I. The Chief Present-day Problems, Perplexities, and Requirements with Regard to the After-Life in General

Now I take our chief present-day problems, perplexities, and resultant requirements with regard to the After-Life in general, to fall into three groups, according as those problems are predominantly Historical, or Philosophical, or directly Practical and Ethical.

1. Three Historical Difficulties.

The Historical group now brings very clearly and certainly before us the striking non-universality, the startling lateness, and the generally strange fitfulness and apparent unreasonableness characterizing the earliest stage of belief in the soul’s heightened, or at least equivalent, consciousness after death.

(1) Now with respect to the Non-Universality of the doctrine, it is true that, in China, Confucianism is full of care for the dead. “Throughout the Empire, the authorities are obliged to hold three annual sacrifices for the refreshment and rest of the souls of the dead in general.” “It is hardly doubtful that the cultus of Ancestors formed the chief institution in classical Confucianism, and constituted the very centre of religion for the people. Even now ancestor-worship is the only form of religion for which rules, applicable to the various classes among the Emperor’s subjects, are laid down in the Dynastic Statutes.” And Professor De Groot, from whom I am quoting, gives an interesting conspectus of the numberless ways in which the religious service of the dead penetrates Chinese life.—Yet we hear of Kong-Tse (Confucius) himself (551-478 B.C.), that, though he insisted upon the most scrupulous execution of the three hundred rules of the then extant temple-ceremonial, which were no doubt largely busy with the dead, and though he said that one should sacrifice to the spirits as if they were present, he designated, in several of his sayings, occupation with theological problems as useless: “as long as we do not know men, how shall we know spirits? As long as we do not understand life, how should we fathom death?” And to questions relative to the spirits and the dead, he would give evasive answers. Thus the founder of the most characteristic of the Chinese religions was without any clear and consistent conviction on the point in question.

In India we find, for Brahmanic religion, certain unmistakable Immortality-Doctrines (in the sense of the survival of the soul’s self-consciousness), expressed in the hymns of the Rig-Veda.—But already, in the philosophizings of the Upanishads, we get a world-soul, and this soul’s exclusive permanence: “to attain to true unity, the very duality of subject and object is to disappear. The terms Atman and Brahman here express the true Being which vivifies all beings and appearances, and with which cognizing man reunites himself whilst losing his individual existence.”

And if we move on to Buddhism, with its hundreds of millions of adherents in Burmah, Tibet, China, and Japan, we can learn, from the classical work of Oldenberg, how interestingly deep down lies the reason for the long conflict between scholars as to whether Nirvana is or is not to be taken for the complete extinction of the individual soul. “Everything, in the Buddhist dogmatic system, is part and parcel of a circle of Becoming and of Dissolution: all things are but a Dhamma, a Sankhara; and all Dhamma, all Sankhara are but temporary.… The Mutable, Conditioned is here thinkable only as conditioned by another Mutable and Conditioned. If we follow the dialectic consequence alone, there is no seeing how, according to this system, there can remain over, when a succession and mutual destruction of things conditioning and of things conditioned has run its course, anything but a pure vacuum.” And we have also such a saying of the Buddha as the following. “Now if, O disciples, the Ego (atta) and anything appertaining to the Ego (attaniya) cannot be comprehended with accuracy and certainty, is not then the faith which declares: ‘This is the world, and this is the Ego; this shall I become at death,—firm, constant, eternal, unchangeable,—thus shall I be there, throughout eternity,’—is not this sheer empty folly?” “How should it not, O Lord, be sheer empty folly?” answer the disciples. “One who spoke thus,” is Oldenberg’s weighty comment, “cannot have been far from the conviction that Nirvana is annihilation. Yet it is understandable how the very thinkers, who were capable of bearing this consequence, should have hesitated to raise it to the rank of an official dogma of the community.… Hence the official doctrine of the Buddhist Church attained the form, that, on the question of the real existence of the Ego, of whether or not the perfected saint lives on after death, the exalted Buddha has taught nothing. Indeed the legally obligatory doctrine of the old community required of its votaries an explicit renunciation of all knowledge concerning the existence or non-existence of completely redeemed souls.”

