The Will to Doubt Part 8

[p.224]

III. A GENUINE INDIVIDUALITY.

Besides the reality, without finality, of all things in experience, to which we gave our first attention in this chapter, and the perfect sympathy of the spiritual and the material, which we have just seen to give new dignity to the intellectual life, making thought free, and new worth to the life and movement of nature, making nature not lifelessly mechanical, but mechanically productive; besides these two features of the doubter's world, there still remain two others to be observed by us.

For the first of these there is the fact of a genuine individuality.

Different persons, as well as different things, possess a substantial worth to the real and the true. No one may be either real or worthy by himself, but no one is unreal for being dependent on others. The persons, like the things, that work together for what is real, find the service its own reward. Reality, having no exclusive resting-place must itself be dependent. It is dependent on an infinite multiplicity of differences. Therein lies the person's chance for individuality; nay, it is his right to it and a.s.surance of it.

Before the days of Descartes, to speak generally, the typical individual in human society--and let me say also, though at the expense of running into a rather violent metaphor, the typical individual in any cla.s.s or group whatsoever--was the soldier, a creature of another's will, doing only another's work, and having reality only by virtue of characters so apart from individual peculiarities as actually to imply existence in another world. The individual, in other words--if [p.225] at once real and worthy--was then an unearthly being. For a being so const.i.tuted, or living as if he were so const.i.tuted, the creationalistic theology and the a.n.a.logous monarchical politics were of course largely responsible, since in their different ways they took individual independence of action from the general run of mankind. They imposed on men at large a certain uniform of life and belief, and then, as it were, appeased them for this suppression with a doctrine of another life in a world yet to come. Plainly, then, the time was not one when personal individuality, except as it was referred to the other world yonder and apart, was recognized as of much positive worth. Under the regime of prescribed routine, of life with regard to the hereafter, and of mysterious powers of all sorts, more or less in good standing in the realm of the unworldly, personal individuality, though in itself not without some honour, was valued chiefly and primarily for the different conditions, the different relations to the things of this world, and the different views of these things, which men succeeded in overcoming, or rather in completely denying and eschewing. A worthy individuality was thus secured rather through self-denial than self-expression; through the va.s.sal's devotion to his lord, the gallant's submission to his lady, the courtier's humility before his king, or the saint's self-abas.e.m.e.nt before church and heaven. Just think a moment of resting your claim to distinct personal worth on the mere fact of what you have eschewed or escaped being in some way different, perhaps more worldly, more dangerous, and more powerful, from what some others have eschewed or [p.226] escaped, and you will be able to appreciate the main ground of the ideally significant distinction between man and man in the days before Descartes.

But with the advent of the doubter's view of life absolutism and its appropriate other-worldism melted away like snow beneath a noonday sun, and upon their going self-denial ceased to be the cardinal virtue and the chief ground of an approving self-consciousness. Authority came to be placed not in a visible form, but in an abstract principle. Law became superior to laws; monarchy to monarchs; divinity to G.o.ds; truth to truths, and righteousness to rites and habits. The abstract principle, too, instead of being, as many might imagine, a wholly shadowy thing, real only to the logician, stood for something vital and substantial, for something wholly real, for an inner spirit or life or power in the very things of experience. Authority, henceforth refused to any specific thing, whether person or manner of life, inst.i.tution or formal belief, became a prerogative of all things together, of all persons or all manners of life or all creeds; and, residing in the working together of them all, it made personal worth consist no longer in the denial of individual characters and relations, but in honest a.s.sertion and open use of them. As some have liked to describe the change, the "universal individual," the individual as an authoritative and heaven-made type, that dictated a life and a belief to others generally, pa.s.sed away, and in its stead, instead of unity as itself an individual, instead of an incarnate type, came unity as in the relation, or the activity maintaining the relation, of all individuals. Instead of a single planet, for [p.227] example, as the controlling centre of the heavenly bodies, came the unity of the solar system through the force or the law of gravity. Instead of a monarch or a book or a city the self-sufficient ruler of human life and human thought, came unity through the ballot; through freedom of thought--always loyal only to a real unity and in being thus loyal also always tolerant; and through all sorts of like means to individuality. The "universal individual" died, and there arose, as it were, out of his grave the living unity of manifold individuals, each one different, yet each quite essential.

And the change brought a transfiguration. It was as if the human soul had entered a new body, or as if the human body had received a new soul.

Not least among the significant evidences of the new life were the rise of the study of history and the awakening of a keener and more practical interest in men and things the wide world over. With its valuable accounts of the manifold experiences of different peoples and different times, at last seen to be real parts even of the life present and at hand, the study of history became wonderfully absorbing and inspiring; and not less valuable than this travel in time was the travel in s.p.a.ce, the real travel or the imaginary, which accompanied it. Furthermore, such ideas as balance of power and preservation of the worth and integrity of the individual nation, and division of labour and right of free speech and of political and religious liberty, developed into most powerful influences in the life and consciousness of society. And, to return definitely to the single person, he found himself, not in spite of, but because of his [p.228] special place and special standpoint, an active partic.i.p.ant in the effective life of his time. Instead of being a mere soldier as before, he found himself a mechanic; certainly the proper inhabitant of a mechanically productive nature.

