It is our intention further to consider what bold, and even adventurous hypotheses may be necessary to enable one to translate into philosophic language the sacred symbols of religion, or the destiny of the soul.
Death and idealism.
I. There are two possible conceptions as to life after death; that of eternal existence and that of immortality, properly so called, or continuation and evolution of life under a superior form. The first conception corresponds more particularly to the idealistic theories of the world, which we have analyzed above, which, regarding the basis of things as an eternal thought, a thought of thought, believe that by identifying itself with it mankind might pass out of time into eternity. Thought, which seems at first no more than a reverberation and image of things, idealists believe, turns out in the last analysis to be the very reality of which all the rest of the world is but a reflection; but this conception of an eternal existence is not in the least incompatible with the philosophy of evolution, for evolution in time does not exclude a transcendent mode of existence out of time. Such an existence, however, remains essentially problematic; it corresponds to Kant’s Noumenon and Spencer’s Unknowable; according to this hypothesis, corporal death is simply a stage in physical evolution, and the final term to be attained by all beings is their fixation in the consciousness of eternity. This point of fixation, accessible to every thinking being, is to be attained only by the highest, most disinterested, impersonal, and universal thought possible.
An eternal element in man.
Such is the hope which lies at the bottom of the great religions, and the great idealistic systems of metaphysics. According to Plato there is nothing durable in us but what relates to the eternal, and to the universal, and is therefore of the same nature as they are. All the rest is eliminated by Becoming, by perpetual Generation, that is, by evolution. A flower is, in our eyes, a friend; it owes its colour and charm, however simple, to a ray of the sun; but this ray, to which our affection is due, is wholly impersonal; it creates the beauty of the flower, and passes on its way; and it is the sun that we should love, both for the ray and the flower. Too exclusive and limited affection is always based on some mistake, and is on that account perishable. It insists on our stopping at such and such a link in the infinite chain of causes and effects. It is the principle of the universe, it is the universal being that we must love, if our heart is big enough, and it is that love alone, according to Plato, which is eternal. Is not eternity the very form of existence in the intelligible world, in which Goodness is the sun and the Ideas are the stars? Christian neo-Platonists, over and above Time and its incessant mobility, have dreamed of an intemporal and immutable somewhat, that they call the life eternal: Quæ enim videntur, temporalia sunt; quæ autem non videntur, æterna. Spinoza has dealt with the same conception of an existence under the form of eternity, which does not exclude the perpetual development of changing modes. Kant also, by his word Noumenon, designated an intelligible, intemporal, transcendent somewhat, that lay beyond the scope of physical evolution. “The eternal evolution of the soul,” Schelling has said in his turn, “is not eternal in the sense that it possesses neither a beginning nor an end, but in that it bears no relation to Time.” And Schopenhauer, finally, believes in an intemporal, eternal will, which is distinguished from the will to live that belongs to time and to the evolution of temporal forms. “We willingly recognize,” says Schopenhauer, “that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is absolutely nothing to those who are still full of the desire of life, but for those in whom desire is annihilated what does our evil world, with its sun and its Milky Way, amount to? Nothing.” It is with these words that Schopenhauer closes his book. He brings us once more into the presence of Nirvâna, conceived not only as a refuge from life, but also as a refuge from death; as an existence that shall be placeless and timeless, and, so to speak, utopian (in its primary intention) and achronistic.
Is such immortality personal or not?
But is this eternal life, the fact of which is, as we have seen, problematic, altogether impersonal or not? No certain reply can be given since we are as ignorant of the essence of individual being as of the essence of universal being, and consequently of the degree to which it is possible for individuality to subsist in universality. Schopenhauer, however, in his endeavour to ascribe to the individual a greater amount of reality than Plato allowed, opposed the principle of individuation to the natural individualities in which it manifests itself, and it may, indeed, be asked, whether genuine consciousness, genuine thought, and genuine volition do not at once pass beyond the individual, and preserve what is most essential in the individual. Individuality is always more or less physical, but it is possible that what makes individuality limited is not of the essence of personality, of consciousness; perhaps what is best in thought and will may become universal, without ceasing in the best sense to be personal like the Νοῦς of Anaxagoras.[164]
No positive knowledge to oppose to hypothesis of immortality.