“Buddhism,” so Oldenberg sums up the matter, with, I think, the substantial adhesion of all present-day competent authorities, “teaches that there is a way out of the world of created things, out into the dark Infinite. Does this way lead to new being? or does it lead to nothingness? Buddhist belief maintains itself on the knife’s edge of these alternatives. The desire of the heart, as it longs for the Eternal, is not left without something, and yet the thinking mind is not given a something that it could grasp and retain. The thought of the Infinite, the Eternal, could not be present at all, and yet vanish further away than here, where, a mere breath and on the point of sinking into sheer nothingness, it threatens to disappear altogether.” This vast Buddhist community, numbering, perhaps, a third of the human race, should not, then, be forgotten, when we urge the contrary instances of the religions of Assyria and Babylonia; of Egypt; of Greece and Rome; and, above all, of the Jews and Christianity.

Yet it is well to remember that such non-universality of belief is at least as real, to this very hour, for such a fundamental religious truth and practice as Monotheism and Monolatry; such purely Ethical convictions as Monogamy and the Illicitness of Slavery; such a plain dictate of the universal humanitarian ideal as the illegitimacy of the application of physical compulsion in matters of religious conviction; and such directly demonstrable psychical and natural facts as subconsciousness in the human soul, the sexual character of plants, and the earth’s rotundity and rotation around the sun. In none of these cases can we claim more than that the higher, truer doctrine,—that is, the one which explains and transcends the element of truth contained in its predecessor and opposite,—is explicitly reached by a part only of humanity, and is but implied and required by other men, at their best. Yet this is clearly enough for leaving us free to decide,—reasonably conclusive evidence for their truth being forthcoming,—in favour of the views of the minority: since the assumption of an equality of spiritual and moral insight and advance throughout mankind is as little based upon fact, as would be the supposition of men’s equal physical strength or height, or of any other quality or circumstance of their nature and environment.

(2) The lateness of the doctrine’s appearance, precisely in the cases where there can be no doubt of its standing for a conviction of an endless persistence of a heightened consciousness after death,—that is, amongst the Greeks (and Romans) and the Jews (and Christians),—has now been well established by critical historical research.

With regard to the Greeks, the matter is particularly plain, since we can still trace even in Plato, (427 to 347 B.C.), who, next to Our Lord Himself and to St. Paul, is doubtless the greatest and most influential teacher of full individual Immortality that the world has seen, two periods of thought in this matter, and can show that the first was without any such certain conviction. In his Apology of Socrates, written soon after the execution in 399 B.C., he makes his great master, close to his end, declare that death would bring to man either a complete unconsciousness, like to a dreamless sleep, or a transition into another life,—a life here pictured like to the Homeric Hades. Both possibilities Socrates made to accept resignedly, in full reliance on the justice of the Gods, and to look no further; how should he know what is known to no man?—And this is Plato’s own earlier teaching. For in the very Republic which, in its chronologically later constituents, (especially in Book V, 471c, to the end of Book VIII, Book IX, 560d to 588a, and Book X up to 608b), so insists upon and develops the truth and importance of Immortality in the strictest, indeed the sublimest sense: we get, in its earlier portions, (especially in Book II, 10c, to Book V, 460c), no trace of any such conviction. For, in these earlier passages, the Guardians in the Ideal State are not to consider what may come after death: the central theme is the manner in which Justice carries with it its own recompense; and the rewards, that are popularly wont to be placed before the soul, are referred to ironically,—Socrates is determined to do without such hopes. In those later portions, on the contrary, there is the greatest insistence upon the importance of caring, not for this short life alone, but for the soul’s “whole time” and for what awaits it after death. And in the still later parts, (as in Books VI and VII), the sublimest form of Immortality is presupposed as true and actual throughout. Thus in Greece it is not till about 390-380 B.C., and in Plato himself not till his middle life, that we get a quite definite and final doctrine of the Immortality of all souls, and of a blessed after-existence for every just and holy life here below.

