Chapter IX: The Psychology of Death (2)

Other studies show that there is a sense in which every incident of a funeral tends to lay ghosts. If we simply hear at a distance of the death of our friends, we are far more liable to receive visits from their revenient spirits or dream of them as alive than if we have actually seen them buried, because all the incidents of this ceremony bring home, even to our unconscious selves, the fact that they are really dead and gone from us, soul and body. Thus the tears, Scripture reading, badges of mourning, and even the expense tend to reef in our sense of our dead friend’s personality and to make it powerless to project ghostly phantasms, because such ceremonials are cathartic and preventative of all such hallucinations.

Thus, at this stage of the story of the immortality cult we have two worlds well apart and the _Jenseits_, or the realm of death, can perhaps be reached from the _Diesseits_ of the body only by a long and dangerous journey that the psyche must take after leaving the soma to moulder. Why has man always stood in such awe of the ghosts of even his friends? The answer is not simple. It is partly because he wanted to be free from their constraint. They included his parents, from whose control even youth, at a certain stage, wants to be well rid. Even his dearest ones might cherish some secret grudge that could now be indulged in with impunity. As spirits they have certain unknown new powers for mischief, whereas if they were enemies they could use these powers for revenge. Toward the dead we generally have a bad conscience. They can often read our secret motives while we cannot read theirs. Thus man propitiated the pallid shades of Orcus by offerings and sacrifices to abate their malevolence and secure their good-will. However remotely he banished them, he has never been able to realize the fact that they were utterly dead forever, soul as well as body. All his will to rid himself of them has always stopped short of entire fulfillment.

On the contrary, some of the great dead he has not only immortalized but deified. Others may still come back at midnight in a dream or vision at some weird haunted spot or in dire emergencies; or if conjured by constraining spells of sufficient potency; perhaps if they have not been rightly buried; or to deliver some pregnant message; or, again, to pronounce a curse or benediction. It is generally hard for them to get to us and also, having done so, to make their presence felt and they are perhaps so exhausted by this effort that they can tell us nothing; while it is given to but few mortals to visit their abode and come back unscathed and to fewer yet it is given to bring back others with them.

One of the most momentous steps in culture was taken by the ancient Egyptians, whose religion, more than that of any other race, might, in view of our recent knowledge of it, be called the cult of the dead _par excellence_. The new step here taken consisted, in a word, in making the postmortem status of the soul dependent upon virtue in this life, thus enlisting the mighty power of the next world in behalf of morals. Their famous book of the dead presupposes “a religious belief in the actual revivification of the body,” because of which hoped-for event the Egyptians took the greatest possible care to preserve and afterwards to hide the bodies of the dead. This famous book treats of the soul’s journey through Amenti, of the gods and other residents there, with formulæ that will deliver the migrant thither from foes. It contains prayers and hymns to the great gods intended to recommend him to all of them; texts that must be inscribed on both the amulets and bandages of the mummies; plan and arrangement of the mourning chamber; the confession before the assessors; the scene where the heart is weighed in the hall of Osiris; and a representation of the Elysian fields, etc.

At death, relatives and mourners emerged from their houses to the streets, placed mud upon their heads, fasted, and priests pronounced an oration describing the good works of the great dead. There were sometimes accusations and formal judgments by the forty elders as to whether or not the burial should be in due form to convey the soul to the gods. If the verdict was favorable, the gods were entreated to admit him into the place reserved for the good; if not, he was deprived of burial and must lie in his own house. If there were debts, the body was given to creditors as a pledge until the sacred duty of redeeming it was performed. The details of embalmment during the seventy-two days of mourning were given in great profusion for each part of the body. Each bandage had its text and the tomb must be made a proper dwelling place for the ka, or soul, which will stay there as long as the body does. Each process, pledget, and wrapping, had its name and there was an elaborate trade in bitumen, which is the meaning of the word mummy.

The people felt great satisfaction in preserving and seeing the simulated features of their ancestors, whom they came to regard in some sense as contemporaneous. The welfare of the soul in the nether world depended upon the completeness of all the funeral processes. At the height of this central cult of Egypt, bulls, antelopes, cats, crocodiles, ibis, hawk, frog, toad, scorpion, snake, fish, hippopotamus, cow, lion, sphinx, were sacred to the gods and were mummified, while the scarab was loaded down with symbolic meanings and became central in all funeral rites. These ceremonials did not decline until the third or fourth century of our era and only when Christianity taught that the body would be given back in a changed and incorruptible form, did it cease to be necessary to preserve it with drugs. This necrophilism was all for the sake of the soul and both expressed and strengthened belief in it. The cult of no race has been so saturated with thanatism.

In all we know of the folk-soul there is no more striking illustration of geneticism than the slow but sure establishment in recent years, by comparing ancient myths and rites with the findings of excavations, of the fact that in the great countries about the eastern Mediterranean, especially Thrace, Asia Minor, and Egypt, the highest religious consciousness of these races was expressed in elaborate cults of death and resurrection, to have participated in which is said to have made the celebrants over and initiated them into a new and higher life. All was so secret and oath-bound that it found little representation, save the most incidental allusions in history and literature, so that it was reserved for modern research to uncover, reconstruct, and understand its tremendous power.

