of the field and jungle, and every fowl of the air, and every insect
that creeps and flies; and we can only look upon creation as an end
in itself. To ask what the great spectacle is for, is to betray our
tradesman habit of mind. Man is a link in an endless chain of being.
If we ask what he is for, the old answer of the catechism is as good
as any--“To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” In other words, to
make the most of his life and strive for the highest happiness, which
is knowledge and appreciation of the universal. Coleridge says we
glorify God when we work for the well-being of mankind.
How quite impossible it is for us to adjust our minds to the thought
of death--to the thought of the absolute negation of life! When we
torment ourselves about death, about the coldness and darkness of the
grave, about being cut off from all the warm and happy currents of
life that flow about us, we are unconsciously thinking of ourselves
as still living, or as conscious of the gloom and negation that
await us. Thus, when Huxley wrote to a friend (John Morley) that the
thought of extinction disturbed him more and more as he neared the
end of life, he fell into this common fallacy, or contradiction. “It
flashes across me,” he writes, “at all sorts of times with a sort of
horror that in 1900 I shall probably know no more of what is going on
than I did in 1800. I had sooner be in hell, a good deal--” as if he
expected to lie awake nights in his grave lamenting his sad fate and
saying to himself, “I had sooner be in hell,” where also he expected
he would be conscious of his improved condition!
What possible difference could it make to him if he did not know
any more in 1900 than he did in 1800? Did he expect to enjoy his
knowledge in 1900? If not, why worry about it? What he was really
lamenting was that he did not know then and there what he might
know if he lived till 1900. He knew that human knowledge was making
tremendous strides, and the thought that he should not share in its
advancement chilled him.
It is all very human, but very childish. We may to-day dread some
task or ordeal that we are to face to-morrow, because to-morrow we
expect to be alive, but shall we shrink from the to-morrow of death
on the same grounds?
There is wisdom as well as wit in the epitaph in dialogue which a
clever Greek Byzantine composed for Pyrrho:
“Art thou dead, Pyrrho?”
“I do not know.”
If we put the same question to our own dead, if they could answer,
they would say, “We do not know.” If they knew, would not that be
proof that they were not dead? May we not answer Huxley that if
consciousness is extinguished with life, he is not going to lie
awake nights in his grave worrying about it? There is comfort in the
thought that if there is no immortality, we shall not know it.
Rereading that wise and delightful old Frenchman, Montaigne, I find
that more than three hundred years ago he was of the same mind that
I am in this matter: “Why should we fear a thing whose being lost
cannot be lamented?” “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred
years hence is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a
hundred years ago.”
An avaricious man might worry if he knew he would have no more money
on the next Christmas than he had on the last, unless his physician
had assured him that he could not be alive on the next Christmas.
Then, if he worried, it would be on account of his heirs. But one’s
heirs cannot inherit his wisdom; it dies with him.
Death is such an extraordinary, such an unspeakable event that we
cannot think of ourselves as non-existent. When you try to see
yourself in your own coffin, or standing beside your own grave, it
is still as a living man that you thus behold yourself. It is, of
course, as living men and women that we are disturbed over thoughts
of the grave. The future is just as secure for us all as is the past.
A moment between two eternities is life; a spark that draws a brief
line upon the darkness and is gone. The spark has its antecedent
condition in the wood and coal and the processes of combustion
from which it sprang, and it has its subsequent conditions in the
invisible gases into which it has vanished, but as a point of heat
and light, it exists no more. Our wise attitude toward death is, I
think, to forget or ignore it entirely. We shall not know it when it
overtakes us. “_Avida nunquam desinere mortalitas._” “Men must endure
their going hence, even as their coming hither--ripeness is all.”
