THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME
When we survey the past of the earth as science has revealed it to us, we gain some conceptions which will help us in our judgments as to what this phenomenon of human life may signify in the future. We are accustomed to look upon the earth as aged, but these terms are only relative; and if we compare our own planet with its neighbours in the solar system, we shall have good reason to suppose that, though the past of the earth is very prolonged, its future will probably be far more so. As for life—and we must think not only of human life, but of life as a planetary phenomenon—that is necessarily much more recent than the formation even of the earth's crust, the existence of water in the liquid state being necessary for life in any of its forms. And human life itself, though the extent of its past duration is seen to be greater the more deeply we study the records, is yet a relatively recent thing. The utmost, it appears, that we can assign to our past would be perhaps six million years, taking our species back to mid-Miocene times. Doubtless this is a mighty age as compared with the few thousand years allotted to us in bygone chronologies; but, looked at sub specie æternitatis, and with an eye which is prepared to look forward also, and especially with relation to what we know and can predict regarding the sun, these past six million years may reasonably be held to comprise only the infantine period of man's life.
It is very true that on such estimates as those of Lord Kelvin, and according to what astronomers and geologists believed not more than twelve or even eight years ago, regarding the secular cooling of earth and sun—that, according to these, the time is by no means "unending long," and we may foresee, not so remotely, the end of the solar heat and light of which we are the beneficiaries. But the discovery of radium and the phenomena of radio-activity have profoundly modified these estimates, justifying, indeed, the acumen of Lord Kelvin, who always left the way open for reconsideration should a new source of heat and energy in general be discovered. We know now that, to consider the earth first, its crust is not self-cooling, or at any rate not self-cooling only, for it is certainly self-heating. There is an almost embarrassing amount of radium in the earth's crust, so far as we have examined it; a quantity, that is to say, so great that if the same proportion were maintained at deeper levels as at those which we can investigate, the earth would have to be far hotter than it is. Similar reasoning applies to the sun. Definite, immediate proof of the presence of radium there is not forthcoming yet, but that presence is far more than probable, especially since the existence of solar uranium, the known ancestor of radium, has been demonstrated. The reckonings of Helmholtz and others, based upon the supposition that the solar energy is entirely derived from its gravitational contraction, must be superseded. It would require but a very small proportion of radium in the solar constitution to account for all the energy which the centre of our system produces; and, as we have already seen, the earth is to no small extent its own sun—its own source of heat. The prospect thus opened out by modern physical inquiry supports more strongly than ever the conviction that the life of this world to come will be very prolonged. It is true that there is always the possibility of accident. Encountering another globe, our sun would doubtless produce so much heat as to incinerate all planetary life. But the excessive remoteness of the sun from the nearest fixed star suggests that the constitution of the stellar universe is such that an accident of this kind is extremely improbable. As for comets, the earth's atmosphere has already encountered a comet, even during the brief period of astronomical observation. This thick overcoat of ours protects us from the danger of such chances.
What, then, is the record? We are told that the belief in progress is a malady of youth, which experience and the riper mind will dissipate. Some such argument from the lips of the disillusioned or the disidealized has been possible, perhaps, with some measure of probability, until within our own times. They must now forever hold their peace. We know as surely as we know the elementary phenomena of physics or chemistry, that the record of life upon our planet, though not only a record of progress by any means, has nevertheless included that to which the name of progress cannot be denied in any possible definition of the word. For myself, I understand by progress the emergence of mind, and its increasing dominance over matter. Such categories are, no doubt, unphilosophical in the ultimate sense, but they are proximately convenient and significant. Now, if progress be thus defined, we can see for ourselves that life has truly advanced, not merely in terms of anatomical or physiological—i. e. mechanical or chemical—complexity, but in terms of mind. The facts of nutrition teach us that the first life upon the earth was vegetable; and though the vegetable world displays great complexity, and that which, on some definitions, would be called progress, yet we cannot say that there is any more mind, any greater differentiation or development of sentience, in the oak than in the alga. When we turn, however, to the animal world—which is parasitic, indeed, upon the vegetable world—we find that in what we may call the main line of ascent there has been, along with increasing anatomical complexity, the far greater emergence of mind. In its earliest manifestations, sentience, consciousness, the psychical in general, and the capacity for it, must be regarded merely as phenomena of the physical organism; the capacity to feel, as no more than a property of the living body; and such mind as there is exists for the body. But, as we may see it, there has been a gradual but infinitely real turning of the tables, so that, even in a dog, as the lover of that dog would grant, the loss of limbs and tail, or, indeed, of any portion of the body not necessary to life, does not mean the loss of the essential dog—not the loss of that which the lover of the dog loves. Already, that which is not to be seen or handled has become the more real. In ourselves, it is a capital truth, which asceticism, old or new, perverted or sane, has always recognized, that the mind is the man, and must be master, and the body the servant. Yet, historically, this creature, who by the self means not the body, but, as he thinks, its inhabitant, is historically and lineally developed—is also, indeed, developed as an individual—from an organism in which anything to be called psychical is but an apparently accidental attribute, to be discerned only on close examination. This emergence of mind is progress; and this, notwithstanding the sneers of those who do not love the word or the light, has occurred. Its history is written indelibly in the rocks. And, as we shall argue, this is the supreme lesson of evolution—that progress is possible, because progress has occurred.
