With the disappearance of the ancient opinion that the universe was created for man, the sun to light him by day and the stars by night, disappeared also the later thesis that the happiness or the education of man was the aim of the Order in Things. The extent and duration of matter, if they indicate any purpose at all, suggest one incomparably vaster than this; while the laws of mind, which alone distinctly point to purpose, reveal one in which pain and pleasure have no part or lot, and one in which man has so small a share that it seems as if it must be indifferent what his fate may be. The slightest change in the atmosphere of the globe will sweep away his species forever.
Schopenhauer classified all religions as optimisms or pessimisms. The faith of the future will be neither. What is agreeable or disagreeable to man will not be its standard of the excellence of the universe. However unwillingly, he is at last brought to confess that his comfort is not the chief nor even any visible aim of the order in things. In the course of that order it may be, nay, it is nigh certain, that the human species will pass through decadence to extinction along with so many other organisms. Neither as individuals nor as a race, neither in regard to this life nor to the next, does the idea of God, when ennobled by a contemplation of the cosmical relations, permit to man the effrontery of claiming that this universe and all that therein is was made with an eye to his wants and wishes, whether to gratify or to defeat them.
(3.) The closer defining of life as a result of physical force, and the recognition of mind as a connotation of organism, promise to be active in elevating religious conceptions, but at the expense of the current notions of personality. Sensation and voluntary motion are common to the fetus, the brute and the plant, as well as to man. They are not part of his “soul.” Intellect and consciousness, as I have shown, exclude sensation, and in these, if anywhere, he must look for his immortal part. Even here, error works destruction, and ignorance plants no seed of life. We are driven back to the teaching of Buddha, that true thought alone is that which does not die.
Why should we ask more? What else is worth saving? Our present personality is a train of ideas base and noble, true and false, coherent through the contiguity of organs nourished from a common center. Another personality is possible, one of true ideas coherent through conscious similarity, independent of sensation, as dealing with topics not commensurate with it. Yet were this refuge gained, it leaves not much of the dogma that every man has an indestructible conscious soul, which will endure always, no matter what his conduct or thoughts have been. Rather does it favor the opinion expressed so well by Matthew Arnold in one of his sonnets:
“He who flagged not in the earthly strife
From strength to strength advancing—only he,
His soul well knit and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.”
Not only has the received doctrine of a “soul,” as an undying something different from mind and peculiar to man, received no support from a closer study of nature,—rather objections amounting to refutation,—but it has reacted injuriously on morals, and through them on religion itself. Buddha taught that the same spark of immortality exists in man and brute, and actuated by this belief laid down the merciful rule to his disciples: “Do harm to no breathing thing.” The apostle Paul on the other hand, recognizing in the lower animals no such claim on our sympathy, asks with scorn: “Doth God care for oxen?” and actually strips from a humane provision of the old Mosaic code its spirit of charity, in order to make it subserve a point in his polemic.
(4.) As the arrogance of the race has thus met a rebuke, so has the egotism of the individual. His religion at first was a means of securing material benefits; then a way to a joyous existence beyond the tomb: the love of self all the time in the ascendant.
This egoism in the doctrine of personal survival has been repeatedly flung at it by satirists, and commented on by philosophers. The Christian who “hopes to be saved by grossly believing” has been felt on all hands to be as mean in his hope, as he is contemptible in his way of attaining it. To center all our religious efforts to the one end of getting joy—however we may define it—for our individual selves, has something repulsive in it to a deeply religious mind. Yet that such in the real significance of the doctrine of personal survival is granted by its ablest defenders. “The general expectation of future happiness can afford satisfaction only as it is a present object to the principle of self-love,” says Dr. Butler, the eminent Lord Bishop of Durham, than whom no acuter analyst has written on the religious nature of man.
Yet nothing is more certain than that the spirit of true religion wages constant war with the predominance or even presence of selfish aims. Self-love is the first and rudest form of the instinct of preservation. It is sublimed and sacrificed on the altar of holy passion. “Self,” exclaims the fervid William Law, “is both atheist and idolater; atheist, because it rejects God; idolater, because it is its own idol.” Even when this lowest expression of the preservative instinct rises but to the height of sex-love, it renounces self, and rejoices in martyrdom. “All for love, or the world well lost,” has been the motto of too many tragedies to be doubted now. By the side of the ancient Roman or the soldier of the French revolution, who through mere love of country marched joyously to certain death from which he expected no waking, does not the martyr compare unfavorably, who meets the same death, but does so because he believes that thereby he secures endless and joyous life? Is his love as real, as noble, as unselfish?
Even the resistless physical energy which the clear faith in the life hereafter has so often imparted, becomes something uncongenial to the ripened religious meditation. Such faith brings about mighty effects in the arena of man’s struggles, but it does so through a sort of mechanical action. An ulterior purpose is ahead, to wit, the salvation of the soul, and it may be regarded as one of the best established principles of human effort that every business is better done, when it is done for its own sake, out of liking for it, than for results expected from it.