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I HAVE discussed the whole problem of a future life purely as a scientific
question. I have not invoked human interests as an argument or an influence for
determining conviction. I have appealed strictly to the nature of the problem
and the facts which are relevant to its solution. Human interests often affect
the convictions of the individual on this subject as well as many or all others,
but it is the purpose of the scientific spirit to eliminate emotional influences
from the solution of all questions of fact. It is hard, of course, to dissociate
our interests from any problem, and though we have to deprecate their undue
influence on conviction, there is always a reason for recognizing that they have
a place in final meaning of any fact. The pragmatic philosophy is founded on the
recognition of this place for the emotions, and religion has been affected by
them more perhaps than any other body of beliefs. The "will to believe" has all
along been a powerful factor in determining the direction in which belief goes,
and the skeptical, usually also the scientific man, deprecates this, but the
will to disbelieve is just as much the danger of the skeptic as the "will to
believe" is of the believer. One class is as much tarred and feathered with the
use of the will in its problems as the other. It is the duty of both, while they
admit a place for the will in both belief and disbelief, to adjust it to the
facts, and that is true scientific method.
There is also a bias in previous opinions affecting the challenge to change our
ideas at any stage of our development and that bias may consist in fixed ideas
or a fixed attitude of will, both perhaps being always associated together in
greater or less degree of one or the other factor. But an intellectual bias is
more easily conquered than an emotional and volitional one. Facts offer the mind
no chance to escape their cogency, and we can only deceive ourselves by
equivocating when asked to revise beliefs, if we do not wish to run up against
stone walls. Scientific men and skeptics do not always escape this bias. The
unsophisticated believer in any doctrine is less affected by this bias than the
educated man. He may refuse, often rightly enough, to allow the sophisticated
scientist to make a football of his beliefs, but this is because he rightly
enough clings to practical problems which are for him the meaning of the
intellectual ones, and he does not separate the two fields as does the
scientific man and philosopher. With such we have no dispute. They do not
require to unravel paradoxes.
When it comes to the belief in survival after death, which is convertible with
the belief in the existence of discarnate spirits, there are two superficial
difficulties which most believers have to face in the matter, difficulties which
the sophisticated man always urges against the belief. They are (1) the illusion
about the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and (2) the
conflict between the cultured and the uncultured man in the interpretation of
the world. Each of these must be examined.
The first impulse of most scientific men is to oppose the belief in spirits
because they seem to be a restoration of the idea of the supernatural. For more
than three centuries the supernatural has been excluded from scientific
recognition of any kind, and with most men of that class it is like a red rag to
a bull. In the present age, however, there is no excuse for this hostility.
There was a time when the opposition between the "natural" and the
"supernatural" had a meaning of some importance, but it has none any more. The
conception of the "natural" has so changed that it either includes all that had
formerly been denominated by the "supernatural" or it does not prevent the
"supernatural" from existing alongside of it. The antithesis between the two
ideas has changed from age to age and as a result one term has altered its
import as much as the other. The first meaning of the term "natural" was the
physical. This served to define the "supernatural" as the spiritual.
Christianity asserted the opposition most clearly, as it set up the theistic
system with the idea of spirit as wholly unphysical. In Greek thought the
"supernatural," if we could use the term at all in it, was the supersensible
physical world and mind or spirit was only a kind of matter more refined than
the coarser type affecting the senses. But Christianity assigned none of the
material attributes to spirit, and thus altered the conception both of the
"natural" and the "supernatural."
When the scientific spirit arose, however, it relegated metaphysics, including
the physical speculations of philosophers, to the limbo of the imagination and
the "natural" became the uniform, whether in matter or mind. Before this, mind
was essentially "supernatural," but now that the uniformities of mind were
recognized, as like those of matter, it was not so easy to confine the "natural"
to matter and the phenomena of mind were no longer regarded as "supernatural."
As in the miracles the "supernatural" became convertible with the capricious or
lawless; that is, irregular and unpredictable. The antithesis was no longer
between the physical and the spiritual, but between the uniform and the
capricious, and the scientific man denied that there was any caprice in
"nature." This meant that there was no "supernatural" at all, and as he reduced
the phenomena of mind to functions of the organism, it had no place for the
"supernatural" in his scheme.
The fact is, however, that both terms are relative. That is, they are relative
to the definitions which you may give of them. If the "natural" is made
convertible with the "physical" as material substance, then space, time, ether,
electricity, magnetism are "supernatural." If it be made convertible with the
"physical" as including physical phenomena and activities, then ether, mind,
space and time are "supernatural." If it be made convertible with the uniform or
fixed order, then it actually includes nearly all that had formerly been
expressed by the "supernatural" and the latter is left to denote the capricious
and lawless events of the world, which has been the tendency of its meaning. But
if the capricious and lawless be admitted as a fact we should have the
"supernatural" without question and set off from the "natural." But you can
exclude the "supernatural" only by including the capricious within the territory
of the fixed and uniform, and by thus extending the term "natural" you would not
only include all that had once been expressed by the "supernatural," but you
would not be able to draw the inferences or insist-on the implications which had
depended on the formerly narrower import of the "natural."