Osiris, Persephone, Attis, the lover of the all-mother Cybele, Demeter and Dionysius in the Eleusinian mysteries, Astar in her restoration of Phanæus and many others, some with very high and full and some with very scanty and fragmentary developments of the myth and cult, died and perhaps went to Hades and came back bringing, now one, now many with them. Typical of these ceremonies were the funereal sadness, death dirge, wailings, active symbolic manifestations of grief and despair, as if to attain the very acme of psychalgia. The great, good, beautiful, divine hero is not only dead but has perhaps gone over into the nether-world to defy death and the power of evil in their stronghold and to conquer and bind them. There is, then, a phase of painful, anxious, silent suspense. Will he succeed and return or will he fail and never reappear? Then, when the tension is at the very breaking-point, comes the thumic ebb, rebound, or reversal. Someone whispers or cries aloud, “He has won and comes back,” and then all is changed. Lights flare out in the darkness. Instead of tears and sobs there is joy unrestrained, congratulations, embraces, and soon frantic ecstasy, leaping, shouting, wine, song, revelry, bells, fireworks, and sometimes in degenerate days, drunkenness and gluttony with the sacramental elements and, in token of the triumphs of the higher love, perhaps carnal debauch and revelry and always ecstasy and inebriation with euphoria. Thus from three to six centuries B.C. men strove to attain an immunity bath that should safeguard them from all excessive pain and pleasure of life by participation in a pageantry or dramatization of the eternal struggle between the greatest evil, death, and the dread of it and the greatest joy of the most intense living, thus ensuring their souls against being led captive by the pleasures or pains of life, neither of which could be so extreme as these, by keeping wide open the way from the extremest depression to the maximum of exaltation.

Now all this rests in every case where it can be traced upon the retreat of the sun and the death of the world, symbolized by winter and the return of spring, reinforced, of course, by the alternations of day and night. These deities or their prototypes were originally gods of vegetation and their resurrections are vernal. The everlasting bars that broke were snow and ice. The king of glory that came in when the gates were lifted was spring, the conqueror, or dawn; and in these secular changes of the year are found the first preformations of the soul and the momentum that still subconsciously reinforces belief in a life after death and supplies always an anodyne and often an antidote for the death-fear.

It was on this basis that Christianity, especially as interpreted by Paul, arose.[213] The culminating event in its story took place in the few days between the burial of Jesus and the Pentecostal outburst. Never in history, if it be history, and never in the subject story of Mansoul, if this be the stage on which it was all accomplished, has there been such an _au rebours_ from the nadir of depression of the disciples, because the type-man of their race, who had grown to their minds to be a fully diplomated God-man, was completely dead--and that in shame and ignominy--and his corpse sealed up to moulder and rot in a rock. Then came first the timid and then the plenary conviction that He had conquered death and even hell, risen from the dead, walked and conversed with friends in an attenuated body and had visibly ascended to Heaven and God. Once fully convinced that this was all veritably true, witnessed and attested by every sense and proof, the great incubus of ages was thrown off and Death, the supreme terror, was abolished. This brought an ecstasy or intoxication of joy called the gift of the Holy Spirit, which possessed the lives of believers. The ecstatic disciples shouted in weird unknown tongues until onlookers thought them “full of new wine” (Acts 2:13, 15), gazed all day into Heaven, henceforth the home of souls, and had to be exhorted to cease their raving jubilations and go to work. In this exhilarating new joy and freedom they, and later their successors, met the nine persecutions, during which martyrdom became a passion and tender youths and maidens could hardly be restrained from throwing themselves to the wild beasts in the arena as the supreme crown and testimony to their faith.

So, too, Christian asceticism followed from the same motive. This life was mean and it mattered little how squalid it was, for it was only a provisional, probationary moment compared to the eternal joy and happiness where all real worths and values were confidently awaited and compared to which those of earth were only dross. “There is no death. What seems so is transition” to an infinitely higher state than this. Never did the other world so absorb the power of this. Visions, trances, homilies, poems, poetry and theology fitted the other world out with every good and the chief offices of the church were to keep the keys of the transcendental world and to wield its tremendous sanctions in a way to dominate life and determine good and evil. Thus never was the greatest _Verdrängung_ (repression) that ever oppressed the human race so completely removed. The most essential claim of Christianity is to have obviated the fear of death and made the king of terrors into a good friend, if not into a boon companion, by this the most masterly of all psychotherapies. If it be only a pragmatic postulate or hypothesis or _Als Ob_ (As If) in Vaihinger’s sense, it has worked well on the whole. Despite the ever present dangers of transcendental selfishness that prompts only to save one’s own soul, it is nevertheless the supreme demonstration of the “_Allmacht_” (omnipotence) of the folksoul to minister to its own gravest diseases and banish its greatest enemy, the death fear.

