Now I take our chief present-day problems, perplexities, and resultant requirements with regard to the After-Life in general, to fall into three groups, according as those problems are predominantly Historical, or Philosophical, or directly Practical and Ethical.
1. Three Historical Difficulties.
The Historical group now brings very clearly and certainly before us the striking non-universality, the startling lateness, and the generally strange fitfulness and apparent unreasonableness characterizing the earliest stage of belief in the soul’s heightened, or at least equivalent, consciousness after death.
(1) Now with respect to the Non-Universality of the doctrine, it is true that, in China, Confucianism is full of care for the dead. “Throughout the Empire, the authorities are obliged to hold three annual sacrifices for the refreshment and rest of the souls of the dead in general.” “It is hardly doubtful that the cultus of Ancestors formed the chief institution in classical Confucianism, and constituted the very centre of religion for the people. Even now ancestor-worship is the only form of religion for which rules, applicable to the various classes among the Emperor’s subjects, are laid down in the Dynastic Statutes.” And Professor De Groot, from whom I am quoting, gives an interesting conspectus of the numberless ways in which the religious service of the dead penetrates Chinese life.[191]—Yet we hear of Kong-Tse (Confucius) himself (551-478 B.C.), that, though he insisted upon the most scrupulous execution of the three hundred rules of the then extant temple-ceremonial, which were no doubt largely busy with the dead, and though he said that one should sacrifice to the spirits as if they were present, he designated, in several of his sayings, occupation with theological problems as useless: “as long as we do not know men, how shall we know spirits? As long as we do not understand life, how should we fathom death?” And to questions relative to the spirits and the dead, he would give evasive answers.[192] Thus the founder of the most characteristic of the Chinese religions was without any clear and consistent conviction on the point in question.
In India we find, for Brahmanic religion, certain unmistakable Immortality-Doctrines (in the sense of the survival of the soul’s self-consciousness), expressed in the hymns of the Rig-Veda.—But already, in the philosophizings of the Upanishads, we get a world-soul, and this soul’s exclusive permanence: “to attain to true unity, the very duality of subject and object is to disappear. The terms Atman and Brahman here express the true Being which vivifies all beings and appearances, and with which cognizing man reunites himself whilst losing his individual existence.”[193]
And if we move on to Buddhism, with its hundreds of millions of adherents in Burmah, Tibet, China, and Japan, we can learn, from the classical work of Oldenberg, how interestingly deep down lies the reason for the long conflict between scholars as to whether Nirvana is or is not to be taken for the complete extinction of the individual soul. “Everything, in the Buddhist dogmatic system, is part and parcel of a circle of Becoming and of Dissolution: all things are but a Dhamma, a Sankhara; and all Dhamma, all Sankhara are but temporary.… The Mutable, Conditioned is here thinkable only as conditioned by another Mutable and Conditioned. If we follow the dialectic consequence alone, there is no seeing how, according to this system, there can remain over, when a succession and mutual destruction of things conditioning and of things conditioned has run its course, anything but a pure vacuum.” And we have also such a saying of the Buddha as the following. “Now if, O disciples, the Ego (atta) and anything appertaining to the Ego (attaniya) cannot be comprehended with accuracy and certainty, is not then the faith which declares: ‘This is the world, and this is the Ego; this shall I become at death,—firm, constant, eternal, unchangeable,—thus shall I be there, throughout eternity,’—is not this sheer empty folly?” “How should it not, O Lord, be sheer empty folly?” answer the disciples. “One who spoke thus,” is Oldenberg’s weighty comment, “cannot have been far from the conviction that Nirvana is annihilation. Yet it is understandable how the very thinkers, who were capable of bearing this consequence, should have hesitated to raise it to the rank of an official dogma of the community.… Hence the official doctrine of the Buddhist Church attained the form, that, on the question of the real existence of the Ego, of whether or not the perfected saint lives on after death, the exalted Buddha has taught nothing. Indeed the legally obligatory doctrine of the old community required of its votaries an explicit renunciation of all knowledge concerning the existence or non-existence of completely redeemed souls.”
