of large affairs, in commerce, in the courts, in the state,--is prone to
develop narrow and special talent; but, unless combined with a certain
contemplative turn, a taste for abstract truth, for the moral
laws,--does not build up faith, or lead to content. There is a profound
melancholy at the base of men of active and powerful talent, seldom
suspected. Many years ago, there were two men in the United States
Senate, both of whom are now dead. I have seen them both; one of them I
personally knew. Both were men of distinction, and took an active part
in the politics of their day and generation. They were men of intellect,
and one of them, at a later period, gave to a friend this anecdote: He
said that when he entered the Senate he became in a short time intimate
with one of his colleagues, and, though attentive enough to the routine
of public duty, they daily returned to each other, and spent much time
in conversation on the immortality of the soul, and other intellectual
questions, and cared for little else. When my friend at last left
Congress, they parted, his colleague remaining there, and, as their
homes were widely distant from each other, it chanced that he never met
him again, until, twenty-five years afterwards, they saw each other,
through open doors, at a distance, in a crowded reception at the
President's house in Washington. Slowly they advanced towards each
other, as they could, through the brilliant company, and at last
met,--said nothing, but shook hands long and cordially. At last his
friend said, "Any light, Albert?" "None," replied Albert. "Any light,
Lewis?" "None," replied he. They looked in each other's eyes silently,
gave one more shake each to the hand he held, and thus parted for the
last time. Now I should say that the impulse which drew these minds to
this inquiry through so many years was a better affirmative evidence
than their failure to find a confirmation was negative. I ought to add
that, though men of good minds, they were both pretty strong
materialists in their daily aims and way of life. I admit that you shall
find a good deal of scepticism in the streets and hotels and places of
coarse amusement. But that is only to say that the practical faculties
are faster developed than the spiritual. Where there is depravity there
is a slaughter-house style of thinking. One argument of future life is
the recoil of the mind in such company,--our pain at every sceptical
statement. The sceptic affirms that the universe is a nest of boxes with
nothing in the last box. All laughter at man is bitter, and puts us out
of good activity. When Bonaparte insisted that the heart is one of the
entrails; that it is the pit of the stomach that moves the world;--do we
thank him for the gracious instruction? Our disgust is the protest of
human nature against a lie.
The ground of hope is in the infinity of the world, which infinity
reappears in every particle; the powers of all society in every
individual, and of all mind in every mind. I know against all
appearances that the universe can receive no detriment; that there is a
remedy for every wrong and a satisfaction for every soul. Here is this
wonderful thought. But whence came it? Who put it in the mind? It was
not I, it was not you; it is elemental,--belongs to thought and virtue,
and whenever we have either, we see the beams of this light. When the
Master of the universe has points to carry in his government he
impresses his will in the structure of minds.
But proceeding to the enumeration of the few simple elements of the
natural faith, the first fact that strikes us is our delight in
permanence. All great natures are lovers of stability and permanence, as
the type of the Eternal. After science begins, belief of permanence must
follow in a healthy mind. Things so attractive, designs so wise, the
secret workman so transcendently skilful that it tasks successive
generations of observers only to find out, part with part, the delicate
contrivance and adjustment of a weed, of a moss, to its wants, growth,
and perpetuation, all these adjustments becoming perfectly intelligible
to our study,--and the contriver of it all forever hidden! To breathe,
to sleep, is wonderful. But never to know the Cause, the Giver, and
infer his character and will! Of what import this vacant sky, these
puffing elements, these insignificant lives full of selfish loves and
quarrels and ennui? Everything is prospective, and man is to live
hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution
of the enigma. And I think that the naturalist works not for himself,
but for the believing mind, which turns his discoveries to revelations,
receives them as private tokens of the grand good-will of the Creator.
The mind delights in immense time; delights in rocks, in metals, in
mountain-chains, and in the evidence of vast geologic periods which
these give; in the age of trees, say of the Sequoias, a few of which
will span the whole history of mankind; in the noble toughness and
imperishableness of the palm-tree, which thrives under abuse; delights
in architecture, whose building lasts so long,--"a house," says Ruskin,
"is not in its prime until it is five hundred years old,"--and here are
the Pyramids, which have as many thousands, and cromlechs and
earth-mounds much older than these.
We delight in stability, and really are interested in nothing that ends.