However, that is the last thing the advocate of the "natural" will do. He never
thinks of the fact that the extension of the "natural" to include the
"supernatural" of the earlier period implies the very existence of all the facts
on which the older "supernatural" depended and that spirit becomes a part of the
scheme of things. He is equivocating with the term. He is trying to remain by
the implications of the older "natural" while he extends its meaning to exclude
those implications. In fact the distinction to-day between the "natural" and the
"supernatural" no longer has any controversial value. We have only proved that
spirit exists as a fact, or that we have facts which will not permit any other
explanation of them than the fact of their existence, and you may call them
either "natural" or "supernatural," physical or spiritual. I for one shall not
stickle at the terms of the case. It is a question of fact and evidence, and not
of preserving the usage of terms that have wholly outlived their usefulness. I
refuse to discuss the question in its terms. The man who insists on it has not
done clear thinking.
After the fear of science that the "supernatural" would be restored to power, if
the existence of spirit be proved, there is an influence against it quite as
strong or stronger. But it cannot be so easily argued with. It is a matter of
taste. This however, would not affect it so much were it not that the
Spiritualists have been mostly to blame for the possibility of invoking
scientific blemishes to support ridicule on other grounds. Throughout all
history, beginning among savages, Spiritualism has invited the contempt of
intelligent and refined people. A large part of the conflict between the
primitive Spiritualists, fetish worshippers, followers of incantations and the
oracles, totem worshipers, the practise of sorcery, and all superstitious
ritualism, and the philosophers, was based upon the everlasting opposition
between intelligence and ignorance.
Confucious founded his system of ethics entirely upon secular and social
principles. He admitted the existence of spirits, the discarnate but he advised
letting them alone and ignored their existence as much as the Epicureans did
their gods. The Buddhists denied the existence of spirits, but made concessions
in practical politics to the superstitions of the common people by sugar coating
their philosophy with reincarnation, though that had no interest for those who
really understood it. Judaism in its monotheistic impulse was mortally opposed
to idolatry and the naive fetishism of its time. Its intelligent people strove
to destroy every vestige of it. The Greek philosophers even of the materialistic
type believed in spirits, as we have seen above, but they made no use of them in
their cosmic theories. The early Greek philosophy was exclusively occupied with
material causes, the "stuff" out of which things were made, and almost wholly
neglected efficient or creative causes par excellence. When the schools of
Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics came they could ignore Spiritualism altogether
and gave knowledge that degree of refinement and association with aesthetics,
the latter being more important to the race than ethics, that Spiritualism had
neither to be considered nor respected. In the course of time Christianity
cultivated some harmony of the intellectual with the aesthetic until its present
chief antagonism to Spiritualism in which it was founded is based upon aesthetic
reasons alone. Throughout it all, intelligence has been arrayed against
ignorance and has associated with it the antagonism between refinement and
vulgarity, a conflict far more irreconcilable than the conflict between science
and religion.
The chief hostility of the academic man to-day against psychic research is based
upon his dislike of the vulgarity of spiritualistic performances and the
triviality of its incidents. The intellectual man of to-day has inherited the
Greco-Roman aristocratic feelings in regard to knowledge and has added to it,
unconsciously perhaps, the Christian ideals of what a spiritual world would be,
if it exists at all, and with these standards revolts against the puerilities of
the phenomena as he characterizes them. He has forgotten his science in his
devotion to the aesthetic life and intellectual and literary refinements. He
thinks no good can come out of Nazareth. The attack of the Pharisees and
Sadducees upon Christ and his apostles was based upon their plebeian character,
not upon the untrue nature of their facts. This sort of snobbery has perpetuated
itself and the academic world is the inheritor of its antagonisms. This class of
self-appointed authorities arrogates every right to regulate human thinking, and
when it cannot achieve its purpose by reason, it appeals to ridicule, and has
never learned that all the great ethical movements of history have originated
and sustained themselves among the common people. It is their duty to lead, not
to despise them. But they dispense contempt of those they were appointed to
teach and then wonder why their self-arrogated wisdom is not respected!
The Christian Church also shares in this hostility to the whole subject more
than it should. It is true that just at this time it cannot be reproached as
much for antagonism as it could a generation ago. Then it maintained the
attitude of aestheticism as much as the academic world. But its own decline of
power and the shame that an institution which was founded on the immortality of
the soul should cultivate ridicule for scientific proof of what it already
believed and always taught has become too great to find any excuse for its
continuance. Its own crying needs for certitude that may justify its claims are
too strong for it to resist any longer and the dawn is beginning to show on the
horizon of its vision. But it is too slow and too cowardly in many instances to
seize the reins of power which it once enjoyed and to be at the front of this
contest with materialism. It has been too thoroughly saturated with the
aesthetic view of life. It has imbibed the spirit of intellectual aristocracy
and has too often become the inheritor of the Phariseeism and Sadduceeism of its
first enemies to see the way of redemption. Snobbery in high places helps to
blind its vision of the truth. No wise man can disregard the facts of nature
whatever their unbidding appearance. Professor
William James once wrote that a
scientific man - and the scientific man is first a lover of truth - would
investigate in a dunghill to study a new fungus and thereby find laws of nature
that might be discovered nowhere else. But the academic and religious aesthete
prefers artistic comfort and environment to the truth.