For the survival after the body’s death, indubitably attributed to the Psyche in the Homeric Poems, is conceived there, throughout, as a miserably shrunken consciousness, and one which is dependent for its continuance upon the good offices bestowed by the survivors upon the corpse and grave. And the translation of the still living Menelaus to Elysium (Od. IV, 560-568) is probably a later insertion; belongs to a small class of exceptional cases; implies the writer’s inability to conceive a heightened consciousness for the soul, after the soul’s separation from the body; and is based, not upon any virtue or reward, but upon Menelaus’s family-relationship to Zeus. Ganymede gets similarly translated because of his physical beauty (II. XX, 232 seq.).

Hesiod, though later than Homer as a writer, gives us, in his account of the Five Ages of the World (Works and Days, ll. 109-201), some traces of an Animistic conception of a heightened life of the bodiless soul beyond the grave,—a conception which had been neglected or suppressed by Homer, but which had evidently been preserved alive in the popular religion of, at least, Central Greece. Yet Hesiod knows of such a life only for the Golden and for the Silver Ages, and for some miraculous, exceptional cases of the fourth, the Heroic Age: already in the third, the Bronze Age, and still more emphatically in his own fifth, the Iron Age, there are no such consolations: nothing but the shrunken consciousness of the Homeric after-death Psyche is, quite evidently, felt by him to be the lot of all souls in the hard, iron present.

The Cultus of the Heroes is already registered in Draco’s Athenian Laws, in about 620 B.C., as a traditional custom. And these Heroes have certainly lived at one time as men upon earth, and have become heroes only after death; their souls, though severed from the body, live a heightened imperishable life, indeed one that can mightily help men here below and now,—so at Delphi and at Salamis against the Persians. Yet here again each case of such an elevation was felt to be a miracle, an exception incapable of becoming a universal law: not even the germ of a belief in the Immortality of the soul as such seems to be here.

The Cultus of the Nether-World Deities, of the Departed generally, and, as the culmination of all this movement, the Eleusinian Mysteries, must not be conceived as involving or as leading to, any belief in the ecstatic elevation of the soul, or consciousness of its God-likeness; and such unending bliss as is secured, is gained by men, not because they are virtuous and devout, but through their initiation into the Mysteries. Rhode assures us, rightly I think, that “it remains unproved that, during the classical period of Greek culture, the belief in Judges and a Judgment to be held in Hades over the deeds done by men on earth, had struck root among the people”; Professor Percy Gardner adds his great authority to the same conclusion. Here again it is Plato who is the first to take up a clearly and consistently spiritual and universalistic position.

Indeed it is only in the predominantly neuropathic, indeed largely immoral and repulsive, forms of the Dionysiac sect and movement, (at work, perhaps, already in the eighth century B.C. and which leads on to the formation of the more aristocratic and priestly Orphic communities) that a demonstrable and direct belief arose in the soul’s intrinsic God-likeness, or even divinity, and in its immortality, or even eternity; and that stimulations, materials, and conceptions were furnished to Greek thought, which are traceable wheresoever it henceforth inclines to belief in the soul’s intrinsic Immortality.

Yet the leaven spread but slowly into philosophy. For the Ionian philosophers, and among them Heraclitus, the impressive teacher of the flux of all things, flourish from about 600 to 430 B.C.; but, naïve Materialists and Pantheists as they are, they frankly exclude all survival of individual consciousness after death. The Eleatic philosophers live between 550 and 450 B.C., and are all busy with a priori logical constructions of the physical world, conceived as sole and self-explanatory; and amongst them is Parmenides, the powerful propounder of the complete identity and immutability of all reality. Those transcendent spiritual beliefs appear first as part, indeed as the very foundation, although still rather of a mode of life than of a formal philosophy, in the teaching and community of Pythagoras, who seems to have lived about 580 to 490 B.C., and who certainly emigrated from Asia Minor to Croton in Southern Italy. The soul appears here as intrinsically immortal, indeed without beginning and without end. And then Immortality forms one (the mystical) of the two thoroughly heterogeneous elements of the, otherwise predominantly Ionic and Materialistic, philosophy of Empedocles of Agrigentum in Sicily, about 490 to 435 B.C. In both these cases the Dionysiac-Orphic provenance of the “Immortality”-doctrines is clearly apparent.

