Part 12

The facts in the case, logically and practically, appear to be somewhat as follows: The individual's view-point, and the special machinery by which he undertakes to realize it, can be only tentative or provisional; they have the character, and usually he knows that they have the character, if I may use a somewhat extravagant term, of makeshifts; and, such being the fact, he is bound always to be in a state of constraint or tension, in a relation of suspense towards them and towards the environment to which they refer or belong. He feels a positive resistance, a something disposed to counteract what he would do, and of course the feeling means that he is really party to a growing life, not established in a completed life. Suppose a view-point, or a machinery that was perfectly applicable, that worked perfectly, that never did and never could give out, that might not even very suddenly go all to pieces, and that therefore put no strain nor uncertainty upon him who held or employed it; could such a view-point or such machinery be of any service to a growing life, to productive [p.231] activity? Most certainly not. Tension, or a strained relationship, is necessary to every individual's conduct and to every individual's ideas. But this strain, to be real, just to accomplish its own purposes must be not merely of a person with his own ideas or with the outer world to which the ideas refer, but of a person with other persons; not merely of conscious man with a mechanical nature, but of conscious and mechanically active man with other conscious and mechanically active men.

It is now an old story for us, but an important one, that there must be society. A genuine individuality requires society. Society is a medium not by which something is added to individual life, but by which something in individual life is kept real and manifest. By maintaining, as it were always from without, the natural tension of individual life, it ensures to the individual the constant growth that is his legitimate inheritance. The doubter is a social creature. The free thinker accepting his ideas only tentatively, though at the same time using them hopefully, sure that they will lead somewhere, is a social creature; and the mechanic is a social creature, being one with others for whom life is not routine but growth, and among whom the growth in which each has his part induces constant tension, the tension of difference, the tension of opposition and competition, the tension of mutual correction and compensation, the tension, finally, of reality refusing to be bound. Not the individual's provisional standpoint, nor yet the machinery that he employs and that sooner or later must go to pieces, not these alone, I must therefore reiterate, make the individual effectively [p.232] active in a growing world, make him a worthy creature doing the work of nature or of God; these have their place and part; but constant relation to other individuals, the objects not less of hate than of love, not less of rivalry than of friendship, is also essential.

In the so-called material world all things, in and by themselves unreal, get reality, yes, get individual reality, only as through their very differences they work together for what is real. In the world of mind, or thought, if this can be imagined apart from the world of things, all thoughts or ideas, in and by themselves untrue for being subjective, relative, and partial, get truth only as also through their differences, so tense and interactive, they work together for what is true. And, likewise, in the world of persons, if indeed this can be imagined apart from the world of thought, all individuals, call them now mechanics or what you will, though in and by themselves without personal worth or real individuality, without freedom or immortality, get genuine worth and are assured even immortality only as shoulder against shoulder they work together for a life that is true and real, worthy and genuine.

But in an earlier chapter, dealing with "The Personal and the Social, the Vital and the Formal in Experience," a different argument for individuality was insisted upon. Then the person was individual because of his independence of particular form; now he is so because a real life demands the particular and different, with which he is assumed to be necessarily identified. Then he was the "living, integral exponent of the unity of experience," free with the [p.233] genius of universality, now he is one among all the particular conflicting elements of that unity--or at least of the reality to which that unity refers. So there appears to be even an inconsistency in my thinking. Yet, I venture still to think, the inconsistency is only apparent. Certainly it should be remembered that the person's asserted genius for universality was not for the universal in an abstract sense, in the sense of the universal as something by itself and apart from particulars; rather it was for a constant enriching of the universal through particulars, for the translation of any one particular relation and experience, which had reached a higher state of development, to all the other actual or possible relations of life; and this can mean only that the universal, in which the personal individual has a place, is not denying or betraying, but always holding and lifting up to itself all particular factors or elements in the unity of experience or of reality. Simply, though perhaps abstrusely too, the universal is just all the particulars; unity is always in and through difference; and there is, therefore, without inconsistency, a case for individuality from either side. Indeed, the life of the individual being, as was said, always in a tension or strain of difference, of opposition and competition, is bound to have, it can be real only as it has, both a particular form and a genius for universality. Not in the sense of that conventional theology, crudely dualistic and unthinkable, but in a sense that is not to be gainsaid and that may give some meaning even to the conventional theology, every individual is real only in having a body and a [p.234] soul. The soul of a man is only his genius for universality, but for a universality that works through, not that is independent of, the particular.