Too many seek first beauty and truth and goodness afterward. In fact they too
often make beauty convertible with the good and never find the real ethics at
which nature aims. Nothing but the cold truth, divested of the illusions that
hover around material art and refinement, can ever awaken man to the correct
sense of duty. Knowledge may be obscured often by the life of ease and
materialistic culture, but the Nemesis is always near to disturb that inglorious
peace. The fishermen of Galilee were the conquerers of the world. They did not
wear ermine or live in luxury. They had no fine carpets or paintings to adorn
the walls of their homes. They did not talk in philosophic terms that no one
could understand but themselves. If philosophy is to have any legitimate
function in the world it must be convertible into the language of common life at
some point of its meaning. No doubt it has its esoteric aspects and that it
cannot be understood as a whole by every one. But it is not a true philosophy
unless it touches life in some general doctrine or belief. But between religion
and philosophy survival after death has been either an object of faith or of
ridicule. In an age where certitude is demanded for every belief, faith will
have difficulty in maintaining itself. In an age which seeks the assurance that
science can give faith and aesthetics will not save the church and the multitude
will turn to any method that offers it a refuge from despair. They are never
nice about the form of truth. If it be the truth, they will sacrifice the
elegancies of polite society to it. No doubt some concessions are needed to good
taste, but this will no more save a decaying creed than vulgarity will destroy a
true one.
The Spiritualists have been too slow to appreciate the value of culture in the
protection of truth among those who value that commodity more than the accuracy
of their intellectual formulas. While abandoning the church and its creeds and
appealing to facts, they have neglected scientific method as well as the ethical
impulses of religion and the influence of good taste. Demanding the favor of
both science and religion they despise the method of one and the ethical ideals
of the other. No wonder the word Spiritualism has become a byword among
intelligent people, and no redemption can come from calling themselves by a
respectable name while their performances have no respectability in them.
If Spiritualism had long ago abandoned its evidential methods to science and
joined in the ethical and spiritual work of the world it might have won its
victory fifty years ago. Christianity was founded on psychic phenomena, and it
neglected miracles in the interest of moral teaching, especially when it could
no longer reproduce the healing of its founder. Its primary impulse was ethical
teaching and not a vaudeville show. When Spiritualism has as much passion for
morals as it has morbid curiosity for communication with the dead, it may hope
for success, but not until then. The intelligent man, whether in the church or
the college, will stay his interest until he is safe from the gibes of his
friends for sympathy with the twaddle and unscientific discourse of the average
psychic. But if the respectable classes know their duty they will organize the
inquiry and combine truth and good taste with scientific method to revive the
dying embers of religious and ethical passion. No intelligent person would allow
the truth to perish because it is not clothed in the majesty of art or the
beauty of literary expression.
Spiritualism had one merit. It looked at the facts. The scientific man and the
church cannot claim that defense in their objections to it. They allowed their
aesthetics to influence judgments that should have subordinated taste to truth.
But whatever apology can be made for Spiritualism in this one respect, it
forfeited consideration because it did not and does not organize its position
into an ethical and spiritual force for the redemption of individual and social
life. It concentrated interest on communication with the dead and came to the
facts only to witness "miracles." Christ complained that many of his followers
were interested in his work only for the loaves and fishes, or for the
spectacular part of it. The regeneration of their lives was secondary. St. Paul
entered a similar complaint against the Athenians for being interested only in
some new thing, not in the eternal truths in which salvation was found, no
matter in what form you conceived that salvation. Communication with the dead
has no primary interest in our problem. It is but a mere means to the
establishment of certain truths which have a pivotal importance in the
protection of an ethical interpretation of nature. To congregate only to see the
chasm bridged between two worlds has no importance compared with other objects
to be attained by it. We do not dig tunnels or build bridges just for the sake
of the amusement. We have an ulterior object of connecting places and resources
which have an intimate part in the economic and social structure. Communication
with the dead is not to take the place of a theatre or the movie, but to find a
principle which shall be a means of starting an ethical inspiration, or of
protecting the claims of those who have discovered the real meaning of nature.
I can understand the impression created by the triviality of the facts in the
communications, but I can hardly respect the minds that do not see why this is
the case, or that suppose they are in the least testimony to the nature of the
future life in their superficial interpretation. The inexcusable habit of many
minds is to suppose that spirits are occupied in that life with the trivial
matters communicated, and as our own spiritual life is much superior to any such
conception as that, these people unfavorably compare the two worlds. They
picture to themselves a world given over to thought and conversation about the
little articles of household interest or of the past physical life; and having,
under the tutelage of various religions, formed the conception that the next
life is idyllic and paradisaic, even though they have in most cases construed
this in materialistic terms and conceptions, they revolt against occupation with
the trivialities of life. They do not take offense at pearly gates and golden
streets, or a sublimated monarchy and its accompaniments, or at an intellectual
banquet of literati, or anything except preoccupation with a duplication of the
physical. But there is no reason to interpret the messages as either
representing a physical life or as evidence of what the general life is like.
The problem, as we have shown, is one of personal identity and that requires
trivial facts for its proof and assurance in regard to the supernormal character
of the knowledge. The more elevated and inspiring communications are not
evidence and have to be minimized in the treatment of the subject. Living men,
when asked to prove their personal identity over a telegraph line or the
phonograph, resort naturally to just such trivialities to effect their end, and
they are not proof of their character or their general life. No one would think
for a moment to ridicule them for such communications or use them to determine
the general nature of their lives and occupations.
There are paradoxes and perplexities enough in certain communications, but they
are such only for those who use materialistic categories or standards of
judgment when interpreting them. Construe them as indicating a mental world,
such a spiritual life as we denominate by that term right among ourselves in the
physical life, as involving larger creating powers of consciousness than we now
enjoy, and perhaps more direct creative powers, and we should have no trouble in
displacing the sensuous ideas formed from the language employed in the
communications. If we were not so materialistic now, we should not be so much
astonished or offended at certain types of messages. But, supposing certain
statements to be used as we would use them in describing the physical life as we
know it, we receive from the language the effect of an absolute contradiction of
our experience or else the statement of an impossibility which appears just as
preposterous. But it appears so only because we try the case by the standards of
sensory life which do not apply to a purely mental life, though their pictorial
character may mislead us into mistakes and illusions.
