I have careful records of about five hundred death-beds, studied particularly with reference to the modes of death and the sensations of the dying. The latter alone concerns us here. Ninety suffered bodily pain or distress of one sort or another, eleven showed mental apprehension, two positive terror, one expressed spiritual exaltation, one bitter remorse. The great majority gave no sign one way or the other; like their birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting. The Preacher was right: in this matter man hath no preëminence over the beast—“as the one dieth so dieth the other.”217
I have careful records of about five hundred death-beds, studied particularly with reference to the modes of death and the sensations of the dying. The latter alone concerns us here. Ninety suffered bodily pain or distress of one sort or another, eleven showed mental apprehension, two positive terror, one expressed spiritual exaltation, one bitter remorse. The great majority gave no sign one way or the other; like their birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting. The Preacher was right: in this matter man hath no preëminence over the beast—“as the one dieth so dieth the other.”217
This belief persists, thus, only as a dead article of faith which men no longer live by. It is a desiccated herbarium specimen and not a living plant. If common observation did not sufficiently show this, it has appeared very significantly and statistically in many recent studies.218These showed that it diminishes progressively as we go up the educational grades from high school through the university and that, in general, the more cultivated man becomes, the less he believes in any form of personal survival. If we had a similar investigation of the old as compared with the young, my own partial studies incline me to believe that this conviction of personal persistence beyond the grave in general loses its force in senescence, as indeed it becomes vital only at adolescence. If it be thus a creed that first blossoms with the advent and tends to decay at the close of sexual life, we have a new key for understanding both its function and its limitations. True, it often persists, if only feebly, as with the momentum of a spent force, in those who have not fully realized the senium, although they all do not wish to be conserved as old as they really are but to be rejuvenated as they once were.
In what follows we believe it will appear that upon analysis by mechanisms akin to metonymy or synecdoche the vigor with which we have clung to a belief in personal is really motivated by a deeper belief in racial immortality and that in this latter, when the strophe of life is succeeded by its antistrophe, the deeper faith tends to come out and true sages realize what the soul meant by what the tenuous and falsetto faculty called faith blindly groped its way toward.
The psychic factors that have so overdetermined the hope-wish of personal immortality are as follows.
I. First is the desire to be remembered and esteemed by survivors. The soul abhors oblivion somewhat as it does extinction. We wish our friends not only to think of us but to think well of us. How satisfying this is both to those who die and to those who live is seen in Confucianism, where ancestor worship vicariates for belief in personal immortality. It would almost seem that some of the good and great would think more of the certainty of being canonized in due time or perpetuated in the form of bronze or marble, or enrolled in some temple of fame, than of personal immortality. At any rate, this mundane, would in some degree compensate for the loss of celestial perpetuation. Those who die in more or less full consciousness are prone in their last moments to dwell upon their friends far more than they do upon their own future state, as if the enshrinement they chiefly sought were in the hearts and minds of those they leave behind. Conversely, those who die alone, friendless, or with the execration of survivors, cling the more to the rehabilitation that death itself always tends to bring. On the basis of questionnaire data it would seem that some about to die shudder more at the thought that others would think they were totally extinct at death than from inwardly facing this conviction for themselves. We want others to think we are enjoyingthe best the universe can provide for its favorites, because in that case they will think more highly of us since we have obtained the diploma of the cosmos, that we have stood the test and have graduatedsumma cum laudefrom the terrestrial curriculum. Perhaps if we were early Christians we should begin to “put on airs” and affect the manners of a higher life here to impress our own valuation of ourselves upon others. An ancient sage would rather that others thought him bad and hated him than to be forgotten. Thus, in fine, if all knew that they and all their good deeds would never fade from grateful memory of their descendants, the conviction of a conscious personal existence beyond the grave would lose one of its preforming determinants and reinforcements. Therefore, those concerned to keep alive the fate and hope of another life should foster any agency that keeps the memory of the dead green. There really ought to be those who sum up effectively the good lessons and meaning of every life when it closes, as a kind of mundane judgment day so that no good influence be lost and no warning fail to have its due effect—a court of the dead to pass impartially upon each life as it sets out to sea. We censor books and are beginning to test eugenic marriages, etc.; and so, if all knew that upon their death an impartial tribunal would pass upon their lives in the interests of the common weal, even if their verdict came late or was given only to those most interested to know, ethical culture would mark a great advance and the fear of death, instead of consoling itself with belief in a future life, would be set to work in the interests of normal lives here.
II. The second mundane surrogate for transcendental immortality is doing things that will affect those who survive or will perpetuate our will and works to those who know little or nothing of us or of our name. Many last wills and testaments benefit those who knew nothing ofthe donor. Many such have reared buildings, started movements, built organizations, written books, invented, created works of art, transformed the face of nature with an instinct of workmanship in which all thought of self was merged. All our lives are thus greatly influenced by those who are unknown. The egoistic element tends to merge in a disinterested desire to make part of the world in some way better for our having lived. Sometimes, indeed, anonymity is actively striven for and the individuality of benefactors is hidden. The phobia here is that we may have lived for naught. Here the idea of God as an All-Discerner who sees virtue and vice, and rewards or punishes in secret, coöperates. Such hidden service to the race, with no thought of any compensation here or hereafter, has a unique charm all its own. Scientific discoveries and beneficent inventions have sometimes thus been given freely to all without any personal benefit and without a personal label. True love sometimes lavishes every gift, opportunity, and joy upon its object, with no stipulation of love or gratitude or even recognition in its turn. Indeed, the possession of wealth compels more or less attention to this field of the immortality of influence. Unlike the pauper, the millionaire must forecast if he would try to shape the future; and even if great givers attach their names to their bequests, they know that to most who profit by them their name will soon mean nothing. Jubal invented music and wandered afar and when he came back he found a great festival in honor of his art and of his name, but could not identify himself and was cast out as an impostor. “Jubal’s fame and art filled all the sky, while Jubal lonely laid him down to die,” supremely happy in the thought that he had done the race a great service. To love and serve man is far higher than to love and serve God, for we can do nothing for Him save in this way and He needs and expects no help from us save this.Men come and go but institutions and influence go on forever and those who start them share their mundane deathlessness long after they are forgotten. The cup of cold water illustrates the way of the gentleman or lady born and bred, best attested by the desire that others be happy and not that they themselves shine, be aggrandized, or have pleasure. This is the most ideal conduct and appeals most strongly of all things to the two great and ultimate standards of conduct, namely, honor and an approving conscience. And as we achieve this we belong to the order of the immortals and have triumphed over death. Desjardins, the founder of the order of the new life, said in substance, “We are never so impelled to snap our fingers in the face of death, to despise all its pomp and horror, and to defy him to do his worst to body and soul, as when we have just performed some such act of pure but passionate duty or kindness.” Then only can we truly feel that “no evil can befall a good man living or dead” and that the cosmos is moral to the core.