XI. DEATH
I
In death the elements of the body are not changed--oxygen is still
oxygen, carbon still carbon. What has happened, then? Can it be
explained by saying that a process has been reversed? Does it bear
any true analogy to the redistribution of type after the printer
has set it up and printed his book? The type is the same, but the
relation of all the units has been changed. The printer has arranged
them so that collectively they expressed to him certain meanings or
ideas. These ideas did not exist in the type, but in the order of
its arrangement. In one order or combination the letters meant one
thing; in another order or combination they expressed quite another.
The same type will spell dog or God. When redistributed and returned
to the different fonts, the letters express nothing but themselves.
If this is a true analogy, then, in the case of the living book, man,
what stands for the compositor and printer? We can only call the
compositor the organizing impulse; but whence this impulse, and whose
idea is it trying to express? The redistribution of the elements of
the body is done through the activity of other forms of life--the
micro-organisms--those minute forms reduce the body to its original
elements. As we thus have life at the end of the life of an organism,
do we also have life at the beginning of the organism? Ancestral life
certainly, or the primordial germ; but is there a living principle
back of and before all? Does the logic of the situation force us to
the belief in an original Creator? The human mind is so constituted
that in some form or under definite concepts, we have to postulate a
first or primal Cause; we have to think of a beginning; but is there
any beginning to a circle, or any center to the surface of a sphere?
There may be no beginning or no limit in time or space to the cosmos.
This is unthinkable to us in our present state. Yet in making that
statement I am thinking of the unthinkable. We can deal only with
parts of Nature; as a whole it is beyond our power to grasp. All
bodies on the earth’s surface unsupported fall; this is our universal
experience. All moving bodies come to a standstill unless power from
without is constantly supplied. Perpetual motion is impossible, but
the earth and the other planets are unsupported, and their motion is
perpetual. Or we may say that they fall forever toward the sun and
never reach it, and that the sun falls forever toward some other
sun or system and never reaches it. The laws of force and matter as
we contend with them in our experiences are inoperative in sidereal
space; there is motion without friction, energy without waste,
dissipation without exhaustion. Neither upper nor under, neither
falling nor rising, neither end nor beginning. Cause and effect,
rest and motion, are one. The self-activity of the universe quite
transcends our experiences; the self-maintenance of living bodies
is far beyond our reach; any end to the chain of causal sequence is
quite unthinkable to us. Our minds are made in that way. They are
fashioned in the school of cause and effect.
Nothing can get out of the universe because there is no out to the
universe. Can that which has no ending have a beginning? Can that
which has no circumference have a center? Can we think of anything
so hot that it could not be hotter? Or so small that it could not
be smaller? Or so big that it could not be bigger? No, because our
minds have been schooled in this comparative method. Our sense shows
us a world of degrees. We can think of absolute darkness, but not
of absolute light. In the Mammoth Cave you may realize absolute
darkness; but even on the sun itself would you experience absolute
light? We seem to be able to find an end to the negative, but not to
the positive. We can think of a body as at absolute rest, but can we
conceive of it going so fast that it could not go faster?
Death is our consciousness of a peculiar change in matter, just as
life is our consciousness of the opposite change--one destructive,
the other constructive. The constituents of the body remain
unchanged, but a peculiar activity set up among the particles,
by what, we know not, is instituted in life and ceases in death.
An organism is made up of organs, all working together, but each
subordinated to the whole. The whole, this concerted action, may
cease, and the individual dies, as we say, and yet the minute
subdivisions, the cells, may be alive. Certain ferments in the body
may go on for some time after the life of the man has gone out. And
living cells may go on multiplying endlessly without producing an
organized being.
II
“It is all right,” said Walt Whitman to me as I was leaving his
death-bed and hearing his voice for the last time--“It is all right.”
Of course it was all right, and it will be all right when each and
all of us fall into the last eternal sleep. Else it would not be.