However, once recognize the supersensible nature of that life; the inadequacy of
sensory standards and conceptions of it, and the creative possibilities of
thought as in dreams and other subconscious activities, and we may find all the
paradoxes resolve themselves into. casual proofs of the nature of a spiritual
life. The process of communication between the two worlds is so fragmentary and
confused that it may well suggest a chaotic and disordered world to those who do
not know or recognize the fragmentary and confused nature of the process. But
make this characteristic of it clear once for all, and we can build up a whole
as science has enabled those who know to reconstruct an extinct animal from the
fragments of skeleton which has lain for ages in the rocks.
Another important consideration in behalf of the spiritistic theory is its
pivotal character. By this I mean its support to other truths which are
independently believed to have value, or may even have their whole integrity
determined by it. The same principle' rules in other questions. For instance,
the whole theory of Mechanics is dependent on the fact and law of inertia. If
inertia were not true we should have Biology instead of Mechanics. We could not
depend on the stability of our manufacturing processes but for inertia. The same
is true of impenetrability and gravity. Again the law of gravitation is
necessary to our construction of astronomical theories. We could not simplify
our ideas of the cosmos without it. We might invent supporting theories as in
the Ptolemaic system, but we should find confusion ever increasing with their
invention and multiplication. But gravitation reduces the cosmos to a perfectly
simple and intelligible conception. The law of supply and demand is necessary
for understanding economics. It is pivotal to its structure. The rotundity of
the earth was necessary to enable Columbus to make a reasonable plea for the
means of discovering America.
It is similar with survival after death. It is the key to certain ideals and
conceptions of life. It puts a value on personality which materialism must
distinctly deny or weaken. Materialism cannot perpetuate any of the values which
it recognizes. It can never reproduce anything but a succession of individuals
with transient mental states. Sensation and copies of sensation in memory and
imagination are all it can secure and these only for a short time. The
individual personality is snuffed out of existence. But the instinct for
self-preservation creates a tendency to prolong consciousness and to make this
prolongation the standard of ethics in this life. The hostility to suicide,
whether opposing the act in others or ourselves, is more or less testimony to
this view, and certainly the supreme value which we place upon personality, the
stream of consciousness, is unescapable evidence of what human nature values as
the highest object of interest and preservation. Without it, all the ethical
impulses dependent upon it must shrivel and decay.
Materialism cannot sustain any other view than that consciousness is a function
of the brain, and if it or any other view of the cosmos admitted or contended
that organic life was the limit of its intelligence and purpose, then sensuous
experience with accompanying mental states for a brief period would be the only
meaning of life. All the higher achievements of the mental life would be
sacrificed to the sensuous existence. But once concede that the inner stream of
consciousness, with all the sanctities which it values and maintains, can exist
after death, then you will have clear indication that the sensible life is
secondary and that personality is the thing that nature specially conserves, and
you will have a situation in which the infinities felt in normal consciousness
will have some meaning. Otherwise they would be mere bubbles on an ocean of
illusion. Survival shows that nature values personality above all else and that
it does not snuff this out when it dissolves the physical organism and its
sensory phenomena. With that survival you have a standard of values, not merely
for the next life, but for this one also, a standard which we have instinctively
employed in all our systems of education, whether of the intellect, the feelings
or the will; that is, science, art and ethics.
It is the permanent that philosophers have always Placed at the base and the
goal of reality, and that permanence always has its eye on the future as well as
the past and the present. Our present life would have no rationality but for the
constants in it, for the thread of unity that runs through it, the permanent
element in spite of change. Our development, whether physical or spiritual,
depends on the possibility of pursuing one aim in a world chaos, so to speak.
Habit is the condition of rational life and habit represents the persistence of
certain thoughts and modes of activity. Their meaning would be lost unless the
subject of them can persist. Hence the constants or uniformities of life are the
condition of whatever achievements we have attained in our evolution.
It is the future that determines the full meaning of life, not the past or the
present. All thought and action, especially action, has reference to the future,
whatever relation they may have to the past and present. In fact the pragmatic
philosopher has made this future the fundamental meaning of his truth. There is
no disputing this fact in all ethical questions. For ethics pertains to the
realization of an end in the future, not to thinking about the past which is
mere history. With this essential characteristic of all ethical ideas and
ideals, you may well ask if nature is strictly ethical to implant so fixed and
necessary an element in human nature and then cut it short at the grave without
the fruition which is a part of its very being. There is no reason whatever for
drawing the line of meaning for life at the grave except the supposed fact that
death ends all. The essence of ethics involves the future, even though it
terminates for the individual at death, and we should have to be Stoics about
its extension, if facts proved that life or personality ended at the dissolution
of the body. But how much less nature would mean for us when it establishes an
opposition between the ideals which it implants and the opportunities to realize
them?
Immanuel Kant felt this so keenly that he regarded immortality as the necessary
consequence of a rational world. He assumed, however, that the world was
rational, but the scientific point of view suspends its judgment on that
rationality until it has proved the fact of survival. This technical question of
accuracy or inaccuracy of Kant's view aside, however, it is certain that the
proof of survival would establish a complete consonance between the instincts
affecting our ideals and conduct, and the facts of nature. The value of
personality as we view it in ethical and social life would be vindicated by
scientific evidence and the melancholy outlook which death offers to the
materialist would be changed into a rainbow of promise, the dawn of another
morning.
