Chapter V (2)

The gravest objection that can be urged against hopefulness, an objection which has hitherto not been sufficiently considered, and which M. Renan has omitted to deal with in his something too optimistic “Dialogues”—is that of the eternity _a parte post_, is the semi-abortion, the partial miscarriage of a universe which, throughout an infinite past, has proved itself incapable of a better world than this.[161] Still, if that fact constitutes a reason for looking with less confidence toward the future, it cannot be regarded as a ground for despair. An infinite past has proved to be more or less sterile, but an infinite future may prove to be otherwise. Even taking for granted the total miscarriage hitherto of the labours of humanity and of the infinity of extra-terrestrial beings who no doubt coöperate with us, there remains, so far as the future is concerned, mathematically one chance out of every two of success; and that is enough to debar pessimism forever of an ultimate triumph. If the mere chances of the dice, by which, according to Plato, the universe is governed, have as yet produced nothing but crumbling worlds and caducous civilization, a calculation of probabilities demonstrates that even after an infinite number of throws the result of the present cast or of the next cast cannot be foreseen. The future is not entirely determined by the past _which is known to us_. Future and past are reciprocally related and the one cannot be absolutely known without the other, and the one cannot be absolutely divined from a knowledge of the other. Conceive a flower in bloom at some point in infinite space—a sacred flower, the flower of thought: hands have been groping for it in every direction throughout an infinite past; some have touched it by chance and then lost it again before they could seize it. Is the divine flower never to be plucked? Why not? A negative answer would be simply the outcome of discouragement, not the expression of probability. Or conceive, once more, a ray of light following a straight line through space, not reflected by any solid atom or molecule of air, and an infinity of eyes in an eternal obscurity seeking for this ray, with no means of discovering how near to them or how far from them it may, at any moment, be. The ray pursues its way unimpeded, and innumerable open, ardent eyes long for it and sometimes seem to feel the presence of the luminous wave moving forward on its victorious course. Must their search eternally be vain? If there is no definitive reason for affirming it, there is still less any categorical reason for denying it. It is a matter of chance, the man of science might say; it is a matter, also, of perseverance and intelligence, would be added by the philosopher.

[161] See on this subject the author’s _Vers d’un philosophe_,
p. 198.

[Sidenote: Positive evidence of ultimate success.]

The fact that we are to-day capable of stating such problems in regard to the destiny of the universe seems to indicate something like an advance in the direction of solving them; thought is unable to advance upon reality beyond a certain point; the conception of an ideal presupposes the existence of a more or less imperfect realization of it. In the tertiary period no animal speculated about the universal society. A true conception of the ideal, if the truth about the matter could be known mathematically, would be found to possess, in all probability, an enormous number of chances of being realized; properly to state a problem is to have begun to solve it. A purely mathematical calculation of the external probabilities of the case does not, therefore, express the real value in the domain of intelligence and morality, because in matters of intelligence and morality, possibility, probability, and the powers upon which the realization of the fact depends, lie in thought which is a concentration of inner and, so to speak, living chances.

[Sidenote: In especial when the infinity of space is taken into account.]

Over and above infinity of number and eternity of time, a field of hopefulness lies in the immensity of space, which makes it irrational for us to judge too absolutely of the future of the universe solely from our experience of so small a portion of it as our solar, and even as our stellar system. Are we the only thinking beings in the universe? We have already seen that, without passing far beyond what science holds to be certain, one may even now reply in the negative. There very probably exists an infinity of cold or cooling stars, which have arrived at about the same point in their evolution as our earth; each of these stars is physically and chemically analogous to the earth, and they must have passed through analogous stages of vapourization, and condensation, and incandescence, and cooling. It is therefore probable that they have given rise to forms of organic life more or less analogous to those that we are acquainted with. In effect, the homogeneity of the organic matter of which our stellar system is composed (a fact which spectral analysis enables us to ascertain in regard to even the most remote stars) allows us to infer, by an induction which is not too improbable, a certain similitude in the most fundamental types of organic life. Analogous types of mineralization and crystallization must have given rise to analogous types of organization, although the number and richness of the forms that are possible increase as existence grows more complex. We do not see why the primordial protoplasm should in such and such a satellite of Sirius be especially different from that of our globe; nay, there may even obtain a certain cycle of forms and “living numbers,” as Pythagoras would say, that periodically recur. It is difficult in the actual state of science to conceive life as appearing except in some form of matter analogous to the cellule, and to conceive consciousness as otherwise than centralized in and manifesting itself by vibrations such as those to which our nervous systems are subject. Conscious life implies a society of living beings, a sort of social consciousness which the individual consciousness seems, in a sort, to presuppose. Organic and conscious life, the conditions of which are so much more determinate than those of inorganic life, must everywhere, in spite of differences in the circumstances, have assumed in the course of evolution forms that, in a number of respects, must have been analogous to animals and human beings such as we are familiar with. Perhaps the most general of the laws formulated by Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire on the correlation of organs might be found to hold good of the animals existing on the satellites of distant stars of the twentieth magnitude. In spite of the infinite variety of the flora and fauna of our globe, and the seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity that nature has displayed in varying their forms, it may reasonably be surmised that the difference between the types of life with which we are acquainted and those with which we are not acquainted is subject to certain considerable limitations. In spite of differences of temperature, of light, of attraction, of electricity, sidereal species, how different soever they may be from terrestrial species of living beings, must, by the necessities of the case, have been developed in the direction of sensitiveness and of intelligence, and have gone in that direction sometimes not as far as we, sometimes farther. Note also that even on our globe the excessively odd and monstrous types produced, like those of the tertiary period, as it were in obedience to a sort of apocalyptic imagination, have proved unable to maintain themselves. The most enduring species have generally been the least eccentric, the closest to a uniform and æsthetic type. It is not excessively improbable, therefore, that the universe contains an infinite number of human species analogous to humanity as we know it, in all essential faculties, although, perhaps, very different in the form of their organs and in the degree of their intelligence. They are our planetary brothers. Perhaps by comparison with us they are gods; and in that fact lies, as we have said, the kernel of possible or actual truth in the ancient beliefs in regard to the divine inhabitants of the skies.[162]

