Problems of Immanence Part 11

convinces no one. Most men have known moods of severe depression and la.s.situde when not to be at all seemed the one consummation to be desired; but that is not the normal att.i.tude of normal people. Such would still fain believe that the grave is not the end, but many of them are in a state of bewilderment and insecurity. On the one hand men have never grown reconciled to the heart-breaking triviality of death, never accepted this dispensation without a question, a hope, or, failing hope, a sense of rebellion; on the other, we have to recognise that we live in an age when mult.i.tudes have ceased to accept religious beliefs simply upon the authority of the Bible--when educated people generally have come quite definitely to disbelieve in the resurrection of the body, a final day of judgment, a localised {222} heaven and material h.e.l.l--an age which must be one of manifold doubts and misgivings.

But this break-up of Biblical authority and its unquestioning acceptance is itself largely due to that resistless advance of physical science which has reconstructed the world for us with such masterful hands. The results of the modern conception of the universe are only just beginning to get into our system; as yet they are still largely una.s.similated, and give us trouble accordingly. Let us take such a statement as the following, and imagine its effect upon the average individual:--

Think of Mercury in its wild rush through the solar heat, or Venus gleaming in the western sky, or ruddy Mars with its tantalising problems, or of mighty Jupiter 1,230 times the size of our own planet, or of Saturn with its wondrous rings, or of Ura.n.u.s and Neptune revolving in their tremendous...o...b..ts--the latter nearly three thousand millions of miles away from the centre of our system. . . But the true awfulness is yet untouched. What of the millions of millions of suns that blaze in immeasurable s.p.a.ce beyond our comparatively little solar sphere? Sirius alone, at the foot of the constellation of Orion, is 125 times larger than our sun. Fifteen hundred millions of millions of miles away, where ordinary eyes dimly descry half a dozen points of light, the telescope reveals more than a thousand orbs, some seventy of them vaster than our sun. What indeed is the whole of this our tiny planet compared with Alcyone--1,000 times larger than our central sun![2]

These, of course, are among the commonplaces of modern astronomy; but we do not think we {223} are wrong in saying that they leave a great many minds singularly ill at ease, in a condition of vague but unmistakeable discomfort, oppressed by the vastness of the universe as revealed by science, feeling lost and utterly insignificant in this illimitable expanse of worlds on circling worlds, and aeons upon exhaustless aeons. It was possible, when the universe was regarded as a comparatively small affair, with our earth as its veritable centre, to think oneself of sufficient value in the scheme of things to live for ever; but now such a claim seems to not a few grotesque in its presumption. Have we not been told by Mr. Balfour that, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, man's "very existence is an accident, his story a brief and discreditable episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets"?--and shall such a one, member of such a race, dream of prolonging his atomic existence world without end? As Lucretius asked:--

What! Shall the dateless worlds to dust be blown Back to the unremembered and unknown, And this frail Thou--this flame of yesterday-- Burn on, forlorn, immortal, and alone?

This mental att.i.tude, familiar enough nowadays, has been forcibly and typically expressed in a clever, melancholy book, _The Letters Which never Reached Him_. "We suffer," the author says, "from our own diminutiveness and from the narrow limits of our life and knowledge since the endlessness of s.p.a.ce and time have {224} been taught to us.

People of former epochs cannot have known this contrast between human smallness and the world's infinity; they must have been more contented, because they fancied they were made in right proportion to everything else." Such conditions as these favoured the flouris.h.i.+ng of "that highest blossom of the conviction of personal importance, the belief in one's eternal individual continuance." "But one who has been cast by the waves on countless foreign sh.o.r.es, and who has reflected that everywhere, and since times infinite, millions and millions have been born and buried without leaving by their coming and going more trace than the swarms of insects which for a moment glide through the rays of the sun--such a one loses the belief in the importance of all transitory phases, and doubts the inner necessity of an eternal continuance for all those ephemeral, ant-like existences which in endless, unchanging repet.i.tions ever rise anew to disappear again."

Modern astronomy and geology, by expanding the world beyond all conception, seem, in fact, but to emphasise Omar Khayyam's mocking lines:--

And fear not lest Existence, closing your Account and mine, should know the like no more; The Eternal Saki from that bowl hath pour'd Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour.