Assuredly we should never use this word "progress" without reminding ourselves of the cardinal distinction that exists between two forms that it may manifest. There is a progress which consists in and depends upon an advance in the constitution of the living individual; and, so far as we are more mental and less physical than the men who have left us such relics as the Neanderthal skull, in so far we exemplify this kind of progress. But, on the other hand, we can claim progress as compared with even the Greeks in some respects, though there is no evidence whatever that, so far as the individual is concerned, there is any natural, inherent, organic progress. But we know more. Our school-boys know more than Aristotle. We stand upon Greek shoulders. This is traditional progress—something outside the germ-plasm; a thing dependent upon our great human faculty of speech.
That, surely, is why the word infantine was rightly used in our first paragraph. For we may ask why, if man be millions of years old, any record of progress should be a matter of only a few thousand years—perhaps not more than fifteen or twenty. The answer, I believe, is that traditional progress depends upon the possibility of tradition. Now speech, apart from writing, involves the possibility of tradition from generation to generation, and I am very sure that "Man before speech" is a myth; the more we learn of the anthropoid apes the surer we may be of that. But, after all, the possibilities of progress dependent upon aural memory are sadly limited; not only because it is easy to forget, but because it is also conspicuously easy to distort, as a familiar round-game testifies. The greatest of all the epochs in human history was that which saw the genesis of written speech. I believe that hundreds of thousands, nay millions, of preceding years were substantially sterile just because the educational acquirements of individuals could be transmitted to their children neither in the germ-plasm (for we know such transmission to be impossible), nor outside the germ-plasm, by means of writing. The invention of written language accounts, then, we may suppose, for the otherwise incomprehensible disparity between the blank record of long ages, and the great achievement of recent history—an achievement none the less striking if we remember that the historical epoch includes a thousand years of darkness. Thus, as was said at the Royal Institution in 1907, when discussing the nature of progress, we may argue in a new sense that the historians have made history: it is the possibility of recording that has given us something to record.
Now, it is in terms of this latter kind of progress that our duty to the past, as we conceive it, may be defined. And in its terms also must we define the grounds of our veneration for the past. None of us invented language, spoken or written; nor yet numbers, nor the wheel, nor much else. We see further than our ancestors because we stand upon their shoulders, and, as Coleridge hinted, this may be so even though we be dwarfs and they were giants. Some of us see this. How can we fail to do so? And the past becomes in our eyes a very real thing, to which we are so greatly indebted that we should even live for it. But there is a great danger, dependent upon a great error, here. Let us consider what is our right attitude towards the past. We are its children and its heirs. We are infinitely indebted to it. We must love and venerate that which was lovable and venerable in it. But are we to live for it?