[162] To understand the enormous differences which, in spite
of the analogies, may exist between the organization of the
planetary or stellar beings and our own, it suffices to
consider the immense variety which obtains among terrestrial
species. Ants have already achieved an advanced state of
society with their shepherd, labouring, and warrior castes.
Suppose them to continue their intellectual development instead
of halting at a mechanical life of instinct; they might arrive
at a point of mental evolution analogous, _mutatis mutandis_,
to that of such and such a human society; for example, that
of the Chinese. Who knows, indeed, but that they might rule
the earth by virtue of substituting number and intelligence
for individual power? Their civilization would be in some sort
Liliputian, and destined, no doubt, to exercise a smaller
influence on the course of things than that of which physically
stronger beings might prove capable; or, to pass from one
extreme to the other, in the dreamland in which Fontenelle,
Diderot, and Voltaire have laboured, conceive a race of human
beings developed not from anthropoids, but from the next most
intelligent members of the animal kingdom—from elephants.
Scientifically, the supposition is not impossible, when it is
considered that the elephant’s trunk is at once one of the
strongest and most delicate organs of prehension known to us,
and that to possess a well-developed brain and good organs of
prehension are perhaps the prime requisites for success in the
struggle for existence. A giant civilization, therefore, quite
different from ours in externals, if not in essentials, might
well have been achieved on the earth or on some neighbouring
star. However repugnant to our instinctive anthropomorphism,
we should familiarize ourselves with the thought that if
evolution is subject to necessary laws, a simple series of
accidents and favourable circumstances may give such and such
a species the advantage over such and such another, and invert
the comparative dignity of the two without the general onward
movement of evolution being checked.

Moreover, the development of intelligence in a planet depends
much less on the bodily form and number of the inhabitants
than on the nature of their life; and as their life depends
upon phenomena of heat, light, electricity, and the chemical
modifications that they produce, it is these phenomena that
in some sort decide the intellectual future of the planet.
Kant threw out the suggestion that in an astronomic system,
for example—in our solar system—the intellectual and moral
perfection of the inhabitants increases with their aloofness
from the central star, and thus follows a lowering of the
temperature; but such a hypothesis is much too simple to
account for so complex an effect, and one which is dependent
upon many other things than temperature. What is probable, from
the phenomena of life as we know them, is that thought could
scarcely be developed either in a brazier or a glacier, and
that a certain mean is a necessary condition of organic and
intellectual development.

[Sidenote: Objections answered.]

But, it has been said, if other globes than ours are inhabited by intelligent and affectionate beings who live as we do upon the daily bread of science, these beings cannot be notably superior to us, or they would have given us before this time visible signs of their existence. To argue thus is not sufficiently to take account of the terrible power of space to imprison beings in infinite isolation. It may well be doubted whether beings of a relatively infinite intelligence, as compared with us, would not find their power unequal to dealing with such spaces as separate the stars. Our testimony on a question of the existence of such beings has no more value than that of a flower in the polar regions, or a bit of moss on the Himalayas, or a bit of weed in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, would have if it should declare the earth to be void of really intelligent beings on the ground that they had never been plucked by a human hand. If, therefore, the universe somewhere contains beings really worthy of the name of gods, they are probably so distant from us that they are as unaware of our existence as we are of theirs. They perhaps have realized our ideals, and the fact of that realization will perhaps remain unknown to us to the end.

[Sidenote: Possibility of discovering inhabitants in other spheres.]

It is to-day admitted that every thought corresponds to a certain kind of motion. Suppose that an analysis more delicate even than that of the spectrum should enable us to record and to distinguish, not only vibrations of light but the invisible vibrations of thought in distant worlds. We should, perhaps, be surprised to see that in proportion as the light and heat of the incandescent stars decrease, there by degrees arises consciousness, and that the smallest and most obscure stars are the first to produce it, whereas the most brilliant and enormous, like Sirius and Aldebaran, are the last to feel these subtler vibrations, but feel them ultimately with greater power, and develop a humanity with faculties and powers proportionate to their enormity.

