SURVIVAL AND IMMORTALITY

(1917)

The recrudescence of superstition in England was plain to all observers many years before the war; it was perhaps most noticeable among the half-educated rich. Several causes contributed to this phenomenon. The craving for the supernatural, a very ancient and deeply rooted thought-habit, had been suppressed and driven underground by the arrogant dominance of a materialistic philosophy, and by the absorption of society in the pursuit of gain and pleasure. Modern miracles were laughed out of court. But materialism has supernaturalism for its nemesis. An abstract science, erecting itself into a false philosophy, leaves half our nature unsatisfied, and becomes morally bankrupt before its intellectual errors are exposed. Supernaturalism is the refuge of the materialist who wishes to make room for ideal values without abandoning the presuppositions of materialism. By dovetailing acts of God into the order of nature, he materialises the spiritual, but brings the Divine will into the world of experience, from which it had been expelled, and produces a rough scheme of providential government, by which he can live.

The revolt against scientific materialism was made much easier by the disintegration of the mechanical theory itself. Biology found itself cramped by the categories of inorganic science, and claimed its autonomy. The result was a fatal breach in the defences of materialism, for biology is being driven to accept final causes, and would be glad to adopt some theory of vitalism, if it could do so without falling back into the old error of a mysterious 'vital force.' Biological truth, it is plain, cannot be reduced to the purely quantitative categories of mathematics and physics. Then psychology aspired to be a philosophy of real existence, and attacked both absolutism and materialism. The pretensions of psychology rehabilitated subjectivism and founded pragmatism, till reactionary theology took heart of grace and defended crude supernaturalism, with the whole apparatus of sacerdotal magic, as the 'Gospel for human needs.' All protection against the grossest superstitions was thus swept away. With no fixed standard of reference to distinguish fact from fiction, it was possible to argue that 'whatever suits souls is true.'

In this atmosphere many old habits of thought reasserted themselves. While we enjoyed peace and prosperity, the credulity of the public found its chief outlet in various systems of faith-healing and in the time-honoured pretensions of priest-craft. But the devastation which the war has brought into countless loving families has turned the current of superstition strongly towards necromancy. The 'will to believe,' no longer inhibited and suspected as a reason for doubt, has been allowed to create its own logic. A few highly educated men, who have long been playing with occultism and gratifying their intellectual curiosity by exploring the dark places of perverted mysticism, have been swept off their feet by it, and their authority, as 'men of science,' has dispelled the hesitation of many more to accept what they dearly wished to believe. The longing of the bereaved has created for itself a spurious and dreary satisfaction.

One cause of this strange movement cannot be emphasised too strongly. It proves that the Christian hope of immortality burns very dimly among us. Those who study the utterances of our religious guides must admit that it is so. References to the future life had, before the war, become rare even in the pulpit. The topic was mainly reserved for letters of condolence, and was then handled gingerly, as if it would not bear much pressure. Working-class audiences and congregations listened eagerly to the wildest promises of an earthly utopia the day after tomorrow, but cooled down at once when they were reminded that 'if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.' Accordingly, the clerical demagogue showed more interest in the unemployed than in the unconverted. Christianity, which began as a revolutionary idealism, had sunk into heralding materialistic revolution. Such teachers have no message of hope and comfort for those who have lost their dearest. And they have, in fact, been deserted. Their secularised Christianity was received with half-contemptuous approval by trade unions, but far deeper hopes, fears, and longings have now been stirred, which concern all men and women alike, and on the answers to which the whole value of existence is now seen to depend. Christianity can answer them, but not the Churches through the mouths of their accredited representatives. And so, instead of 'the blessed hope of everlasting life,' the bereaved have been driven to this pathetic and miserable substitute, the barbaric belief in ghosts and dæmons, which was old before Christianity was young. And what a starveling hope it is that necromancy offers us! An existence as poor and unsubstantial as that of Homer's Hades, which the shade of Achilles would have been glad to exchange for serfdom to the poorest farmer, and with no guarantee of permanence, even if the power of comforting or terrifying surviving relations is supposed to persist for a few years. Such a prospect would add a new terror to death; and none would desire it for himself. It is plainly the dream of an aching heart, which cannot bear to be left alone.