If we could imagine ourselves coming from afar and contemplating the sequence of universal phenomena now for the first time, we should realize that the past, though real, because it was once real, is yet a fleeting aspect of change, and, in a very real sense also, is not. Nor, indeed, is the future; but it will be. We cannot alter, we cannot benefit, we cannot serve the past, because it is not and will not be. Our besetting tendency as individuals is to live for our own pasts, more especially as we grow old; to become retrospective, to cease to look forward, even to dedicate what remains to us of life to the service of what is not at all. In this respect, as in so many others, we are less wise than children. We will not let the dead bury its dead. This is also the tendency of all institutions. Even if there were founded an Institute of the Future, dedicated to the life of this world to come, after only one generation its administrators would be consulting the interests of the past, turning to the service of the name and the memory of their founder, though it was for the future that he lived. Throughout all our social institutions we can perceive this same worship of what no longer is at the cost of the most real of all real things, which is the life of the generation that is and the generations that are to be.
Everywhere the price for this idolatry is exacted. The perpetual image of it is Lot's wife, who, looking backwards upon that from which she had escaped, was turned into a pillar of salt. Nature may or may not have a purpose, and exhibit designs for that purpose; she may or may not, in philosophical language, be teleological. Man is and must be teleological. We must live for the morrow, for what will be, whether as individuals or as a nation, or our ways are the ways of death. This is looked upon as a human failing—that man never is, but always to be blest; that man is never satisfied, that he will not rest content with present achievement.
Well, it is stated of our first cousin, once removed, the orang-outang, that in the adult state he is aroused only for the snatching of food, and then "relapses into repose." His reach does not exceed his grasp, and one need not preach contentment to him. But we, the latest and highest products of the struggle for existence, we are strugglers by constitution; and when we relapse into repose we degenerate. Only on condition of living for the morrow can we remain human. Put a sound limb on crutches and you paralyze it; wear smoked glasses and your eyes become intolerant of light, or wear glasses that make the muscle of accommodation superfluous and it atrophies; take pepsin and hydrochloric acid and the stomach will become incapable of producing them; cease to chew and your teeth decay; let the newspaper prepare your mental food as the cook cuts up your physical food, and you will become incapable of thought—that is, of mental mastication and digestion. It is above all things imperative to strive, to have a goal, to seek it on our own legs, to cry for the moon rather than for nothing at all. And Nature teaches us unequivocally that our purpose is ever onward—
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until we die.
It is to go, and not to get, that is the glory. To be content is to have no ideal beyond the real; we were better dead and nourishing grass. It is part of the whole structure of life, as we can read it, whether in the animal or in the vegetable world, but pre-eminently in ourselves, that the very body of the individual is constructed as for purpose; nay more, as for the purposes of the future. Every little baby girl that is born into the world bears upon her soft surface signs and portents—not merely promise, but the promise of provision—for the life of the world to come. At her very birth she teaches us that she is not created for self alone, but for what will be. Running through the whole body—and this the more markedly the higher the type of life—we find organs, tissues, functions, co-ordinations existing not for the present, but for the life of the world to come. When, some day, the social organism is as rightly constructed as the body of any woman, or even, in some measure, of any man, when it is similarly dedicated to the real future, and as resolutely turned away from any worship of what no longer is, then heaven will be nearer to earth.
It is quite clear that the supreme choice for any individual or institution or nation is between unborn to-morrow and dead yesterday. No one who concerns himself in the current political controversies, as, for instance, that thing of unspeakable shame which is called the "education question," will doubt that the present and the future are constantly being sacrificed to the past. It may be that the spirit of a trust is being grossly violated; but, rather than infringe the letter of it, the life of to-day and to-morrow must suffer: thus do the worshippers of dead yesterday—the most lethal idol before which fond humanity ever prostrated itself.