Thus Jesus is most widely known as the Man of the Cross and the crucifix and even the fragments of the Cross are revered throughout the Christian world. In no other religion has the death of the founder had such prominence or efficacy. All the events of Holy Week have been wrought out in great detail by tradition and art. Its story is the world’s great masterpiece of pathos. The ecstasy of the passover represents the culmination of the conquest of the death-fear by Mansoul. The gift of the Holy Spirit was simply the conviction that death itself was dead. For centuries preaching consisted of nothing else than telling this story, which was the gospel of the gladdest of all glad tidings. If Christ is not arisen, our faith is vain. To doubt this has always been the most culpable of all heresies save that of atheism itself.

Thus night, day; sleep, waking; autumn, spring--cadence the soul to life and death. To these were added the higher symbolisms of sin and holiness, illness and health, old age and rejuvenation, crushing despair and triumphant hope, pessimism and optimism, with the latter and not the former, as had often been the case before, final and triumphant. Every known race of man initiates the young at puberty by a ritualized pain and pleasure treatment that anticipates all this. Youth was isolated, made to fast, scarified, tattooed, made to endure extreme hardship, fatigue, sometimes partial burial; and then followed remission, dance, feasting, perhaps orgies, only after which did the young become full members of the tribe. Thus it is the inveterate consensus of man through all his history that on the threshold of mature life each individual should be oriented to its sovereign master’s pain and pleasure by extreme experience with each in turn, as if thereby to develop the power of elasticity, resilience, and reaction, and to impress upon it throughout all its profoundest depths the conviction that there is no defeat that should not be followed by victory, no darkness so black as that which just precedes day, no virtue like that which has just overcome evil, no passivity that will not tend to react toward progressiveness. Indeed, this is a kind of modulus that Christianity has impressed upon the entire occidental world and it is this that has given it its courage, _élan_, and enterprise. This is the chief imprint it has left upon the human soul, even for those who have forgotten or denied all its tenets. Thus there is a deep psychological sense in which all those who have not passed rigorously through the experience that Christianity symbolizes by the phrase “dying and rising with Jesus” are not initiated into life and remain immature.

It is they who are more liable to be arrested in the trough of the wave and to become discouraged or even melancholic and when they meet the ills and hardships of life to flee from reality and seek some refuge from its stern demands, because life in them has not conquered death. They have not learned the great law of taking their pleasure and pain in the things they ought and in a measure proportionate to each. Indeed, modern psychotherapy is, for the most part, a new application of this old mode of rescue for such souls in distress. Maeder[214] has well and wisely found all its processes typified in Dante’s descent into hell at the nethermost center of the earth where Satan himself was; and his emergence a slow ascent up the purgatorial mount to the infinite joys of paradise, first under the guidance of a human sage and then led by Beatrice, a type of the supreme self-directing oracle within. Dante, as everyone knows, called his poem a comedy because it had a happy ending, but every modern novel and drama is constructed according to the same formula that Christianity made current.

And who would read a story or see a play in which at the end the hero or heroine did not achieve all they desired? And, again, why do we love to experience all the desperate miseries to which our favorites in story and on the stage are subjected before the happy dénouement begins to show but that we are dead sure that in the end both the villain and the virtuous will get their deserts. Indeed, at least one German “pithiatric” psychiatrist prescribes a drastic experience of the story of the Cross as a therapeutic method in certain cases. All this, of course, has no reference to the question whether the story is all fact or all fancy. The psychologist only studies its effects and its inner mechanisms, which, save for those who have grown scrupulous under the influence of modern controversy, are no more relevant than is the historicity of Hamlet, Lear, or Portia to the audience in a theater. In the patristic and in the Middle Ages, and even now, children and neurotics have suffered almost to the point of stigmatization at any realistic description or at the Ober-Ammergau dramatization of the items of the crucifixion and feel with all the vicariousness that sympathy can yield the thorns, bitter cup, nails, spear, etc., as we have elsewhere shown in detail.[215]

But despite all the realistic pedagogy of the church the conviction of another life is very rapidly fading from the modern consciousness and even within the church itself is becoming an ineffective shadow of a shade. Dr. George A. Gordon of the Old South Church, Boston, preaching to the Congregational State Association in 1902, said: “We ministers of the Lord Jesus Christ know as no other persons in the community what a paralysis has come over intelligent and thinking people in regard to the reality of the other life. So many doubt it; so few have any strong confidence in regard to it.” This opinion, of course, was posited not only on the confidences of the pastor’s study but also on the confidences of the sick room and the death chamber. The tendency has steadily increased and in funeral services we hear little of future rewards and punishments and only of rest and peace. The old evidence from death-beds is fallacious.