But, it will be said, there is scientific evidence for survival. This claim is now made. Cases are reported, with much parade of scientific language and method, and those who reject the stories with contemptuous incredulity are accused of mere prejudice. Nevertheless, I cannot help being convinced that if communications between the dead and the living were part of the nature of things, they would have been established long ago beyond cavil. For there are few things which men have wished more eagerly to believe. It is no doubt just possible that among the vibrations of the fundamental ingredients of our world—those attenuated forms of matter which are said to be not even 'material,' there may be some which act as vehicles for psychical interchange. If such psychic waves exist, the discovery is wholly in favour of materialism. It would tend to rehabilitate those notions of spirit as the most rarefied form of matter—an ultra-gaseous condition of it—which Stoicism and the Christian Stoic Tertullian postulated. The meaning of 'God is Spirit' could not be understood till this insidious residue of materialism had been got rid of. It is a retrograde theory which we are asked to re-examine and perhaps accept. The moment we are asked to accept 'scientific evidence' for spiritual truth, the alleged spiritual truth becomes for us neither spiritual nor true. It is degraded into an event in the phenomenal world, and when so degraded it cannot be substantiated. Psychical research is trying to prove that eternal values are temporal facts, which they can never be.

The case for necromancy is no better if we leave 'scientific proof' alone, and appeal to the relativist metaphysics of the psychological school. Intercourse with the dead is, we are told, a real psychical experience, and we need not worry ourselves with the question whether it has any 'objective truth.' But we cannot allow psychology to have the last word in determining the truth or falsehood of religious or spiritual experience. The extravagant claims of this science to take the place of philosophy must be abated.

Psychology is the science which describes mental states, as physical science describes the behaviour of matter in motion. Both are abstract sciences. Physical science treats nature as the totality of things conceived of as independent of any subject; psychology treats inner experience as independent of any object. Both are outside any idea of value, though it is needless to say that the votaries of both sciences trespass habitually, and often unconsciously. Both are dualisms with one side ignored or suppressed. When psychology meddles with ontological problems—when, for instance it denies the existence of an Absolute, or says that reality cannot be known—it is taking too much upon itself, and has fallen into the same error as the materialism of the last century. On such questions as the immortality of the soul it must remain silent.

Faith in human immortality stands or falls with the belief in absolute values. The interest of consciousness, as Professor Pringle-Pattison has said in his admirable Gifford Lectures, lies in the ideal values of which it is the bearer, not in its mere existence as a more refined kind of fact. Idealism is most satisfactorily defined as the interpretation of the world according to a scale of value, or, in Plato's phrase, by the Idea of the Good. The highest values in this scale are absolute, eternal, and super-individual, and lower values are assigned their place in virtue of their correspondence to or participation in these absolute values. I agree with Münsterberg that the conditional and subjective values of the pragmatist have no meaning unless we have acknowledged beforehand the independent value of truth. If the proof of the merely individual significance of truth has itself only individual importance, it cannot claim any general meaning. If, on the other hand, it demands to be taken as generally valid, the possibility of a general truth is acknowledged from the start. If this one exception is granted, the whole illusory universe of relativism is overthrown. To deny any thought which is more than relative is to deprive even scepticism itself of the presuppositions on which it rests. The logical sceptic has no ego to doubt with. 'Every doubt of absolute values destroys itself. As thought it contradicts itself; as doubt it denies itself; as belief it despairs of itself.' It is not necessary or desirable to follow Münsterberg in identifying valuation with will. He talks of the will judging; but the will cannot judge. In contemplating existence we use our will to fix our attention, and then try conscientiously to prevent it from influencing the verdict. But this illegitimate use of the word 'will' does not impair the force of the argument for absolute values.