And if such are the reflections forced upon us by the contemplation of the vastness of {225} the cosmos--a vastness in whose midst we feel homeless and forlorn--it has further to be remembered that the att.i.tude of modern science, as embodied in that of some of its most confident and popular representatives, has been distinctly and openly unfavourable to belief in a future life. If man was truly descended from the lower creation, it seemed obvious to infer that as had been his origin, so also would be his destiny--the destiny of the beasts that perish. The _Kraft und Stoff_ school of physicists proclaimed aloud that consciousness was only a function of the brain, and would come to a stop together with the mechanism which produced it; as Haeckel expressed it, "The various functions of the soul are bound up with certain special parts of the brain, and cannot be exercised unless these are in a normal condition; if the areas are destroyed their function is extinguished; and this is especially applicable to the 'organs of thought,' the four central instruments of mental activity."

[3] But if our inner life was merely the counterpart of certain changes in the grey matter of the brain, how could the function be expected to persist after its organ had undergone decay?

Such, in short, are our princ.i.p.al modern difficulties with regard to belief in a life to come; do they, or do they not, present valid and insuperable obstacles to a reasonable faith?

{226}

(1) While making all allowance for the feeling of insignificance and forlornness which is apt to overwhelm us when we begin to realise the immensity of the material universe, a little closer thought should make it obvious that nothing in the nature of mere bulk or bigness furnishes even a reasonable presumption, let alone a convincing argument, against the survival of the soul; it is indeed difficult to perceive what legitimate bearing these physical phenomena are supposed to have upon a purely spiritual question. If we are to argue on _a priori_ grounds, we are on the contrary justified in saying that the human mind, which has discovered and is capable of co-ordinating the myriad facts concerning the world of matter that make up modern science, is itself something far more wonderful than any of its discoveries, or the sum of them. If we are asked, "Is it conceivable that suns and stars shall pa.s.s away--as they undoubtedly will--and that man shall persist?" we can but answer, "Yes; it is very conceivable; for man is far more highly organised than suns and stars, moves on an immeasurably higher level, can reason, look before and after, form ideals of conduct, reach out in love, and think the thoughts of G.o.d after Him." As soon as we leave the lower reaches of being, bulk is seen to matter very little.

The immense proportions of those flying reptiles and other monsters which peopled the earth in pre-historic {227} times did not protect them against dying out, and their places being taken by much slighter creatures which had some more valuable attributes than size; the _diplodocus Carnegii_ in the British Museum measures some seventy-five feet, but that fact did not prevent the species from becoming extinct uncounted ages since--simply because it was lacking in the higher qualities which would have enabled it to survive. And even the _diplodocus_, with its lumbering body and diminutive brain, was whole worlds superior to inorganic nature. That the marvellous thing called human personality should outlast the decay of what is so much inferior to itself, is therefore not only not inconceivable, but in itself not even improbable. It is a strange sort of modesty--to say the least of it--which would make us think ourselves of less account in the scale of existence or the sight of G.o.d than unconscious matter in its cruder and lower stages. One might as sensibly urge that the delicate hairspring of a watch, being of featherweight and almost invisible, must be worth less than a lump of crude iron-ore.

(2) We turn to the supposed argument from evolution, _viz._, from man's lowly origin, as furnis.h.i.+ng a strong presumption against his immortality. This plea, familiar enough in sceptical discussions of the subject, has been put forward with great poetic force by Mr.

William Watson; after graphically describing {228} "the gibbering form obscene that was and was not man," as lower in many respects than the beasts and birds in whose midst he dwelt, he suggests that it was

Rather some random throw Of heedless Nature's die, 'Twould seem, that from so low Hath lifted man so high.

If, then, our rise from gloom Hath this capricious air, What ground is mine to a.s.sume An upward process there, In yonder worlds that s.h.i.+ne From upward tracts of sky?

No ground to a.s.sume is mine Nor warrant to deny.

Equal, my source of hope, my reason for despair.