It is thus apparent that immortality has ethical implications when other
theories of consciousness and its destiny have none. All theories either
directly or indirectly favoring materialism or its equivalent, whether called
idealism or not, do not satisfy ethical postulates in regard to the values
placed upon personality or the ethical impulses in our very conceptions of
morality as it requires the future for the realization of its ideals. Man will
always place ethics above everything else. Knowledge and art have their value,
their utilitarian meaning, determined by their relation to the ends which ethics
serve. Any theory which does not imply or conserve these will have difficulty in
vindicating itself 'at the bar of intelligence.
Materialism can sustain no ethics beyond present satisfaction, and if our
highest ideals are found in the greater deeps of internal personality, while
materialism offers no time for their realization, the belief in survival
reconciles the imperative of conscience with the limitations under which the
fulfilment of it can be attained in this life. Survival gives us time where
materialism does not, and the conflict between duty and our limited
possibilities here is fully satisfied in the continuance of our chances for
achievement.
I have said immortality is a pivotal belief; that is, supporting in some way a
number of other beliefs or maxims of life and conduct. Besides an influence on
the individual life it also has a great significance for social ethics. The
interest in it may be largely an egoistic one. It is not always so, for I often
meet with those who care little for it for themselves, but they passionately
desire it for their friends or those they love. It thus becomes an altruistic
instinct. But it probably affects the majority of the race as an egoistic
instinct connected with the same general impulse of self-preservation and the
prolongation of consciousness. Hence the greater interest of men and women in
survival than in the other phenomena of psychic research.
The mysteries of nature evoke less interest than the possibility that life looks
into eternity. Assure men of this, and they will listen to its gospel. But its
ethical implications do not stop with individual interest. Survival establishes
that view of personality which enables us to concentrate emphasis upon the
rights of others in the struggle for existence. On the materialistic theory
which has only matter and force to determine its ideals personality independent
of sense has no existence or value, and the individual would be tempted to
sacrifice all other personality to his own. But once establish the fact that
personality is permanent and we have the eternal value of our neighbor fixed
upon as secure a, basis as our own. We may have a center of social interest in
others, as well as a position which offers larger hopes to the process of
evolution. Man need not stop with the pursuit of self-interest, but will find
his salvation in the social affections, precisely as taught in primitive
Christianity, and as is more uniformly insisted on in spiritistic communications
than any other fact. The contradictions about the nature of the next life are
numerous enough to make one pause in accepting anything about it. But there is
no variation on the theme of social service and the value of altruistic
interests and conduct. The permanence of personality protects this ideal and
offers a stable basis for all social ethics. But it does so, not because of any
direct indication of this effect, but because it serves as a standard of value
for every individual and enables the ethical teacher to enforce maxims of
conduct which would be less effective without survival than with it. All
progress by education and reasoning depends upon premises that can force a
proper conclusion. The educational influences of the world can do nothing
without resorting to reason or discipline. Reason is an appeal to a man's
intellect; discipline appeals to his will. Education by reason depends on
argument; education by discipline depends on restraints or punishment. Where
there is no universal recognition of ethical postulates whatever morality we
get-and this. is objective morality - depends on the force which the ruler can
apply to extort obedience to the law. But where each man recognizes the moral
law restraint and discipline may be abolished. In the one system power is the
authority and in the other it is reason. The latter represents the minimum of
social friction.
Now the establishment of the value of personality in the scheme of nature will
offer the rational man a leverage on social instincts, if not to create them,
certainly to encourage their proper exercise and to protect them by showing that
they are a part of the scheme aiming at the permanence of the individual and the
eternal place they have in the evolution of man. It is not that we can directly
infer the system of social ethics from survival or the permanence of
personality, but that we can more easily connect this ethics with a stable basis
and reinforce them by the fact of that permanence. The brotherhood of man will
have a new sanction, one of the sanctions it received in its earlier association
in Christianity with the immortality of the soul. Its natural synthesis is that
association.
The next matter of interest is the relation of a future life to the problem of
Theism. The present writer thinks that Theism cannot have a basis of any
importance without first proving survival after death. The usual course of
theologians is to proceed in the reverse order. They try to prove the existence
of God and then argue regressively to survival from his character. But I regard
this procedure as unfounded and such a change of venue as to create rather than
to lay skepticism. Let me make this clear.
It is most interesting to remark that primitive Christianity had no foundation
whatever in a philosophy or a theology. The existence of God was not made the
logical basis of survival. The New Testament writers did not argue from the
intelligence and goodness of God to immortality, but asserted the latter on the
ground of certain alleged facts embodied in the story of the resurrection and
other psychic experiences. The New Testament is one record of psychic
experiences including spiritual healing. Christ taught no system of philosophic
theism. He probably emphasized immortality in his teaching much less than
ethics. If what was said about it before the story of the resurrection was
interpolated by the apostles and disciples, he made as little of it until the
end of his life as Confucius. But whether this possibility be true or not, it is
certain that belief in the existence of God was not made the condition of
believing in survival after death. The ground for this latter belief was a
scientific one; namely, an appeal to facts, real or alleged, and theism crept
into the system after the age of "miracles" had disappeared and they found a
need to protect the doctrine by a comprehensive scheme of the cosmos. When they
could not rely any longer on psychic phenomena, they constructed a philosophy
which required the existence of a Divine intelligence to explain the cosmos.