“Buddhism,” so Oldenberg sums up the matter, with, I think, the substantial adhesion of all present-day competent authorities, “teaches that there is a way out of the world of created things, out into the dark Infinite. Does this way lead to new being? or does it lead to nothingness? Buddhist belief maintains itself on the knife’s edge of these alternatives. The desire of the heart, as it longs for the Eternal, is not left without something, and yet the thinking mind is not given a something that it could grasp and retain. The thought of the Infinite, the Eternal, could not be present at all, and yet vanish further away than here, where, a mere breath and on the point of sinking into sheer nothingness, it threatens to disappear altogether.”[194] This vast Buddhist community, numbering, perhaps, a third of the human race, should not, then, be forgotten, when we urge the contrary instances of the religions of Assyria and Babylonia; of Egypt; of Greece and Rome; and, above all, of the Jews and Christianity.
Yet it is well to remember that such non-universality of belief is at least as real, to this very hour, for such a fundamental religious truth and practice as Monotheism and Monolatry; such purely Ethical convictions as Monogamy and the Illicitness of Slavery; such a plain dictate of the universal humanitarian ideal as the illegitimacy of the application of physical compulsion in matters of religious conviction; and such directly demonstrable psychical and natural facts as subconsciousness in the human soul, the sexual character of plants, and the earth’s rotundity and rotation around the sun. In none of these cases can we claim more than that the higher, truer doctrine,—that is, the one which explains and transcends the element of truth contained in its predecessor and opposite,—is explicitly reached by a part only of humanity, and is but implied and required by other men, at their best. Yet this is clearly enough for leaving us free to decide,—reasonably conclusive evidence for their truth being forthcoming,—in favour of the views of the minority: since the assumption of an equality of spiritual and moral insight and advance throughout mankind is as little based upon fact, as would be the supposition of men’s equal physical strength or height, or of any other quality or circumstance of their nature and environment.
(2) The lateness of the doctrine’s appearance, precisely in the cases where there can be no doubt of its standing for a conviction of an endless persistence of a heightened consciousness after death,—that is, amongst the Greeks (and Romans) and the Jews (and Christians),—has now been well established by critical historical research.
With regard to the Greeks,[195] the matter is particularly plain, since we can still trace even in Plato, (427 to 347 B.C.), who, next to Our Lord Himself and to St. Paul, is doubtless the greatest and most influential teacher of full individual Immortality that the world has seen, two periods of thought in this matter, and can show that the first was without any such certain conviction. In his Apology of Socrates, written soon after the execution in 399 B.C., he makes his great master, close to his end, declare that death would bring to man either a complete unconsciousness, like to a dreamless sleep, or a transition into another life,—a life here pictured like to the Homeric Hades. Both possibilities Socrates made to accept resignedly, in full reliance on the justice of the Gods, and to look no further; how should he know what is known to no man?—And this is Plato’s own earlier teaching. For in the very Republic which, in its chronologically later constituents, (especially in Book V, 471c, to the end of Book VIII, Book IX, 560d to 588a, and Book X up to 608b), so insists upon and develops the truth and importance of Immortality in the strictest, indeed the sublimest sense: we get, in its earlier portions, (especially in Book II, 10c, to Book V, 460c), no trace of any such conviction. For, in these earlier passages, the Guardians in the Ideal State are not to consider what may come after death: the central theme is the manner in which Justice carries with it its own recompense; and the rewards, that are popularly wont to be placed before the soul, are referred to ironically,—Socrates is determined to do without such hopes. In those later portions, on the contrary, there is the greatest insistence upon the importance of caring, not for this short life alone, but for the soul’s “whole time” and for what awaits it after death. And in the still later parts, (as in Books VI and VII), the sublimest form of Immortality is presupposed as true and actual throughout. Thus in Greece it is not till about 390-380 B.C., and in Plato himself not till his middle life, that we get a quite definite and final doctrine of the Immortality of all souls, and of a blessed after-existence for every just and holy life here below.