But, with great admiration for Mr. Watson as a poet, it is impossible not to recognise that at least two radical flaws lurk in his agnostic argument. In the first place, he makes the mistake of judging issues by origins instead of origins by issues; the sub-human beginnings of man trouble us not at all, since we can see in the subsequent history of the race how great were the possibilities infolded in that "gibbering form obscene," and unfolded in a Plato, a Raphael, a Shakespeare. That such a development from such a lowly initial stage should have been so much as possible, is in itself significant of much; for nothing is evolved that was not first involved. But in the second place, Mr. Watson's a.s.sumption that the process which lifted man from the level of the {229} brute to one immeasurably higher was dictated by "hap and hazard" strikes us as wholly gratuitous. On the face of it, that process, in itself so little to be expected, bears the mark, not of chance but of its very contrary. That the cosmic drama should have followed this particular course; that from the cooling down of fiery nebulas there should have come forth the orderly system we behold in nature; that life should have climbed up from the speck of protoplasm "through primal ooze and slime," making its way step by step through all the lower creation until it "blossomed into man"--this, to the unbia.s.sed mind, does not wear the aspect of mere incalculable accident, but of all-embracing wisdom and directivity. And once we have shaken off the delusion that the marvellous order and progress we behold in nature are the outcome of chance, we have the best of reasons for a.s.suming that the same "upward process" will still continue, reaching forward from the seen to the unseen; at any rate, so well-qualified and thorough-going an evolutionist as Professor Fiske gave it as his mature opinion that "in the course of evolution there is no more philosophical difficulty in man's acquiring immortal life, than in his acquiring the erect posture and articulate speech." [4]

{230}

And the reasonableness of this view grows the clearer to us the more we realise the purposive character of the evolutionary process. The unmistakeable purpose of that process is the production of the higher from the lower; all through the ages the vast design works itself out in a ceaseless ascending movement, the theme expanding, its meaning becoming more apparent. Then, when a certain point in this development has been reached, evolution takes a direction such as no one could have forecast: "its operation upon the physical frame is diverted to the mind, the centre of interest transferred from the outward organism to the inner forces of which it is the vehicle"--and man becomes a living soul. Since, then, it has taken all these myriad ages, all this immense expenditure of planning and energy, to produce what is incontestably the crowning work of creation on this globe, must we not say that this was the issue towards which the whole process was set in motion from the very beginning? And if this is so, are we to think that at the end, when its carefully, patiently wrought-out purpose has been attained, this process suddenly turns irrational, and hands over its last and highest product to destruction? As has been well said, "To suppose that what has been evolved at such cost will suddenly collapse, is to suppose that the whole scheme of things is self-stultifying"; and for such a supposition we {231} see not only no necessity, but no shadow of warrant.

The question is reduced to this: are man's highest spiritual qualities, into the production of which all this creative energy has gone, to disappear with the rest? Has all this work been done for nothing? Is it all ephemeral, all a bubble that bursts, a vision that fades? Are we to regard the Creator's work as like that of a child, who builds houses out of blocks, just for the pleasure of knocking them down? For aught that science can tell us, it may be so, but I can see no good reason for believing any such thing . . . The more thoroughly we comprehend that process of evolution by which things have come to be what they are, the more we are likely to feel that to deny the everlasting persistence of the spiritual element in man is to rob the whole process of its meaning. It goes far towards putting us to permanent intellectual confusion, and I do not see that anyone has as yet alleged, or is ever likely to allege, a sufficient reason for our accepting so dire an alternative.[5]

If belief in the soul's persistence must always be an act of faith, it is for the evolutionist an act of reasonable faith, based on his experience of the rationality, and what has been called the integrity, of the cosmos.