III. The third killer of the death-fear is children and posterity. To die childless, knowing that our heredity that began with the amœba and came down to us in an unbroken line dies, sharpens the sting of death; while, on the other hand, to have many well born and well reared children to rise up and call us blessed is one of the best antidotes to its baleful psychic virus. As every one knows, every creature, man included, lives about as long after the maximum power to propagate as his offspring requires to become mature, so that the prolongation of the period of immaturity means the prolongation of old age. Our foremost duty is to transmit the sacred torch of life undimmed, to give the maximal momentum and right direction to the nature and nurture of offspring and to bring rising generations to their full maturity—that is the highest criterion of an ever rising nation, including civilization itself. The true parent lives not only in andfor the children but is the ancestor of their souls as well as of their bodies and even his belief in a future life is a good or bad thing according as it affects this. We feel this life incomplete, unfinished, and in need of a supplement because its possibilities are as yet unrealized. But we feel all this so much the less if we have children, while the dread of the inevitable hour becomes that of a kind of second or dual death for the childless because not only they but their line die in them. Yet, on the other hand, they have less ties and so less to lose, even though they may feel that they have, in a sense, lived in vain. What parent was ever so world-weary, so strong a believer in postmortem joy, that he would not rather live on here and see his children’s children thrive than go on hence to any conceivable future state? Those who leave offspring have had less time to develop morbid fears of Lethe’s waters and if they expect to enter a great peace beyond, they often find their chief joy in contemplating the fruits of their loins on earth. We have seen how the death thought begins with the life of sex and when the latter, if it has been normal and happy, comes to an end, death has already begun and we are advancing deeper into the shades of the dark valley, so that there is already less to lose. Thus the death of the aged is less tragic and less inconsolable; and, what is far more important, normal and cultured souls think and care progressively less about another life.
IV. As for the good old doctrine of personal immortality, we cannot yet escape the great law that the next life is compensatory. If men are wretched here, the future becomes a refuge and grows not only actual but attractive; while, conversely, if this life is rich and abounding, the next tends to fade. No Christian age was ever so heedless of the latter as our own. For most intelligent, prosperous women, and especially men, it has lapsed to little more than a mere convention or trope orfetish of an effete orthodoxy, and hell is at most only a nightmare of the past, a childish phantom. Our actualmodus vivendiis as if another life did not exist and death were the end. No priestcraft can longer make men content with misery here in the hope of compensation hereafter. All make the most and best of this life as if it were all they were sure of and the motto of most believers is, “One life at a time and this one now.” Only in a kind of secondary falsetto Sunday consciousness do their thoughts turn to the future and does a flickering hope that death is not the end appear. Extinction is black by contrast in proportion as life is bright, happy, and absorbing, so that the death dread is in some respects growing as our life becomes richer, while it is at the same time being more and more banished from consciousness. The chief attractiveness it now has is that it brings rest and peace, for our tropes of it are more and more borrowed from sleep. Thus if the idea of the negation of life was never so dreadful, there was never such diversion from its closer envisagement. Thus, too, although suppressed, it was never so potent a factor in governing conduct, in improving hygiene, and providing for our offspring. Although we take a chance at saving our souls by church membership it is more and more bad form to discuss such matters. The real treasure of the soul is laid up elsewhere than in heaven and the growing phobia of death has now psychotherapies that are more and more effective. Its power is far greater than we know and there are endless uses to which it can yet be put in helping on the world’s work. Just as every pain that depresses the vital spirits a few points on the scale of euphoria, though they still remain far above zero, inclines to death, so when life is at its optimum or flood-tide man is wonderfully immune and recuperative in body and soul and the higher up the euphoric scale we live, the more difficult it is to fear or even think of death.Thus every legitimate fear of death is in a sense a life-preserver and -prolonger. Our business is to live and not to die, to keep at the very top of our condition and as far as possible from death, which is thesummum malum.
As to the relation of these four immortalities, nominal, influential, plasmal, and orthodox, to each other, geneticism and the revelations of the dynamism of the folk-soul have shed much new light. This may be summarized in the statement that each of them is correlated with all the others. Even he who is chiefly intent on perpetuating his name is gratifying the deep instinct of transcending the limits of his own personal life and to know that he is remembered is not without consoling power even in the loss of property or if the conviction arises that death means extinction; while, conversely, the prospect of death in utter obscurity and of being completely forgotten tends to reinforce any or all of the other immortalities. Were we to rehabilitate hell in a modern sense, one of its horrors would be a sentence of summary oblivion even to our friends: “Let his name be forever taboo from mention or even from memory.” Of course, we shall all sooner or later fall under this sentence despite all our pathetic efforts to leave durable names behind.
As to anonymous influence, we are all sure of it to a degree, for the world we are born into is made by those who preceded us and we help to shape the future. In the social field we have endless illustrations of a service that involves more or less emulation. The case in point is a woman I knew who, having lived a most disinterested and self-sacrificing life, when told that God would reward her in the next world replied that she had never had either conviction or interest about another life but had been too busy doing good to think about it. If another life was in the order of things, all would be well, but if annihilation were in store, that, too, would bejust as welcome, for she had found her pay in the satisfaction that each day’s work brought. She had no children and wanted no outer recognition but was content that her good deeds registered in others’ lives would follow her and nothing else really mattered in her scheme of life. The point is that in any other ages or environments the same instinct to enlarge life might have found expression in either of the other forms. Some even commit colossal crimes from a perverted form ofGeltung’spropensity. Because they cannot be potent for good they make themselves so for evil. Anonymity is often a passion and finds outcrops not only in religion and philosophy but also in science. Indeed, very much of our civilization is composed of innumerable influences originated by those whose names no history orActa Sanctorumhave preserved and are products of this deep basal trend in the human soul.
As to plasmal immortality, who knows how much of all the good done in the world, if traced to its genetic roots, comes straight from the original momentum of the instinct to make the world better for posterity? To be sure, many of them are now broken erratic trends, forgetful of their source, which is really a nest-building instinct so irradiated and sublimated as to have lost orientation toward both its origin and goal. The first constructions in the world were nidifications. The first animal societies were stirpicultural. The primal examples of self-sacrifice were for the young. Everything for the world is good that squares with the functions of parenthood broadly conceived, and all is bad that contravenes it. Psychotherapy is slowly leading us to the astonishingly new insight that aberrations of the life-transmitting, young-rearing propensities constitute very many if not most of our mental abnormalities and that the rectification of these functions has marvelous therapeutic efficiency. The race is immortal, at least back to the first protozoanand indeed infinitely beyond. And so, in the future, our race and it only is immortal to the cosmic end. If we are tips of the twigs of a vast buried tree, these twigs may become themselves roots of a yet greater one and even a true superman may yet be born in the line of any of us. Thus, perhaps all the other immortalities have their dynamogeny in the instincts of parenthood.