[Sidenote: Slowness of spread of civilization from star to star.]

The total amount of space which is known to us, from our earth to the farthest nebulæ that the telescope renders visible, and to the dark depths beyond, is no more than a mere point as compared with the totality of the universe—supposing always that there is a totality. Eternity may, therefore, be necessary for progress to traverse the immensity of space, if one conceives progress (if such a thing exists at all) as starting from some one point of departure, from a sort of holy-land and elect people, and spreading from them out in all directions into the infinite. Modern science, of course, scarcely permits one to believe in so privileged a land. Illimitable nature scarcely possesses, after the fashion of God, exclusive election. If the ideal has been achieved in one place, it must also, in all probability, have been achieved in a number of others, although the wave of progress has not yet spread to us. Intellectual light travels less rapidly than solar and stellar light, and yet how long it takes a ray to come to us from Capricornus!

[Sidenote: Possibility of mind-acting on mind at a distance.]

In our inferior organisms, consciousness does not seem to pass from one living molecule to another unless they are contiguous in space; still, according to the most recent discoveries in regard to the nervous system, and to the propagation of thought by mental suggestion from a distance,[163] it is not contrary to the facts to conceive the possibility of a sort of radiation of consciousness through space by means of undulations of a degree of subtlety as yet unknown to us. It is not utterly unpermissible to conceive a society of consciousnesses not hemmed into some small corner of the universe, each in a narrow organism which is a prison, but communicating freely with each other throughout the whole expanse of space; it is not utterly unpermissible to conceive the ultimate realization of the ideal of universal sociality which constitutes the basis of the religious instinct. Just as out of a more intimate communication with individual consciousnesses there may arise upon our earth a sort of collective consciousness, so it is not ridiculous to suppose that there may arise, in an infinity of ages, a sort of intercosmic consciousness.

[163] See the _Revue philosophique_, 1886.

[Sidenote: Patience.]

God is patient because he is eternal, theologians are fond of saying. In an all-powerful being patience of evil would be a crime; patience, which can scarcely be ascribed with any propriety to God, belongs however most fitly to a being who is aware of his fundamental unity with the totality of things, and is conscious of his eternity as a member of the human species, as a member of the brotherhood of living beings of which the human species is simply an accident, as a part of the evolution of this globe in which conscious life itself at first appears as no more than an accident, and of the evolution of the vast astronomical systems in which our globe is no more than a point. Man may be patient because, as an inseparable part of nature, he is eternal.

_IV. The destiny of the human race and the hypothesis of immortality from the point of view of monism._

[Sidenote: Theory of evolution and death.]

Next to the fate of the universe, what interests us most vitally is the question of our own destiny. Religion consists for the most part in a meditation on death. If death were not an incident of life mankind would nevertheless be superstitious, but superstition would probably never have been systematized into religions. The mass of society possesses so slight an interest in metaphysics! A problem must bruise and wound them to attract their attention; and death prevents such problems. Will the gates of the valley of Jehoshaphat, through which the dead must pass, open on the heavens like a rainbow made of light and hope, like a joyous triumphal arch, or will it be low as the door of the tomb, and open upon infinite darkness? Such is the great question to which all religions have endeavoured to furnish a response. “The last enemy that shall be vanquished is death,” says St. Paul; perhaps that also represents the last secret that shall be penetrated by human thought. The ideas which tend to become dominant in modern philosophy seem, however, to exclude the notion of the perpetuity of the self. The conception of evolution principally is based on a theory of mobility, and appears to result in the dissolution of the individual, with even a greater certainty than in that of the species or the world. The individual form, and the species form, are equally unstable. On the walls of the catacombs may often be seen, roughly designed, the dove, bringing back to the ark the green bough, the symbol of the soul which has passed beyond the ocean and discovered the eternal harbour; at the present day the harbour recoils _ad infinitum_, before human thought; limitless open sea stretches away before it: where in the abyss of bottomless and limitless nature shall be found the branch of hope. Death is a wider void than life.

[Sidenote: The problem of life after death at the present day.]

When Plato approached the problem of destiny, he did not hesitate to launch out into philosophical hypotheses, and even into poetical myths. It is our present purpose to examine what are to-day the suppositions, or, if you choose, the dreams that may still be entertained as to the future by a sincere believer in the dominant philosophy of the present day, the philosophy of evolution. Given the present conception of nature, would Plato have found himself cut off from those beautiful expectations to the charm of which he said we ought to submit ourselves? In Germany, and in especial in England, it is not uncommon to endeavour to discover how much of the antique religious beliefs still subsists, and is, in however problematic and uncertain a form, involved in the scientific and philosophic hypotheses of the day. It is our purpose to undertake here an analogous inquiry in regard to immortality, recognizing how conjectural any attempt to solve the mystery of fate must be. Is it necessary to say that we make no pretensions to “demonstrating” either the existence or even the _scientific_ probability of a life after death? Our design is more modest; it is enough to show that the impossibility of such a life is not yet proven; even in the presence of modern science immortality is still a problem; if this problem has not received a positive solution, no more has it received a negative solution.