Now, valuation arranges experience in a different manner from natural science. The attributes of reality, in our world of values, are Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. And we assert that we have as good reason to claim objective reality for these Ideas as for anything in the world revealed to our senses. 'All claims on man's behalf,' says Professor Pringle-Pattison, 'must be based on the objectivity of the values revealed in his experience, and brokenly realised there. Man does not make values any more than he makes reality.' Our contention is that the world of values, which forms the content of idealistic thought and aspiration, is the real world; and in this world we find our own immortality.

But there could be no greater error than to leave the two worlds, or the two 'judgments,' that of existence and that of value, contrasted with each other, or treated as unrelated in our experience. A value-judgment which is not also a judgment of existence is in the air; it is the baseless fabric of a vision. Existence is itself a value, and an ingredient in every valuation; that which has no existence has no value. And, on the other side, it is a delusion to suppose that any science can dispense with valuation. Even mathematics admits that there is a right and a wrong way of solving a problem, though by confining itself to quantitative measurements it can assert no more than a hypothetical reality for its world. It is quite certain that we can think of no existing world without valuation.

'The ultimate identity of existence and value is the venture of faith to which mysticism and speculative idealism are committed.'⁹³⁹³Quoted by Professor Pringle-Pattison from an article by me in the Times Literary Supplement. It is indeed the presupposition of all philosophy and all religion; without this faith there can, properly speaking, be no belief in God. But the difference between naturalism and idealism may, I think, be better stated otherwise than by emphasising the contrast between existence and value, which it is impossible for either side to maintain. Naturalism seeks to interpret the world by investigation of origins; idealism by investigation of ends. The one finds the explanation of evolution in that from which it started, the other in that to which it tends. The one explains the higher by the lower; the other the lower by the higher. This is a plain issue; either the world shows a teleology or it does not. If it does, the philosophy based on the inorganic sciences is wrong. And the attempt to explain the higher by the lower becomes mischievous or impossible when we pass from one order to another. In speaking of different 'orders,' we do not commit ourselves to any sudden breaks or leaps in evolution. The organic may be linked to the inorganic, soul to the lower forms of life, spirit to soul. But whether the 'scale of perfection' is a ladder or an inclined plane, new categories are necessary as we ascend it. And unless we admit an inner teleology as a determining factor in growth, many facts even in physiology are hard to explain.

If the basis of our faith in the world-order is the conviction that the Ideas of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are fully real and fully operative, we must try to form some clear notion of what these Ideas mean, and how they are related to each other. The goal of Truth, as an absolute value, is unity, which in the outer world means harmony, in the intercourse of spirit with spirit, love; and in the inner world, peace or happiness. The goal of Goodness as an absolute value is the realisation of the ought-to-be in victorious moral effort. Beauty is the self-recognition of creative Spirit in its own works; it is the expression of Nature's own deepest character. Beauty gives neither information nor advice; but it satisfies a part of our nature which is not less Divine than that which pays homage to Truth and Goodness.

Now, these absolute values are supra-temporal. If the soul were in time, no value could arise; for time is always hurling its own products into nothingness, and the present is an unextended point, dividing an unreal past from an unreal future. The soul is not in time; time is rather in the soul. Values are eternal and indestructible. When Plotinus says that 'nothing that really is can ever perish' (ἁπολεἱται οὑδεν τὡν ὁντων), and when Höffding says that 'no value perishes out of the world,' they are saying the same thing. In so far as we can identify ourselves in thought and mind with the absolute values, we are sure of our immortality.

But it will be said that in the first place this promise of immortality carries with it no guarantee of survival in time, and in the second place that it offers us, at last, only an impersonal immortality. Let us take these two objections in turn, though they are in reality closely connected.