(3) Of the hostility of physical science to belief in life beyond the grave it is perhaps sufficient to say that the somewhat dogmatic att.i.tude of denial which flourished in certain scientific circles somewhere about a quarter of a century ago has to-day made room for a very different temper, at once more sympathetic and more willing to acknowledge {232} that a belief is not necessarily disproved because the methods of the chemical or biological laboratory fail to substantiate it. As for the crude proposition that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile, and that the life of the soul must cease with that of the body, this was characterised by the eminent thinker whom we quoted a moment ago as "perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless a.s.sumption that is known to the history of philosophy." Admitting that to every state of consciousness, to every minutest transition in our thoughts, there corresponds a cerebral change, it is yet nothing less than a childish blunder to confound correspondence with causality. The materialist has positively no good ground for stating that cerebral changes are the _causes_ of the mental states corresponding to them; indeed, the contrary proposition is far more inherently probable, since it is spirit, and not matter, that "possesses the power of purpose," and may therefore be regarded as the final cause of matter.[6] When Professor Haeckel urges that "the various functions of the soul are bound up with certain special parts of the brain," and cease when the latter are destroyed, the reply is quite simple: _non sequitur_. He has apparently forgotten his own warning against the "dangerous error" of a "one-sided over-estimation of experience." [7] {233} The utmost that experience can prove is that the brain is the transmitting apparatus for flas.h.i.+ng forth and making intelligible the messages of the soul, and that, when this apparatus breaks down, further transmission of messages becomes impossible; but no experience can prove that when the instrument is destroyed, the soul which used it for purposes of communication and self-manifestation ceases to be, and only slipshod logic would draw such an inference. In discussing the Divine Personality, we already quoted Mill, a far more careful reasoner than Haeckel, who laid it down that while experience furnished us with no example of any series of states of consciousness without a material brain, yet it was "as easy to imagine such a series of states without as with this accompaniment"; indeed, he saw no valid reason to preclude us from supposing that "the same thoughts, emotions, volitions, and even sensations which we have here, may persist or recommence somewhere else under other conditions"--_i.e._, without such an apparatus as is at present at our disposal. It is only a dogmatic materialist of Haeckel's almost extinct pattern who could fail to make the simple distinction between visible instrument and invisible player.

Turning aside, however, from the antiquated views of Haeckel--views which, as he himself bitterly complains, some of his most {234} ill.u.s.trious scientific compeers in his own country, men like Virchow, Du Bois-Reymond and Wundt lived to repudiate[8]--we may for a moment glance at an argument on behalf of belief brought forward by so distinguished and modern a spokesman of physical science as Sir Oliver Lodge. His contention, set forth in the course of a paper on _The Permanence of Personality_,[9] is really identical with that which Browning expresses with such pa.s.sionate conviction in the words, "There shall never be one lost good." While we have become familiar with such a conception as the conservation of energy, Sir Oliver Lodge brings before us Professor Hoffding's axiom of the "conservation of value,"

and applies it to the question under discussion. According to him, "the whole progress and course of evolution is to increase and intensify the Valuable--that which 'avails' or is serviceable for highest purposes"; and he accordingly defines immortality as the persistence of things which the universe has gained and which, once acquired, cannot be let go. "From this point of view," he says, "the law of evolution is that Good shall on the whole increase in the universe with the process of the suns: that immortality itself is a special case of a more general law, namely, that in the whole universe nothing really finally perishes that is worth keeping, that a thing once attained {235} is not thrown away." The soul, in other words, will not perish--just as we had already argued--because it is too valuable to perish; if we may trust this latest interpretation of the meaning and purpose of evolution, the spiritual element in man will endure because it is worthy to endure.

But how are we to think of its enduring? As a separate self, conscious of its ident.i.ty, able to form the proposition "I am I," or swallowed up in the Whole, with a final merging and loss of selfhood? Must we think of man's ultimate destiny in the terms of the concluding distichs of Mr. Watson's great _Hymn to the Sea_--a consummation

When, from this threshold of being, these steps of the Presence, this precinct, Into the matrix of Life darkly divinely resumed, Man and his littleness perish, erased like an error and cancelled, Man and his greatness survive, lost in the greatness of G.o.d?

That is the query with which we opened this chapter; and, in answering it, it is but fair to say that Sir Oliver Lodge shows a marked inclination to take up a position identical with that of Mr. Watson: "Everything sufficiently valuable," he says, "be it beauty, artistic achievement, knowledge, unselfish affection, may be thought of as enduring henceforth and for ever, _if not with an individual {236} and personal existence, yet as part of the eternal Being of G.o.d_."