What lasts a century pleases us in comparison with what lasts an hour.
But a century, when we have once made it familiar and compared it with a
true antiquity, looks dwarfish and recent; and it does not help the
matter adding numbers, if we see that it has an end, which it will reach
just as surely as the shortest. A candle a mile long or a hundred miles
long does not help the imagination; only a self-feeding fire, an
inextinguishable lamp, like the sun and the star, that we have not yet
found date and origin for. But the nebular theory threatens their
duration also, bereaves them of this glory, and will make a shift to eke
out a sort of eternity by succession, as plants and animals do.
And what are these delights in the vast and permanent and strong, but
approximations and resemblances of what is entire and sufficing,
creative and self-sustaining life? For the Creator keeps his word with
us. These long-lived or long-enduring objects are to us, as we see them,
only symbols of somewhat in us far longer-lived. Our passions, our
endeavors, have something ridiculous and mocking, if we come to so hasty
an end. If not to _be_, how like the bells of a fool is the trump of
fame! Nature does not, like the Empress Anne of Russia, call together
all the architectural genius of the Empire to build and finish and
furnish a palace of snow, to melt again to water in the first thaw. Will
you, with vast cost and pains, educate your children to be adepts in
their several arts, and, as soon as they are ready to produce a
masterpiece, call out a file of soldiers to shoot them down? We must
infer our destiny from the preparation. We are driven by instinct to
hive innumerable experiences, which are of no visible value, and which
we may revolve through many lives before we shall assimilate or exhaust
them. Now there is nothing in nature capricious, or whimsical, or
accidental, or unsupported. Nature never moves by jumps, but always in
steady and supported advances. The implanting of a desire indicates that
the gratification of that desire is in the constitution of the creature
that feels it; the wish for food, the wish for motion, the wish for
sleep, for society, for knowledge, are not random whims, but grounded in
the structure of the creature, and meant to be satisfied by food, by
motion, by sleep, by society, by knowledge. If there is the desire to
live, and in larger sphere, with more knowledge and power, it is because
life and knowledge and power are good for us, and we are the natural
depositaries of these gifts. The love of life is out of all proportion
to the value set on a single day, and seems to indicate, like all our
other experiences, a conviction of immense resources and possibilities
proper to us, on which we have never drawn.
All the comfort I have found teaches me to confide that I shall not have
less in times and places that I do not yet know. I have known admirable
persons, without feeling that they exhaust the possibilities of virtue
and talent. I have seen what glories of climate, of summer mornings and
evenings, of midnight sky,--I have enjoyed the benefits of all this
complex machinery of arts and civilization, and its results of comfort.
The good Power can easily provide me millions more as good. Shall I hold
on with both hands to every paltry possession? All I have seen teaches
me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen. Whatever it be which
the great Providence prepares for us, it must be something large and
generous, and in the great style of his works. The future must be up to
the style of our faculties,--of memory, of hope, of imagination, of
reason. I have a house, a closet which holds my books, a table, a
garden, a field: are these, any or all, a reason for refusing the angel
who beckons me away,--as if there were no room or skill elsewhere that
could reproduce for me as my like or my enlarging wants may require? We
wish to live for what is great, not for what is mean. I do not wish to
live for the sake of my warm house, my orchard, or my pictures. I do not
wish to live to wear out my boots.
As a hint of endless being, we may rank that novelty which perpetually
attends life. The soul does not age with the body. On the borders of the
grave, the wise man looks forward with equal elasticity of mind, or
hope; and why not, after millions of years, on the verge of still newer
existence?--for it is the nature of intelligent beings to be forever new
to life. Most men are insolvent, or promise by their countenance and
conversation and by their early endeavor much more than they ever
perform,--suggesting a design still to be carried out; the man must have
new motives, new companions, new condition, and another term. Franklin
said, "Life is rather a state of embryo, a preparation for life. A man
is not completely born until he has passed through death." Every really
able man, in whatever direction he work,--a man of large affairs, an
inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter,--if you talk
sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far
short of what it should be. What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but
the perpetual promise of his Creator?