We must not regard time as an external, inhuman, unconscious process. Time is the frame of soul-life; outside this it has no existence. The entire cosmic process is the life-frame of the universal Soul, the Divine Logos. With this life we are vitally connected, however brief and unimportant the span and the task of an individual career may seem to us. If my particular life-meaning passes out of activity, it will be because the larger life, to which I belong, no longer needs that form of expression. My death, like my birth, will have a teleological justification, to which my supra-temporal self will consent. When a good man's work in this world is done, when he is able to say, without forgetting his many failures, 'I have finished the work that Thou gavest me to do,' surely his last word will be, 'Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace'; not, 'Grant that I may flit for a while over my former home, and hear what is happening to my country and my family.' We may leave it to our misguided necromancers to describe the adventures of the disembodied ghost—

The most respectable motive which leads men to desire a continuance of active participation in the affairs of time is that which Tennyson expresses in the often-quoted line, 'Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.' We may feel that we have it in us to do more for God and our fellow-men than we shall be able to accomplish in this life, even if it be prolonged to old age. Is not this a desire which we may prefer as a claim? And in any case, it is admitted that time is the form of the will. Are we to have no more will after death? Further, is our probation over when we die? What is to be the fate of that large majority who, so far as we can see, are equally undeserving of heaven and of hell? To these questions no answer is possible, because we are confronted with a blank wall of ignorance. We do not know whether there will be any future probation. We do not know whether Robert Browning's expectation of 'other tasks in other lives, God willing,' will be fulfilled.

The question here raised is whether there is such a thing as reincarnation. This belief, so widely held at all times by eminent thinkers, and sanctioned by some of the higher religions, cannot be dismissed as obsolete or impossible. But if it is put in the form, 'Will the same self live again on earth under different conditions?' it may be that no answer can be given, not only because we do not know, but because the question itself is meaningless. The psycho-physical organism which was born at a certain date and which will die on another date is compacted of idiosyncrasies, inherited and acquired, which seem to be inseparable from its history as born of certain parents and living under certain conditions. It is not easy to say what part of such an organism could be said to maintain its identity, if it were housed in another body and set down in another time and place, when all recollection of a previous state has been (as we must admit) cut off. The only continuity, it seems to me, would be that of the racial self, if there is such a thing, or of the directing intelligence and will of the higher Power which sends human beings into the world to perform their allotted tasks.

The second objection, which, as I have said, is closely connected with the first, is that idealism offers us a merely impersonal immortality. But what is personality? The notion of a world of spiritual atoms, 'solida pollentia simplicitate,' as Lucretius says, seems to be attractive to some minds. There are thinkers of repute who even picture the Deity as the constitutional President of a collegium of souls. This kind of pluralism is of course fundamentally incompatible with the presuppositions of my paper. The idea of the 'self' seems to me to be an arbitrary fixation of our average state of mind, a half-way house which belongs to no order of real existence. The conception of an abstract ego seems to involve three assumptions, none of which is true. The first is that there is a sharp line separating subject from object and from other subjects. The second is that the subject, thus sundered from the object, remains identical through time. The third is that this indiscerptible entity is in some mysterious way both myself and my property. In opposition to the first, I maintain that the foci of consciousness flow freely into each other even on the psychical plane, while in the eternal world there are probably no barriers at all. In opposition to the second, it is certain that the empirical self is by no means identical throughout, and that the spiritual life, in which we may be said to attain real personality for the first time, is only 'ours' potentially. In opposition to the third, I repeat that the question whether it is 'my' soul that will live in the eternal world seems to have no meaning at all. In philosophy as in religion, we had better follow the advice of the Theologia Germanica and banish, as far as possible, the words 'me and mine' from our vocabulary. For personality is not something given to start with. It does not belong to the world of claims and counter-claims in which we chiefly live. We must be willing to lose our soul on this level of experience, before we can find it unto life eternal. Personality is a teleological fact; it is here in the making, elsewhere in fact and power. So in the case of our friends. The man whom we love is not the changing psycho-physical organism; it is the Christ in him that we love, the perfect man who is struggling into existence in his life and growth. If we ask what a man is, the answer may be either, 'He is what he loves,' or 'He is what he is worth.' The two are not very different. Thus I cannot agree with Keyserling, who in criticising this type of thought (with which, none the less, he has great sympathy) says that 'mysticism, whether it likes it or not, ends in an impersonal immortality.' For impersonality is a purely negative conception, like timelessness. What is negated in 'timelessness' is not the reality of the present, but the unreality of the past and future. So the 'impersonality' which is here (not without warrant from the mystics themselves) said to belong to eternal life is really the liberation of the idea of personality. Personality is allowed to expand as far as it can, and only so can it come into its own. When Keyserling adds, 'The instinct of immortality really affirms that the individual is not ultimate,' I entirely agree with him.

