Chapter X: Paying the Debt

In my youth I often heard the old people speak of death as “paying the debt of Nature”--“He has paid the debt.” Life puts us in debt to Nature--the earth, the air, the water--for the elements of our bodies and the powers of our minds, and the time inevitably comes when we must settle the account. That we are going to have something left over--that we have only to pay the debt of the body, and not of the mind--is one of the dreams that it is hard for most persons to give up. Will not then the universal mind that pervades Nature claim its own also? Can you and I hope to remain detached from it forever? Is that a consummation devoutly to be wished?

Be assured that no particle of soul or body can be lost. But processes may cease; the flame of the lamp may go out, and the sum total of force and matter remain the same. When a blade of grass dies, a process has ended, and as mysterious a process as went on in Cæsar’s brain and body. And when all life on the earth and in our universe ceases, if it ever does, the problem would remain just as puzzling, if we can fancy ourselves still here to puzzle over it. We are links in an endless cycle of change in which we cannot separate the material from what we call the spiritual.

The water in our bodies to-day may have flashed as a dewdrop yesterday, or lent itself to the splendor of the sunrise or sunset, or played a part in the bow in the clouds. To-morrow it may be whirling in the vortex of a tornado, or helping to quench the life of a drowning man, or glistening in the frost figures on the window-pane. The movements of the brain molecules in which the phenomena of thought and consciousness are so mysteriously involved, they, too, are links in the cycle of change.

One of our younger poets, John Russell McCarthy, has had the courage to say:

“that we must look for life
Hereafter, not by one and one,--your soul
Alone among the souls of other men,
Drifting and staying, a thing apart forever--
But we must see when all at last is counted
And the great sum is made, how one by one
We have returned to Her, the Mother of All,--
The bit of soul-stuff that She loaned us.

For we must live at last a part of Her--
For we shall be forever as one with Her.”

The reverent old people to whom I just referred paid the debt long ago, and the day of reckoning for some of us cannot be far off. After the account is closed who or what has profited by the transaction? We are prone to put such questions to Nature, but they are irrelevant. The universe is not run for profit, as we use the term. So far as we can see, it is run just to satisfy the æsthetic and creative feeling of the Eternal. When the sidereal systems in space run down, they are wound up again, and suns and planets are started anew. The great game never comes to an end; in fact, it is unthinkable that it should ever have begun, except as the flowers begin in spring, or as a man begins when he is born. Antecedents! Antecedents!--always. We cannot apply our standards of loss and gain to the dealings of the Eternal with us. “That I have positively appeared,” says Whitman, “that is enough.”

Each of us is an incarnation of the universal mind, as is every beast 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.”