Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

Now, all noetic theories of immortality agree in holding that it is attained when the intellect intuits or grasps one or more of these ultimate truths and thus partakes of or participates in their perdurability. They are so high and abstract that Plato considered philosophy not only as the withdrawal from sense and the world toward the solitariness of the infinite but as the active practice of death. Hegel thought them the inner constitution of the mind of God, and to know God is eternal life. The great bliss and peace of what Aristotle described and praised as the theoretic life have thus often been interpreted as a foretaste of heaven. Thus the love and struggle for knowledge have been said to be motivated by the desire for an incorporeal existence.

Wordsworth’s “truths that wake to perish never,” “high instincts before which our mortal nature trembles like a guilty thing surprised,” is based upon the doctrine of reminiscence. When the soul has attained the unconditioned, and even when it experiences a love that is felt to be stronger than death, or a pure autonomous oughtness, or conceives the idea of God as the greatest and best being, which Descartes said it could not do if such a being did not exist; when it envisages a beauty that is transcending and seems to take the mind above time and space into pure being and whenever we reach generalizations of such a high degree that they include soul and body, life and death, and all things else, man has been told in countless ways that he was becoming immortal, that in such experiences the soul was outsoaring mortality, as if the subject were parasiting on to its object, absorbed in ecstasy of contemplation, till the subject and object fused in a unique way. The soul that harbors such great thoughts and has passed through such experiences thereby acquires a quality of permanence, whether it acts by apperçus or by severe logical ratiocination.

All such arguments, however, from their very nature are fallacious. Knowledge is not participation in this sense. A being of low may know one of a far higher order, but the chasm between subject and object remains unbridged. To know beauty and power is not to attain them. The further epistemological assumption that the world of ideas is itself a projection, just as subjective idealism asserted the world of sense to be, would also be necessary. But even this colossal postulate would not suffice for a world that is all eject and ends as well as begins with man. On this hypothesis the mind creates its own saving principle and was saved by its products. Indeed, such a method begs the whole question, which becomes again one of fact. Does or does not such a power exist in our psychic nature? The only possible support for such a hypothesis is the degree of coherence of its own parts with each other and with experience. All such arguments, however, are really pantheistic and leave little room for personality but are rather destructive of it. Nothing individual can persist in the absolute for in it all distinctions are merged.

Connected with this view is that which assumes that because we have the idea of or the wish for immortality and because this is so generally implanted in human nature, the latter is a lie if it is not a fact. Of this class of proofs the most common are those that urge it because of its practical utility for morality. In the other-worldness of early Christian centuries, where eschatology was more developed than cosmology, fear of hell and hope of heaven performed the greatest service for virtue and its progress was advanced by these artificial and extraneous supports. The danger is lest they have undue weight and be relied on long after their function should have been progressively replaced by the conception of virtue as its own reward. Luther thought that the chief motive of morality would be gone if there were no future life. Andrews Naughton said there could be no religion without it. Theodore Parker said: “If I perish in death I know no law but passion.” Chalmers urged that without it God would be stripped of wisdom, authority, and honor. Walt Whitman exclaimed: “If rats and maggots end us, then alarum! for we are betrayed.” Human nature has been called a lie and God a liar if there is no future life and those who do not desire it have been called in reality already dead. It is a potent motive to escape eternal pain and secure eternal bliss for our own ego hereafter. “If,” says one, “our souls do not hold the latchstring of a new world’s wicket, then goodbye, put out the lights, ring down the curtain. We have had our turn and it is all so nauseating that even suicide is a welcome spectacle.” One need only glance over a few of the five thousand titles of Alger’s very incomplete and quite out-of-date bibliography upon the subject to be able to draw up a long list of desperate things that would happen in the world and that individual writers would do, or of imprecations on God’s character and the nature of the universe, if it were proven false or if none of the strands in the complex net of theories and demonstrations that have been flung to the other shore should hold. All virtues, piety, honor, integrity, and civilization itself would perish, men become brutes, God a malign fiend gloating over the unbridled lust and supreme selfishness that would slowly sweep man from the earth, etc.