The question, however, is not whether in heaven the circumference of the soul's life is indefinitely enlarged, but whether the centre remains. These centres are centres of consciousness; and consciousness apparently belongs to the world of will. It comes into existence when the will has some work to do. It is not conterminous with life; there is a life which is below consciousness, and there may be a life above consciousness, or what we mean by consciousness. We must remind ourselves that we are using a spatial metaphor when we speak of a centre of consciousness, and a temporal one when we ask about a continuing state of consciousness; and space and time do not belong to the eternal world. The question therefore needs to be transformed before any answer can be given to it. Spiritual life, we are justified in saying, must have a richness of content; it is, potentially at least, all embracing. But this enhancement of life is exhibited not only in extension but in intensity. Eternal life is no diffusion or dilution of personality, but its consummation. It seems certain that in such a state of existence individuality must be maintained. If every life in this world represents an unique purpose in the Divine mind, and if the end or meaning of soul-life, though striven for in time, has both its source and its achievement in eternity, this, the value and reality of the individual life, must remain as a distinct fact in the spiritual world.

We are sometimes inclined to think, with a natural regret, that the conditions of life in the eternal world are so utterly unlike those of the world which we know, that we must either leave our mental picture of that life in the barest outline, or fill it in with the colours which we know on earth, but which, as we are well aware, cannot portray truly the life of blessed spirits. To some extent this is true; and whereas a bare and colourless sketch of the richest of all facts is as far from the truth as possible, we may allow ourselves to fill in the picture as best we can, if we remember the risks which we run in doing so. There are, it seems to me, two chief risks in allowing our imagination to create images of the bliss of heaven. One is that the eternal world, thus drawn and painted with the forms and colours of earth, takes substance in our minds as a second physical world, either supposed to exist somewhere in space, or expected to come into existence somewhen in time. This is the heaven of popular religion; and being a geographical or historical expression, it is open to attacks which cannot be met. Hence in the minds of many persons the whole fact of human immortality seems to belong to dreamland. The other danger is that, since a geographical and historical heaven is found to have no actuality, the hope of eternal life, with all that the spiritual world contains, should be relegated to the sphere of the 'ideal.' This seems to be the position of Höffding, and is quite clearly the view of thinkers like Santayana. They accept the dualism of value and existence, and place the highest hopes of humanity in a world which has value only and no existence. This seems to me to be offering mankind a stone for bread. Martineau's protest against this philosophy is surely justified:

But though our knowledge of the eternal world is much less than we could desire, it is much greater than many thinkers allow. We are by no means shut off from realisation and possession of the eternal values while we live here. We are not confined to local and temporal experience. We know what Truth and Beauty mean, not only for ourselves but for all souls throughout the universe, and for God Himself. Above all, we know what Love means. Now Love, which is the realisation in experience of spiritual existence, has an unique value as a hierophant of the highest mysteries. And Love guarantees personality, for it needs what has been called otherness. In all love there must be a subject and an object, and a bond between them which transcends without annulling their separateness. What this means for personal immortality has been seen by many great minds. As an example I will quote from Plotinus' picture of life in the spiritual world. This writer is certainly not inclined to overestimate the claims of separate individuality, and he is under no obligation to make his doctrine conform to the dogmas of any creed.