As to the venerable belief in personal immortality, it was of course selfishness transcendentalized so as to subordinate every other goal in life to that of insuring our own happiness in a postmortem world. And we have to-day only contempt for the squalid ascetic who made his life miserable with the prime end of saving his own soul. But this crude doctrine now stands forth in a very new light, for psychology shows it to have been an ugly cyst or cast that enclosed and sheltered through hard dark ages a precious and beauteous thing now just emerging. Its content, as now revealed by analysis, is really man’s ineluctable conviction that his own life was insignificant compared with its larger meanings. Its real lesson is the subordination of the individual to the greater whole toward which it gave him a correctEinstellung. The close attachment of this doctrine to the ego was incorrect, for the self is only a trope or metaphor of the race, but even this was necessary at an earlier stage of race pedagogy. The transcendentality ascribed to a self freed from the body was inevitable because that was the only symbol by which the greater life of the race could be described or comprehended. This belief stored up and conserved the psychic promise and potency that is now again flowing over by transfer to the other outcrops of the immortality instinct. It did not say what it meant but was a pragmatic masterpiece, like so many great creations of the folksoul. From the soul of the race it went straight home to that of the individual and if it overstressed individuation for a time, that, too, wasat first needful. Had man not so long or so inevitably believed in the great work of saving souls for the next world, he would now be less effective in saving them from the evils of this world. Had he not so cherished the conviction of a future heaven, he would have lost much of the very energy of his soul, which now strives to transform this world into a paradise and to populate it well. Thus we have here a great field in which the laws of the transposition of psychic trends into their kinetic equivalents, with very many different forms but with persistence of identical content, are abundantly shown. Man’s instinct has always been right and only his more superficial conscious interpretations of it wrong.
Excess or defect of either of at least the first three immortalities hypertrophies or dwarfs the others. The doctrine of conscious personal survival was not only developed in unconscious conformity to this principle but has an even more important pedagogic rôle for the young than we had hitherto supposed. It is a pragmatic, artistic, and in no sense a scientific fact. It utterly fails before the criteria of reason but it has worked far better results than it could have done had these requirements been alone regarded. It should not only be inculcated in the young but has immense therapeutic value and to doubt this is only another side illustration of the fact that cultivated adults have, the world over and particularly in our country, unprecedentedly lost touch with youth. Wherever the instincts of parenthood have not degenerated, it must be clear that belief in future personal rewards and punishments is a wholesome regulative of the lives of the young at a stage when feeling and impulse are at their strongest and before reason is mature.
V. But there is a fifth form of immortality concept somewhat more apart and uncorrelated with the others because newer and which comes from the lure of the infinitesimalelements which science now finds at the basis of the universe. What Dalton called atoms are now known to be planetary systems of unimaginably minute corpuscles, one thousandth the mass of an atom of hydrogen and, if they are solely electrical, “their size must be one millionth of the linear dimensions of an atom,” or relatively as a period on the printed page is to a large theater. Their groupings constitute the chemical elements, so that matter is dynamic to a degree we cannot conceive; and if so-called inorganic matter were proven to contain germs of man and mind, this would add but little to the new marvel of it. Matter is so active and subtle that the modern conceptions of it that have come from the study of radium make us feel that in a sense it is more spiritual than we have ever conceived spirit itself to be. In this new world, which may be homogeneous with mind, there is nothing like death anywhere to be found, and there is an unbroken gradation from the corporative unity of electrons in an atom up to the aggregations of man in society—and some think further still. On this view death is not only non-existent but inconceivable. True, more complex aggregations are reduced to simpler, more transient to more permanent ones by it, but matter is not only not dead but more intensely active than mind, so that the student of the ultimate constitution of matter and the persistence of energy is in a sense studying immortality, for this is the basis from which all orders of animal nature arose and into which they will all be resolved.
Thus we are told that the new physics and chemistry are really investigating death and regeneration. Our brains have little sense of the marvelous and lawful processes that underlie all their activities. While we have deemed evolution upward, there is another sense in which it is a fall or a series of departures from a more durable and elemental state, so that the gain is not allone way and catabolism has its own attractions. If our lives affect these more permanent electrons, this is survival and our ego is only part of a larger continuum and is without end or beginning, although inconceivably changed. The disintegration of our elements is the harvest-home back to the cosmos from which we arose and may involve increase, not decrease, to the sum total of good. This unselfing or “fusing with all we flow from” is the direction in which love, whether of man, woman, animals, or nature itself, as well as subordination of self to others and the world, inclines us. Thus the conscious soul of man is swept by tides of which our poor psychology as yet knows but little. Should such a conception of the world become general, it could still use many of our religious phrases, litanies, and symbols, but they would be inundated with fresh meanings.
Jean Finot’s book219is marvelously learned, his view is unique, and his style fascinating. It rapidly passed through fourteen editions and was translated into many languages. He has almost nothing to say of the soul, so that his volume might be entitled The Immortality of the Body, or Death, the Great Illusion. He is bitter against theologians for having made death such an all-dominating fear fetish in the world. Tolstoi feared death all his life and writes, “Nothing is worse than death, and when we consider that it is the inevitable end of all which lives, we must also recognize that nothing is worse than life.” We are told that the dread of it poisoned the life of Daudet and that Zola trembled before the thought, “which obsessed him and caused him nightmares and insomnia.” Renan says, “We may sacrifice all to truth and good, which are the ends of life, and when we have done say, ‘Following the call of this interior siren wehave reached the turn where the rewards should lie. Oh, dreadful consoler, there is none!’ The philosophy which promised us the secret of death stammers excuses.” Finot says, “A study of the evolution of death in the literature of the past and to-day would become almost a history of literature itself.” “The meditations of the fathers of the church and the monks of the Middle Ages would shine particularly in this concert of vociferations against death (‘If the slightest wound made on one finger can cause so great a pain, what a horrible torture must be death, which is the corruption or dissolution of the entire body’). We can look fixedly neither at the sun nor at death.” Mme. de Sévigné says, “I am swallowed up in the thoughts of death and find it so terrible that I hate life more because it leads there.” It is no great consolation to say with Renan, “We shall live by the trace which each of us leaves upon the bosom of the infinite.” “All that lives is simply preparing for death.” Belief in the perdurability of the soul is an alternative or placation, a mirage. Only Confucianism and Taoism, if they had remained faithful to the teachings of their creators, would close to their initiates all possibilities of an after life; but they did not remain faithful. Even Luther at the beginning of his campaign against Rome classed the dogma of immortality of the soul as amongst “the monstrous fables which are part of the Roman dung heap,” although he later became reconciled to it.
The very fear of death has killed many. “Sick persons who gather from their doctor a presentiment of their term usually die before reaching it.” The Western world should take heart from the millions of Buddhists who view the prospect of death with enchantment. For subjective idealists like Berkeley, who tell us that we can really know nothing of the external world, death only deprives us of our conceptions and we may really take consolation in the fact that our individuality is composedof a whole hierarchy of more or less independent centers, each of them made up of more complex units, until our ideas of immortality merge with those of the conservation of energy.
Finot’s own views begin with his conception of “life in the coffin.” “The underground existence of our body is far more animated than that which is led above the earth.” “The fathers of some few human beings upon the earth, we become the fathers of myriads of beings within its depths,” and man perhaps gives more pleasure to his grave companions than he ever enjoyed. He specifies nine species of insects, mostly strikingly colored flies and coleoptera, which in regular order, one after another, live upon and copulate, lay their eggs and rear their maggots in corpses that are paradises to them, and he praises the work of Francisco Redi who gave us “the admirable science of the entymology of graves,” which now takes the place of the old ideas of Tartarus and the Elysian fields. The foods brought to the tomb and frankly meant for the dead, who were often conceived as hungry, were really consumed by the “worms” that devour us. He tells us of a young woman caught singing at a grave who, seeing that she was observed, remarked, “My mother liked the Casta Diva.” The Greeks certainly did not believe that those beneath the earth were quite quit of existence and perhaps the first religion was that of the grave or tomb, which was a factor in the birth of patriotism. The tomb is democratic because all bodies suffer exactly the same fate if exposed alike to the elements. We may really be interested in “our offspring” in the grave, for they, at least to biologists, have more interest than do the poetic conceptions that we become flowers, trees, or drifting clouds. We may thus “facilitate the body’s immortal diffusion into immortal nature.”
