Speculate as we may upon individual and universal being, we are all but brought face to face in the end with the same transcendental x. Such speculations, however, are not without a certain utility, that of impressing us afresh with the limits of our knowledge. A belief in a transcendent immortality, as Fiske says, can be defined only negatively, as a refusal to believe that this world is everything. The materialist maintains, Fiske says, that when we have described the entire universe of phenomena, of which we are capable of taking cognizance under the conditions of this life, the whole of the story has been told. Fiske himself believes, on the contrary, that the whole has not then been told.[165] We may at least say that it is possible that the whole story has not then been told. But to pass from the possible to the probable, no conclusion of the kind can be considered satisfactory that is not based upon more positive reason, psychological or moral; unsupported metaphysical speculations leave the mind simply in the presence of a problem.
The hypothesis of a conditional eternity.
Theories in regard to an eternal life such as we above mentioned have always proved in history more or less aristocratic and inclined to limit the number of the elect. In Buddhism the sage alone is capable of achieving eternal existence, whereas all the rest of mankind are condemned to life in time and illusion. Spinoza recognizes eternity only in what he calls cognition of the third order, intellectual intuition and love. Such cognition belongs properly to the true philosopher only. The intelligence of the vulgar is passive and perishable. “The instant the vulgar cease ... to suffer,” says Spinoza, “they cease to exist.” And Goethe, too, was inclined to regard the eternal life as reserved for an aristocracy.
Criticised.
This theory of inequality is maintainable only in so far as it is based upon an actual ascertainment of the difference in progress displayed by different minds, and of the small number of those who achieve the heights of wisdom. The case is otherwise when such an observed fact of natural or moral inequality is converted into a divine right, and God is conceived as creating and desiring precisely such a state of things. The latter, however, is the alternative that modern Christian theologians have adopted in their effort to offer a re-reading of the sacred texts. In their judgment the good alone are immortal, or, rather, are immortalized by God; the others are damned, in the sense that they are totally annihilated—an interpretation of the dogma of eternal punishment that seems to them wholly to exculpate the Deity. Any such notion is based upon a metaphysical illusion. The hypothesis of traditional eternity is inconsistent with that of the existence of a creator, since it is forever impossible on that hypothesis, to escape the contradiction involved in the notion of a being’s creating only to destroy—of a being’s choosing among his creatures a certain number for condemnation to death. Annihilation is simply damnation palliated; it is the substitution of a celestial guillotine for the long miseries that have preceded. This theological hypothesis affords us no way out of the difficulties involved in the doctrine of divine sanction that lies at the heart of all religions; it is the sacrifice of Isaac, or of Jesus, in another form simply. Will it be said that, on the hypothesis of conditional immortality, the immoral being is alone responsible for his own death? Yielding to passion, or even to vice, cannot be assimilated to suicide, for in suicide one knows what one is doing and is responsible for it; one kills one’s self because one wishes to die; but one does not wish to die when one abandons one’s self to a passion; and, if the result therefore of so doing is annihilation, death comes upon one unforeseen and undesired, takes one by surprise, by a sort of divine ruse, and the responsibility for such annihilation lies and must lie with God. Moreover, how can there exist between two individuals of the same nature a sufficiently great natural or moral difference to justify the one’s being wholly annihilated, and the other’s being permitted to live in æternum? It may be said, with Plato in the “Republic,” that, if vice were a disease that is really mortal to the soul, it would kill it in this life. Its destructive influence would be felt long before the occurrence of death, which, so far as vice is concerned, is an accidental circumstance simply.
Is incompatible with human fellowship.
As the notion of conditional immortality is incompatible with the notion of an omnipotent, omniscient, sovereignly loving creator, so also is it with that of a society of souls, of a spiritual kingdom, from which a certain number of mankind would be excluded forever. An absolutely wicked and hateful soul, unpossessed of any element of humanity, not to say of divinity, and consequently unfit to live, is a pure figment of hate and amounts to transporting the caste of pariah into the celestial city. It is a contradiction in terms to enjoin us to universal charity toward all men without exception, and at the same time to wish us to consent to the absolute annihilation and damnation of some of them. We are naturally and morally too intimately related for certain of us to be condemned definitively to death without the rest of us being impeded on our upward course; we are bound to each other by our love of humanity like Alpine climbers by the cord that passes from waist to waist, and one of us cannot slip but that the rest of us feel it, nor fall without all of us falling. Nihil humani alienum; one heart beats in the bosom of humanity, and if it stops forever in a single human breast, it will stop forever in the breasts of those also who are supposed to be immortal. The best of us, those who would be fit to receive baptism into immortality, would do as the barbarous and pagan chief, who, after having washed away his sins in the holy water of the font, with salvation in his hand and Paradise before his eyes, demanded suddenly what would be the fate of his former companions who had died unconverted, and whether he should find them in heaven. “No,” replied the priest, “they will be among the miserable and the damned, and thou amongst the blessed.” “I will go, then, among the damned, for I wish to go where I shall find my companions in arms. Adieu!” And he turned his back upon the font.
Summary.