And then, among the poets who bridge over the period up to Plato, we find Pindar, who, alongside of reproductions of the ordinary, popular conceptions, gives us at times lofty, Orphic-like teachings as to the eternity, the migration, and the eventual persistent rest and happiness of the just Soul, and as to the suffering of the unjust one; Aeschylus, who primarily dwells upon the Gods’ judgment in this life, and who makes occasional allusions to the after-life which are partly still of the Homeric type; Sophocles, who indeed refers to the special privileges which, in the after-life, attend upon the souls that have here been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, and who causes Oedipus to be translated, whilst still alive, to Other-World happiness, but who knows nothing of an unceasing heightened consciousness for all men after death; and Euripides, who, showing plainly the influence of the Sophists, gives expression, alongside of Pantheistic identifications of the soul and of the aether, to every kind of misgiving and doubt as to any survival after death.

And as to the appearance of the doctrine among the Jews, we again find a surprising lateness. I follow here, with but minor contributions and modifications from other writers and myself, the main conclusions of Dr. Charles’s standard Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, London, 1899, whose close knowledge of the subject is unsurpassed, and who finds as many and as early attestations as are well-nigh findable by serious workers.

“The primitive beliefs of the individual Israelite regarding the future life, being derived from Ancestor-worship, were implicitly antagonistic to Yahwism, from its first proclamation by Moses.… This antagonism becomes explicit and results in the final triumph of Yahwism.” And to the early Israelite, even under Yahwism, “the religious unit was” not the individual but “the family or tribe.” Thus, even fully six centuries after Moses, “the message of the prophets of the eighth century,” Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, “is still directed to the nation, and the judgments they proclaim are collective punishment for collective guilt. It is not till late in the seventh century B.C. that the problem of individual retribution really emerged, and received its first solution in the teaching of Jeremiah.” And “the further development of these ideas,” by the teaching of Ezekiel and of some of the Psalms and Proverbs, as regards individual responsibility and retribution in this life, and by the deep misgivings and keen questionings of Job and Ecclesiastes, as to the adequacy of this teaching, “led inevitably to the conception of a blessed life beyond the grave.”

Yet throughout the Hebrew Old Testament the Eschatology of the Nation greatly predominates over that of the Individual. Indeed in pre-Exilic times “the day of Yahwe,” with its national judgments, constitutes the all but exclusive subject of the prophetic teaching as to the future. Only from the Exile, (597 to 538 B.C.), onwards, does the eschatological development begin to grow in complexity, for now the individualism first preached by Jeremiah begins to maintain its claim also. But not till the close of the fourth century, or the beginning of the third century B.C., do the separate eschatologies of the individual and of the nation issue finally in their synthesis: the righteous individual will participate in the Messianic Kingdom, the righteous dead of Israel will arise to share therein,—thus in Isaiah xxvi, 1-19, a passage which it is difficult to place earlier than about 334 B.C. The resurrection is here limited to the just. In Daniel xii, 2, which is probably not earlier than 165 B.C., the resurrection is extended, not indeed to all members of Israel, but, with respective good and evil effects, to its martyrs and apostates.

And the slowness and incompleteness of the development throughout the Hebrew Old Testament is strikingly illustrated by the great paucity of texts which yield, without the application of undue pressure, any clear conviction or hope of a heightened, or even a sheer, maintenance of the soul’s this-life consciousness and force after death. Besides the passages just indicated, Dr. Charles can only find Psalms xlix and lxxiii, and Job xix, 25-27, all three, according to him, later than Ezekiel, who died in 571 B.C. The textually uncertain and obscure Job-passage (xix, 25, 26) must be discounted, since it evidently demands interpretation according to the plain presupposition and point of the great poem as a whole.—And the same result is reached by the numerous, entirely unambiguous, passages which maintain the negative persuasion. In the hymn put into the mouth of the sick king Hezekiah, for about 713 B.C., (a composition which seems to be very late, perhaps only of the second century B.C.), we hear: “The grave cannot praise Thee … they that go down into the pit cannot hope for truth. The living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day.” And the Psalter contains numerous similar declarations. Thus vi, 5: “In death there is no remembrance of Thee: in the grave who shall give Thee thanks?” and cxv, 17: “The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence; but we praise the Lord.” See also Psalms xxx, 19; lxxxviii, 11.