Doubtless the term soldier lends itself more readily to philosophical generalization than the term mechanic. Perhaps, too, distance in time lends enchantment to the view, for the day of the soldier was, while the day of the mechanic is. The day of the soldier has reached the stage of romance and reflection, while the day of the mechanic suffers from what is commonplace and prosaic, from the a.s.sociations of a particular life, from dust and smoke and factories, from tools and utilities. Yet the mechanic must be the romantic figure of the future. He is the typical individual of these modern times, of these times of the free because practical thinker, and of a nature not lifelessly mechanical but mechanically productive. Forget the grimy hands and the noisy machinery, the overshadowing smoke and the apparent absorption in mere utility, and think only of the man, who in his best moments feels himself individually responsible and capable, who believes in himself as having at once a peculiar and a necessary part in the real life of his time, and who expresses himself through some skilful mastery over the resources of nature, applying to them the principles his own thinking has uncovered, and using her machinery to the ends of his own nature, which, as we have seen, is bounded only by the "unity of experience."

Remember, too, the mechanic of our modern world is [p.229] not the factory labourer alone. Wherever in social life, whether in political activity or in industrial management, in educational methods or in religious effort, there appears a man who appreciates the need first of observing natural conditions and finding natural laws, and then of acting only in accord with the suggestions of the laws discovered, just there is the mechanic, the responsible agent of a law-free but always lawful nature. The soldier as creature of this world was only a pa.s.sive, wholly material part of a mechanism which depended for its movement upon some outside power or will; but the mechanic, be he humble labourer skilful in the use of tools, or political leader supporting no law that is not, so far as can be known, in accord with natural life, or religious reformer loyal to life as it is, shares positively in the activity that makes the machinery go and in whatever this activity produces.

And yet one thing more must be said. Just as before we had to view free thought in the light of a divided labour, the individual sharing in it only as he treated his own peculiar experience as hypothetical, as a means to an end, not merely an end in itself, or as he was subject to the restraint and correction of the different experiences of others, so now we must recognize that effective activity, not less than true thinking or than realistic experience, is also necessarily the labour, never of one alone, but of many. The successful mechanic--in other words, the fully responsible agent of a law-free nature--is never an isolated creature with merely such a sentimental concern for his neighbours as might spring from the recognized chance [p.230] of meeting them in that world of the hereafter, where all are to be equal and where love and peace are to supplant the present hate and rivalry; he is, on the contrary, one among others, different from him, it is true, and often very positively at variance with him, but engaged with him in a single activity and achievement. His difference works not against, but with their differences for thoroughly controlled, truly effective activity. As things are real, though never final, so men, at work in the world, are individual and individually important, but never alone.

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 makes.h.i.+fts; 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 relations.h.i.+p, 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 compet.i.tion, 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 G.o.d; 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.serted 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 compet.i.tion, 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_.[5] "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]

const.i.tuted 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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 superst.i.tion, that something that is real now can pa.s.s 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 friends.h.i.+ps 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 G.o.d dies, this being just one of the things that make him G.o.d. 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 a.s.sist the understanding of the difference between the two deaths or the two after-lives.

[p.239] Soldiers are companionable, of course, but they live less in and with each other than in and with the will which they serve or than in and with the separate world which at any moment may suddenly take them to itself. Their lives, accordingly, or their deaths, are aloof from each other, and are brought together only through their common subjection or their common destiny, through something which is without.

But the mechanic is social in his own nature, in his own right. The very reality, too, of the world in which he works is, as in so many ways we have seen, maintained only by a divided labour. It is, then, a reality, or a labour, that bridges the chasm between one man's life and another's, as well as between all separate lives and the unity of all life. It makes the many lives "parallel" and harmonious--nay, it makes them actively and vitally sympathetic. Not, as is certainly true, at the expense of any one's real individuality, for each man has his place and his part, real and immortal, and not one falls unnoticed or unguarded to the ground; but, nevertheless, whatever all have and do, they have and do together. They live-and-die together. There is, in a word, but one death, as well as but one life, the life or the death, which all share, and which accordingly is definitely and specifically nowhere and n.o.body's. And in the light of this supreme unity, while any live, none can be merely dead, or while any die, none can be merely alive or living to themselves or their time alone. And, living and dying together, in and with each other, all are parties to the immortality of what is real.

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 companions.h.i.+p denied him here; we die a death that is never death alone, and we die as we live, in a companions.h.i.+p 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?[6]

We commonly think of history as the pa.s.sing of persons, nations, and civilizations. Men come and go, but history goes on for ever. To be sure, history acc.u.mulates, as if its gifts from humanity, innumerable treasures, books, relics, inst.i.tutions, 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 a.s.sisted. 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 inst.i.tutions? 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 a.n.a.logy, that is perhaps more than a mere a.n.a.logy, 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 s.h.i.+nes, or tries to s.h.i.+ne, 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 pa.s.sed 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 repet.i.tion 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.[7] 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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-wors.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p and [p.244] family. In these latter matters the heart more than the mind is addressed. Still, the relations of friends.h.i.+p and kins.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p to have it said that the relation is as universal as particular or local, and as eternal as temporal? Is a relations.h.i.+p worth less than any one of its manifestations? Why, the universality of the relations.h.i.+p gives meaning or reality to any manifestation. Friends.h.i.+p, then, or kins.h.i.+p, 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, friends.h.i.+p, or kins.h.i.+p, 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 trans.m.u.ted.

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. Friends.h.i.+p 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.

[1] 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.)

[2] Chap. VIII., pp. 177 seq.

[3] Chaps. III., IV., V., and VI.

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

[5] 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.

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

[7] In a small book, _Citizens.h.i.+p and Salvation, or Greek and Jew_, published some years ago, I have tried to show this of Socrates and Christ.

[p.248]

X.

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 pa.s.sed. 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 a.s.surance in place of threatened despair. A precipice intervened, and the waters fell hundreds of feet; a glorious fall --spray, sunlight, colour, eloquence.