So the difference between this chapter and the former chapter is merely one of emphasis. The double character of the individual, however, as it is now before us, starts an inevitable question. Is the individual as immortal as real? If he is immortal, does the immortality belong to both sides of his character, to his body and to his soul, or only to one? And, admittedly, this question offers more serious difficulties than the suspicion of inconsistency. How can it be met?

IV. IMMORTALITY.

To write a useful essay on immortality has long been one of my ambitions, and, as regards the views in that essay, my faith and my reason alike have so far brought me to this thesis: Whatever is real is immortal. "A most meagre contribution to the subject," I hear some one exclaim. But is it so very meagre after all? "A most gloomy contribution," says another, "for evil, and above all death, are real." But is it so gloomy? Remember, not even death can be real alone. Possibly, too, the meagreness will seem less and the gloom will be illuminated if the need of the real being also the ideal, is brought to mind. That the real must be ideal, that the world must be so [p.235] constituted that the law of whatever is good will prevail in it, has been a faith manifested among all men and expressed through history in countless ways. True, no particular experience ever satisfies it. Not even the particular things we adjudge to be best are adequate to it, and the things we think evil, the suffering and the hardships of all kinds, the always tragic death and the too often offensive life, seem its eternal rebuke. Yet the faith remains, and you and I and all others are forever calling out to it. Our very doubts are its altars; our honest, rational thoughts, as they are uttered, are prayers; perhaps the only prayers to which we have any right.

So the real, which must be also the ideal, is immortal; and this, quite apart from any particular questions about the body or the soul, makes a world to live in and to hope in, whatever happens. Of body and soul, too, it says something. These, in just so far as they are real, are immortal, and any real relation between them is immortal also, for the conclusive test of immortality is just reality, reality here and now. Whatever is real in your life or in mine, whatever reality our present personality may possess, be it physical or spiritual, be it both or neither of these, that and only that is immortal. That and only that, however, let it be said again, is now or never. The most serious error, so it seems to me, in all the controversy about immortality, is the notion, or the superstition, that something that is real now can pass away, or that something real in the future is not real, not freely real now. With this error corrected, of course at the expense of certain attempts to bind reality to [p.236] something that is visible, if not to the natural eye, at least to the eye of the mind, man has nothing to fear. Reality will hold him to itself, will support whatever truly inheres in his friendships or his family ties, in his best hopes or in his personal conceits, for ever and ever. Reality can never betray what it has ever harboured.

And the whole trend of thinking in this book has been to make the reality here spoken of a most hospitable harbour. So innate to all experience is the spirit of truth, the principle of veracity, that life can have no absolute illusions. True, life also can have no positive knowledge final and exact, so that all things definitely manifest are only relatively true or real. All things definitely manifest, whether to the consciousness that looks without or that looks within, are mixedly true or false, real or unreal. But just this impossibility, now so familiar to us, at once of absolute illusion and of absolute knowledge, is, as said so often, a condition of the true and the real, and it means in this place that nothing which is ever defined, which is ever hypostasized or apotheosized, which in any way is erected into a thing or nature quite by itself, possessing determined or determinable qualities, can ever be said to be either mortal or immortal, since it must be as truly one as the other. It must be significantly, but never purely and exclusively either. Not this hand of mine nor that picture on the wall, not this body which, so to speak, I seem to wear, nor that soul, which you or I imagine to be in the body and more or less loosely connected with the body, is unqualifiedly immortal. Nor yet [p.237] is any of these unqualifiedly mortal. Still, again, there is immortality, and an infinitely hospitable immortality, which the hand and the whole body and the soul, be it yours or be it mine, all have a place and a part in. There is immortality, and, besides those things that were just named, divinity is also immortal. But even a God dies, this being just one of the things that make him God. Any man, then, or any being, or any thing, may say, "I am immortal." No one, however--to speak now only in words directly applicable to man--may say, "My body is immortal," nor even, "My soul is immortal," if, so speaking, he means only what he seems to say. Body and soul alike, if two separate things, are both of them at once living and dying. They are equally mortal or immortal, for only so, as two things, can they belong to the real self. Can parts, be they two or many more, ever be unmixedly what the whole is? There is immortality, then, yet nothing, not the body nor the soul, is wholly or selfishly immortal. Reflect, to take an illustration from the practice, if not from the conscious thinking of men, how through the centuries of the dualistic view of human nature, the saving, or the losing, of the separate soul has been a keen human interest, and how the separate body, living, has been neglected and despised, and, dead, has been cherished and honoured. Yes, man's immortality is deeper, and it is more hospitable, than any distinction, be this invidious on one side or on the other or be it not, between the physical and the spiritual. Even in the case of the spiritual, the cannot be a.