Sir William Osler[216] says:

I have careful records of about five hundred death-beds,
studied particularly with reference to the modes of death and
the sensations of the dying. The latter alone concerns us here.
Ninety suffered bodily pain or distress of one sort or another,
eleven showed mental apprehension, two positive terror, one
expressed spiritual exaltation, one bitter remorse. The
great majority gave no sign one way or the other; like their
birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting. The Preacher
was right: in this matter man hath no preëminence over the
beast--“as the one dieth so dieth the other.”[217]

This belief persists, thus, only as a dead article of faith which men no longer live by. It is a desiccated herbarium specimen and not a living plant. If common observation did not sufficiently show this, it has appeared very significantly and statistically in many recent studies.[218] These showed that it diminishes progressively as we go up the educational grades from high school through the university and that, in general, the more cultivated man becomes, the less he believes in any form of personal survival. If we had a similar investigation of the old as compared with the young, my own partial studies incline me to believe that this conviction of personal persistence beyond the grave in general loses its force in senescence, as indeed it becomes vital only at adolescence. If it be thus a creed that first blossoms with the advent and tends to decay at the close of sexual life, we have a new key for understanding both its function and its limitations. True, it often persists, if only feebly, as with the momentum of a spent force, in those who have not fully realized the senium, although they all do not wish to be conserved as old as they really are but to be rejuvenated as they once were.

In what follows we believe it will appear that upon analysis by mechanisms akin to metonymy or synecdoche the vigor with which we have clung to a belief in personal is really motivated by a deeper belief in racial immortality and that in this latter, when the strophe of life is succeeded by its antistrophe, the deeper faith tends to come out and true sages realize what the soul meant by what the tenuous and falsetto faculty called faith blindly groped its way toward.

The psychic factors that have so overdetermined the hope-wish of personal immortality are as follows.

I. First is the desire to be remembered and esteemed by survivors. The soul abhors oblivion somewhat as it does extinction. We wish our friends not only to think of us but to think well of us. How satisfying this is both to those who die and to those who live is seen in Confucianism, where ancestor worship vicariates for belief in personal immortality. It would almost seem that some of the good and great would think more of the certainty of being canonized in due time or perpetuated in the form of bronze or marble, or enrolled in some temple of fame, than of personal immortality. At any rate, this mundane, would in some degree compensate for the loss of celestial perpetuation. Those who die in more or less full consciousness are prone in their last moments to dwell upon their friends far more than they do upon their own future state, as if the enshrinement they chiefly sought were in the hearts and minds of those they leave behind. Conversely, those who die alone, friendless, or with the execration of survivors, cling the more to the rehabilitation that death itself always tends to bring. On the basis of questionnaire data it would seem that some about to die shudder more at the thought that others would think they were totally extinct at death than from inwardly facing this conviction for themselves. We want others to think we are enjoying the best the universe can provide for its favorites, because in that case they will think more highly of us since we have obtained the diploma of the cosmos, that we have stood the test and have graduated _summa cum laude_ from the terrestrial curriculum. Perhaps if we were early Christians we should begin to “put on airs” and affect the manners of a higher life here to impress our own valuation of ourselves upon others. An ancient sage would rather that others thought him bad and hated him than to be forgotten. Thus, in fine, if all knew that they and all their good deeds would never fade from grateful memory of their descendants, the conviction of a conscious personal existence beyond the grave would lose one of its preforming determinants and reinforcements. Therefore, those concerned to keep alive the fate and hope of another life should foster any agency that keeps the memory of the dead green. There really ought to be those who sum up effectively the good lessons and meaning of every life when it closes, as a kind of mundane judgment day so that no good influence be lost and no warning fail to have its due effect--a court of the dead to pass impartially upon each life as it sets out to sea. We censor books and are beginning to test eugenic marriages, etc.; and so, if all knew that upon their death an impartial tribunal would pass upon their lives in the interests of the common weal, even if their verdict came late or was given only to those most interested to know, ethical culture would mark a great advance and the fear of death, instead of consoling itself with belief in a future life, would be set to work in the interests of normal lives here.