Indeed the name for the Departed is Rephaim, “the limp, the powerless ones.” Stade well says: “According to the ancient Israelitish conception the entire human being, body and soul, outlasts death, whilst losing all that makes life worth living. That which persists in Sheol for all eternity is the form of man, emptied of all content. Antique thought ignores as yet that there exists no such thing as a form without substance. The conception has as little in common with the conviction of the Immortality of the Soul, which found its chief support in Greek ideas, as with the expectation of the Resurrection, which grew out of the Jewish Messianic hope, or with the Christian anticipation of Eternal Life, which is also based upon religious motives.”

Yet, with respect to this objection from the lateness of the doctrine, we must not forget that fully consistent Monotheism and Monogamy are also late, but not, on that account, less true or less precious; and indeed that, as a universal rule, the human mind has acquired at all adequate convictions as to most certain and precious truths but slowly and haltingly. This process is manifest even in Astronomy, Geology, Botany, Human Anatomy. It could not fail to be, not less but more the case in a matter like this which, if it concerns us most deeply, is yet both too close to us to be readily appreciated in its true proportions, and too little a matter of mathematical demonstration or of direct experience not to take much time to develop, and not to demand an ever-renewed acquisition and purification, being, as it is, the postulate and completion of man’s ethical and spiritual faiths, at their deepest and fullest.

(3) And with regard to the unsatisfactory character of some of the earliest manifestations of the belief, this point is brought home to us, with startling vividness, in the beginnings of the doctrine in ancient Greece. For Rhode’s very careful and competent examination of precisely this side of the whole question shows conclusively (even though I think, with Crusius, that he has overlooked certain rudiments of analogous but healthy experiences and beliefs in pre-Dionysiac Greece) how new and permanently effective a contribution to the full doctrine was made, for the Hellenic world and hence indirectly for all Western humanity, by the self-knowledge gained in that wildly orgiastic upheaval, those dervish-like dances and ecstatic fits during the Dionysian night-celebrations on the Thracian mountain-sides. Indeed Rhode traces how from these experiences, partly from the continuation of them, partly from the reaction against them, on the part of the intensely dualistic and ascetic teaching and training of the Orphic sect, there arose, and filtered through to Pythagoras, to Plato, and to the whole Neo-Platonist school, the clear conception and precise terminology concerning ecstatic, enthusiastic states, the divinity and eternity of the human soul, its punitive lapse into and imprisonment within the body, and its need of purification throughout the earthly life and of liberation through death from this its incurably accidental and impeding companion.—Thus we get here, concerning one of the chief sources of at least the formulation of our belief in Immortality, what looks a very nest of suspicious, repulsive circumstances:—psycho-physical phenomena, which, quite explicable to, and indeed explained by, us now as in nowise supernatural, could not fail to appear portentous to those men who first experienced them; unmoral or immoral attitudes and activities of mind and will; and demonstrable excesses of feeling and conception as regards both the static goodness, the downright divinity, eternity, and increateness of the soul, and the unmixed evil of the body with its entirely disconnected alongsideness to the soul. Does not all this spell a mass of wild hallucination, impurity, fanaticism, and superstition?

Yet here again it behoves us, if not to accept, yet also not to reject, in wholesale fashion and in haste. For the profoundly experienced Professor Pierre Janet shows us, what is now assumed as an axiom, and as the ultimate justification of the present widespread interest in the study of Hysteria, that “we must admit for the moral world the great principle universally admitted for the physical world since Claude Bernard,—viz. that the laws of illness are, at bottom, the same as those of health, and that, in the former, there is but the exaggeration or the diminution of phenomena which existed already in the latter.”