Indeed, each of the thirty trillion cells of our body has its own partial elemental life and, while we live, thesepartake in the general life of the common wealth. Each has to eliminate waste, ingest food, and their energy is such that “we should need a force of several hundred thousand horsepower to kill simultaneously” and instantly all these cells. Even molecules have infinitely little lives, each after its own fashion. The chemist’s view of even putrefaction, which appeals so repulsively to one of our senses, makes it interesting. Thus the elements of our body carry on after what we call death, for life dwells in each cell and even molecule. The very first germ was immortal. True, we cannot analyze the consciousness of a cell, if it has one. Back of all this there is the life of inanimate nature. Again, many of the organs and elements of our body continue to live and grow, if sufficiently nourished, after the death of the body as a whole, though a part does not have the power, as in some animals, of regenerating the whole. The heart has been revived after thirty hours of death. Bits of skin have been removed and preserved and grafted on to other bodies six months after detachment and this process might go on indefinitely, the same skin being transferred for generations to new bodies. True, organs, like cells, lose their subordination at what we call death.220
At this point Finot introduces a very long argument against cremation because it interferes with all these processes. He seems to have a rancor against it that is somewhat like that of the Western believer in personal immortality against Oriental pantheism, which holds that the soul melts into the universe like a drop into the ocean. He finds great comfort in the scientific phenomena, which he résumés as “the life of so-called inanimate matter,” which, we are coming to realize, is by no means dead. Indeed, molecules lead an intensely active life, changing their place, perhaps vibrating, traveling, groupingthemselves in very many different ways, so that metals have a kind of physiology and even therapy of their own. Perhaps, indeed, crystallized matter represents the most perfect and stable arrangement to which the particles of the body are susceptible. Thermodynamics shows us that motion and heat are related in metals as in our bodies. Metals suffer fatigue and recuperate from rest, as Bosé has shown. Perhaps even the soul of life is here and we are just beginning to know the powers of ferments, which seem on the borderline between the organic and inorganic. Both are subject to evolution.
Again, there is no sharp line between animal and vegetable life. Protoplasms are as different or must be so as individuals. Both have variability. Both the cabbage and the rat, as standard biological experiments show, breathe. Plants are affected by narcotics. Sick vegetables respond to some of the same medicaments that animals do, while some actually have a sensorium. Philosophers like Descartes have tried to break down all the identities between man and animals and give the former a unique place in the universe. Fechner, who believed plants besouled, and even Haeckel knew better, although Wundt insisted to the last that “all psychic activity is conscious.” The unconscious, which comparative psychology must admit, opens the door downward toward the very dawn of life, so that perhaps even unicellular organisms have elemental souls. Very many of the earlier philosophers, when human thought was fresh and untrammeled by tradition, insisted on the unity of life and mind. For a long period animals were thought to be moral beings and courts were held in which they were tried. Indeed, we may conclude that “a living being is always living” and back of this life merges by imperceptible gradations into the larger life of the cosmos.
All religion, says Finot, is based on a belief in a soul independent of the body and while so many Western philosophers have insisted on a perdurable and even immaterial personality, there has always been a background of thought repressed by current opinion to the contrary view, till we have developed a kind of “sentiment of the end.” In point of fact, those near death have first a feeling of beatitude, then complete insensibility to the outer world and to pain, and lastly great rapidity of thought, so that dying is a kind of beatitude. Finot thinks modern biology by its experiments, not on spontaneous generation but on the control of fertilization, has gone some way toward realizing the goal of the alchemists, which was to create homunculi; and he wonders whether man may not sometime be thus able to control the very sources of life.
Alchemy, which for centuries was the mystic philosophy of the wise but has seemed to modern minds only a mass of felted symbols that could never be resolved except in the new light shed upon it by the studies of A. E. Hitchcock, Silberer, and others, represents in one of its aspects a unique trend of the quest for immortality. The lower alchemist strove to reduce the baser metals back to a common element, menstruum, or materia prima, for which there were fifty mythological expressions, and then and there to transmute them into the purest and the most precious of all metals, gold. The later higher alchemy left all this behind and strove to bring not only life but the homunculus itself out of various rotting putridities or out of decomposition backward and downward to evolve something endowed with exceptional vitality. Near this devolutive pole lie the deep sources of creative energy, the antæus touch of which brings regeneration. So regression to the “within” causes the soul to arise from the body and the spirit from the soul. It is like the transmutation of experience into heredityor individuality reinforcing itself by contact with the mighty spirit of the race. The personal is united with the world’s will or with that of God and is transmuted into it. Symbols are always a product of “apperceptive insufficiency” but the higher anagogic meaning of many of them in the hermetic field is that askesis, sacrifice, the death of egoism, and renunciation lead to the great treasure, the new light, self-impregnation with Pneuma, a new birth, joy, thesummum bonum, etc. To some alchemists this goal was like that of the Yogi cult, depersonalization if not annihilation, while to others it was more like a distillation of a quintessential supersoul from its sarcous base, as mercury and even lead are transmuted into gold. Palingenesis is the purpose not only of experimentation but of the prayer and meditation that must precede it. In the sex symbolisms the subject fuses with the object as the male and female principle unite in conjugation. Old age is regression or retreat toward the fountain heads of life and the new life may be formed within the old body before its collapse, so that there is no break of either conscious or physical continuity. Where and when there is most death, there is also most life, for the two are true reciprocals.
But the alchemists did not make gold nor evolve an homunculus nor achieve even spontaneous generation according to our criteria. Diligently as they sought for them, they never found the philosopher’s stone, the fountain of youth, or theelixir vitæ. Active as were their immortal longings and intricate as were their products, they were all abortive. They groped toward chemistry and metallurgy and these came in due time, although they were no more products of it than the modern building trades are of freemasonry. But their quest for a transmortal life neither achieved nor was followed by any after results that seem to us to be of value.