II. The second mundane surrogate for transcendental immortality is doing things that will affect those who survive or will perpetuate our will and works to those who know little or nothing of us or of our name. Many last wills and testaments benefit those who knew nothing of the donor. Many such have reared buildings, started movements, built organizations, written books, invented, created works of art, transformed the face of nature with an instinct of workmanship in which all thought of self was merged. All our lives are thus greatly influenced by those who are unknown. The egoistic element tends to merge in a disinterested desire to make part of the world in some way better for our having lived. Sometimes, indeed, anonymity is actively striven for and the individuality of benefactors is hidden. The phobia here is that we may have lived for naught. Here the idea of God as an All-Discerner who sees virtue and vice, and rewards or punishes in secret, coöperates. Such hidden service to the race, with no thought of any compensation here or hereafter, has a unique charm all its own. Scientific discoveries and beneficent inventions have sometimes thus been given freely to all without any personal benefit and without a personal label. True love sometimes lavishes every gift, opportunity, and joy upon its object, with no stipulation of love or gratitude or even recognition in its turn. Indeed, the possession of wealth compels more or less attention to this field of the immortality of influence. Unlike the pauper, the millionaire must forecast if he would try to shape the future; and even if great givers attach their names to their bequests, they know that to most who profit by them their name will soon mean nothing. Jubal invented music and wandered afar and when he came back he found a great festival in honor of his art and of his name, but could not identify himself and was cast out as an impostor. “Jubal’s fame and art filled all the sky, while Jubal lonely laid him down to die,” supremely happy in the thought that he had done the race a great service. To love and serve man is far higher than to love and serve God, for we can do nothing for Him save in this way and He needs and expects no help from us save this. Men come and go but institutions and influence go on forever and those who start them share their mundane deathlessness long after they are forgotten. The cup of cold water illustrates the way of the gentleman or lady born and bred, best attested by the desire that others be happy and not that they themselves shine, be aggrandized, or have pleasure. This is the most ideal conduct and appeals most strongly of all things to the two great and ultimate standards of conduct, namely, honor and an approving conscience. And as we achieve this we belong to the order of the immortals and have triumphed over death. Desjardins, the founder of the order of the new life, said in substance, “We are never so impelled to snap our fingers in the face of death, to despise all its pomp and horror, and to defy him to do his worst to body and soul, as when we have just performed some such act of pure but passionate duty or kindness.” Then only can we truly feel that “no evil can befall a good man living or dead” and that the cosmos is moral to the core.

III. The third killer of the death-fear is children and posterity. To die childless, knowing that our heredity that began with the amœba and came down to us in an unbroken line dies, sharpens the sting of death; while, on the other hand, to have many well born and well reared children to rise up and call us blessed is one of the best antidotes to its baleful psychic virus. As every one knows, every creature, man included, lives about as long after the maximum power to propagate as his offspring requires to become mature, so that the prolongation of the period of immaturity means the prolongation of old age. Our foremost duty is to transmit the sacred torch of life undimmed, to give the maximal momentum and right direction to the nature and nurture of offspring and to bring rising generations to their full maturity--that is the highest criterion of an ever rising nation, including civilization itself. The true parent lives not only in and for the children but is the ancestor of their souls as well as of their bodies and even his belief in a future life is a good or bad thing according as it affects this. We feel this life incomplete, unfinished, and in need of a supplement because its possibilities are as yet unrealized. But we feel all this so much the less if we have children, while the dread of the inevitable hour becomes that of a kind of second or dual death for the childless because not only they but their line die in them. Yet, on the other hand, they have less ties and so less to lose, even though they may feel that they have, in a sense, lived in vain. What parent was ever so world-weary, so strong a believer in postmortem joy, that he would not rather live on here and see his children’s children thrive than go on hence to any conceivable future state? Those who leave offspring have had less time to develop morbid fears of Lethe’s waters and if they expect to enter a great peace beyond, they often find their chief joy in contemplating the fruits of their loins on earth. We have seen how the death thought begins with the life of sex and when the latter, if it has been normal and happy, comes to an end, death has already begun and we are advancing deeper into the shades of the dark valley, so that there is already less to lose. Thus the death of the aged is less tragic and less inconsolable; and, what is far more important, normal and cultured souls think and care progressively less about another life.

IV. As for the good old doctrine of personal immortality, we cannot yet escape the great law that the next life is compensatory. If men are wretched here, the future becomes a refuge and grows not only actual but attractive; while, conversely, if this life is rich and abounding, the next tends to fade. No Christian age was ever so heedless of the latter as our own. For most intelligent, prosperous women, and especially men, it has lapsed to little more than a mere convention or trope or fetish of an effete orthodoxy, and hell is at most only a nightmare of the past, a childish phantom. Our actual _modus vivendi_ is as if another life did not exist and death were the end. No priestcraft can longer make men content with misery here in the hope of compensation hereafter. All make the most and best of this life as if it were all they were sure of and the motto of most believers is, “One life at a time and this one now.” Only in a kind of secondary falsetto Sunday consciousness do their thoughts turn to the future and does a flickering hope that death is not the end appear. Extinction is black by contrast in proportion as life is bright, happy, and absorbing, so that the death dread is in some respects growing as our life becomes richer, while it is at the same time being more and more banished from consciousness. The chief attractiveness it now has is that it brings rest and peace, for our tropes of it are more and more borrowed from sleep. Thus if the idea of the negation of life was never so dreadful, there was never such diversion from its closer envisagement. Thus, too, although suppressed, it was never so potent a factor in governing conduct, in improving hygiene, and providing for our offspring. Although we take a chance at saving our souls by church membership it is more and more bad form to discuss such matters. The real treasure of the soul is laid up elsewhere than in heaven and the growing phobia of death has now psychotherapies that are more and more effective. Its power is far greater than we know and there are endless uses to which it can yet be put in helping on the world’s work. Just as every pain that depresses the vital spirits a few points on the scale of euphoria, though they still remain far above zero, inclines to death, so when life is at its optimum or flood-tide man is wonderfully immune and recuperative in body and soul and the higher up the euphoric scale we live, the more difficult it is to fear or even think of death. Thus every legitimate fear of death is in a sense a life-preserver and -prolonger. Our business is to live and not to die, to keep at the very top of our condition and as far as possible from death, which is the _summum malum_.

