“For each man kills the thing he loves,
Though each man does not die.”
While the more emotional form of the passion almost rejoices in its contempt of life and its willingness to face dangers and death for the sake of the beloved. It says as plain as words:—“I can fulfil myself and my purposes all right, even without this mortal part which you hold so dear”; and unless we think that the hidden being who thus speaks is a perfect fool, we must conclude that it is aware of a life surpassing that of the body.
Such a continuing life we no doubt have evidence of, and indeed commonly admit to exist, in the Race-life; and as a first approximation it seems natural and obvious to interpret the underlying or subliminal self as being simply the Race-self. In the case of the lower and less developed forms of creation, perhaps this is the wisest thing to do. In default of more detailed and perfect knowledge, we may easily assume that in a shoal of several million herrings or in a ‘culture’ of several billion microbes the underlying self of each particular herring or microbe is practically identical with the self of the race concerned. But in the case of man and some of the higher animals it is not so easy to do this. We find a strongly individual element in his subconscious mind, which must also be accounted for. I have already alluded to the stores of individual memory which this mind retains, thus differentiating it from others; and I have alluded to the intensely individual phantasms which it projects. And now again we are brought face to face with the greatly individual character of its love-passion. However much the love-passion may be symbolical of the life of the race, and deeply implicated in the same (and both of these it certainly is), still—except in its lower forms—there is nothing vague and general and undifferentiated about that passion; on the contrary, it is most strongly personal and sharply outlined. Why is it that out of the hundred thousand people that a man may meet only one will arouse this tremendous response? Why is it that every great love in its depth seems different from every other? Do not these things suggest a profound difference of outline in the subconscious beings themselves from whom these loves proceed? These beings are manifestations and organic expressions of the Race—yes. But they are also deeply individual and different—each one from the other.
And here we seem to come upon the first emergence of the solution of the problem before us. The self of which we are in search has—especially through its subconscious part—a vast continuing life, affiliated to the life of the race and beyond that to the cosmic life of the All; but it also has a strongly individual outline and character. Nursed in the womb of the Race during countless ages, like a babe within its mother, passing through numberless reincarnations in a kind of collective way, and in more or less unconsciousness of its supreme and separate destiny, it at last in Man attains to the clear sense of individuality, and (through much suffering) is set free to an independent existence; being finally exhaled from earth-mortality into a cosmic life under other conditions of space and time than ours.
Difficult as this conception of a continued individual existence may be to hold to in view of the terrible and external flux of general Nature, and difficult as it may be to understand in all detail; yet, as I say, it is Love which compels us to the insight of its truth. It is Love which has the clear conception of the uniqueness of the beloved, it is love which positively refuses to believe in her (or his) annihilation, it is love alone which in the hour of loss can face the awful midnight sky, and dare to sing:—
“Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace,
Sleep, holy Spirit, blessed soul!
While the stars burn, the moons increase,
And the great ages onward roll.”