The action must be followed into its effects, or into the effect of those effects, and so on infinitely. Our conduct stretches away ad infinitum, beyond the reach of our knowledge. Even from the purely physical and physiological point of view, neither intended nor attempted goodness is ineffective, since both thought and desire develop the mind. The very notion of what is to-day chimerical corresponds to a real movement in our brains; it is a mental force which contains its element of verity and influence. We inherit not only what our fathers did, but what they could not do, what they attempted and did not achieve. We are still alive with the devotion and sacrifice of our ancestors, with the courage that perhaps they spent in vain, as we feel in the spring the breath of distant antedeluvian springs and the loves of the tertiary period.
Failure in the past the guarantee of success in the future.
The ability of the present generation has been made possible by the stumbling and mistakes of generations in the past; and this embryonic and successless past constitutes the guarantee of our future. In the moral, as in the physiological world, there are instances of fertility that are not yet explicable. Sometimes long after the death of the man who first loved her the woman brings forth a child that resembles him; and humanity may bring forth a civilization on the model of some ideal cherished in the past, even when the past seems to be buried forever, if the ideal contains some obscure element of truth and, by consequence, of imperishable force. What has once really lived shall live again, and what seems to be dead is only making ready to revive. The scientific law of atavism is a guarantee of resurrection. To conceive and desire the best is to attempt the ideal, is to predetermine the path that all succeeding generations shall tread. Our highest aspirations, which seem precisely the most vain, are, as it were, waves which, having had the power to reach us, have the power to pass beyond us, and may, by a process of summation with other waves, ultimately shake the world. I am satisfied that what is best in me will survive, perhaps not one of my dreams shall be lost; other men will take them up, will dream them over again in their turn until they are realized. It is by force of spent waves that the sea fashions the immense bed in which it lies.
Death not inevitable.
In effect, in the philosophy of evolution life and death are recognized as relative and correlative conceptions; life is in one sense death, and death is the triumph of life over one of its particular forms. Proteus in the fable could be prevented from changing his shape only by being caught in sleep, which is the image of death; thus it is in nature; fixed form is sleep, is death, is a pause in the eternal fluctuation of life. Becoming and life are alike formless. Form, individuality, species, mark a transitory stoppage in the channel of life; we can neither seize nor hold nature, except when it is laid asleep, and what we call death—my death or yours—is itself a latent pulse of universal life, like one of the secret vibrations that pass through the germ during the months of apparent inertia during which it is making ready for the later stages of its development. The law of nature is eternal germination. A man of science was one day holding a handful of wheat, that had been found in the tomb of an Egyptian mummy. “Five thousand years without sight of the sun! Unhappy grains of wheat, as sterile as death, of which they have so long been the companions, never shall their tall stalks bow beneath the wind on the banks of the Nile. Never? What do I know of life, of death?” As an experiment simply, without much hope of success, the man of science sowed the grains of wheat that he had recovered from the tomb, and the wheat of the Pharaohs received the caress of the sun, of the air, and came up green through the soil of Egypt, and bowed beneath the wind on the banks of the sacred and inexhaustible flood of the Nile. And shall human thought, and the higher life which stirs in us like the germ in the seed, and love that seems to sleep forever in the tomb, not have this reawakening in some unforeseen springtime, and not be brought face to face with eternity, which seems at present to be buried, once and for all, in darkness? What is death, after all, in the universe, but a lesser degree of vital heat, a more or less transitory lowness of temperature? Death cannot be powerful enough to hold life and its perpetual youth in check, and to prevent the infinite activity of thought and of desire.
Is a more personal immortality possible?
III. Yes, I and my works shall survive; but is immortality in this sense sufficient to satisfy the religious sentiment? As an individual, what do science and the philosophy of evolution promise me or permit me to hope? A somewhat external and impersonal immortality is, as we have seen, possible; is anything in the nature of an internal or personal immortality likewise possible?
Science answers in the negative.
Assuredly, it is not of science that the individual can demand proofs of his permanence. The fact of generation is, in the eyes of the man of science, in and of itself a negative of individual immortality; the social instinct which opens our hearts to thousands of other beings emphasizes the negation, and the scientific and metaphysical instincts themselves, which cause us to take an interest in the sensitive world, in its laws and destinies, diminish, so to speak, our importance as limited individuals. Thought breaks the limits of the self in which it is confined, and our breast is too narrow to contain our heart. Oh, how rapidly one learns in science and in art to make small account of one’s self, and this diminution of self-esteem neither lessens one’s enthusiasm nor one’s ardour, but adds to them only an element of manly sadness such as a soldier might feel who says: “I count for but one in the battle, nay, for less than that, for but a hundred millionth, and if I should disappear the result of the contest would no doubt not be changed, and yet I shall stay and fight.”