As to the relation of these four immortalities, nominal, influential, plasmal, and orthodox, to each other, geneticism and the revelations of the dynamism of the folk-soul have shed much new light. This may be summarized in the statement that each of them is correlated with all the others. Even he who is chiefly intent on perpetuating his name is gratifying the deep instinct of transcending the limits of his own personal life and to know that he is remembered is not without consoling power even in the loss of property or if the conviction arises that death means extinction; while, conversely, the prospect of death in utter obscurity and of being completely forgotten tends to reinforce any or all of the other immortalities. Were we to rehabilitate hell in a modern sense, one of its horrors would be a sentence of summary oblivion even to our friends: “Let his name be forever taboo from mention or even from memory.” Of course, we shall all sooner or later fall under this sentence despite all our pathetic efforts to leave durable names behind.

As to anonymous influence, we are all sure of it to a degree, for the world we are born into is made by those who preceded us and we help to shape the future. In the social field we have endless illustrations of a service that involves more or less emulation. The case in point is a woman I knew who, having lived a most disinterested and self-sacrificing life, when told that God would reward her in the next world replied that she had never had either conviction or interest about another life but had been too busy doing good to think about it. If another life was in the order of things, all would be well, but if annihilation were in store, that, too, would be just as welcome, for she had found her pay in the satisfaction that each day’s work brought. She had no children and wanted no outer recognition but was content that her good deeds registered in others’ lives would follow her and nothing else really mattered in her scheme of life. The point is that in any other ages or environments the same instinct to enlarge life might have found expression in either of the other forms. Some even commit colossal crimes from a perverted form of _Geltung’s_ propensity. Because they cannot be potent for good they make themselves so for evil. Anonymity is often a passion and finds outcrops not only in religion and philosophy but also in science. Indeed, very much of our civilization is composed of innumerable influences originated by those whose names no history or _Acta Sanctorum_ have preserved and are products of this deep basal trend in the human soul.

As to plasmal immortality, who knows how much of all the good done in the world, if traced to its genetic roots, comes straight from the original momentum of the instinct to make the world better for posterity? To be sure, many of them are now broken erratic trends, forgetful of their source, which is really a nest-building instinct so irradiated and sublimated as to have lost orientation toward both its origin and goal. The first constructions in the world were nidifications. The first animal societies were stirpicultural. The primal examples of self-sacrifice were for the young. Everything for the world is good that squares with the functions of parenthood broadly conceived, and all is bad that contravenes it. Psychotherapy is slowly leading us to the astonishingly new insight that aberrations of the life-transmitting, young-rearing propensities constitute very many if not most of our mental abnormalities and that the rectification of these functions has marvelous therapeutic efficiency. The race is immortal, at least back to the first protozoan and indeed infinitely beyond. And so, in the future, our race and it only is immortal to the cosmic end. If we are tips of the twigs of a vast buried tree, these twigs may become themselves roots of a yet greater one and even a true superman may yet be born in the line of any of us. Thus, perhaps all the other immortalities have their dynamogeny in the instincts of parenthood.

As to the venerable belief in personal immortality, it was of course selfishness transcendentalized so as to subordinate every other goal in life to that of insuring our own happiness in a postmortem world. And we have to-day only contempt for the squalid ascetic who made his life miserable with the prime end of saving his own soul. But this crude doctrine now stands forth in a very new light, for psychology shows it to have been an ugly cyst or cast that enclosed and sheltered through hard dark ages a precious and beauteous thing now just emerging. Its content, as now revealed by analysis, is really man’s ineluctable conviction that his own life was insignificant compared with its larger meanings. Its real lesson is the subordination of the individual to the greater whole toward which it gave him a correct _Einstellung_. The close attachment of this doctrine to the ego was incorrect, for the self is only a trope or metaphor of the race, but even this was necessary at an earlier stage of race pedagogy. The transcendentality ascribed to a self freed from the body was inevitable because that was the only symbol by which the greater life of the race could be described or comprehended. This belief stored up and conserved the psychic promise and potency that is now again flowing over by transfer to the other outcrops of the immortality instinct. It did not say what it meant but was a pragmatic masterpiece, like so many great creations of the folksoul. From the soul of the race it went straight home to that of the individual and if it overstressed individuation for a time, that, too, was at first needful. Had man not so long or so inevitably believed in the great work of saving souls for the next world, he would now be less effective in saving them from the evils of this world. Had he not so cherished the conviction of a future heaven, he would have lost much of the very energy of his soul, which now strives to transform this world into a paradise and to populate it well. Thus we have here a great field in which the laws of the transposition of psychic trends into their kinetic equivalents, with very many different forms but with persistence of identical content, are abundantly shown. Man’s instinct has always been right and only his more superficial conscious interpretations of it wrong.