Our being here is all right, is it not? “Friendly and faithful,”
says Whitman, “are the arms that have helped me,” and friendly and
faithful must be the arms that bear us away. If it was good to come,
it will be good to go--good in the large, cosmic sense, good in that
it is in keeping with the spirit of the All. Not the good of our
brief personal successes and triumphs, but good as evolution is good,
as the processes of growth and decay are good. If life is good, death
must be equally good, as each waits upon the other. From what point
of view can we say that death is not all right? Certainly not from
the point of view of this universe. Archimedes could have moved the
world had he had some other world upon which to place his lever, and
we must have some other universe to plant our feet upon to condemn
death.
As I have already said, we look upon death as an evil because we look
upon it from the happy fields of life, and see ourselves as alive in
our graves and lamenting that we are shut off from all the light and
love and movement of the world. Does our prenatal state seem an evil?
Did anything begin _de novo_, when we came into being? Not the
elements of our bodies surely; they were as old as the cosmos; not
the germ of our minds and souls; they were as old as the human
race and older--old as the first dawn of life. Is it the _I_ that
is new?--that which makes you you and me me? And that is probably
nothing more than a new distribution and arrangement of the physical
and psychical elements and forces of which and by which we are made.
The pattern of our personality is new; each of us differs somewhat
from all the myriads of human beings who have lived upon the earth;
but is form, pattern, personality, separable from the material that
composes it?
It may be cheerfully admitted that when we look at the question in
this light, we are whistling to keep our courage up. What of it? The
band plays to keep the courage of the soldiers up when they go into
battle, and what are we but soldiers fighting the good fight of truth
against error, of courage against fear, of the heroic against the
pusillanimous? The whole is greater than any of its parts. Nature is
more than man. We must learn to efface ourselves. The soul knows no
rewards or punishments. If it be heroic to sacrifice life in this
world, it may be equally heroic to sacrifice life in any other world,
so that we prove ourselves worthy of the gods.
XII. HEAVEN AND EARTH
Truly things are not what they seem. When we put heaven and earth
far apart, we think as children. Heaven and earth are pretty close
together. The shortest arm can reach from one to the other. When we
go to heaven we shall not have far to travel, and I dare say the
other place is quite as near, and, if reports be true, the road is
broader and easier to travel. What children we are in such matters!
The wisest men have the language of ignorance and superstition
imposed upon them. How difficult it is not to think of the heavens up
there as a reality, something above us and superior to us, a finer
world, nearer God, lighted by the stars, the abode of spirits, the
source of all good, our final celestial home. Did not Elijah ascend
into heaven? Did not Paul have heavenly visions? Have not the saints
in all ages turned their faces and lifted imploring hands to heaven?
How these things have burnt themselves into our minds! We cannot
escape them.
In our floods of religious emotion we instinctively look away from
the earth. The mystery, the immensity, the purity of the heavens
above us make us turn our faces thitherward, and as naturally make us
turn downward when we consider the source of evil. The poor old earth
which has mothered us and nursed us we treat with scant respect. Our
awe and veneration we reserve for the worlds we know not of. Our
senses sell us out. The mud on our shoes disenchants us. It is only
Whitman with his cosmic consciousness that can closely relate the
heavens and the earth:
“Underneath the divine soil,
Overhead the sun.”
To most of us the morning stars that once sang together are of
another stuff. The music of the spheres must be vastly different from
the roar and grind of our old rusty and outworn planet. So we turn
to the heavens, the abode of purity and light. So do we discount and
black-list the earth where we have to pay in struggle and pain the
price of our development. Think you we should not have to pay the
same price in any other world worth living in?
Emerson in his Journal quotes his brother Charles as saying long ago
that “the nap was worn off the earth”; it was become threadbare, like
an outworn garment. Probably it seems so to each of us as time goes
on. In places in Europe the nap must be very short at this time. But
the nap will come again, even on those shell-swept regions, after
Nature has had her way. Nature grows old in geologic or in cosmic
time; the mountains decay, the waters recede; but in man’s time the
earth is endowed with perennial youth.
Science strips us of our illusions and delusions; it strips us of
most of the garments in which the spirit of man has sought in all
ages to clothe itself against the chill of an impersonal universe;
it takes down the protecting roof of the heavens above us and shows
us an unspeakable void strewn with suns and worlds beyond numbers
to compute, but nowhere any signs of the blessed abode to which our
religious aspirations have pointed.