And if thus our recent studies of morbid mentalities have been able to throw a flood of light upon the mechanism and character of the healthy mind, a mind more difficult to analyze precisely because of the harmonious interaction of its forces, there is nothing very surprising if man, in the past, learnt to know his own fundamental nature better in and through periods of abnormal excitation than in those of normal balance. And the resultant doctrines in the case in question only required, and demand again and again, a careful pruning and harmonizing to show forth an extraordinary volume of abiding truth. The insuppressible difference between mind and matter, and the distinction between the fully recollected soul (intuitive reason), and explicit reasoning; the immeasurable superiority of mind over matter, and the superiority of that full reason over this “thin” reasoning; the certainty, involved in all our inevitable mental categories and assumptions and in all our motives for action, of this mind and intuition being more like the cause of all things than are those other inferior realities and activities; the indestructibleness of the postulates and standards of objective and infinite Beauty, Truth, Goodness, of our consciousness of being intrinsically bound to them, and of our inmost humanity and its relative greatness being measurable by just this our consciousness of this our obligation, and hence by the keenness of our sense of failure, and by our striving after purification and the realization of our immanental possibilities: all this remains deeply fruitful and true.

And those crude early experiences and analyses certainly point to what, even now, are our most solid reasons for belief in Immortality: for if man’s mind and soul can thus keenly suffer from the sense of the contingency and mutability of all things directly observed by it without and within, it must itself be, at least in part or potentially, outside of this flux which it so vividly apprehends as not Permanence, not Rest, not true Life. Let us overlook, then, and forgive the first tumultuous, childishly rude and clumsy, mentally and emotionally hyper-aesthetic forms of apprehension of these great spiritual facts and laws, forms which are not, after all, more misleading than is the ordinary anaesthetic condition of our apprehending faculties towards these fundamental forces and testimonies of our lot and nature. Not the wholesale rejection, then, of even those crude Dionysian witnessings, still less of the already more clarified Orphic teaching, and least of all of Plato’s great utilizations and spiritualizations can be required of us, but only a reinterpretation of those first impressions and of mankind’s analogous experiences, and a sifting and testing of the latter by the light of all that has been deeply lived through, and seriously thought out, by spiritually awake humanity ever since.—And we should remember that the history of the doctrine among the Jews is, as has already been intimated, grandly free from any such suspicious occasions and concomitances.

2. Two Philosophical Difficulties.

Yet it is precisely this latter, social, body-and-soul-survival doctrine which brings the second group of objections, the philosophical difficulties, to clear articulation. For thus we are unavoidably driven to one or other of the equally difficult alternatives, of a bodiless life of the soul, and of a survival or resurrection of the body.

(1) Christianity, by its explicit teachings, and even more by its whole drift and interior affinities, requires the survival of all that is essential to the whole man, and conceives this whole as constituted, not by thought alone but also by feeling and will and the power of effectuation; so that the body, or some unpicturable equivalent to it, seems necessary to this physico-spiritual, ultimately organic conception of what man is and must continue to be, if he is to remain man at all.—And Psychology, on its part, is showing us, more and more, how astonishingly wide and deep is the dependence, at least for their actuation, of the various functions and expressions of man’s character and spirit upon his bodily frame. For not only is the reasoning faculty seen, ever since Aristotle, to depend, for its material and stimulation, upon the impressions of the senses, nor can we represent it to ourselves otherwise than as seated in the brain or in some such physical organism, but the interesting Lange-James observations and theory make it likely that also the emotions,—the feelings as distinct from sensations,—ever result, as a matter of fact, from certain foregoing, physico-neural impressions and modifications, which latter follow upon this or that perception of the mind, a perception which would otherwise, as is the case in certain neural lesions and anaesthesias, remain entirely dry and unemotional.—And the sense of the Infinite, which we have had such reason to take as the very centre of religion, arises ever, within man’s life here below, in contrast to, and as a concomitant and supplementation of, his perception of the Finite and Contingent, and hence not without his senses being alive and active.

Now all this fits in admirably with the whole Jewish-Christian respect for, high claims upon, and constant training of the body, the senses, the emotions, and with the importance attached to the Visible and Audible,—History, Institutions, Society.—Yet our difficulties are clear. For however spiritually we may conceive a bodily survival or resurrection; however completely we may place the identity of the various stages of the body in this life, and the sameness between the body before death and after the resurrection, in the identity of its quasi-creator, the body-weaving soul, we can in nowise picture to ourselves such a new, indefinitely more spiritual, incorporation, and we bring upon ourselves acute difficulties, for both before and after this unpicturable event. Before the resurrection there would have to be unconsciousness between death and that event; but thus the future life is broken up, and for no spiritual reason. Or there would be consciousness; but then the substitute for the body, that occasions this consciousness, would, apparently, render all further revivification of the body unnecessary. And if we take the resurrection as effected, we promptly feel how mixed and clumsy, how inadequate, how less, and not more, than the best and noblest elements of our experience and aspirations even here and now, is such a, still essentially temporal and spacial, mode of existence.