Excess or defect of either of at least the first three immortalities hypertrophies or dwarfs the others. The doctrine of conscious personal survival was not only developed in unconscious conformity to this principle but has an even more important pedagogic rôle for the young than we had hitherto supposed. It is a pragmatic, artistic, and in no sense a scientific fact. It utterly fails before the criteria of reason but it has worked far better results than it could have done had these requirements been alone regarded. It should not only be inculcated in the young but has immense therapeutic value and to doubt this is only another side illustration of the fact that cultivated adults have, the world over and particularly in our country, unprecedentedly lost touch with youth. Wherever the instincts of parenthood have not degenerated, it must be clear that belief in future personal rewards and punishments is a wholesome regulative of the lives of the young at a stage when feeling and impulse are at their strongest and before reason is mature.

V. But there is a fifth form of immortality concept somewhat more apart and uncorrelated with the others because newer and which comes from the lure of the infinitesimal elements which science now finds at the basis of the universe. What Dalton called atoms are now known to be planetary systems of unimaginably minute corpuscles, one thousandth the mass of an atom of hydrogen and, if they are solely electrical, “their size must be one millionth of the linear dimensions of an atom,” or relatively as a period on the printed page is to a large theater. Their groupings constitute the chemical elements, so that matter is dynamic to a degree we cannot conceive; and if so-called inorganic matter were proven to contain germs of man and mind, this would add but little to the new marvel of it. Matter is so active and subtle that the modern conceptions of it that have come from the study of radium make us feel that in a sense it is more spiritual than we have ever conceived spirit itself to be. In this new world, which may be homogeneous with mind, there is nothing like death anywhere to be found, and there is an unbroken gradation from the corporative unity of electrons in an atom up to the aggregations of man in society--and some think further still. On this view death is not only non-existent but inconceivable. True, more complex aggregations are reduced to simpler, more transient to more permanent ones by it, but matter is not only not dead but more intensely active than mind, so that the student of the ultimate constitution of matter and the persistence of energy is in a sense studying immortality, for this is the basis from which all orders of animal nature arose and into which they will all be resolved.

Thus we are told that the new physics and chemistry are really investigating death and regeneration. Our brains have little sense of the marvelous and lawful processes that underlie all their activities. While we have deemed evolution upward, there is another sense in which it is a fall or a series of departures from a more durable and elemental state, so that the gain is not all one way and catabolism has its own attractions. If our lives affect these more permanent electrons, this is survival and our ego is only part of a larger continuum and is without end or beginning, although inconceivably changed. The disintegration of our elements is the harvest-home back to the cosmos from which we arose and may involve increase, not decrease, to the sum total of good. This unselfing or “fusing with all we flow from” is the direction in which love, whether of man, woman, animals, or nature itself, as well as subordination of self to others and the world, inclines us. Thus the conscious soul of man is swept by tides of which our poor psychology as yet knows but little. Should such a conception of the world become general, it could still use many of our religious phrases, litanies, and symbols, but they would be inundated with fresh meanings.

Jean Finot’s book[219] is marvelously learned, his view is unique, and his style fascinating. It rapidly passed through fourteen editions and was translated into many languages. He has almost nothing to say of the soul, so that his volume might be entitled The Immortality of the Body, or Death, the Great Illusion. He is bitter against theologians for having made death such an all-dominating fear fetish in the world. Tolstoi feared death all his life and writes, “Nothing is worse than death, and when we consider that it is the inevitable end of all which lives, we must also recognize that nothing is worse than life.” We are told that the dread of it poisoned the life of Daudet and that Zola trembled before the thought, “which obsessed him and caused him nightmares and insomnia.” Renan says, “We may sacrifice all to truth and good, which are the ends of life, and when we have done say, ‘Following the call of this interior siren we have reached the turn where the rewards should lie. Oh, dreadful consoler, there is none!’ The philosophy which promised us the secret of death stammers excuses.” Finot says, “A study of the evolution of death in the literature of the past and to-day would become almost a history of literature itself.” “The meditations of the fathers of the church and the monks of the Middle Ages would shine particularly in this concert of vociferations against death (‘If the slightest wound made on one finger can cause so great a pain, what a horrible torture must be death, which is the corruption or dissolution of the entire body’). We can look fixedly neither at the sun nor at death.” Mme. de Sévigné says, “I am swallowed up in the thoughts of death and find it so terrible that I hate life more because it leads there.” It is no great consolation to say with Renan, “We shall live by the trace which each of us leaves upon the bosom of the infinite.” “All that lives is simply preparing for death.” Belief in the perdurability of the soul is an alternative or placation, a mirage. Only Confucianism and Taoism, if they had remained faithful to the teachings of their creators, would close to their initiates all possibilities of an after life; but they did not remain faithful. Even Luther at the beginning of his campaign against Rome classed the dogma of immortality of the soul as amongst “the monstrous fables which are part of the Roman dung heap,” although he later became reconciled to it.