This eternal world is about us and within us while we live here. 'Heaven is nearer to our souls than the earth is to our bodies.' The world which we ordinarily think of as real is an arbitrary selection from experience, corresponding roughly to the average reaction of life upon the average man. Some values, such as existence, persistence, and rationality, are assumed to be 'real'; others are relegated to the 'ideal' Under the influence of natural science, special emphasis is laid on those values with which that science is engaged. But our world changes with us. It rises as we rise, and falls as we fall. It puts on immortality as we do. 'Such as men themselves are, such will God appear to them to be.'⁹⁶⁹⁶From John Smith, the Cambridge Platonist. Spinoza rightly says that all true knowledge takes place sub specie æternitatis. For the πνευματικοϛ the whole of life is spiritual, and, as Eucken says, he recognises the whole of the spiritual life as his own life-being. He learns, as Plotinus declares in a profound sentence, that 'all things that are Yonder are also Here below.'

Is it then the conclusion of the whole matter that eternal life is merely the true reading of temporal life? Is earth, when seen with purged vision, not merely the shadow of heaven, but heaven itself? If we could fuse past, present, and future into a totum simul, an 'Eternal Now,' would that be eternity? This I do not believe. A full understanding of the values of our life in time would indeed give us a good picture of the eternal world; but that world itself, the abode of God and of blessed spirits, is a state higher and purer than can be fully expressed in the order of nature. The perpetuity of natural laws as they operate through endless ages is only a Platonic 'image' of eternity. That all values are perpetual is true; but they are something more than perpetual: they are eternal. These laws are the creative forces which shape our lives from within; but all the creatures, as St. Augustine says in a well-known passage, declare their inferiority to their Creator. 'We are lower than He, for He made us.' Scholastic theologians interposed an intermediary which they called ævum between time and eternity. Ævum is perpetuity, which they rightly distinguished from true eternity. Christianity is philosophically right in insisting that our true home, our patria, is 'not here.' Nor is it in any place: it is with God,'whose centre is everywhere and His circumference nowhere.' There remaineth a rest for the people of God, when their warfare on earth is accomplished.

A Christian must feel that the absence of any clear revelation about a future state is an indication that we are not meant to make it a principal subject of our thoughts. On the other hand, the more we think about the eternal values the happier we shall be. As Spinoza says, 'Love directed towards the eternal and infinite fills the mind with pure joy, and is free from all sadness. Wherefore it is greatly to be desired, and sought after with our whole might.' But he also says, and I think wisely, that there are few subjects on which the 'free' man will ponder less often, than on death. The end of life is as right and natural as its beginning; we must not rebel against the common lot, either for ourselves or for our friends. We are to live in the present though not for the present. The two lines of Goethe which Lewis Nettleship was so fond of quoting convey a valuable lesson:

'Death does not count,' as Nettleship used to say; and he met his own fate on the Alps with a cheerfulness which showed that he believed it. The craving for mere survival, no matter under what conditions, is natural to some persons, and those who have it not must not claim any superiority over those who shudder at the idea of resigning this 'pleasing, anxious being.' Some brave and loyal men, like Samuel Johnson, have feared death all their lives long; while others, even when fortune smiles upon them, 'have a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better.' But the longing for survival, and the anxious search for evidence which may satisfy it, have undoubtedly the effect of binding us to earth and earthly conditions; they come between us and faith in true immortality. They cannot restore to us what death takes away. They cannot lay the spectre which made Claudio a craven.

We know now, if we did not know it three years ago, that the average man can face death, and does face it in the majority of cases, with a serenity which would be incomprehensible if he did not know in his heart of hearts that it does not matter much. He may have no articulated faith in immortality, but, like Spinoza, he has 'felt and experienced that he is eternal.' Perhaps he only says to himself, 'Who dies if England lives?' But the England that lives is his own larger self, the life that is more his own life than the beating of his heart, which a bullet may still for ever. And if the exaltation of noble patriotism can 'abolish death, and bring life and immortality to light' for almost any unthinking lad from our factories and hedgerows, should not religion be able to do as much for us all? And may it not be that some touch of heroic self-abnegation is necessary before we can have a soul which death cannot touch? When Christ said that those who are willing to lose their souls shall save them, is not this what He meant? We must accustom ourselves to breathe the air of the eternal values, if we desire to live for ever. And a strong faith is not curious about details. 'Beloved, now are we sons of God; and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. But we know that when He is made manifest we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.'

THE END