It is our intention further to consider what bold, and even adventurous hypotheses may be necessary to enable one to translate into philosophic language the sacred symbols of religion, or the destiny of the soul.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Death and idealism.]

I. There are two possible conceptions as to life after death; that of eternal existence and that of immortality, properly so called, or continuation and evolution of life under a superior form. The first conception corresponds more particularly to the idealistic theories of the world, which we have analyzed above, which, regarding the basis of things as an eternal thought, a thought of thought, believe that by identifying itself with it mankind might pass out of time into eternity. Thought, which seems at first no more than a reverberation and image of things, idealists believe, turns out in the last analysis to be the very reality of which all the rest of the world is but a reflection; but this conception of an eternal existence is not in the least incompatible with the philosophy of evolution, for evolution in time does not exclude a transcendent mode of existence out of time. Such an existence, however, remains essentially problematic; it corresponds to Kant’s Noumenon and Spencer’s Unknowable; according to this hypothesis, corporal death is simply a stage in physical evolution, and the final term to be attained by all beings is their fixation in the consciousness of eternity. This point of fixation, accessible to every thinking being, is to be attained only by the highest, most disinterested, impersonal, and universal thought possible.

[Sidenote: An eternal element in man.]

Such is the hope which lies at the bottom of the great religions, and the great idealistic systems of metaphysics. According to Plato there is nothing durable in us but what relates to the eternal, and to the universal, and is therefore of the same nature as they are. All the rest is eliminated by Becoming, by perpetual Generation, that is, by evolution. A flower is, in our eyes, a friend; it owes its colour and charm, however simple, to a ray of the sun; but this ray, to which our affection is due, is wholly impersonal; it creates the beauty of the flower, and passes on its way; and it is the sun that we should love, both for the ray and the flower. Too exclusive and limited affection is always based on some mistake, and is on that account perishable. It insists on our stopping at such and such a link in the infinite chain of causes and effects. It is the principle of the universe, it is the universal being that we must love, if our heart is big enough, and it is that love alone, according to Plato, which is eternal. Is not eternity the very form of existence in the intelligible world, in which Goodness is the sun and the Ideas are the stars? Christian neo-Platonists, over and above Time and its incessant mobility, have dreamed of an intemporal and immutable somewhat, that they call the life eternal: _Quæ enim videntur, temporalia sunt; quæ autem non videntur, æterna_. Spinoza has dealt with the same conception of an existence under the form of eternity, which does not exclude the perpetual development of changing modes. Kant also, by his word _Noumenon_, designated an intelligible, intemporal, transcendent somewhat, that lay beyond the scope of physical evolution. “The eternal evolution of the soul,” Schelling has said in his turn, “is not eternal in the sense that it possesses neither a beginning nor an end, but in that it bears no relation to Time.” And Schopenhauer, finally, believes in an intemporal, eternal will, which is distinguished from the will to live that belongs to time and to the evolution of temporal forms. “We willingly recognize,” says Schopenhauer, “that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is absolutely nothing to those who are still full of the desire of life, but for those in whom desire is annihilated what does our evil world, with its sun and its Milky Way, amount to? Nothing.” It is with these words that Schopenhauer closes his book. He brings us once more into the presence of _Nirvâna_, conceived not only as a refuge from life, but also as a refuge from death; as an existence that shall be placeless and timeless, and, so to speak, _utopian_ (in its primary intention) and _achronistic_.

[Sidenote: Is such immortality personal or not?]

But is this eternal life, the fact of which is, as we have seen, problematic, altogether impersonal or not? No certain reply can be given since we are as ignorant of the essence of individual being as of the essence of universal being, and consequently of the degree to which it is possible for individuality to subsist in universality. Schopenhauer, however, in his endeavour to ascribe to the individual a greater amount of reality than Plato allowed, opposed the principle of individuation to the natural individualities in which it manifests itself, and it may, indeed, be asked, whether genuine consciousness, genuine thought, and genuine volition do not at once pass beyond the individual, and preserve what is most essential in the individual. Individuality is always more or less physical, but it is possible that what makes individuality limited is not of the essence of personality, of consciousness; perhaps what is best in thought and will may become universal, without ceasing in the best sense to be personal like the Νοῦς of Anaxagoras.[164]

[164] At the very centre of one’s being, universality and
personality increase side by side; that is to say, the greater
the share of existence a being possesses, the greater the
amount of existence that it is capable of sharing with other
beings. Incommunicability or impenetrability represents the
lowest degree of existence; natural existence, the existence
of forces as yet blind and fatal, maintains by their mutual
antagonism an equilibrium in a state of inertia and torpor
... The greater one’s self-appropriation by intelligence, the
greater one’s power of taking possession of other beings by
thought; the being that best knows itself best knows other
beings ... the spirit, in so far as it is intelligent, should
be open, penetrable, participable, and participant. Two minds,
in so far as they are perfect, may interpenetrate each other by
means of thought (A. Fouillée, _Philosophie de Platon_).