The very fear of death has killed many. “Sick persons who gather from their doctor a presentiment of their term usually die before reaching it.” The Western world should take heart from the millions of Buddhists who view the prospect of death with enchantment. For subjective idealists like Berkeley, who tell us that we can really know nothing of the external world, death only deprives us of our conceptions and we may really take consolation in the fact that our individuality is composed of a whole hierarchy of more or less independent centers, each of them made up of more complex units, until our ideas of immortality merge with those of the conservation of energy.

Finot’s own views begin with his conception of “life in the coffin.” “The underground existence of our body is far more animated than that which is led above the earth.” “The fathers of some few human beings upon the earth, we become the fathers of myriads of beings within its depths,” and man perhaps gives more pleasure to his grave companions than he ever enjoyed. He specifies nine species of insects, mostly strikingly colored flies and coleoptera, which in regular order, one after another, live upon and copulate, lay their eggs and rear their maggots in corpses that are paradises to them, and he praises the work of Francisco Redi who gave us “the admirable science of the entymology of graves,” which now takes the place of the old ideas of Tartarus and the Elysian fields. The foods brought to the tomb and frankly meant for the dead, who were often conceived as hungry, were really consumed by the “worms” that devour us. He tells us of a young woman caught singing at a grave who, seeing that she was observed, remarked, “My mother liked the Casta Diva.” The Greeks certainly did not believe that those beneath the earth were quite quit of existence and perhaps the first religion was that of the grave or tomb, which was a factor in the birth of patriotism. The tomb is democratic because all bodies suffer exactly the same fate if exposed alike to the elements. We may really be interested in “our offspring” in the grave, for they, at least to biologists, have more interest than do the poetic conceptions that we become flowers, trees, or drifting clouds. We may thus “facilitate the body’s immortal diffusion into immortal nature.”

Indeed, each of the thirty trillion cells of our body has its own partial elemental life and, while we live, these partake in the general life of the common wealth. Each has to eliminate waste, ingest food, and their energy is such that “we should need a force of several hundred thousand horsepower to kill simultaneously” and instantly all these cells. Even molecules have infinitely little lives, each after its own fashion. The chemist’s view of even putrefaction, which appeals so repulsively to one of our senses, makes it interesting. Thus the elements of our body carry on after what we call death, for life dwells in each cell and even molecule. The very first germ was immortal. True, we cannot analyze the consciousness of a cell, if it has one. Back of all this there is the life of inanimate nature. Again, many of the organs and elements of our body continue to live and grow, if sufficiently nourished, after the death of the body as a whole, though a part does not have the power, as in some animals, of regenerating the whole. The heart has been revived after thirty hours of death. Bits of skin have been removed and preserved and grafted on to other bodies six months after detachment and this process might go on indefinitely, the same skin being transferred for generations to new bodies. True, organs, like cells, lose their subordination at what we call death.[220]

At this point Finot introduces a very long argument against cremation because it interferes with all these processes. He seems to have a rancor against it that is somewhat like that of the Western believer in personal immortality against Oriental pantheism, which holds that the soul melts into the universe like a drop into the ocean. He finds great comfort in the scientific phenomena, which he résumés as “the life of so-called inanimate matter,” which, we are coming to realize, is by no means dead. Indeed, molecules lead an intensely active life, changing their place, perhaps vibrating, traveling, grouping themselves in very many different ways, so that metals have a kind of physiology and even therapy of their own. Perhaps, indeed, crystallized matter represents the most perfect and stable arrangement to which the particles of the body are susceptible. Thermodynamics shows us that motion and heat are related in metals as in our bodies. Metals suffer fatigue and recuperate from rest, as Bosé has shown. Perhaps even the soul of life is here and we are just beginning to know the powers of ferments, which seem on the borderline between the organic and inorganic. Both are subject to evolution.

Again, there is no sharp line between animal and vegetable life. Protoplasms are as different or must be so as individuals. Both have variability. Both the cabbage and the rat, as standard biological experiments show, breathe. Plants are affected by narcotics. Sick vegetables respond to some of the same medicaments that animals do, while some actually have a sensorium. Philosophers like Descartes have tried to break down all the identities between man and animals and give the former a unique place in the universe. Fechner, who believed plants besouled, and even Haeckel knew better, although Wundt insisted to the last that “all psychic activity is conscious.” The unconscious, which comparative psychology must admit, opens the door downward toward the very dawn of life, so that perhaps even unicellular organisms have elemental souls. Very many of the earlier philosophers, when human thought was fresh and untrammeled by tradition, insisted on the unity of life and mind. For a long period animals were thought to be moral beings and courts were held in which they were tried. Indeed, we may conclude that “a living being is always living” and back of this life merges by imperceptible gradations into the larger life of the cosmos.