I take it that, against all this, we can but continue to maintain two points. The soul’s life after bodily death is not a matter of experience or of logical demonstration, but a postulate of faith and a consequence from our realization of the human spirit’s worth; and hence is as little capable of being satisfactorily pictured, as are all the other great spiritual realities which can nevertheless be shown to be presupposed and implicitly affirmed by every act of faith in the final truth and abiding importance of anything whatsoever.—And again, it is not worth while to attempt to rescue, Aristotle-wise, just that single, and doubtless not the highest, function of man’s spirit and character, his dialectic faculty, or even his intellectual intuitive power, for the purpose of thus escaping, or at least minimizing, the difficulties attendant upon the belief in Immortality. If we postulate, as we do, man’s survival, we must postulate, without being able to fill in or to justify any details of the scheme, the survival of all that may and does constitute man’s true and ultimate personality. How much or how little this may precisely mean, we evidently know but very imperfectly: but we know enough to be confident that it means more than the abstractive, increasingly dualistic school of Plato, Philo, Plotinus, Proclus would allow.

(2) But speculative reason seems also to raise a quite general objection, based upon man’s littleness within the immense Universe, and upon the arbitrariness of excepting those tiny points, those centres of human consciousness, men’s souls, from the flux, the ceaseless becoming and undoing, of all the other parts of that mighty whole, immortal, surely, only as a whole.

Here we can safely say that, at least in this precise form, the difficulty springs predominantly not from reason or experience, but from an untutored imagination. For all our knowledge of that great external world, which this objection supposes to englobe our small internal world, as a part inferior, or at most but equal, to the other parts of that whole, is dependent upon this interior world of ours; and however truly inherent in that external world we may hold that world’s laws to be, those laws can, after all, be shown to be as truly the result of our own mind’s spontaneous work,—an architectonic building up by this mind of the sense-impressions conveyed to it from without. And that whole Universe, in so far as it is material, cannot be compared, either in kind or in dignity, to Mind: only the indications there, parallel in this to our experiences within our own mind, of a Mind and Spirit infinitely greater and nobler than, yet with a certain affinity to, our own,—only these constitute that outer world as great as this our inner world. Indeed it is plain that Materialism is so far from constituting the solution to the problem of existence, that even Psycho-Physical Parallelism, even the attribution of any ultimate reality to Matter, are on their trial. It is anyhow already clear that, of the two, it is easier and nearer to the truth to maintain that Matter and its categories are simply modes in the manifestation of Mind to minds and in the apprehension of Mind by minds, than to declare Mind to be but a function or resultant of Matter.

But if all this is so, then no simply sensible predominance of the sensible Universe, nor even any ascertainment of the mere flux and interchange of and between all things material and their elements, can reasonably affect the question as to the superiority and permanence of Mind. But we shall return, in the next chapter, to the difficulties special to the Immortality of individual human spirits or personalities,—for this is, I think, the point at which the problem is still acute.

3. Three Ethico-Practical Difficulties.

The last group of objections is directly practical and ethical, and raises three points: the small space and influence occupied and exercised, apparently, by such a belief, in the spiritual life of even serious persons; the seemingly selfish, ungenerous type of religion and of moral tone fostered by definite belief in, or at least occupation with, the thought of an individual future life, as contrasted with the nobility of tone engendered by such denials or abstractions from all such beliefs as we find in Spinoza and Schleiermacher; and, finally, the plausibility of the teaching, on the part of some distinguished thinkers and poets, that a positive conviction of this our short earthly life being the sole span of our individual consciousness is directly productive of a certain deep tenderness, an heroic concentration of attention, and a virile truthfulness, which are unattainable, which indeed are weakened or rendered impossible by, the necessarily vague anticipation of an unending future life; a hope which, where operative at all, can but dwarf and deaden all earthly aspiration and endeavour.