It is interesting, in this connection, to note the attitude of the
old writers, such as Cornaro, the Italian, toward the heavens. They
evidently look upon the heavens as outside of Nature. In speculating
as to why it is that some persons have so little vitality, Cornaro
reckons the influence of the heavens may be one cause. He says he
never could persuade himself to believe that Nature, being the mother
of all, could be so ungenerous to any of her children; hence it must
be some hostile influence from above. Similar notions seem to have
been held in Shakespeare’s time:
“It is the stars,
The stars above us, govern our conditions;
Else one self mate and make could not beget
Such different issues.”
XIII. THINKING AND ACTING
It is true we do not, as a rule, act without thinking, or without
some sort of psychic process, but thinking and acting are radically
different. Or, we may say that the practical reason is alone
concerned in action, and the abstract intellect in general reasoning.
When we come to act, we know that we are free to choose between two
or more objects or courses; when we think or reason abstractly, we
know the will is not free. Every act has its antecedent cause. But
we are practically free because we feel no restraint or compulsion.
We feel responsible for our acts. We do not blame our red-haired
father, or our grandfather of Irish blood, for our hasty temper; we
feel that this is our very selves. What we call moral responsibility
rests upon this sense of freedom. We are not aware of the fatality
that binds us, any more than we are of the weight of the atmosphere
that presses upon us so tremendously. At the court of absolute
reason we see what puppets and automata we are, but at the court of
practical justice we see and feel that we are free to do right as we
see the right. The contradictions which Balfour sees, in his chapter
on “Naturalism and Ethics,” between the results of practical life and
of abstract reasoning is of a kind which one sees everywhere in the
universe. The circle is a perpetual contradiction. How can a line go
in all directions?--and in no direction? In our practical lives there
is an upper and an under, an up and a down, but away from the earth,
or considering the earth as a whole, there is no such thing.
Righteous indignation at the misconduct of others, or
self-condemnation, repentance, remorse, are reasonable feelings
because we actually feel them. We have no choice in the matter. To
whatever conclusion abstract reason leads us in regard to them, it
does not affect our practical conduct, because our conduct is founded
upon the sense of freedom. We are here to act, to do, and not to
reason abstractly. This is the tree of the forbidden fruit. When we
eat of it we know things that may stand in the way of our practical
living. Balfour should see that we are determinists or naturists when
we reason, but free agents when we act, and that there is no getting
away from the contradiction.
I may be the duplicate of my father, or of my grandfather; every one
of my traits may be inherited; but that does not prevent me from
feeling that they are my own; they are vital in me as they were in
him, and I feel responsible for my own acts just as he did for his,
though I could not act otherwise. I could not, but I did not know it.
I thought I could act as I pleased.
The world which philosophy reveals to us is vastly different from
the world practical life reveals. We are sure that light and sound
are real entities, but philosophy tells us that one is the sensation
which vibrations in the ether, set going by the sun, make upon the
optic nerve, and that sound is the sensation which vibrations in
the air make upon the auditory nerve. When we know this we do not
change our action in reference to them--they are still just as real
to our senses as ever they were. The moral law is not discredited
or overthrown when we discover through the abstract reason that
fate, or necessity, rules our lives. We made the moral law and we
try to live up to it. We do not always succeed. All trees aim at the
vertical position; it is the position which gravity imposes upon
them; but owing to various accidents and conditions the trees are
not all plumb. How free they seem to grow at almost any angle with
the plane of the earth’s surface! How they run out their branches
horizontally in defiance of the gravity that rules them and lift up
in their trunks and leaves tons of water and other minerals against
the pull of gravity! How free they seem, how they bend to the wind
that would overthrow them, how various they are in form and habit of
growth, in the shape of their leaves, the kinds of their fruits, the
character of their roots! Yet science shows us how the unalterable
physical laws rule them. They lean toward the light and the free air
in obedience to physical and chemical laws. And yet, no doubt, if
the trees were conscious of themselves, as we are, every oak-tree
would say, “I feel free to be an oak,” and every pine-tree and beech
and willow and maple would feel a like freedom. The Irishman feels
no compulsion or necessity in being an Irishman, nor the Frenchman
in being a Frenchman. All life is held in the leash of physical and
chemical laws, and yet knows it not.