The soldier and the mechanic have been mentioned [p.238] as types of personal individuality appropriate respectively to the medieval and the modern period, to the period of the "universal individual," on the one hand, and of unity realized, not through a type, but through the working together of different individuals, on the other. The type was of another world; the living unity is here and now in this. For the mechanic, then, death is not what the soldier has found it, and immortality is different too. But how fully to describe the difference, and how above all really to appraise it, I do not clearly know. Perhaps there is not enough of the poetic in my nature. The soldier, as the political historian or as the philosopher sees him, has had his appreciative poets, but the mechanic has been little sung. The mechanic's death, however, and the life following it, afford a theme that some poet of the future, let me hope, will be able to do justice to. The soldier leaves this for another world, by his violent death only fulfilling his extreme subjection here. The mechanic, somewhat like the tools which he employs, actually continues with the always productive life of this world, by his death, natural rather than violent, even contributing to, as well as sharing in, what is produced. Not less than the soldier's is his after-life an appropriate fulfilment of his earthly career; each gains through death the natural reward of his life's service. But though I find myself so unable to say what I would, to express either in prose or in poetry all that I seem to feel, there is just one thought that I must try to articulate, and that will certainly assist the understanding of the difference between the two deaths or the two after-lives.

So, again, there is immortality for mankind--the [p.240] immortality of him whom I have called the mechanic. There is immortality, mine and yours and ours. We die, but not as dies the soldier, who leaves this life for another quite apart, securing there a companionship denied him here; we die a death that is never death alone, and we die as we live, in a companionship that is real now and throughout all time. Furthermore, our death is always, or always may be, self-denial, and self-denial, too, in its supreme moment, the moment of its greatest achievement, but our self-denial is also very different from that of the soldier.

There is immortality, then, but what results has all that has now been said for the interpretation of history, for our feelings about the life and death of our fellows, and for the relevant doctrines of Christianity?

We commonly think of history as the passing of persons, nations, and civilizations. Men come and go, but history goes on for ever. To be sure, history accumulates, as if its gifts from humanity, innumerable treasures, books, relics, institutions, buildings, machinery and the like, but the donors, as we are wont to think, are lost to it, remaining as ideal influences perhaps, but not as vitally active in the life they once assisted. This common view, however, must now seem wrong. The past must ever persist in the present, and not as an aside in some other world, nor yet as merely so much ideal influence, but vitally as a party to the present. Those that were must also live now. Have we their literature? Yes, and their consciousness [p.241] too. Their institutions? And also their life. Their achievements? And their power and will. Altogether too fanciful, some one thinks; but give it meaning from what has been said here especially about individuality. In the real world there can be but one life and one death, and we individuals, whatever our century, divide the labour of them both. Even our present life and consciousness and our will must be said to belong, in return, to those who have gone before; for it is wrong, it must be wrong, to think of the life of the past and the life of the present as two lives, as independent and perhaps even different in kind. Not those that are now gone once lived and we live, but they and we are living, they in us, and we with them; they in the world of our life, not in a world yonder and apart. They live in us, to suggest a simple analogy, that is perhaps more than a mere analogy, very much as our own past selves, our infancy and our youth, are alive with us and in us to-day. If a physical scientist can see the same force in the military weapons and engines of ancient times that he sees in those of our own time, if a sociologist can find the same social phenomena then and now, may not the historian regard the older life in general and the newer life as not less intimate? Did different winds blow in 1492 from those that blow to-day? Was it a different sun that shone in 500 B.C.: from that which shone in A.D. 500, or which shines, or tries to shine, to-day? We do not deny that the animal nature is still alive in us as well as around us, although at the same time we suppose it to belong to a very early period in our development. Why, then, should we exclude what is [p.242] so much more recent? Because it is too distinctly human to be so robbed of its temporal independence, of its own date and place? That is certainly a strange reason in view of the fact that men have insisted on erecting, in their minds, for the human nature that has passed away, a place which is altogether timeless and eternal. Why not dignify human nature, then, by making it, and all that it bears, eternal in its own natural life, not in a sphere that is unnatural? It is sheer materialism, in letter or in spirit, either to entomb the historic past, as some would, in books and monuments of all sorts, or, as others would, to lay it aside in a so-called immaterial world. Who does either of these things forgets how the books are written and how the monuments are erected, and how in general the things of the past come to be. The future is always a party to whatever is done. The men who have ever achieved anything have always been, in their character and in their work, as if made by the future, "ahead of their times." An uncanny phrase, unless one can think of the deeds and men of any time as in a vital unity with the deeds and men of all times. A man is great only as he identifies himself with some social force, with some actual movement of his day, fulfilling it out of a long past, bringing it to focus and so making it definite and manifest, and as the life around him which gave him birth, adopts his will and repeats his achievement. History has many cases of human societies repeating in their lives as a whole the careers of great men. Only it is not repetition exactly; it is resurrection and continuation. Great men make history, but they make it only because they [p.243] are alive in it before their birth and survive in it, in its doing and in its thinking, after they die. Would history be even thinkable without such continuity? Could we honestly call it history? What good American to-day is not, convinced that he has a share in what Washington and Lincoln accomplished years ago, and also--and this one may, or may not, regret--in the doings of Benedict Arnold and Booth? And, to put a very practical question, would it not be well if in the popular consciousness great men, good and bad, were really identified with history instead of being treated as fixtures outside of it? Make them separate fixtures and you make them oracles, the spirits of quite another world, with which the demagogue, as if a medium, can excite the people; but identify them in a vital way with history and they must grow with it, speaking quite as much out of the present conditions as out of the past. Hero-worship is too often idolatry, and for my part the literalism of it is only "spiritualism" trying to be respectable. Every extravagance, of course, has to have its lawful or conventionally respectable expression.