The fable of the Wandering Jew is agreeable to men, because they want
more time and land in which to execute their thoughts. But a higher
poetic use must be made of the legend. Take us as we are, with our
experience, and transfer us to a new planet, and let us digest for its
inhabitants what we could of the wisdom of this. After we have found our
depth there, and assimilated what we could of the new experience,
transfer us to a new scene. In each transfer we shall have acquired, by
seeing them at a distance, a new mastery of the old thoughts, in which
we were too much immersed. In short, all our intellectual action, not
promises, but bestows a feeling of absolute existence. We are taken out
of time and breathe a purer air. I know not whence we draw the assurance
of prolonged life, of a life which shoots that gulf we call death, and
takes hold of what is real and abiding, by so many claims as from our
intellectual history. Salt is a good preserver; cold is: but a truth
cures the taint of mortality better, and "preserves from harm until
another period." A sort of absoluteness attends all perception of
truth,--no smell of age, no hint of corruption. It is self-sufficing,
sound, entire.
Lord Bacon said: "Some of the philosophers who were least divine denied
generally the immortality of the soul, yet came to this point, that
whatsoever motions the spirit of man could act and perform without the
organs of the body might remain after death, which were only those of
the understanding, and not of the affections; so immortal and
incorruptible a thing did knowledge seem to them to be." And Van
Helmont, the philosopher of Holland, drew his sufficient proof purely
from the action of the intellect. "It is my greatest desire," he said,
"that it might be granted unto atheists to have tasted, at least but one
only moment, what it is intellectually to understand; whereby they may
feel the immortality of the mind, as it were, by touching." A farmer, a
laborer, a mechanic, is driven by his work all day, but it ends at
night; it has an end. But, as far as the mechanic or farmer is also a
scholar or thinker, his work has no end. That which he has learned is
that there is much more to be learned. The wiser he is, he feels only
the more his incompetence. "What we know is a point to what we do not
know." A thousand years,--tenfold, a hundred-fold his faculties, would
not suffice. The demands of his task are such that it becomes
omnipresent. He studies in his walking, at his meals, in his amusements,
even in his sleep. Montesquieu said, "The love of study is in us almost
the only eternal passion. All the others quit us in proportion as this
miserable machine which holds them approaches its ruin." "Art is long,"
says the thinker, "and life is short." He is but as a fly or a worm to
this mountain, this continent, which his thoughts inhabit. It is a
perception that comes by the activity of the intellect; never to the
lazy or rusty mind. Courage comes naturally to those who have the habit
of facing labor and danger, and who therefore know the power of their
arms and bodies; and courage or confidence in the mind comes to those
who know by use its wonderful forces and inspirations and returns.
Belief in its future is a reward kept only for those who use it. "To
me," said Goethe, "the eternal existence of my soul is proved from my
idea of activity. If I work incessantly till my death, nature is bound
to give me another form of existence, when the present can no longer
sustain my spirit."
It is a proverb of the world that good-will makes intelligence, that
goodness itself is an eye; and the one doctrine in which all religions
agree, is that new light is added to the mind in proportion as it uses
that which it has. "He that doeth the will of God abideth forever."
Ignorant people confound reverence for the intuitions with egotism.
There is no confusion in the things themselves. Health of mind consists
in the perception of law. Its dignity consists in being under the law.
Its goodness is the most generous extension of our private interests to
the dignity and generosity of ideas. Nothing seems to me so excellent as
a belief in the laws. It communicates nobleness, and, as it were, an
asylum in temples to the loyal soul.
I confess that everything connected with our personality fails. Nature
never spares the individual. We are always balked of a complete success.
No prosperity is promised to _that_. We have our indemnity only in the
success of that to which we belong. _That_ is immortal and we only
through that.
The soul stipulates for no private good. That which is private I see not
to be good. "If truth live, I live; if justice live, I live," said one
of the old saints, "and these by any man's suffering are enlarged and
enthroned."
The moral sentiment measures itself by sacrifice. It risks or ruins
property, health, life itself, without hesitation, for its thought, and
all men justify the man by their praise for this act. And Mahomet in the
same mind declared, "Not dead but living ye are to account all those who
are slain in the way of God."