If it be our duty to do—not "as though to breathe were life"—and if nature indicates the future as that which we are to serve, what evidence have we, or what likelihood, that such service is worth our while? Of course, such a question as this may be answered in some such terms as those of the further question, What has posterity done for us? And it is interesting, perhaps, to consider that, so far as we can judge the attitude of our ancestors towards ourselves, their chief interest in us seems to have been as to what we should think of them—"What will posterity say?" They left their records, as we leave our records, for posterity to discover. With singular lack of judgment, as I think, we bury examples of our newspapers for posterity to discover: these are amongst the things which I should rather not have posterity discover. But this is no right outlook upon the future. It is not a question of what posterity can do for us. Posterity is here within us. The life of the world to come is in our keeping. We carry it about with us in all our goings and comings. It is at the mercy of what we eat and drink, at the mercy of the diseases we contract. Its fate is involved when we fall in love with each other, or out of love with each other; it is we ourselves. Just as the father who perhaps is losing his own hair may like to see how pleasantly his children's hair is growing, and finds consolation therein; just as, indeed, all the hopes of the parent become gradually transferred from self to that further self, those further selves, which his children are, so we are to look upon the future as our continuing self. To ask, What has posterity done for us? should be looked upon as if one should say, What have my children done for me? The parallel is indeed a very close one: and it is pointed out by the fine sentence from Herbert Spencer, which should be known to all of us—"A transfigured sentiment of parenthood regards with solicitude not child and grandchild only, but the generations to come hereafter—fathers of the future, creating and providing for their remote children."
We may grant that there is no money in posterity. The germ-plasm has infinite possibilities; but, so long as it remains germ-plasm, it can write no cheques in our favour. If you serve the present, the present will pay; posterity does not pay. If you write a "Merry Widow," the present will pay; if you write an "Unfinished Symphony," you will be dust ere it is performed. If you create that which will last forever, but which makes no appeal to the transient tastes of the moment, you may starve and die and rot, because the future, for which you work, cannot reward you. Life is so constructed that only in our own day, and not always now, is the mother—even Nature's own supreme organ of the future—rewarded for her maternal sacrifice. Nature does not trouble about the fate of the present, because she is always pressing on and pressing on towards something more, higher, better. The present, the individual, are but the organs of her purpose. We are to look upon ourselves as ends in ourselves; but we are also means towards ends which we can only dimly conceive, but towards which we may rightly work, and the service of which, though by no means freedom in the ordinary sense, is yet of that higher kind, that perfect freedom, which consists in the development of all the higher attributes of our nature. For it is in our nature to work and to feel and to live for the life that will be. That, as I say, is because living creatures are so constructed.
Huxley said that if the present level of human life were to show no rising in the future, he should welcome the kindly comet that should sweep the whole thing away. None of us is content with things as they are. If we are, better were it for us to be nourishing the grass and serving the things that will be in that way, if we cannot in any other. What promise, then, have we that things as they will be are worth working for? We live now in an age to which there has been revealed the fact of organic evolution. From the fire-mist, from the mud, from the merely brutal, there have been evolved—such is the worth of Nature's womb—there have been evolved intelligence and love, sacrifice, ideals; splendours which no splendour to come can utterly dim. These things are in the power of Nature. This is what "dead matter" can mother. So much the worse for our contemptible conceptions of matter, and That of which matter is the manifestation. But if it be that from the slime, by natural processes, there can grow a St. Francis, surely our dim notions of the potencies of Nature must be exalted. The forces that have erected us from the worm, are they necessarily exhausted or exhaustible? Who will dare to set limits to the promise of Nature's womb? I mean, in a word, that the history of evolution is a warrant for the idea that we ourselves, even erected men and women, are but stages to what may be higher. We look with contempt upon the apes, but time must have been when "simian" would have been as proud an adjective as "human" is to-day: and human may become superhuman.
Many passages might be quoted to show that our expectation of future progress is well based, and I will content myself with a single excerpt from the final page of the masterpiece of which all the civilized world was lately celebrating the jubilee. Says Darwin: "Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection."
The quotation will suffice to remind us that, if we are to serve the life of the world to come in the surest way, we must become Eugenists, accepting and applying to human life Nature's great principle of the selection of worth for parenthood and the rejection of unworth. We must modify and adapt our conceptions of education thereto. We must make parenthood the most responsible thing in life. We must teach the girl—aye, and the boy too—that the body is holy, for it is the temple of life to come. We must perceive in our most imperious instincts Nature's care for the future, and must humanize and sanctify them by conscious recognition of their purpose, and by provident co-operation with Nature towards her supreme end. We could spare from education, perhaps, those fictions concerning the past which are sometimes called history, were they replaced by a knowledge of our own nature and constitution as instruments of the future.