Modern astronomy tells us that the stellar universeis at least 250,000 light years in diameter, so that if one of the remoter stars went out we should not know it for that number of years. The extensions outside the range of even our Euclidean axioms which we now know were only provisional and where time is only a fourth dimension of space (Einstein); suns a million times larger than ours; thousands of millions of celestial bodies in all stages of evolution and devolution, yet all composed of nearly the same chemical elements as our tiny planet and all following the same laws of gravity, light, heat, the conservation of energy through all its transformations so that none of it is ever or anywhere lost, with illustrations of every stage of planetary development and dissolution, some of them probably evolving life and creatures far higher than man:—it is out of this universe that our world and we came and back into it we shall both be resolved sooner or later. As we advance in life we turn our backs to all this but when the retreat begins we face the stupendous whole of it again and death is freedom from the progressive limitations involved in individuation and a return home to the One and All. It is restoration, resumption, emancipation, diffusion, reversion, and all worlds and systems as well as men are thus destined to die of old age, perhaps by collision or other accident, since time is as boundless as space and the history of our solar system is but a single tick of the cosmic clock-work which we know is always running down even though it may have the power of eternally winding itself up again. If “our hearts like muffled drums are beating funeral marches to the grave,” so is also the heart of the universe. As we “join the majority” when we die, so do suns that become extinct and those we see with the strongest telescope may be but a handful compared to those that within its range have suffered “entropy.” Thus the true death thought is the transcender of all horizons and its musepoints us straight to infinity as our goal. Along with this there is a deep conviction that there is no void or vacuum but that even though the existence of universal ether is now doubted by certain experts the cosmos is somehow a plenum full to repletion of being as it is of energy and teeming with the possibilities of even life far richer and more abundant than we can conceive. Thus we see again that personality is arrest, exclusion from all this, which ceases at death when we reënter the great current that sweeps onward all that is. Thus the solar system, earth, man, and finally our own ego involve descent as from asummumgenus to aninfimaspecies. This progressive individuation is at every step arrest which death removes and reverses, so that the energies which during all our lives have held up and hampered us by so many disharmonies and conflicts are gone forever.
VI. Next come the noetic theories of immortality. Gnostics, illuminati, mystics, logicians of the categories, and all who seek salvation and perdurability by the noetic way assume that as the soul leaves individual things and persons and passes to species, to genera, and on to the abstract and unconditioned, certainty increases until it tends to become cataleptic in the old Stoic sense. The ultimate goal is pure absolute being, knowledge of which brings ecstasy, love of, and identification with it. Self is merged and lost in the infinite. Negatively this seems not merely death but annihilation. It should be regarded positively as the great affirmation and realization of true existence and the proper and only true finish and completion of human life, the last stage of psychogenesis. It is involution, the at last fully developed counterpart and complement of evolution. To this the genetic life impulse with which each of us starts will take us if its trajectory suffers no arrest and does not swerve from its proper course. This ontological immortality is Oriental, eleatic, and frankly pantheistic. It is a product notonly of old thinkers but of old races and civilizations. It goes with retirement from and not with useful advent into the world. Those who begin this involution by, for example, knowing that they know, knowing that they know they know, etc., find that at the mathematical point when they reach the center of the involucre, the universe bursts in upon them. By tracing self-consciousness to its deepest root all that is conscious is lost in an unconscious that is utterly without bounds or orientation.
The religious instinct has always been vastly wiser than it knew but it always needs reconstruction, often radical in form. Thus, if at death the psyche is disintegrated as much as the body is and the disintegration goes down into molecules or any of the basal forms of energy, death is not absolute. The difference is like that between the mountains and the sea level when compared with that from the surface of the earth to its center. Hering and Simon tell us that what we have called heredity is really memory. The world beyond is like an ocean to an ant accustomed to its own ant-hill but floating out to sea on a straw. The subconscious is greater than the conscious and we do not dread this in sleep and so biology is greater than psychology, just as folklore is broader than psychology or philosophy. We want to feel ultimately forces and powers that are not our own, to be inundated with a larger strength, to fall back into everlasting arms. Thus, back of Christianity is an older, larger, meta-Christian, meta-human religion found in the love of nature, and old men ought to grow progressively interested first in animals, then in plants, then in the inanimate world, with a view to the ending of life in a pantheistic absorption.
This view has had another great reinforcement of late from studies that originated with Durkheim and Lévy-Brühl, from which it appears that back of primitive animism there are always found traces of some kind ofmana cult, which is not unlike that of Om in India. Man is anthropic or upward-gazing. We address the sky not as “our father in heaven” but as a vastated navel-gazing orientation toward the source of all things. Schleiermacher, who conceived religion as absolute dependence and in his earlier writings made it pantheistic at root, sought to console a young widow who said that her whole soul went out to her dead husband and she could not possibly feel that he would be resolved back into the great One-and-All by saying that this should bring her no grief for it meant merging into the highest life of the infinite whole and no longer setting up for self—“If he is now living in God and you love him eternally in God as you loved and knew God in him, can you think of anything sublimer or anything more glorious? Is not this the highest end of love?” etc. Mailander held that pantheistic divinity died in giving birth to the world and that all its processes are self-destructive, pointing ultimately to a Nirvana; that everything is traveling the road to death, the desire for which is really the universal motive, so that we are unconsciously seeking this kind of absorptive death in all we do or say. Man’s business is to know the great whole and thus he will enjoy the prospect of annihilation and attain the full and glorious will to die. We must be resolved back into primal energy, which is nothing only in the sense that it is too great to be defined.
Meyer-Denfey urges that no part of the soul can be lost any more than can any element of the body and that the fuller our life has been the more of these modifications of cosmic matter and energy does it effect. Pantheism has resources for meeting the death fear which the Western world knows little of. It should also be noted that to the psychologist consolations drawn from the persistency of the elements of our body in the above sense are related to world-soul theories merely by ambivalentvariance. Psychogenetically there is little difference between concepts of absolute mind back of all conscious and sentient beings and those of preëxisting energy, stress, nebulæ, or any other mother-lye of the universe. The Schiller-James view is that matter limits the expression of the absolute mind back of all. Our brain is a thin place in the veil through which the great life of soul breaks into the world but always in restricted forms. The philosopher, Schelling, thought mind and nature at root identical but Schiller is more dualistic and regards the body as a “mechanism for inhibiting consciousness.” “With our brains we are able to forget.”
Still, the mind is in rapport, however dim, in contact, if not indeed continuous with a larger consciousness of unknown and perhaps universal scope that is disclosed to us in our subliminal self. On this view the brain does not secrete thought but obstructs it like a bad conductor, so that when the thought currents of the great Autos make the nerves glow, the phosphorescence or incandescence caused by the resistance of the brain is what appears to our fragmentary subliminal mind as consciousness. Ideation is thus a transmissive function of the brain and when it perishes, personality, which means limitation, is dissolved into the larger life of the whole. Mind stuff, like force and matter, may preëxist in minute and disseminated fragments, which our bodies mass and our brains combine into what we call souls. And on this view these fragmentary psychic elements, whether they be combined in a human or even animal ego or not, must also be immortal for all the reasons we are. Perhaps the highest combinations may be grouped into yet higher beings, which would be resolved back again into us on their way to more elemental states.
If our soul is the mouthpiece of an absolute soul, as the wordpersonais often interpreted to imply, inadequate though it be it is still to those lower mausolizedsouls somewhat as the more definite and absolute soul is to us; and as their voices are absorbed in us so we are in infinite being. We are bundles, vincula, or parentheses of more ultimate elements that preceded and will survive us, but we are somehow helping these immortal components on to their own goal, so that the real value of life is theirs and not ours. But if subliminal functions are most immortal, the dissolution of our consciousness might be desiderated, for organization obscures the ultimate reals and the massing of lower monads involves a larger sum of arrest, so that perhaps our lives really hinder rather than help on the cosmic process of evolution or redemption. As in chemistry the more complex combinations are unstable and tend to disintegrate, so the higher psychic compounds we cause and that make our minds persist a while will be resolved into lower and simpler ones that outlast them. Thus, at best the problem and conduct of our earthly life would be akin to that of a careful breeder who would leave permanent variations in the vegetable and animal species to be cultivated that would persist long after he himself is forgotten. If this soul of the world is conscious, as we are, death is lapsing down the evolutionary scale. But this ideolatry of consciousness is passing. And if the unconscious is higher and the basal cosmic energies are greater, more perfect, and more important than our psyche and soma, then we have lost our sense of direction and devolution is really upward.