“We must distinguish,” M. Janet also says, “between
personality and individuality. Individuality consists in all
the external circumstances which distinguish one man from
another—circumstances of time, place, organization, etc....
The root of personality lies in individuality, but it tends
incessantly to withdraw from it. The individual is centred in
himself; personality aspires to rise above itself. The ideal
of individuality is egoism, the focussing of the whole in
self; the ideal of personality is devotion, the identification
of self with the whole. Personality, properly so called, is
consciousness of the impersonal” (_Moral_, 573).

[Sidenote: No positive knowledge to oppose to hypothesis of immortality.]

Speculate as we may upon individual and universal being, we are all but brought face to face in the end with the same transcendental _x_. Such speculations, however, are not without a certain utility, that of impressing us afresh with the limits of our knowledge. A belief in a transcendent immortality, as Fiske says, can be defined only negatively, as a refusal to believe that this world is everything. The materialist maintains, Fiske says, that when we have described the entire universe of phenomena, of which we are capable of taking cognizance under the conditions of this life, the whole of the story has been told. Fiske himself believes, on the contrary, that the whole has not then been told.[165] We may at least say that it is _possible_ that the whole story has not then been told. But to pass from the possible to the probable, no conclusion of the kind can be considered satisfactory that is not based upon more positive reason, psychological or moral; unsupported metaphysical speculations leave the mind simply in the presence of a problem.

[165] Fiske, _The Destiny of Man_, p. 113.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The hypothesis of a conditional eternity.]

Theories in regard to an eternal life such as we above mentioned have always proved in history more or less aristocratic and inclined to limit the number of the elect. In Buddhism the sage alone is capable of achieving eternal existence, whereas all the rest of mankind are condemned to life in time and illusion. Spinoza recognizes eternity only in what he calls cognition of the third order, intellectual intuition and love. Such cognition belongs properly to the true philosopher only. The intelligence of the vulgar is passive and perishable. “The instant the vulgar cease ... to suffer,” says Spinoza, “they cease to exist.” And Goethe, too, was inclined to regard the eternal life as reserved for an aristocracy.

[Sidenote: Criticised.]

This theory of inequality is maintainable only in so far as it is based upon an actual ascertainment of the difference in progress displayed by different minds, and of the small number of those who achieve the heights of wisdom. The case is otherwise when such an observed fact of natural or moral inequality is converted into a divine right, and God is conceived as creating and desiring precisely such a state of things. The latter, however, is the alternative that modern Christian theologians have adopted in their effort to offer a re-reading of the sacred texts. In their judgment the good alone are immortal, or, rather, are immortalized by God; the others are damned, in the sense that they are totally annihilated—an interpretation of the dogma of eternal punishment that seems to them wholly to exculpate the Deity. Any such notion is based upon a metaphysical illusion. The hypothesis of traditional eternity is inconsistent with that of the existence of a creator, since it is forever impossible on that hypothesis, to escape the contradiction involved in the notion of a being’s creating only to destroy—of a being’s choosing among his creatures a certain number for condemnation to death. Annihilation is simply damnation palliated; it is the substitution of a celestial guillotine for the long miseries that have preceded. This theological hypothesis affords us no way out of the difficulties involved in the doctrine of divine sanction that lies at the heart of all religions; it is the sacrifice of Isaac, or of Jesus, in another form simply. Will it be said that, on the hypothesis of conditional immortality, the immoral being is alone responsible for his own death? Yielding to passion, or even to vice, cannot be assimilated to suicide, for in suicide one knows what one is doing and is responsible for it; one kills one’s self because one wishes to die; but one does not wish to die when one abandons one’s self to a passion; and, if the result therefore of so doing is annihilation, death comes upon one unforeseen and undesired, takes one by surprise, by a sort of divine ruse, and the responsibility for such annihilation lies and must lie with God. Moreover, how can there exist between two individuals of the same nature a sufficiently great natural or moral difference to justify the one’s being wholly annihilated, and the other’s being permitted to live _in æternum_? It may be said, with Plato in the “Republic,” that, if vice were a disease that is really mortal to the soul, it would kill it in this life. Its destructive influence would be felt long before the occurrence of death, which, so far as vice is concerned, is an accidental circumstance simply.

[Sidenote: Is incompatible with human fellowship.]