Let us grant even, for the argument, that nothing more is possible than mankind has yet achieved. There remains the hope that that which human nature at its best has been capable of may be realized by human nature at large. In their great moments the great men have seen this. That last sentence is, indeed, a paraphrase from a remark at the end of Herbert Spencer's "Ethics." Ruskin—to choose the polar antithesis of the Spencerian mind—declares that "there are no known limits to the nobleness of person or mind which the human creature may attain if we wisely attend to the laws of its birth and training." Wordsworth asks whether Nature throws any bars across the hope that what one is millions may be. Take it, then, that nothing more is conceivable in the way of mathematics than a Newton, or of drama than an Æschylus or a Shakespeare, or of sacrifice than a Christ. These, then, are types of what will be. They demonstrate what human nature is capable of. What one is, why may not millions be? Here is an ideal to work for. Here is something real to worship, to dedicate a life to. It is not merely that we can make smoother the paths of future generations—which George Meredith declared to be the great purpose and duty of our lives—but that, as Ruskin suggests in the foregoing quotation, we may raise the inherent quality of those future generations, so that they can make their own ways smooth and straight and high. It is our business, I repeat, to conceive of parenthood as the most responsible and sacred thing in life. True, it now follows, according to physiological law, upon the satisfaction of certain tendencies of our nature, which in themselves may be gratified, and even worthily gratified, without reference to anything but the present; yet these tendencies, commonly reviled and regarded with contempt—at least overt contempt—exist, like most of our attributes, for the life of the world to come. And that in which they may result, the bringing of new human life into the world, is the most tremendous, as it is the most mysterious, of our possibilities.
The laws of life are such that at any given moment the entire future is absolutely at the mercy of the present. The laws of life, indeed; one might have said the law of universal causation. But so it is. There is no conceivable limit to our responsibility. We act for the moment, we act for self; but there will be no end to the consequences. When the stuff of which our bodies are made has passed through a thousand cycles, the consequences of our brief moments will still be felt. This dependence of the future upon the present in the world of life is an almost unrealizable thing. Life could not have persisted upon such conditions had not Nature from the first, and increasingly up to our own day (for it is the human infant that is the most helpless, and the longest helpless), had not Nature, I say, persistently constructed the individual, in all his or her attributes, as a being whose warrant and purpose lay yet beyond. We are organs of the race, whether we will or no. We are made for the future, whether we will, whether we care, or no. We are only obeying Nature, and therefore in a position to command her, in dedicating ourselves and our purposes, our customs, our social structures, to the life of the world to come. We shall be there. Our purposes and hopes, the flesh and blood of many of us, will be there. Posterity will be what we make it, as we, alas! are what our ancestors have made us.
To this increasing purpose there will come, I suppose, an end—an inscrutable end. Yearly the evidence makes it more probable that in a sister world we are gazing upon the splendid efforts of purposeful, intelligent, co-ordinated life to battle against planetary conditions which threaten it with death by thirst. How long intelligence has existed upon Mars, if intelligence there be, no one can say; nor yet what its future will be. It would seem probable that our own fate must be similar, but it is far removed. And though the Whole may seem wanton, purposeless, stupid, we are very little folk; we see very dimly; we see only what we have the capacity to see; and there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of the wisest of us. So also there are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered. We are the shapers, the creators, the parents of those events. The still, small voice of the unborn declares our responsibility. There may be no reward. What does reward mean? Who rewards the sun, or the rain, or the oak, or the tigress? But there is the doing of one's work in the world, the serving of the highest and most real purpose that may be revealed to us. That is to be oneself, to fulfil one's destiny, to be a part of the universe, and worthy to be such a part. And though it be even unworthy for us to suggest that at least posterity will be grateful to us, such a thought may perhaps console us a little. At any rate, to those who worship and live for the past, we may offer this alternative: let them work for what will be. Perhaps the reward will be as real as any that the worship of what is not can offer. And, reward or no reward, it is something to have an ideal, something to believe that earth may become heavenly, and that, in some real sense which we can dimly perceive, we may be part—must be part, indeed—of that great day which is in our keeping, and which it is our privilege to have some share in shaping. Thus we may repeat, and thrill to repeat, with new meaning, the old but still living words, Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi sæculi—"I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come."