VII. As to the philosophic attempts to prove the doctrine of personal immortality, no genetic psychologist can to-day despise even the most proletarian form of belief in a principle that survives death. Although the time is past when the old theological arguments for immortality are convincing, save to those whose religious development has been arrested, they will always deserve respect not only because they have done so much tosustain great souls in the past but because, as we now interpret them, they mean a larger and more complete life for man here in the future. Disregarding these, we must, however, briefly pass in review the chief views that the philosophic minds have evolved that the soul lives on.
We begin with Plato, who finds not one but many proofs of it. In thePhaedrushe finds it in the spontaneity and power of self-motion of the soul. In theTimaeushe finds it in the fact that the soul is thechef d’œuvreof the world, so wondrous and beautiful that the gods would and could not really let it die. Elsewhere he finds proof of its immortality in the soul’s struggle for knowledge, the impulse to progress to ever more general ideas, which, as we have seen, he thought akin to death. Again, he deemed it immortal because he thought no sin or evil could kill it. Once more, as all that live must die, so the correlate must hold that all the dead live or, as Cebes puts it, the latter is a necessary postulate to the idea of life. The soul, too, is simple and undecomposable and so can never be destroyed. His doctrine of reminiscence was that we remember previous incarnations, preëxistence being long thought to be as necessary and as demonstrable as postexistence. Plato found Greek life and mind confused and sought by cross-examination and induction in the psychic field to attain a few fixed ideas that the soul could anchor to in the sophistic flux, minds be drawn together, and Greece thus saved from disintegration as the old theological views crumbled. The products of all this Socratic midwifery were basal concepts, the eternal patterns of which by participation in things made them real. These Aristotle and many later writers elaborated and defined as a table of categories and in nature they were interpreted assumma generaor fixed species or types. It was the persistence of belief in these that both Darwin and Locke attacked. The species and entities of the scholastics, which underlayeven the doctrine of the Eucharist, and not only nativism and apriorism but all forms of philosophic realism, as well as absolutism, metaphysics, ontology, rational transcendentalism, the passion for deducing conclusions from presuppositionless data elsewhere derived, and even the Stoic and Kantian conscience—all rest upon the assumption of definite and abiding norms in nature or mind that are simple and undecomposable by psychic analysis and from which all thinking starts and in which it ends. Thus the doctrine of ideas has been the key not only to philosophic orthodoxy but to much of the thought and most of the great controversies of the world. Not only theologians but Descartes, Spinoza, Fichte, Hegel, and also no less but in a different manner, mystics, illuminati, rationalists, scientists in their quest for constants and laws of nature, and even the codifiers of Roman law, were all inspired by belief in attaining ultimate principles, and all these were looking toward immortality.
Now, all noetic theories of immortality agree in holding that it is attained when the intellect intuits or grasps one or more of these ultimate truths and thus partakes of or participates in their perdurability. They are so high and abstract that Plato considered philosophy not only as the withdrawal from sense and the world toward the solitariness of the infinite but as the active practice of death. Hegel thought them the inner constitution of the mind of God, and to know God is eternal life. The great bliss and peace of what Aristotle described and praised as the theoretic life have thus often been interpreted as a foretaste of heaven. Thus the love and struggle for knowledge have been said to be motivated by the desire for an incorporeal existence.
Wordsworth’s “truths that wake to perish never,” “high instincts before which our mortal nature trembles like a guilty thing surprised,” is based upon the doctrineof reminiscence. When the soul has attained the unconditioned, and even when it experiences a love that is felt to be stronger than death, or a pure autonomous oughtness, or conceives the idea of God as the greatest and best being, which Descartes said it could not do if such a being did not exist; when it envisages a beauty that is transcending and seems to take the mind above time and space into pure being and whenever we reach generalizations of such a high degree that they include soul and body, life and death, and all things else, man has been told in countless ways that he was becoming immortal, that in such experiences the soul was outsoaring mortality, as if the subject were parasiting on to its object, absorbed in ecstasy of contemplation, till the subject and object fused in a unique way. The soul that harbors such great thoughts and has passed through such experiences thereby acquires a quality of permanence, whether it acts byapperçusor by severe logical ratiocination.
All such arguments, however, from their very nature are fallacious. Knowledge is not participation in this sense. A being of low may know one of a far higher order, but the chasm between subject and object remains unbridged. To know beauty and power is not to attain them. The further epistemological assumption that the world of ideas is itself a projection, just as subjective idealism asserted the world of sense to be, would also be necessary. But even this colossal postulate would not suffice for a world that is all eject and ends as well as begins with man. On this hypothesis the mind creates its own saving principle and was saved by its products. Indeed, such a method begs the whole question, which becomes again one of fact. Does or does not such a power exist in our psychic nature? The only possible support for such a hypothesis is the degree of coherence of its own parts with each other and with experience. All such arguments, however, are really pantheistic andleave little room for personality but are rather destructive of it. Nothing individual can persist in the absolute for in it all distinctions are merged.
Connected with this view is that which assumes that because we have the idea of or the wish for immortality and because this is so generally implanted in human nature, the latter is a lie if it is not a fact. Of this class of proofs the most common are those that urge it because of its practical utility for morality. In the other-worldness of early Christian centuries, where eschatology was more developed than cosmology, fear of hell and hope of heaven performed the greatest service for virtue and its progress was advanced by these artificial and extraneous supports. The danger is lest they have undue weight and be relied on long after their function should have been progressively replaced by the conception of virtue as its own reward. Luther thought that the chief motive of morality would be gone if there were no future life. Andrews Naughton said there could be no religion without it. Theodore Parker said: “If I perish in death I know no law but passion.” Chalmers urged that without it God would be stripped of wisdom, authority, and honor. Walt Whitman exclaimed: “If rats and maggots end us, then alarum! for we are betrayed.” Human nature has been called a lie and God a liar if there is no future life and those who do not desire it have been called in reality already dead. It is a potent motive to escape eternal pain and secure eternal bliss for our own ego hereafter. “If,” says one, “our souls do not hold the latchstring of a new world’s wicket, then goodbye, put out the lights, ring down the curtain. We have had our turn and it is all so nauseating that even suicide is a welcome spectacle.” One need only glance over a few of the five thousand titles of Alger’s very incomplete and quite out-of-date bibliography upon the subject to be able to draw up a long list of desperate things that would happenin the world and that individual writers would do, or of imprecations on God’s character and the nature of the universe, if it were proven false or if none of the strands in the complex net of theories and demonstrations that have been flung to the other shore should hold. All virtues, piety, honor, integrity, and civilization itself would perish, men become brutes, God a malign fiend gloating over the unbridled lust and supreme selfishness that would slowly sweep man from the earth, etc.
The most vivid portraitures of heaven and hell have been made. Isaac Taylor deemed the sun heaven although a later contemporary thought it hell, adding that its dark spots were the souls of the damned. The great comets in the last century were called hell making its rounds to gather its victims. The old Saxon catechist pronounced the setting sun red because it looked on hell. Thus the flood of evil now held in restraint would deluge the earth and chaos break loose if, when pay day came, men found a future life of rewards and punishments bankrupt.