As the notion of conditional immortality is incompatible with the notion of an omnipotent, omniscient, sovereignly loving creator, so also is it with that of a society of souls, of a spiritual kingdom, from which a certain number of mankind would be excluded forever. An absolutely wicked and hateful soul, unpossessed of any element of humanity, not to say of divinity, and consequently unfit to live, is a pure figment of hate and amounts to transporting the caste of pariah into the celestial city. It is a contradiction in terms to enjoin us to universal charity toward all men without exception, and at the same time to wish us to consent to the absolute annihilation and damnation of some of them. We are naturally and morally too intimately related for certain of us to be condemned definitively to death without the rest of us being impeded on our upward course; we are bound to each other by our love of humanity like Alpine climbers by the cord that passes from waist to waist, and one of us cannot slip but that the rest of us feel it, nor fall without all of us falling. _Nihil humani alienum_; one heart beats in the bosom of humanity, and if it stops forever in a single human breast, it will stop forever in the breasts of those also who are supposed to be immortal. The best of us, those who would be fit to receive baptism into immortality, would do as the barbarous and pagan chief, who, after having washed away his sins in the holy water of the font, with salvation in his hand and Paradise before his eyes, demanded suddenly what would be the fate of his former companions who had died unconverted, and whether he should find them in heaven. “No,” replied the priest, “they will be among the miserable and the damned, and thou amongst the blessed.” “I will go, then, among the damned, for I wish to go where I shall find my companions in arms. Adieu!” And he turned his back upon the font.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

The hypothesis of conditional immortality can, therefore, be maintained only by eliminating from it the doctrine of a creator of absolute merit, of virtue, and of universal and infinite charity; thus diminished, it becomes a belief in a sort of natural or metaphysical necessity to which beings are subject according to their degree of perfection simply. This hypothesis is essentially anti-providential, and in harmony only with systems more or less analogous to that of Spinoza.

In general the notion of eternal life is altogether transcendent and a fit subject for mystical dreams only. Let us, therefore, abandon this high ground and descend to nature and experience. Instead of talking of eternity, let us speak of life after death and of an immortality not conditional, but conditioned by the laws of matter and of mind and attainable by everyone.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Does personality contain a permanent element?]

II. Let us take our stand in the beginning on positive experience, and consider what sort of immortality the philosophy of evolution permits us to hope for. There exists in the sphere of consciousness, so to speak, a series of concentric circles which lie closer and closer about an unfathomable centre, personality. Let us pass in review the diverse manifestations of personality and see if they contain any imperishable element.

[Sidenote: One’s works immortal.]

The most external, and, in some sort, the most observable aspect of mankind, consists in their works and actions. Where material works alone are concerned, such as a house that one has built, a picture that one has painted, a statue that one has modelled, it may be felt that the distance between the worker and the work is too great, and that immortality in one’s work is too much like a sort of optical illusion. But when intellectual and moral works are concerned, the effect and the cause are more nearly one; therein lies the element of truth contained in the highly impersonal and disinterested doctrine that one lives in one’s works. Intellectual and moral labours are more than their mere material effect. The good man’s highest wish is to live and live again in his good actions; the thinker’s highest wish is to live and live again in the thought that he has contributed to the inheritance of humanity. This doctrine may be found in almost all great religions and is capable of subsistence in the domain of pure science. According to the modern Buddhists of India a man’s actions are his soul, and it is this soul that survives his death, and transmigration of souls is simply the constant transformation of good into better, and evil into worse; the immortality of one’s soul is the immortality of one’s actions, which continue to operate forever in the world according to their original force and direction.

[Sidenote: Continuity of human effort.]

Generation after generation labours at the task, and passes the token of hope from hand to hand. _Heri meum, tuum hodie_, yesterday was mine and I spent it in doing good, but not enough good; to-day is thine: employ the whole of it, do not lose an hour of it; if an hour dies sterile, it is a chance lost of realizing the ideal. Thou art master of to-day; do what in thee lies to make to-morrow what thou wouldst have it, let to-morrow be always in advance of to-day, and the horizon that men see each fresh morning be brighter and higher than the one they saw before.

[Sidenote: Nothing lost.]

The action must be followed into its effects, or into the effect of those effects, and so on infinitely. Our conduct stretches away _ad infinitum_, beyond the reach of our knowledge. Even from the purely physical and physiological point of view, neither intended nor attempted goodness is ineffective, since both thought and desire develop the mind. The very notion of what is to-day chimerical corresponds to a real movement in our brains; it is a mental force which contains its element of verity and influence. We inherit not only what our fathers did, but what they could not do, what they attempted and did not achieve. We are still alive with the devotion and sacrifice of our ancestors, with the courage that perhaps they spent in vain, as we feel in the spring the breath of distant antedeluvian springs and the loves of the tertiary period.

[Sidenote: Failure in the past the guarantee of success in the future.]

The ability of the present generation has been made possible by the stumbling and mistakes of generations in the past; and this embryonic and successless past constitutes the guarantee of our future. In the moral, as in the physiological world, there are instances of fertility that are not yet explicable. Sometimes long after the death of the man who first loved her the woman brings forth a child that resembles him; and humanity may bring forth a civilization on the model of some ideal cherished in the past, even when the past seems to be buried forever, if the ideal contains some obscure element of truth and, by consequence, of imperishable force. What has once really lived shall live again, and what seems to be dead is only making ready to revive. The scientific law of atavism is a guarantee of resurrection. To conceive and desire the best is to attempt the ideal, is to predetermine the path that all succeeding generations shall tread. Our highest aspirations, which seem precisely the most vain, are, as it were, waves which, having had the power to reach us, have the power to pass beyond us, and may, by a process of summation with other waves, ultimately shake the world. I am satisfied that what is best in me will survive, perhaps not one of my dreams shall be lost; other men will take them up, will dream them over again in their turn until they are realized. It is by force of spent waves that the sea fashions the immense bed in which it lies.