But what, now, of friendship and family ties? Can we view these in the same light? I think we would; I think we can; I think we must. True, it is easier to speak in this large, "philosophical" way of history and of the men who have had part in it, inventing and effectively using the machinery that has enabled its progress, than of such matters as friendship and [p.244] family. In these latter matters the heart more than the mind is addressed. Still, the relations of friendship and kinship are not themselves born, nor do they die and all friends abroad and kin at home live and move and have their being only in these. Does it destroy or even weaken the meaning or the reality of friendship to have it said that the relation is as universal as particular or local, and as eternal as temporal? Is a relationship worth less than any one of its manifestations? Why, the universality of the relationship gives meaning or reality to any manifestation. Friendship, then, or kinship, for this person or that, cannot be separated from the experience in general. Separate it, and one's friends or kin surely do die, remaining after death, like the characters of the older history, as only ideal "influences," or as unearthly spirits that sometimes idly chatter. But in reality, friendship, or kinship, is one, not merely many, all of its members labouring together for, and forever surviving in, what it truly is. The friends, then, or the kin that lived, live still. In others about us? Yes; and in ourselves too; or rather in the relation of man to man or in the unity of all that lives. Not literally in others, then, although the meaning intended was a genuine one, nor yet literally in ourselves, for nothing crudely like transmigration of souls is in my mind, but--to repeat--in the living relationship of friends or kin. There is indeed a truth in transmigration, as also in other related notions; witness all the facts of inheritance, of historical succession or continuity, of social growth and personal character, of evolution; but it is the truth, or is near to [p.245] the truth, of a reality that is conserved even in its changing. The soldier of the past, let me say, at his death was "translated," but the mechanic of to-day is transmuted. The latter word may be stranger and harsher in sound than the former, but there is truly less violence and more honour in its meaning. So, again, friends and kin that ever lived, live still. Friendship and fatherhood and motherhood and all the relations of kin, nay, all the relations of life, that make our individuality real, that make it personal, that make it social, that make, it natural, have been from the beginning, live now, and must survive forever, and by their survival hold for the present and the future life all who have ever been. Where would faith go, and where worth and responsibility, if birth really created and death destroyed, or if birth were a coming from no one knows where, from a realm unlike and apart, and death the return? Birth cannot create or introduce; it can only express, revealing and realizing. Death cannot destroy or "translate"; it can be only fulfilment at a crisis.