All this assumes that it is proven because it has aided virtue and because a belief so general must be true. But even the good Bishop Butler argued that men must be prepared to find themselves misled—“Light deceives, why not life?” From childhood to the grave, from savagery to the present, man’s history has been one of disillusion and disenchantment. His mind has been far more fertile of error than of truth. Few of his wants have been satisfied and no wise man would feel secure in arguing from desire to attainment. The impetuous diathesis of the West may have grown neurotic as it became free, rich, and powerful, but it is all unavailing. Despite all that pragmatism can say, truth is very different from utility. In view of all this we might, with Bishop Courtney, refute all proofs of post-mortem existence, insisting that all men die, body and soul, and areextinguished but at some appointed time their spirits are resurrected by the power of God. The other alternative is more familiar. “If our ship never reaches port and if there be no haven, it becomes us to keep all taut and bright, sails set, and to maintain discipline.” All we want even of a future life is opportunity for virtue.
A special form of this argument from ideas to reality was developed by Kant. Reason always seeks the unconditioned by its very nature and nothing but thesummum bonumwill satisfy it. This includes two things, perfection and happiness, the two great desires of the ages. The ancients thought each implied the other. The old Hebrews believed that righteousness brought happiness in this world. The Stoics held that the highest joy was implicit in the practice of virtue from its very nature, while the Epicureans taught, conversely, that the highest happiness involved virtue. This does not suffice. The unity between the two must not be analytic but synthetic and causal. That is, each must bring out the other. In the world of experience this is not true and yet they belong together and so must find each other in a higher intelligible world.
Thus the very idea of immortality is the greatest perfection joined to the greatest happiness. They must be united completely. Whereas in the phenomenal world their development and union are only partial, there must be an infinite progression to bring them completely together because a being destined for perfection cannot be arrested. If this were the case there would be no perfect virtue and we are immortal because the latter must be attainable. Thus, heaven and hell must rise and fall together. True, the sense of justice by which we judge life, the drama, literature, and novels demands that the good always get their reward and the bad their punishment. This instinct is very deep and underlies law and society but we have no warrant for believing thatthe universe is built upon this principle. There is abundant evidence to the contrary. Neither intellectual intuition nor conscience are constitutive principles. Moreover, only the Western world demands personal immortality, so that the conviction that no evil can befall a good man is only a sentiment or postulate. Who knows but what it is only thehubrisor fatal pride of man, which the gods would destroy, that has impelled him to believe that his wishes, ideas, or even his ego itself are too good to be allowed to perish.
Pluralistic views of immortality may be very roughly grouped together. Howison,221for example, makes pluralism absolute by advocating an eternal or metaphysical world of many minds, all self-active, the items and orders of experience of which constitute real existence, even time and space. About everything is logically implicit in their self-developing consciousness, and the recognition of each by the other constitutes the moral order. This makes an eternal republic or city of God, who is “the fulfilled type of their mind and the living bond of their union.” They control the natural world, are sources of law, and are free, for their essence is mutual relation. In the world of spirits God is not solitary and there is room for the freedom of all. The joint movement that we call evolution is transient and can never enter the real world. Creation is not an event with a date but a metaphor. The key of everything is conscience and teleology. This view differs from Leibnitz’s monadology only in denying grades and castes in these figurations of God. It makes objects in nature the manifestations of mental activity and therefore just as real as they. So the eternal reality of the individual is the supreme fact.
Royce, too, does not teach a psychology without a soul.Individualities are basal and teleological. They are aspects of the absolute life and therefore have a meaning. But in this present life, much as we strive to know and love individuals, there are no true individuals which our present minds can know or express. As we strive, therefore, to find real others, we realize that all we know of them is but a system of hints of an individuality not now revealed to us which cannot be represented by a consciousness that is made up of our own limited experience. Therefore the real individualities we loyally seek to express get from the absolute viewpoint their final expression in a life that is conscious, the only life that idealism recognizes and that in its meaning, but not in time and space, is continuous with the fragmentary, flickering existence wherein we now see so dimly our relations to God and to eternal truth.222
This argument, so dear to and so ably advocated by its author, is obviously suggested by the Kantian postulate. Is it true in fact, however, that the closest companionship, friendship, and even love do not take us to the real individuality of the objects of these impulsions? Though man has always been gregarious and social, it would seem that this instinct is abortive if Royce is correct and also that the reality of such an individuality as he postulates would not be conscious but rather trans-conscious or frankly unconscious.
Miss Calkins in her various writings, although not consciously intent upon proving immortality, belongs to this group. The constant sense of self, which she postulates in the teeth of the modern studies of multiple personality, harks back to Descartes and she seems to be a good illustration of Royce’s persistent quest for a self that from its very nature cannot be known, a quest that in her has its chief strength, if analytically considered, inthe personal satisfaction coming from the subconscious reinforcement by reading and thinking in maturity of a juvenile stage of development, which originated in a theological and here deploys in a metaphysical stage.
C. T. Stockwell223assumes that there is something related to the germ plasm from which the individual sprang as it is to the rest of the body, and Shaler224concludes: “We may therefore say that the most complicated part of life is not that which goes out with the body’s death but that which is cradled in the infinitesimal molecule that is known to us as the germ of another life evolution.” Edwin Arnold225is platonic in assuming that life is so beautiful that “we may rightly feel betrayed if dysentery and maggots end everything.” So our fears may be as ridiculous as those of Don Quixote hanging from a window by the wrist over what he thought was an abyss but, when the thong was cut, falling only four inches. Such an authentic and transfiguring Yes might be pronounced if we could recombine the chemical elements of a man analyzed in the South Kensington museum into a vigorous youth. An anonymous author asks why should the soul, the noblest and last goal of evolution, perish and the cosmos throw away its crown. It is the entelechy of all evolution. In general the best survive and only the worst become extinct. The greatbiologoshas wrought from the beginning to give itself an organ to think through and mirror itself in, and this momentum of self-preservation is too great to be entirely arrested at death. So individuality must have absolute worth and be eternized because it is the key to and the paragon of existence. It must be anens realissimumbecause it has cost so much. Democracy, too, hypertrophiesindividuality. The Orient knewonewas eternal; the Middle Ages knew afewwere; and only lately did man begin to thinkallwere so. Our motto, thus, must beImpavi progrediamurshouted with bravura. Self-conscious life is the highest of all possible categories, the model of all other units by which they are understood, and not merely a symbol of ultimate reality but the thing itself.
S. D. McConnell revives the somewhat patristic idea that man is by nature mortal but is also immortable and can attain another life by piety and knowledge, as of old the Eucharist developed the potentiality of another life or as the infant is a man, only dynamically. Man may become indestructible by a higher process of biogenesis. John Fiske, too, says, “At some period in the evolution of humanity this divine spark may have acquired sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the wreck of material form and endure forever.” To be deified by righteousness would be a fit climax. This life is a period of probation and gestation in a new sense. Thus, too, hell is obsolete and the bad die, so that the great choice is now between continuation and extinction. Some crude prelusions of this were found among the Taoists, who held that “the grosser elements of man’s nature may be refined away and immortality attained even in this world.” This could be done by an elixir of life, the desire to discover which a century or two before and even after Christ became in many places a veritable craze. So-called pills of immortality taken in connection with certain rites and regimen, like alchemy, which could make gold out of baser metals, would purge away mortal elements and transfiguration and sublimation might result, even for animals. But where do we draw the line between the mortal and immortal, for this may be as far above as the Taoists thought it was below us?