They applied finally the argument from design to prove the existence of God and
then reasoned regressively to the conclusion that this Divine intelligence would
preserve its creatures.
But the circumstance that made this method precarious was the disparity between
the conception of God which they held and the evidence for him as defined. God
had to be a being of infinite intelligence and power and character to serve as a
basis of either certitude or hope about the spiritual outcome for man. But the
actual facts of nature gave no assured evidence of this character. All that
nature manifested was an interest in organic beings, so far as normal and
scientific experience went. The intelligence revealed in such beings was
decidely finite and the character of this divine being, if reflected in the
frightfully ugly spectacle of nature, offered no encouraging prospect for
benevolence. Nature seemed a shambles, and one hesitated to worship the author
of such a system. There was no definite assurance in normal experience that
personality survived; and unless it did survive, the Divine seemed to be a
mockery. There was no superficial evidence that this Divine existed. Nature did
not reflect the ideals of theism.
But if it could be proved that nature as a fact actually preserved personality,
this showed an order superior to the creation of organic life, and its meaning
had to be found in some supersensible or transcendental existence. Find that
personality is the permanent fact of human existence and the circumstance will
offer a retrogressive argument as to the character of the basis of nature. If it
actually sustains what the supposed rationality of the world meant, it would be
natural to suppose that this continuity of personal consciousness was some
evidence of the tendency of things and reflecting the nature of the process
which brought us hither. Theism thus becomes an inference or consequence of
immortality rather than immortality a deductive inference from the idea of God.
If our religious minds could have the courage to frankly abandon purely
deductive methods, to make their peace with scientific method and to follow
inductive methods, they would soon find their way out of the wilderness. They
have everything to gain and nothing to lose by the appeal to facts instead of a
priori definitions and deduction from premises including more than their
evidence supplies. Prove immortality scientifically and theism is most likely to
follow as a natural consequence. Let the human mind see that nature is rational
in the preservation of personality, and there will be no need to start with an a
priori ideal and argue from it in an equally a priori manner to conclusions that
cannot be any better established than the premise they are made to rest upon.
But any conclusion resting on proved facts will have nothing to contend with but
the ordinary liabilities to fallacy. The facts will be assured and the
psychological reaction from assurance of survival will be an easier acceptance
of intelligence in the cosmos at least equal to the protection of survival. The
risks of skepticism will be less, because the main outlook and demand upon our
instincts will have been settled scientifically and we can feel less anxiety
about theistic problems, while we shape life to realize ideals which will
themselves constitute the best evidence for the Divine.
I have not appealed to the consolations of survival after death, because it is a
scientific question, so far as this work is concerned. We require always to
maintain as much of an impersonal interest in it as possible, not because the
personal is wrong, but because we escape illusion about the subject more readily
in that way. But for the bias that might lead us astray the personal interest
might be emphasized. But apart from this the scientific man must recognize that
he has the belief always to consider in his practical life. The intensity of the
desire to live and enjoy, especially in young life, offers a way to all sorts of
idealism, influenced partly by the joys of living and partly by the want of wide
experience with nature. This may even grow with this experience and the will to
live becomes a passion which no practical man can ignore.
We have only to look at the ancient ethics and philosophies in the orient which
were conceived either in neglect of, or in antagonism to barbaric religions
founded on animism and fetishism, and to note how these philosophies and ethics
had to compromise with the religions in social and political matters, in order
to find that the practical man to-day must reckon with the belief in survival in
whatever he does. It has been so bound up with ideals of the better kind that
even the skeptic has often to send his children to religious institutions to be
assured that morality will be a part of the environment of his offspring. No
man's education is complete until he at least understands religion and its
springs. He may think what he pleases, but he must understand it, and
immortality has been the atmosphere in which thousands of generations have been
bred and cultured. Whatever modification, or even denial it undergoes, must be
accompanied by some constructive theory of things that will save the ideals that
have sprung from it
But how shall we save any high ethics without protecting the value of
personality exactly as nature does it, if survival be a fact? We have before us
the two conceptions of nature. One, the materialistic, is that nature cares only
for physical organisms and the transient joys which they offer. No ideal that we
may value can have any hope of realization beyond either the phenomenal life or
beyond the possibilities which a badly conducted cosmos or social system will
allow. Duty and the best, even in this life, require some sacrifices to attain
them. And we are often not allowed the time or opportunity to realize what we
are bound to pursue, if we respect the best impulses in ourselves. But if we can
believe that nature preserves personality and still offers beyond the grave a
chance to redeem our natures or to realize the right ideals, the ugly aspect of
nature is less disheartening and we can more readily act on the maxim that "all
is well that ends well," even while we have to protest against the process. The
second view of nature which is based upon survival instead of the annihilation
of personality offers this opportunity and it protects ideals which an ephemeral
existence can never favor adequately.
It is all very well to tell mankind that duty requires us to act either without
reward or without making reward the primary condition of virtue, but this
language will not stimulate the will to action which instincts do not favor. It
is true enough that my duties lie right in this world, and that I must not
always be dreaming of the after life and what it offers to the hopes and
imagination, either in correction of the evils here or in opportunity to redeem
character. I should vie with any one in emphasizing the place of salvation in
the present and that looking to the future will not do it, if we do not
cultivate the ideals and habits of redemption in the present. But all action
looks to ends, and there is no reason for drawing the line of redemption and
realization at the grave, if nature does not do this. I am quite as much
entitled to put the time of realization at a thousand or ten thousand years as
at three score and ten, if nature does this.