[Sidenote: Death not inevitable.]

In effect, in the philosophy of evolution life and death are recognized as relative and correlative conceptions; life is in one sense death, and death is the triumph of life over one of its particular forms. Proteus in the fable could be prevented from changing his shape only by being caught in sleep, which is the image of death; thus it is in nature; fixed form is sleep, is death, is a pause in the eternal fluctuation of life. Becoming and life are alike formless. Form, individuality, species, mark a transitory stoppage in the channel of life; we can neither seize nor hold nature, except when it is laid asleep, and what we call death—my death or yours—is itself a latent pulse of universal life, like one of the secret vibrations that pass through the germ during the months of apparent inertia during which it is making ready for the later stages of its development. The law of nature is eternal germination. A man of science was one day holding a handful of wheat, that had been found in the tomb of an Egyptian mummy. “Five thousand years without sight of the sun! Unhappy grains of wheat, as sterile as death, of which they have so long been the companions, never shall their tall stalks bow beneath the wind on the banks of the Nile. Never? What do I know of life, of death?” As an experiment simply, without much hope of success, the man of science sowed the grains of wheat that he had recovered from the tomb, and the wheat of the Pharaohs received the caress of the sun, of the air, and came up green through the soil of Egypt, and bowed beneath the wind on the banks of the sacred and inexhaustible flood of the Nile. And shall human thought, and the higher life which stirs in us like the germ in the seed, and love that seems to sleep forever in the tomb, not have this reawakening in some unforeseen springtime, and not be brought face to face with eternity, which seems at present to be buried, once and for all, in darkness? What is death, after all, in the universe, but a lesser degree of vital heat, a more or less transitory lowness of temperature? Death cannot be powerful enough to hold life and its perpetual youth in check, and to prevent the infinite activity of thought and of desire.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Is a more personal immortality possible?]

III. Yes, I and my works shall survive; but is immortality in this sense sufficient to satisfy the religious sentiment? As an individual, what do science and the philosophy of evolution promise me or permit me to hope? A somewhat external and impersonal immortality is, as we have seen, possible; is anything in the nature of an internal or personal immortality likewise possible?

[Sidenote: Science answers in the negative.]

Assuredly, it is not of science that the individual can demand proofs of his permanence. The fact of generation is, in the eyes of the man of science, in and of itself a negative of individual immortality; the social instinct which opens our hearts to thousands of other beings emphasizes the negation, and the scientific and metaphysical instincts themselves, which cause us to take an interest in the sensitive world, in its laws and destinies, diminish, so to speak, our importance as limited individuals. Thought breaks the limits of the self in which it is confined, and our breast is too narrow to contain our heart. Oh, how rapidly one learns in science and in art to make small account of one’s self, and this diminution of self-esteem neither lessens one’s enthusiasm nor one’s ardour, but adds to them only an element of manly sadness such as a soldier might feel who says: “I count for but one in the battle, nay, for less than that, for but a hundred millionth, and if I should disappear the result of the contest would no doubt not be changed, and yet I shall stay and fight.”

[Sidenote: Counsels resignation.]

Scientifically considered, individuality is a sort of provisional native land, and one’s native land is a sort of magnified individual with a consciousness composed of ideas and sentiments, and one’s love for one’s country may be greater than one’s love for such and such an individual. Such a love does not prevent us from understanding that our country will not be immortal as a nation, that it will have its periods of growth and of decay, that the obstacles which keep peoples apart are caducous, and that nations incessantly disappear and lose old elements and take on new. Why, merely from the fact that we love our own individuality, should we not consent to the same reasoning in regard to it; why should we wish to imprison it forever within the limits of the same individuality? If a nation dies, why should not a man? If it sometimes amounts to divination to cry out as one falls on the battlefield, “_Finis patriæ!_” does it any the less surely amount to divination to cry out in the presence of death, “_Finis individuæ_”? Could Kosciusko feel that he himself had a right to live when Poland and the ideas and beliefs to which he had devoted his life were no more?

[Sidenote: Dignity of resignation.]

A young girl, a relative of mine, on the point of death and unable to articulate, signified her wish for a piece of paper. When it was given to her, she began to write, “I do not want——” Death suddenly intervened and interrupted her volition before it could find expression in words; the thinking being and the expression of her thought seemed to be annihilated by the same blow. The child’s protest, like her life, was interrupted in the middle. Volition is powerless against death, and it is useless to stiffen one’s will against the final blow. On the contrary, man’s sole superiority in death consists in acceptance. Pascal’s conscious reed might not only be constrained to bend like any other reed, it might bend consentingly and respect the law that requires its death. Next to consciousness of his own power, the highest of man’s privileges is consciousness of the limits of his power, at least as an individual. Out of the very disproportion between the infinity that kills us, and the nothing that constitutes us, arises the sense of a certain greatness in us; we prefer to be stricken by a mountain rather than by a pebble; we should rather fall in a struggle against a thousand than in a struggle against one; so that intelligence, by measuring the greatness of our adversary, deprives us of regret at our defeat.