(1) As to the first point, which has perhaps never been more brilliantly affirmed than by Mr. Schiller, I altogether doubt whether the numerous appearances, which admittedly seem to point that way, are rightly interpreted by such a conclusion. For it is, for one thing, most certainly possible to be deeply convinced of the reality and importance of the soul’s heightened after-life, and to have no kind of belief or interest in Psychical Research, at least in such Research as an intrinsically valuable aid to any specifically religious convictions. No aloofness from such attempts to find spiritual realities at the phenomenal level can, (unless it is clear that the majority of educated Western Europeans share the naïve assumptions of this position), indicate negation of, or indifference to, the belief in Immortality.—And next, it is equally certain that precisely the most fruitful form of the belief is that which conceives the After-life as already involved in this one, and which, therefore, dwells specially, not upon the posteriority in time, but upon the difference in kind of that spiritual life of the soul which, even hic et nunc, can be sought after and experienced, in ever imperfect degrees no doubt, yet really and more and more. Here we ever get an approach to Simultaneity and Eternity, instead of sheer succession and clock-time: and here the fundamental attitude of the believer would appear only if pressed to deny or exclude the deathlessness of the spirit and its life,—the usual latency and simple implication of the positive conviction, in nowise diminishing this conviction’s reality.—And, finally, it would have to be seen whether those who are indifferent or sceptical as to Immortal or Eternal Life, are appreciably fewer and largely other than those who are careless as to the other deep implications and requirements of spiritual experience. We may well doubt whether they would turn out to be so.

(2) As to the second point, we have already found how utterly insuppressible is the pleasure, normally concomitant upon every act of noble self-conquest; and how, though we can and should perform such and all other acts, as far as possible, from the ultimate, determining motive of thereby furthering the realization of the Kingdom of God, there can be no solid truthfulness or sane nobility in insisting upon attempts at thinking away and denying the fact and utility of that concomitant pleasure. But if so, then a further, other-world extension of that realization and of this concomitant happiness, and a belief here below in such an eventual extension, cannot of themselves be ignoble or debasing. Occasions for every degree and kind of purely selfish and faultily natural acts, of acts inchoatively supernatural but still predominantly slavish, reappear here, in close parallel to the variety of disposition displayed by men towards every kind of reality and ideal, towards the Family, Science, the State, Humanity, where the same concomitances and the same high uses and mean abuses are ever possible and actual. Neither here nor there should we attempt to impoverish truth and life, in order to exclude the possibility of their abuse.—And it would, of course, be profoundly unfair to contrast such a rarely noble spirit as Spinoza among the deniers with the average mind from among the affirmers. The average or the majority of the deniers would not, I think, appear as more generous and devoted than the corresponding average or majority on the other side.

(3) And as to the supposed directly beneficial effects of a positive denial of Immortality, such as have been sung for us by George Eliot and Giovanni Pascoli, we can safely affirm that the special tendernesses and quiet heroisms, deduced by them from such a negation, are too obviously dependent upon spiritual implications and instincts, for us to be able to put them directly to the credit of that denial. Only in so far as Immortality were not a postulate intrinsically connected with belief in objective and obligatory Beauty, Truth, and Goodness,—in God as our origin and end,—could its persistent and deliberate denial not be injurious to these fundamental convictions and to the ultimate health of the soul’s life: and of this intrinsic non-connection there is no sufficient evidence.—Certainly, in such a case as Spinoza’s, the same strain of reasoning which makes him abandon individual Immortality Ought, in logic, to prevent him, a mere hopelessly determined link in the Natura Naturata, from ever attaining to the free self-dedication of himself, as now a fully responsible member of the Natura Naturans. And if not all the grand depth of his spiritual instinct and moral nobility, and its persistence in spite of its having no logical room in the fixedly naturalistic element of his teaching, can be urged as an argument in favour of the ultimate truth and ethical helpfulness of that whole element, neither can it be urged with respect to what is presumably one part of that element, his denial of personal Immortality.