On these grounds I think that wherever man ripens, this audacious belief
presently appears,--in the savage, savagely; in the good, purely. As
soon as thought is exercised, this belief is inevitable; as soon as
virtue glows, this belief confirms itself. It is a kind of summary or
completion of man. It cannot rest on a legend; it cannot be quoted from
one to another; it must have the assurance of a man's faculties that
they can fill a larger theatre and a longer term than nature here allows
him. Goethe said: "It is to a thinking being quite impossible to think
himself non-existent, ceasing to think and live; so far does every one
carry in himself the proof of immortality, and quite spontaneously. But
so soon as the man will be objective and go out of himself, so soon as
he dogmatically will grasp a personal duration to bolster up in cockney
fashion that inward assurance, he is lost in contradiction." The
doctrine is not sentimental, but is grounded in the necessities and
forces we possess. Nothing will hold but that which we must be and must
do.
"Man's heart the Almighty to the Future set
By secret but inviolate springs."
The revelation that is true is written on the palms of the hands, the
thought of our mind, the desire of our heart, or nowhere. My idea of
heaven is that there is no melodrama in it at all; that it is wholly
real. Here is the emphasis of conscience and experience; this is no
speculation, but the most practical of doctrines. Do you think that the
eternal chain of cause and effect which pervades nature, which threads
the globes as beads on a string, leaves this out of its circuit,--leaves
out this desire of God and men as a waif and a caprice, altogether cheap
and common, and falling without reason or merit?
We live by desire to live; we live by choices; by will, by thought, by
virtue, by the vivacity of the laws which we obey, and obeying share
their life,--or we die by sloth, by disobedience, by losing hold of
life, which ebbs out of us. But whilst I find the signatures, the hints
and suggestions, noble and wholesome,--whilst I find that all the ways
of virtuous living lead upward and not downward,--yet it is not my duty
to prove to myself the immortality of the soul. That knowledge is hidden
very cunningly. Perhaps the archangels cannot find the secret of their
existence, as the eye cannot see itself; but, ending or endless, to live
whilst I live.
There is a drawback to the value of all statements of the doctrine; and
I think that one abstains from writing or printing on the immortality of
the soul, because, when he comes to the end of his statement, the hungry
eyes that run through it will close disappointed; the listeners say,
That is not here which we desire,--and I shall be as much wronged by
their hasty conclusion, as they feel themselves wronged by my omissions.
I mean that I am a better believer, and all serious souls are better
believers, in the immortality than we can give grounds for. The real
evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down in
propositions, and therefore Wordsworth's "Ode" is the best modern essay
on the subject.
We cannot prove our faith by syllogisms. The argument refuses to form in
the mind. A conclusion, an inference, a grand augury, is ever hovering;
but attempt to ground it, and the reasons are all vanishing and
inadequate. You cannot make a written theory or demonstration of this as
you can an orrery of the Copernican astronomy. It must be sacredly
treated. Speak of the mount in the mount. Not by literature or theology,
but only by rare integrity, by a man permeated and perfumed with airs of
heaven,--with manliest or womanliest enduring love,--can the vision be
clear to a use the most sublime. And hence the fact that in the minds of
men the testimony of a few inspired souls has had such weight and
penetration. You shall not say, "O my bishop, O my pastor, is there any
resurrection? What do you think? Did Dr. Channing believe that we should
know each other? did Wesley? did Butler? did Fenelon?" What questions
are these! Go read Milton, Shakspeare, or any truly ideal poet. Read
Plato, or any seer of the interior realities. Read St. Augustine,
Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant. Let any master simply recite to you the
substantial laws of the intellect, and in the presence of the laws
themselves you will never ask such primary-school questions.
Is immortality only an intellectual quality, or, shall I say, only an
energy, there being no passive? He has it, and he alone, who gives life
to all names, persons, things, where he comes. No religion, not the
wildest mythology, dies for him; no art is lost. He vivifies what he
touches. Future state is an illusion for the ever-present state. It is
not length of life, but depth of life. It is not duration, but a taking
of the soul out of time, as all high action of the mind does: when we
are living in the sentiments we ask no questions about time. The
spiritual world takes place;--that which is always the same. But see how
the sentiment is wise. Jesus explained nothing, but the influence of him
took people out of time, and they felt eternal. A great integrity makes
us immortal; an admiration, a deep love, a strong will, arms us above
fear. It makes a day memorable. We say we lived years in that hour. It
is strange that Jesus is esteemed by mankind the bringer of the doctrine
of immortality. He is never once weak or sentimental; he is very
abstemious of explanation, he never preaches the personal immortality;
whilst Plato and Cicero had both allowed themselves to overstep the
stern limits of the spirit, and gratify the people with that picture.