[Sidenote: Desire to survive egoistic.]

To desire to make the individual, who is more or less physical even in his moral nature, eternal, is, in the eyes of the man of science, a remnant of egoism. In his judgment, the human mind should accept the death of the individual by a species of intellectual devotion analogous to that with which we accept the death of our native country. Modern men of science may be defined as those who have no hope, ὁι μὴ ἔχοντες ἐλπίδα, as St. Paul said; we are _individually_ of too small account in the eyes of science to live always _individually_.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: But only when it relates to one’s self.]

Ought we, therefore, to consent cheerfully to the sacrifice of self, and to die willingly for the benefit of the universal life? So far as one’s self is concerned, one can make the sacrifice lightly, but the annihilation of those one loves cannot be accepted by a conscious and affectionate being. It is in vain for scientific and philosophic stoicism to urge with Epictetus that it is natural for a vase, which is fragile, to break, and for a man, who is mortal, to die. The question still remains, whether what is natural and scientific ought, as the Stoics alleged, to satisfy my reason and my love. As a matter of fact, when one really loves another person, what one endeavours to love is not the element of fragility, the vase of clay, but the intelligence and the heart, which Epictetus declines to consider separately from their perishable accompaniments. One attaches one’s self to them as to something permanent; one corrects and transfigures nature itself, and passes in thought beyond the brutality of its laws, and therein lies, perhaps, the very essence of the love of another. If the laws of nature, after seeming for a moment to be suspended and vanquished by the force of one’s disinterested love, subsequently break the bond that holds them in check, is it surprising that one’s love should still hold out against them? It is not only pain that I experience at being baffled by the laws of nature; it is indignation, it is the sense of injustice. The Stoics regarded pain as a passive affection of the sensibility simply, but moral pain implies a struggle of the will against nature, and an effort, as they themselves admit, to correct it. It is on this ground that pain is not an evil; its rôle is incessantly to impose our moral and social ideal on our physical nature, to force it to perfect itself; pain is the principle of development in life, and if there exists a means of vanquishing death, it is perhaps by virtue of pain that we shall arrive at it. We are right, therefore, in rebelling against nature’s powers of life and death, in so far as she exercises them for the purpose of annihilating what is morally best in us and in others.

[Sidenote: Love under the form of eternity.]

True love should never be expressed in the language of time. We say: “I loved my father during his lifetime; I was deeply attached to my mother or my sister.” Why locate it in the past? Why not say always: “I love my father or my mother?” Does not, and should not, love lay claim to an eternal present?

[Sidenote: Uniqueness of the individual.]

How could one say to a mother that there is nothing truly and definitively alive, personal, unique, in the at once smiling and meditative eyes of the child she holds upon her knees; that the little being that she dreams of mature, and good, and great, is a simple incident in the life of the species? No; her child is not like any other that has ever lived or that ever will live; none other could possess that look. Nowhere among the generations of men can there exist a fac-simile of the beloved face before one. All nature does not possess the equivalent of the individual, which it can destroy, but not replace. It is not, therefore, without reason that love refuses to consent to the substitution of one individual for another, which constitutes the very movement of life; it cannot reconcile itself to the eternal whirl in the dust of being; it is bent on fixing life, on arresting the world in mid-progress. But the world does not stop at its bidding. The future calls to generation after generation, and this powerful force of attraction is also a force of dissolution. Nature gives birth by means of death, and the joy of new loves is composed of the fragments of the old.

[Sidenote: The protest of love against death not limited to humanity.]

This protest of love against death, against the dissolution of the individual, attaches also to the lower animals. A dog, it seems, has only a market value, and yet can I ever buy again one that shall be the equivalent of this one that has died before my eyes? He loved me with all the power of his unhappy being, and endeavoured to hold fast to me while he was slipping away, and I endeavoured to hold him fast. Does not every being that loves acquire a right to immortality? Yes; the ideal of affection would be to immortalize all conscious beings; nay, more, the poet who is delicately sensitive to the individuality of a flower, or a ray of coloured light, of the drop of dew that refracts it, would wish to immortalize all nature, would wish to view under the form of eternity the rainbow that quivers in a soap bubble; for can any two bubbles ever be the same? And yet, while the poet aims thus at holding everything fast, at preserving everything, at fixing his dreams, at enchaining the ocean of life, the man of science replies that the eternal flood must be allowed to pulsate, to engulf our tears and our blood, and that the world must be left free. For the man of science, the flux and reflux and progress of life are more sacred than the love of the individual.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Antagonism between love and science.]

Thus, in the question of individual immortality, two great forces drag human thought in opposite directions. Science is inclined everywhere to sacrifice the individual in the name of natural evolution; love is inclined, in the name of a higher moral and social evolution, to preserve the individual. The antinomy is one of the most disquieting that the philosophic mind has to deal with.

[Sidenote: The best in one may survive.]