Now this is not only a wholly unsatisfactory conclusion from the point of view of religion; it is a surrender of the very point at issue--_viz._, the permanence of personality--and in reality lets slip what Sir Oliver Lodge himself was contending for. It is unsatisfactory from the point of view of religion; for such a re-absorption of the soul into a "grand self-conscious totality of being," involving of necessity the end of all we mean by individuality, consciousness, character, is not immortality at all--to all intents and purposes it is, as we said, annihilation. There is not an iota to choose, so far as the religious believer is concerned, between this theory and the frank materialism of Lucretius, so wonderfully rendered by Mr.

Mallock:--

The seeds that once were we take flight and fly, Winnowed to earth, or whirled along the sky, Not lost but disunited. _Life lives on_.

_It is the lives, the lives, the lives that die_.

They go beyond recapture and recall, Lost in the all-indissoluble All: Gone like the rainbow from the fountain's foam, Gone like the spindrift shuddering down the squall,

Flakes of the water, on the waters cease!

Soul of the body, melt and sleep like these.

Atoms to atoms--weariness to rest-- Ashes to ashes--hopes and fears to peace!

{237} Pantheism may speak delusively of "the peace of absorption in the Infinite," or of the end of our being as submersion, "without reserve, in the infinite ocean of G.o.d"; but regarded from the standpoint of individuality, there is no difference between such a fate and the total extinction of the soul--

The healing gospel of the eternal death

--preached with such haunting eloquence by the Roman poet. The truth, as Dr. Illingworth has well expressed it, is that in practice "Pantheism is really indistinguishable from Materialism; it is merely Materialism grown sentimental, but no more tenable for its change of name." [10]

But, in the next place, in tentatively committing himself to the conclusion we are criticising, it seems to us that Sir Oliver Lodge loses sight of the very essence of his own contention: his conclusion, in effect, contradicts his premises. Syllogistically, and, of course, very bluntly stated, his argument might be summed up as follows: "What is of value is preserved; the soul is of value; therefore the soul is--dissolved." Let us put this a little more explicitly. That which has been gained in the course of evolution, so far as the human soul is concerned--that which makes it worthy to endure, _viz._, its character, conscience, idealism and so forth--belongs to the {238} soul precisely as an individual ent.i.ty, and in no other way whatsoever; neither can it be effectively preserved save in the form of an individual ent.i.ty. The soul, in other words, is not to be compared to a mere quantum of raw material, or to a cupful of water temporarily drawn from an infinite deep into which it may be poured back, and nothing lost: it is, on the contrary, a highly individualised product, so individual as to be unique, and in simply being merged in the totality of being all that is most valuable in it would be lost and wasted. We have no difficulty in believing that mere _life_--the potentiality, the material out of which higher things evolve--may go back into the all, to arise again in new manifestations and combinations; but it is otherwise with the highly complex resultant of the evolutionary process which we call _personality_, endowed as it is with self-consciousness, with the sense of right and wrong, the capacity for ideals, the faculty of self-giving, a G.o.d-like within answering to the G.o.d without. It is because these things--those which "avail for highest purposes"--make man personal and mark him off, broadly speaking, from the lower, sub-human life out of which he has emerged, that we believe in the permanence of human personality, of the spiritual element in man, in the survival of the soul _as individual and personal_, and not merely as "part of the eternal Being of G.o.d." A simple ill.u.s.tration will help us to enforce our {239} point of view. In the process of porcelain manufacture the half-finished ware is placed in "seggars" or coa.r.s.e clay sh.e.l.ls for protection in the glaze or enamel kiln. These temporary sh.e.l.ls, having served their purpose, are broken up and ground down again into a shapeless ma.s.s under heavy revolving rollers; but no one would dream of treating the graceful vases and figures they enclosed for a time after the same fas.h.i.+on. The parallel is fairly obvious: the protecting clay envelope broken to pieces, merged and mingled with other clay, to be so used and broken a hundred times; the precious product carefully taken from its coa.r.s.e sh.e.l.l and preserved.