It is a question of facts and what the cosmos intends, and we should find that
immortality will conserve more ethics than any materialistic scheme that we can
contrive. It is usually men who have been bred in a Christian environment and
its ethical ideals that preserve them after they have adopted a cosmic theory
which does not reckon with them. Ethical ideals die more slowly than
intellectual convictions. The pressure of environment keeps a man in a
strait-jacket, unless he is willing to be a martyr, long after he has abandoned
the views which serve those ethical ideals. We cannot change our conduct safely
over night, as we can often change our intellectual beliefs. Time is always in
favor of the dissolution of the ethics founded on beliefs that are dead, only
the process in one is more gradual than in the other. We have only to look at
history to see this, and it is one of the most patent things in the world that
our ethical ideals are decaying. There is much that is going which should go,
and it is unfortunate that the disappearance of error and distorted morals
should carry with them the best conquests of the ages. If we can save the good
while we dispel error by proving survival after death, the intelligent man and
the moral idealist might be expected to discriminate between the use and the
abuse of any belief.
The established fact that nature values personality more than it does mere
organism ought to suffice to give intelligent men a leverage on the passions of
men, whether man conceives his ethics in terms of rewards or obedience to an
abstract duty. All ethics are based upon hope and this because no action of the
will whatever is rational without an end which always requires the future for
the realization of it, and we must be assured that the law of nature allows of
that fulfilment. Hope is therefore as much a part of the cosmic scheme as is any
interest in the past or the present. No science or philosophy is complete
without taking it into account. Nothing but absolute assurance that death
annihilates us can justify the limitation of ethical conduct to the attainments
of the physical life. Any reasonable probability or scientific proof of survival
will justify the cultivation of an ethics which takes into account the remote
future while it does not sacrifice the present to it. That is the function and
the value of the belief in immortality.
But there is in addition to all this the social problem. I have discussed the
question as if it were entirely an individual interest. But the social fabric is
as much interested in it as the individual. This may be only for the reason that
the social system is a plurality of individuals existing in certain ethical
relations which have to be maintained to save us from perpetual war. But
whatever the reason, it is certain that the belief in survival will help us in
the solution of our social problems. I do not need to state its value in this
connection as one of inducing the individual to sacrifice something in this life
to gain more in the next, nor make him contented with evil and suffering here
with the prospect of escaping it beyond the grave. While that is nothing more
than what we demand of every ethical individual in the ethics of the present
life, when we ask him not to be a glutton if he expects to escape the gout,
there has grown up a Stoical ethics which demands that we should not seek
rewards in the future. This is well enough to prevent men from maximizing the
future and minimizing the present, but it is usually only the counsel of not
crying over spilled milk and requires a nature already well developed ethically
to follow it.
Logical consistency and obstinacy are often as much the impulses that take to
this maxim as any love of virtue. Moreover Stoicism has never conquered the
world and when it makes a Simon Stylites of each of us, it does not redeem
civilization. It smacks of the idea of courage, but its defender is usually
careful to limit its application. Throwing aside formal systems like this and
those who do not adequately recognize the utilities of life, we may insist that
social systems will he determined by the ideals which the majority of its
members have formed. In the present age those ideals are materialistic in every
sense of the term. That is both sensational and philosophical materialism
prevail, the first among the unintelligent and the latter among the scientific
classes.
It is said that 300,000 copies of Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe, a
materialistic work, were sold among the laboring classes alone in England in
four years. I understand that it was this fact which instigated Sir Oliver Lodge
to start his propaganda for the purpose of arousing the religious classes from
their lethargy and stupidity in the situation. The poor had waited in all the
ages for a better world. They could put up with suffering, if only happiness
came at the end. But to cut off the prospect of ultimate happiness was only to
enthrone the forces of the French Revolution again - and they have come!
The historians and economists have talked about the economic interpretation of
history and now they are reaping the fruits of their teaching. Their doctrine is
coming home to plague them. The unsuccessful in the struggle for existence are
demanding and fighting for their "share in the hog's wash." They have the throat
of Ophiucus and the conscience of a bear. Their oppressors may have been no
better, but there has been a remnant of idealists who have tried to defend the
spiritual meaning of history, but they had been unfortunate enough to link their
doctrine with indefensible traditions and have gone down before physical science
and the influence of economics. Men have become practical materialists as well
as philosophical ones, and often practical materialists where they are not
philosophical ones. Physical science has achieved so much that it has secured
all the worshipers; and the spiritual interpretation of life, in default of
evidence for its truth, must retire into the limbo of illusions. You are not
going to save civilization without that interpretation of the meaning of nature
which puts personality as the basis of its interest. Physical science with all
its conquests has done nothing more than to support a larger population than
could be sustained without its discoveries and inventions. It has done nothing
for the spiritual life of man.
It is true enough that a man must have his physical necessities satisfied before
he can seek and attain any other ends, and it is just as true that he will form
his conception of the divine which the satisfaction of his appetites will favor.
But at the same time, it is as true that you may supply his physical wants as
much as you please, and there is no guarantee that he will conceive God to be
anything more than a stomach filler. Happiness is not always the same thing.
With one it is, as Carlyle has said, merely enough of "hog's wash" and with
another it is some more spiritual attainment. Man does not live by bread alone,
even when bread is necessary, though too many are willing to stop with it, and
the misfortune is that the poverty problem involves a paradox or a hopeless
riddle. You cannot expect a man to pursue the spiritual unless he has satisfied
the material needs of his nature and when you have satisfied these you have no
assurance that he will seek the spiritual. The solution has to be left to nature
or Providence and every effort we make only seems to land us in perplexities.
