
space where water and warm shelter were to be found; and there, in the
allotted enclosure, according them no liberty, he fed them daily to the
sound of the horn. Food and music became a sort of celestial harmony to
pig’s brain--when they heard the one, good reason was given them for
expecting the other.
Presently, in a well-fed condition, they were set free to roam; and
being full and satisfied they did not roam far; and at night the horn
sounded them back to an ample meal, and continued to sound while again
they ate and were satisfied.
So at last, by association, the horn came to have such a beneficent
meaning that the mere sound of it sufficed to bring them back at
nightfall to their appointed place of rest. They might roam for miles
and miles during the day, but night and the sound of the horn brought
them all back safe to fold. And when that habit had become established,
they did not cease to return even though the swineherd no longer
supplied the food which had first given music its charm to those savage
breasts.
And, similarly, I doubt not, that, though all hope of material profit
or reward be withdrawn from man’s mind, that call of the horn which
he has heard of old will still bring his spirit to the resting-place
at the appointed time; nor will he wish either to shorten his days or
debase his pleasures because the horn has ceased to provide the meal
which it once taught him to expect.
Do not let anything I have said be taken as suggesting that the
spiritual forces of man’s nature may not be conserved, transmuted,
re-assimilated, or re-distributed, as surely and with as little waste
as are the material elements of life which pass through disintegration
and decay into new forms. The processes by which such changes are
wrought may be, and may ever remain, a mystery to human sense. There
may be yet in the making a new order or plane of evolution by which
the process will be quickened and perfected. Soul of man may be in
the making, though it may be very far removed from that aspect of
individualism with which the anthropomorphic tendencies of theology
have burdened it. But--whether life thus rises by unknown law to
further ends, or whether it passes out, like the life of leaves, into
the general decay with which autumn each year fertilises the bed of
mother earth--of one thing I would ask you to be confident--that the
bandying of words and theories, and the discussion, tending this way
or that, of man’s destiny after death, are not in any way likely to
alter or to undo those forward-driving forces and communal desires with
which, from an inheritance of so many millions of years, the life of
humanity has become endowed. The will to live will still lift up the
race and carry it forward to new ends, whether man thinks he sees in
death the end of his personal existence, or only a new and a better
beginning. And whether he claims or resigns that prospect of reward he
will never be able to rid himself of the sense which revives after all
failures and crimes, that man is his brother-man--or be able to refrain
at his best from laying down his life, without calculation of personal
benefit to himself, so that others may live.
The highest manifestations of human genius, the most perfected forms
of self-realisation in art, in literature, and science, have been
given to us--and will continue to be given to us--independent of any
bargain that name and identity shall for ever remain attached thereto
while posterity enjoys the benefit. The artist might foresee that his
name would, in a brief time, become dissociated from his work, and his
memory blotted out from the book of the living; he would produce it all
the same. The reformer might know that his motives would be aspersed,
that his name would become after death a spitting and a reproach; but,
for the sake of the cause he believed in, he would still be willing to
die a dishonoured death and leave a reprobated name, to a world that
had failed to understand.
That is human nature at its best; and you will not change it or
endanger it through any increased doubt thrown by modern thought or
science on the prospect of conscious immortality after death. For
whether we recognise it or not, a subconscious spirit, not perhaps of
immortality but of unity, permeates us all; and for furtherance and
worship of that which his soul desires, the spirit of man will ever be
ready to work and strive, and to pass unconditionally into dust--if
that indeed be the condition on which he holds his birthright in a life
worth living.
W. H. Smith & Son, The Arden Press, Stamford Street, London, S.E.1
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|Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. |
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