How ill agrees this majestical immortality of our religion with the
frivolous population! Will you build magnificently for mice? Will you
offer empires to such as cannot set a house or private affairs in order?
Here are people who cannot dispose of a day; an hour hangs heavy on
their hands; and will you offer them rolling ages without end? But this
is the way we rise. Within every man's thought is a higher
thought,--within the character he exhibits to-day, a higher character.
The youth puts off the illusions of the child, the man puts off the
ignorance and tumultuous passions of youth; proceeding thence puts off
the egotism of manhood, and becomes at last a public and universal soul.
He is rising to greater heights, but also rising to realities; the outer
relations and circumstances dying out, he entering deeper into God, God
into him, until the last garment of egotism falls, and he is with
God,--shares the will and the immensity of the First Cause.
It is curious to find the selfsame feeling, that it is not immortality,
but eternity,--not duration, but a state of abandonment to the Highest,
and so the sharing of His perfection,--appearing in the farthest east
and west. The human mind takes no account of geography, language, or
legends, but in all utters the same instinct.
Yama, the lord of Death, promised Nachiketas, the son of Gautama, to
grant him three boons at his own choice. Nachiketas, knowing that his
father Gautama was offended with him, said, "O Death! let Gautama be
appeased in mind, and forget his anger against me: this I choose for the
first boon." Yama said, "Through my favor, Gautama will remember thee
with love as before." For the second boon, Nachiketas asks that the fire
by which heaven is gained be made known to him; which also Yama allows,
and says, "Choose the third boon, O Nachiketas!" Nachiketas said, there
is this inquiry. Some say the soul exists after the death of man; others
say it does not exist. This I should like to know, instructed by thee.
Such is the third of the boons. Yama said, "For this question, it was
inquired of old, even by the gods; for it is not easy to understand it.
Subtle is its nature. Choose another boon, O Nachiketas! Do not compel
me to this." Nachiketas said, "Even by the gods was it inquired. And as
to what thou sayest, O Death, that it is not easy to understand it,
there is no other speaker to be found like thee. There is no other boon
like this." Yama said, "Choose sons and grandsons who may live a hundred
years; choose herds of cattle; choose elephants and gold and horses;
choose the wide expanded earth, and live thyself as many years as thou
listeth. Or, if thou knowest a boon like this, choose it, together with
wealth and far-extending life. Be a king, O Nachiketas! On the wide
earth I will make thee the enjoyer of all desires. All those desires
that are difficult to gain in the world of mortals, all those ask thou
at thy pleasure;--those fair nymphs of heaven with their chariots, with
their musical instruments; for the like of them are not to be gained by
men. I will give them to thee, but do not ask the question of the state
of the soul after death." Nachiketas said, "All those enjoyments are of
yesterday. With thee remain thy horses and elephants, with thee the
dance and song. If we should obtain wealth, we live only as long as thou
pleasest. The boon which I choose I have said." Yama said, "One thing is
good, another is pleasant. Blessed is he who takes the good, but he who
chooses the pleasant loses the object of man. But thou, considering the
objects of desire, hast abandoned them. These two, ignorance (whose
object is what is pleasant) and knowledge (whose object is what is
good), are known to be far asunder, and to lead to different goals.
Believing this world exists, and not the other, the careless youth is
subject to my sway. That knowledge for which thou hast asked is not to
be obtained by argument. I know worldly happiness is transient, for that
firm one is not to be obtained by what is not firm. The wise, by means
of the union of the intellect with the soul, thinking him whom it is
hard to behold, leaves both grief and joy. Thee, O Nachiketas! I believe
a house whose door is open to Brahma. Brahma the supreme, whoever knows
him, obtains whatever he wishes. The soul is not born; it does not die;
it was not produced from any one. Nor was any produced from it. Unborn,
eternal, it is not slain, though the body is slain; subtler than what is
subtle, greater than what is great, sitting it goes far, sleeping it
goes everywhere. Thinking the soul as unbodily among bodies, firm among
fleeting things, the wise man casts off all grief. The soul cannot be
gained by knowledge, not by understanding, not by manifold science. It
can be obtained by the soul by which it is desired. It reveals its own
truths."
[Footnote 6: Pensées Diverses, p. 223.]
THE END.
Cambridge: Electrotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors have been silently changed.