If, however, we can saturate the human mind with the belief in survival after
death and the fact that it is the higher aspects of his personality that nature
values, you will have the same fulcrum for the moving of its attention that you
have now in Copernican astronomy, Newtonian gravitation and Darwinian Evolution,
or any other belief which is pivotal for the interpretation of nature. Let it be
as definitely assured as any scientific doctrine and it must enter into the
calculations of conduct in the same way. It will color history with the ideals
which it is capable of instigating. The brotherhood of man may be scientifically
defended again as well as ethically. The center of gravity for ethics will not
be placed in sensory happiness alone, but will be pushed into the intellectual
or inner life of higher knowledge and emotions, and carry with it the proper
depreciation of sensuous enjoyment as having less value and less right to
dominate the springs of conduct. Nor is it a fatal fault that it may sometimes
divert motives into wrong channels. That is true of any idea with the
spiritually undeveloped.
The belief in immortality may not be an unmixed good, because man will abuse any
truth you can teach him, until he learns to see it in the right light. But the
educational forces of the world need the stabilizing power of such a truth to
arouse some sort of reflection that may take the place of war to civilize man.
We can influence a man in only two ways, by reason or by force. When we cannot
reason with him we have to fight with him. The school and the police are our
alternatives. The school can be useful only where it has certified truth for its
major premise. You cannot inculcate spiritual ideas unless you have a spiritual
philosophy or scientifically proved truth. This is an engine of power to convey
belief or to stabilize the direction of evolution, to force the mind to
recognize the fact that nature respects personality more than it does organic
forms, and to establish beyond question that it is the inner life of the mind,
both for personal satisfaction and the attainment of social ideals, that
triumphs over the sensuous enjoyments of the world. In all ages the belief in a
future life, if it existed at all in the political organism, has been able to
make itself felt in the social structure, even when that structure was governed
by the disbeliever.
The French Revolutionists found that they had to compromise with the religious
instincts and set up the Goddess of Reason. Skepticism would not see the social
organism perish, as that is also self destruction, and it would beg for
tolerance to save that structure, though the doctrine that saves it is regarded
as an illusion! Even materialism tried to save the ideals that have originated
in another philosophy, but the poor balk at no consequences when they see the
logical meaning of what they have been taught. With the economic interpretation
of history in their minds and no knowledge of other ideals than food and
physical luxury, they put materialism into practise and sacrifice what the
intellectuals would preserve, though their philosophy has no tendency to protect
it. It will devolve on a spiritual view of nature to lead the world out of the
wilderness of Sinai.
There is one very important thing to be overcome by proving survival after
death. It is the fear of death. I do not mean any special craven fear, for it is
probable that this is rarer than we often think. The healthy man has no time to
think about it and the ill man does not care. But all prefer to prolong
consciousness as much as possible. In that sense the fear of death characterizes
all persons, even though we have the courage to sacrifice life in behalf of a
moral cause. In a materialistic age, however, there is sure to be a large number
of persons who will value life above all else. This instinct was probably at the
basis of pacifism in most instances. If we cannot count on continuing
consciousness we shall make the most of that which we have, whether for one kind
of enjoyment or another, and endeavor to prolong it to the utmost. This is the
secret of the development of medicine which combines a philanthropic vocation
with the exploitation of the sick and in many cases avails to save a man from
the consequences of his sins, less to correct his sins. The saving of his soul
was left to the priest and of his body to the physician. The priest saved his
soul without charges while the physician could exploit him and his fear of death
to his heart's content. With the growth of materialism the desire not to die
increased and the physician has complete command of the desires which will
sacrifice all to the prolongation of consciousness. The individual physician may
often live above this situation and so it is only the system or the practical
outcome of the medical life that I have in mind here. It is based upon the
desire to escape death and to prolong life.
Now that we require to learn is a simple law of nature. It is the equal
universality of death with life, or the dissolution of all compounds, organic
and inorganic, unless something interferes to prevent it. Death is as much a
fixed policy of nature as life is, and if we can only assure ourselves of its
place in the economy of the world as a mere transitional process to new
environment, we shall have the same attitude toward it that we do toward life.
We shall recognize it as a part of an ethical dispensation, a part of a scheme
for helping in spiritual development, not terminating it. There is no reason why
we should endeavor to prolong life except to meet the responsibilities of it and
to develop spiritual ideals, and when the physical aspect of it begins to decay,
we might even be glad to die and learn to rejoice at it as we do at a birth.
Indeed death is but a second birth just as birth is our first death. We know at
least two stages of our life, the prenatal and the postnatal, and communication
with the dead proves the post mortem life, thus giving us an idea of three
stages of our development with possibilities yet to be learned. But we have
reason to treat death as a benevolent event in the process of evolution, and the
sooner we come to regard it so, the stress and suffering of life will be less.
We shall prepare and wait for it as we would for an assured happiness, There is
nothing to hinder thus looking at it, except the philosophy of materialism. That
view of nature out of the way would find us rejoicing at the prospect of a
transition to new environment and death might be regarded as an equally happy
event with living.
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For the from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
Tennyson had caught in this poetic glimpse the spirit of inspiration that breaks
out "from the circumambient eternity to color with its own hues man's little
islet of time."
Note:
The article above was originally entitled 'General Questions and Values' and was taken from James Hyslop's "Life
After Death. Problems of the Future Life and Its Nature" (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd, 1918).
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