All arguments of this kind are provincial. Man maybe a mere microbe on our little dirt ball, which the high gods could hardly see if the lentiform Milky Way were the object-glass of a celestial microscope. What reason have we to think that the cosmos accepts us at our own valuation? The great sphinx has for ages suckled children at its breast only to destroy them with its claws and when men die it recks and cares not. As Fechner says, the plant world might say it was supreme and that insects, animals, and men lived to manure its seeds. Vegetation preceded, nourishes, and might at any time send out bacteria and miasma to rid the world of all animal life. Man is perhaps mean compared to the denizens of other worlds and even his type, so precious compared to individuals, may be worthless or serving other ends. Despite his decadent but titanic pride and monumental nescience of self he is really pathetic. So tempting to the vengeance of the gods is his pride that to be disappointed about another life serves him right. The great saurians were once the highest creatures and seemed the pets of nature and the goal of all, but although their period was far longer than man’s they have passed. So, perhaps the superman will sometime quarry and explore, trace by trace, the evidences of a human biped representing our own stage of existence, and man as he is to-day be classified in a tongue as yet unborn. Are we really nearer any ultimate goal than was the amphioxus? We may be only a link to the higher man and that link may sometime be missing.
What right have we to assume anything so sacrosanct and fetchingly irresistible in the human type that the great Goodheart will never seek to evolve anything better but accept us as a stereotype of finality. Such suppositions are naïve and man as a race ought to rejoice if he can serve even infinitesimally in a greater purpose. In fact, in many quarters it is now bad form to even discuss the question of personal immortality because theworld is becoming—in the phrase of Osler—Laodicean, indifferent, or even antagonistic to such views and leaves passionate affirmations of a future life, so in fashion in the days of Tennyson and Browning, to mystics, clerical rhapsodists, pectoralists, or to those steeped in cardiac emotions.
There are many reasons challenging the generality or strength of the desire for another life. From a questionnaire of the Psychic Research Society it was found that very many did not feel it of urgent importance, did not wish to know for certain about it, and many did not desire it, although a few, like Huxley, “would prefer hell, if the conditions were not too rigorous,” to annihilation. Perhaps we are still haunted by submerged reminiscences of the immortality of our primeval unicellular ancestors, which, as we have seen, divide forever and never die. Man is certainly at present a very defective creature, a bundle of anachronisms with organs new and old. Even the aged die with a minority, and very often a majority of their organs and faculties charged with potencies of a longer life. Man may be not a paragon but a fluke or sport of the anthropoid apes and his death is commonly a gruesome execution by microbes, accidents, or hereditary handicaps. His sex nature may be abnormal. Unlike the beasts, he seems to have lost his hygienic or dietetic instinct or conscience. He knows more than he can practice. His consciousness is often abnormal and not remedial as it should be. It is very fallible, always partial, and by no means the oracle he has deemed it to be. It may be nothing but a thing of shreds and patches, extemporized, accidental, transient, made up of fragmentary outcrops of unconscious forces that, deep below the threshold, rule his life. To truly know himself he must go down stratum by stratum, study every outcrop of older formations, every denudation caused by disease, every psychic fossil of tics, obsessions,whims, every anatomical clue, every hint from comparative psychology, disease, crime, rudimentary organs of body or soul; and in his efforts to maximize himself must realize that if all the studies of his nature that have been made were to be depurated of the lust for a future life it would leave a vast void, for the passion for immortality has left its mark on all his cultural history.
But the fear of death and the forms of mitigating this fear are chiefly because man still dies young. If we had experienced and explored senescence fully we should find that the lust of life is supplanted later by an equally strong counter will to die. We should have no immortality mania for we should be satisfied with life here without demanding a sequel to it. Our present dreams of all forms of post-mortem existence would become a nightmare. True macrobiotism means not only more years but completeness of experience, absence of repression and limitation. Had we lived out the whole of our lives and drained all the draughts of bitter and sweet that nature has ever brewed for us, we should feel sated. The fact is, man is now cut off in his prime with many of his possibilities unrealized. Hence he is a pathetic creature doomed to a kind of Herodian slaughter and because he has dimly felt this he has always cried out to the gods and to nature to have mercy. He has imagined answers to the heartrending appeal he shouted into the void: if a man dies shall he live again? and on the warrant of fancied answers has supplemented this by another life, which, when psycho-analyzed in all its processes, means only that he has a sense that the human race is unfinished and that the best is yet to come. And so it is. Man’s future on this earth is the real, only, and gloriously sufficient fulfillment of this hope. It will be found only in the prolonged and enriched life of posterity here. The man of virtue will realize all desires and livehimself completely out so that nothing essentially human will be foreign to his own personal experience.
Thus the wish for and belief in immortality is at bottom the very best of all possible augurs and pledges that man as he exists to-day is only the beginning of what he is to be and do. He is only the pigmoid or embryo of his true and fully entelechized self. Thus when he is completed and has finished all that is now only begun in him, heavens, hells, gods, and discarnate ghosts will all fade like dream fabrics or shadows before the rising sun. All doctrines of another life are thus but symbols and tropes in mythic form of the true superman as he will be when he arrives. The great hope so many have lived and died by will be fulfilled, every jot and tittle of it, not in our own lives but in the perfect man whose heralds we really are without knowing it. Deathbed visions will come true more gloriously than the dying thought. They hunger for more life but the perfect man will die of satiety passing over into aversion and the story will be completed not in a later number but in this.
Is there any true thanatophilia, the opposite of thanatophobia? Does the most complete and harmonious life bring not only the quest for death but an active striving toward Nirvana? Will man ever come to observe the approach of death in himself and in others just as we love to study and observe growth? The records of centenarians do not show it; nor do the superannuated now generally feel it. Even Nothnagel, who observed himself clinically almost up to the moment of his death, did not find it. True euthanasia is not mere resignation or the exhaustion of the momentum to live or satiety with life. We know nothing of truly natural death. But we do know that psychogenetically the old lust for personal immortality has made man now more anxious to prolong and enlarge this mundane life. We can no longer postpone our ideas of happiness. The great and good thingsman once expected beyond he now strives to attain here. He wants more, not less in this life because he expected so much of the other. Thus the belief in immortality is one of the psychic roots of modern hygiene although the question whether it can all go over into orthobiosis and humaniculture still remains open. If all were cut off in their prime, like Jesus, for example, another life would be even more desired and believed in, for the longer and better we live the less we care about it. Thus the answer to the problem of euthanasia strictly considered must remain in abeyance, at least until humanity is more complete. Biological studies and new therapies may develop, give more importance to, and help us to a far better knowledge of, the gerontic stage of life. At any rate, I hope and believe that the data I have gathered and presented in this volume may contribute its mite to make the status of the old more interesting to themselves and to increase the sense that they still owe important duties to a world never more in need of the very best that is in them.