The most vivid portraitures of heaven and hell have been made. Isaac Taylor deemed the sun heaven although a later contemporary thought it hell, adding that its dark spots were the souls of the damned. The great comets in the last century were called hell making its rounds to gather its victims. The old Saxon catechist pronounced the setting sun red because it looked on hell. Thus the flood of evil now held in restraint would deluge the earth and chaos break loose if, when pay day came, men found a future life of rewards and punishments bankrupt.

All this assumes that it is proven because it has aided virtue and because a belief so general must be true. But even the good Bishop Butler argued that men must be prepared to find themselves misled—“Light deceives, why not life?” From childhood to the grave, from savagery to the present, man’s history has been one of disillusion and disenchantment. His mind has been far more fertile of error than of truth. Few of his wants have been satisfied and no wise man would feel secure in arguing from desire to attainment. The impetuous diathesis of the West may have grown neurotic as it became free, rich, and powerful, but it is all unavailing. Despite all that pragmatism can say, truth is very different from utility. In view of all this we might, with Bishop Courtney, refute all proofs of post-mortem existence, insisting that all men die, body and soul, and are extinguished but at some appointed time their spirits are resurrected by the power of God. The other alternative is more familiar. “If our ship never reaches port and if there be no haven, it becomes us to keep all taut and bright, sails set, and to maintain discipline.” All we want even of a future life is opportunity for virtue.

A special form of this argument from ideas to reality was developed by Kant. Reason always seeks the unconditioned by its very nature and nothing but the summum bonum will satisfy it. This includes two things, perfection and happiness, the two great desires of the ages. The ancients thought each implied the other. The old Hebrews believed that righteousness brought happiness in this world. The Stoics held that the highest joy was implicit in the practice of virtue from its very nature, while the Epicureans taught, conversely, that the highest happiness involved virtue. This does not suffice. The unity between the two must not be analytic but synthetic and causal. That is, each must bring out the other. In the world of experience this is not true and yet they belong together and so must find each other in a higher intelligible world.

Thus the very idea of immortality is the greatest perfection joined to the greatest happiness. They must be united completely. Whereas in the phenomenal world their development and union are only partial, there must be an infinite progression to bring them completely together because a being destined for perfection cannot be arrested. If this were the case there would be no perfect virtue and we are immortal because the latter must be attainable. Thus, heaven and hell must rise and fall together. True, the sense of justice by which we judge life, the drama, literature, and novels demands that the good always get their reward and the bad their punishment. This instinct is very deep and underlies law and society but we have no warrant for believing that the universe is built upon this principle. There is abundant evidence to the contrary. Neither intellectual intuition nor conscience are constitutive principles. Moreover, only the Western world demands personal immortality, so that the conviction that no evil can befall a good man is only a sentiment or postulate. Who knows but what it is only the hubris or fatal pride of man, which the gods would destroy, that has impelled him to believe that his wishes, ideas, or even his ego itself are too good to be allowed to perish.

Pluralistic views of immortality may be very roughly grouped together. Howison,[221] for example, makes pluralism absolute by advocating an eternal or metaphysical world of many minds, all self-active, the items and orders of experience of which constitute real existence, even time and space. About everything is logically implicit in their self-developing consciousness, and the recognition of each by the other constitutes the moral order. This makes an eternal republic or city of God, who is “the fulfilled type of their mind and the living bond of their union.” They control the natural world, are sources of law, and are free, for their essence is mutual relation. In the world of spirits God is not solitary and there is room for the freedom of all. The joint movement that we call evolution is transient and can never enter the real world. Creation is not an event with a date but a metaphor. The key of everything is conscience and teleology. This view differs from Leibnitz’s monadology only in denying grades and castes in these figurations of God. It makes objects in nature the manifestations of mental activity and therefore just as real as they. So the eternal reality of the individual is the supreme fact.

Royce, too, does not teach a psychology without a soul. Individualities are basal and teleological. They are aspects of the absolute life and therefore have a meaning. But in this present life, much as we strive to know and love individuals, there are no true individuals which our present minds can know or express. As we strive, therefore, to find real others, we realize that all we know of them is but a system of hints of an individuality not now revealed to us which cannot be represented by a consciousness that is made up of our own limited experience. Therefore the real individualities we loyally seek to express get from the absolute viewpoint their final expression in a life that is conscious, the only life that idealism recognizes and that in its meaning, but not in time and space, is continuous with the fragmentary, flickering existence wherein we now see so dimly our relations to God and to eternal truth.[222]