We feel that there is beauty in nature; when we reflect, we know
that the feeling for beauty is an emotion of our own minds, and
not a quality of outward things. Scenes radically different awaken
the emotion in us, or may awaken it in one and not in another
(see Emerson’s ecstasy on a bare moor). The world is what we make
it, and duty is what we make it, and the ugly is what we make it.
Putrefaction, repulsive to us, is to science a beautiful chemical
process. Odors that are offensive to us are evidently agreeable to
the dog. Sounds which please us seem to disturb him. The absolute
is outside of life. If the orbs of the heavens were conscious, they
would doubtless feel free to go where they do go; it would be their
choice; it would pain them to do otherwise. The comet rushes toward
the sun with joy; the music of the spheres is the expression of their
freedom and contentment. Can you help winking when the flashlight
goes off, or when a missile passes near your eyes? Our voluntary
actions are equally based upon physical laws.
Balfour, in his “Foundation of Belief,” talks about the beauty of
holiness, the beauty of sanctity, but these things are beautiful
only to a certain type of mind. The time will come when they will
not be looked upon as beautiful or desirable. These conceptions
grew when men lived for another world, when this world stood to
them as the sum of evil. Men then saw nothing holy or divine on
earth except the denying of earth. That state of mind has largely
passed. Holy men have had their day. We see now that this world is
a celestial body, and that all our conceptions of heavenly abodes
are untenable. For my part the most lovable and admirable men and
women I have known had no savor of sanctity. They were wise, kind,
helpful, loving, living with zest the life of every day, intent on
making their earthly lives square with what is generally accepted
as right conduct, and therefore comfortably indifferent to what the
theologians are so concerned about--salvation after death, and the
securing of their “mansions in the skies.” Martyrdom bravely faced
excites our admiration, all heroic acts are beautiful and admirable,
and there are good naturalistic reasons why this should be so. But
our religious history has begotten a whole brood of ideas that must
gradually fade and go out, and our standards will more and more be
those of this world.
Mr. Balfour would hardly deny that the organ with which we do our
thinking and reasoning and form our deductions, the organ which
is the seat of our emotions of the beautiful and of religious
aspirations, is a mass of gray and white matter, and that all these
things are the result of certain molecular changes or movements in
the fluids or solids of the brain substance; in other words, that
there is a physical and physiological basis to all our mental and
emotional life. Does this material side in any way discredit these
faculties and feelings? Does not all that we call the spiritual
adhere in the material? Can we find that inner world, or any clue to
it, by dissecting the brain? Has it, therefore, any reality except in
our imagination? Prove that it exists apart from or independent of
the body, and there is no more to be said.
But what I wanted most to say is that the reason of things, or final
explanation of things seems to take the poetry and romance out of
them. Reduce religion or æsthetics or art to terms of psychology, and
they no longer appeal to the emotions or stimulate the imagination.
Naturalism is true--reason can reach no other conclusion--but the
truths of naturalism do not satisfy the moral and religious nature.
The heart is a big, strong, self-acting, muscular pump, but when
we lay our hand upon the heart and refer our emotions, our love,
our aspirations, to it, we idealize it, we do not then think of its
physical function and character. By this act we are still deferring
to the ancient and outworn belief that in this region resides the
soul--the part of man that loves and hates and hopes and fears.
The brain is the temple of the mind or the vestibule of the spiritual
world, but we can explain it only in terms of anatomy, physiology,
and physics which darken and chill our sensibilities.