The mere wordiness of a philosopher! Possibly. And yet Christianity has very nearly implied, if indeed it has not actually said, and said or implied again and again, exactly the same thing. To science, I know, we are peculiarly indebted for the conception of the organism, or the organic, which enables us to bring together the universal and the individual, the eternal and the temporal, the omnipresent and the local, without losing the worth or the reality of either, and of course--for so they would not be together--without erecting separate quarters, or worlds, for their [p.246] occupation; but, when all is said, science has only applied at large the very special and personal doctrines of Christianity, and has therein helped Christianity to a better consciousness of itself. The Resurrection, the Immaculate Conception, the Divinity, the Immediacy of the Kingdom, the Sacrifice, and the Brotherhood of Man are doctrines which one and all testify quite directly that our real individuality, our real being, lies not in a separate existence of any sort, here or hereafter, but in the abiding relations of the actual life now. In these the Christ resides, the always living Christ. What else can the following mean? "In as much as ye have done it unto one of these, my brethren, even these least ye have done it unto me." And again: "For whosoever shall do the will of my father which is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother." The living Christ, one of the dogmas of our day, is more than a fancy and more than a dogma, and for no one so truly as the scientist, the evolutionist. Christ was too great, too deep-lying, too far-reaching in human history not to be more. The letter of Christianity, we are often told, has got to go, but it is quite as true that the real letter of Christianity has got to stay, has yet to come: the real letter, I say, not the parody of a mere physical appearance and reappearance nearly two thousand years ago. If Christ was really not born as men are born, if he did not really die, if truly he still lives in and with our lives to-day, if Christianity honestly means the brotherhood of humanity and the divinity of man, then simply the Christ was more than a pagan's messenger from another world, and [p.247] more than the creature of a single moment in history or a single place; also he reveals to us more in ourselves than any of these things, and instead of resorting to such notions as parthenogenesis and trance to explain the birth and the resurrection, we must rather recognize in him, and in ourselves, an individuality that has, not in spite of, but because of, birth and death, a share in, a place and a part in the immortality of what is real. Now I am not a good preacher, plainly, nor am I exactly a sympathetic theologian, and also I know too well the defects of argument through scriptural quotation; but I have to hope, as personally I believe, that in the foregoing paragraph, given in conclusion to the discussion of immortality in the doubter's world, I have suggested what at least is not an unchristian appreciation of Christianity.

* * * * *

Our journey in the doubter's world here comes to an end. All things are real, yet none final. The spiritual and the material in life are sympathetic even to the point of being vitally at one with each other, thought being free and practical, and material nature being lawful but law-free, and mechanical but productively so, and being in her productiveness definite opportunity, not blind necessity, to human life. And, the "universal individual" being dead, having returned to the other world from which he came, all particular individuals have real and personal shares in the life that is, in the work that is ever to be done. Living or dying, the individual, as we have found him, is the mechanic of to-day, not the soldier of yesterday.

The last few sentences seem like a paragraph from some psychologist of the day. My colleague, Professor W.B. Pillsbury, for example, has just published a book on the attention, in which appears the following statement: "It seems that the problem of voluntary activity is largely, if not entirely, a problem of the attention ... . The processes which are effective in the control of a man's ideas are ipso facto in the control of his movements," and this, besides being the current psychology, is quite in accord with our doubter's vision: "Well thought is well done." (See Attention, chapter ix. London, 1907.)

Chap. VIII., pp. 177 seq.

Chaps. III., IV., V., and VI.

See also an earlier discussion in this book, chap. III., pp. 49 seq.

Two preliminary efforts have already been put in print. See the Appendix, "A Study of Immortality in Outline," to a book: Dynamic Idealism: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Psychology (McClurg, 1898). See, secondly, an article: "Evolution and Immortality," in the Monist, April, 1900.

Except for a few changes, the next few paragraphs are taken from my article, "Evolution and Immortality," in the Monist, April, 1900.

In a small book, Citizenship and Salvation, or Greek and Jew, published some years ago, I have tried to show this of Socrates and Christ.

DOUBT AND BELIEF.

There was once a brook that ran, at times slowly, at times more rapidly, through fields and woods, under trees and over rocks. At every chance, whatever the obstacles in its course, it fell, much or little, as it could; but impatience and uncertainty filled its life as the minutes and the hours passed. Had life nothing more in store for its troubled waters? Was this groping downward all? Were the memory and the accompanying hope, which haunted every thwarted move, of no avail? Would true fulness of life never be attained?

But a great moment for the brook came, rewarding it at last, bringing assurance in place of threatened despair. A precipice intervened, and the waters fell hundreds of feet; a glorious fall --spray, sunlight, colour, eloquence.

"Now," spoke the brook from the deep, smooth pool below, "now I have lived; now I know that my life was real and that my life was good, for I have found myself, I have found my world; and I have found them where I thought them not. And, speaking so, the brook flowed on contented.