The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns unto G.o.d who gave it: returns, but not as it came forth from Him, but differentiated, individual, shaped and coloured; returns, not to be absorbed and lost in an "all-indissoluble All," but, as we hold, for still further processes of perfecting.

And if we are asked for the ground whence we derive the latter a.s.surance, we answer, It is founded upon our belief, not in a "universal substance" or an "all-inclusive consciousness of being," but in the G.o.d and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. By no possibility can these two conceptions be made to harmonise or to pa.s.s into one another; on the former view, as we have seen, the significance of the individual soul is and must be _nil_--on the latter, the value of the soul is infinite, because it is {240} the object of the Divine Love, created by G.o.d "unto Himself," in order to experience and respond to His affection. On the former view, we are finite modes of infinite Being--on the latter, we are children of the Father.

It is because we have believed the love which G.o.d hath to us--the love made manifest supremely in Jesus Christ--that we echo so confidently the poet's "Thou wilt not leave us in the dust": the Christian doctrine of immortality flows quite naturally from the Christian doctrine of G.o.d. The argument is frankly ethical; it flows from the view of G.o.d's character which we have received through the revelation of that character in His Son. Without hurling any wild indictment at life, we dare to say that it requires to be supplemented by the life to come in order to fit in with the idea of a just and loving G.o.d, a faithful and merciful Creator. This span of days, this hand's-breadth of existence, is too palpably fragmentary. The sinner, the failure, all those who have here missed the way, ask another opportunity of the Divine mercy; the wronged, the sufferers from unmerited griefs, those whose lives pa.s.sed in gloom and closed in tragedy, appeal for justice; the longing for reunion with loved ones whose going hence has left us permanently poorer, demands fulfilment; the goodness of the good and the sanct.i.ty of the saint plead for "the wages of going on." This ethical argument for personal {241} immortality--Browning's "On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven the perfect round"--will carry no weight with those who profess a "religion of the universe"; for the universe, viewed simply as the sum-total of phenomena, possesses, as we have so frequently pointed out, no sufficiently decided moral character to inspire us with confidence in its justice, or mercy, or pitifulness.

On the other hand, the same argument will powerfully appeal to all who believe in the Divine Goodness, and especially to those who, looking unto Jesus, have in His face beheld the lineaments of the Father. If G.o.d be such as Jesus taught, then life everlasting may be a dim, intangible dream, but a dream that is destined to come true: we shall be satisfied when we awake.

Thus, at the close of this inquiry, we find ourselves left with two ultimate realities--two, not one; alike, not identical; related, and _therefore_ distinct, for a relation can only subsist between one and another: the realities of G.o.d and the soul. _Gott und die Seele, die Seele und ihr Gott_--these two, eternally akin, yet in their kins.h.i.+p unconfounded, make up the theme and the content of religion; and any attempt to obliterate the distinction between them in some monistic formula, any tendency to surrender either the Divine or the human personality, any philosophy which seeks to merge man in G.o.d and G.o.d in the {242} universe, is fatal to religion itself. We have been told of late that "there is no Divine immanence which does not imply the allness of G.o.d"; we reply that there is no sane and sober theology which will not feel called upon to challenge this fundamental error.

G.o.d, immanent in the universe as life and energy, is not the universe; man, the partaker of the Divine nature, indwelt by the Spirit of G.o.d, is other than G.o.d. These are commonplaces, truly; yet in the presence of more than one contemporary movement aiming to set these basal truths aside--truths whose acceptance or rejection involves far-reaching issues in faith and morals--there may be some excuse and even some necessity for reiterating them so persistently and at such length as has been done in these pages.

Man is inalienably akin to G.o.d--man is everlastingly other than G.o.d; upon this note we are content to close. In that fact we have, not only the ultimate explanation of the phenomenon of religion, the ultimate foundation of ethics, the ultimate ground of the felt need of salvation, but also the ultimate hope of immortality--that reasonable hope, expressed by the Hebrew seer for all time in words of sublime and intuitive insight: _Art not_ THOU _from everlasting, O Lord my G.o.d, mine Holy One_? WE SHALL NOT DIE.

[1] _First and Last Things_, pp. 80, 238.