Counsels resignation.
Scientifically considered, individuality is a sort of provisional native land, and one’s native land is a sort of magnified individual with a consciousness composed of ideas and sentiments, and one’s love for one’s country may be greater than one’s love for such and such an individual. Such a love does not prevent us from understanding that our country will not be immortal as a nation, that it will have its periods of growth and of decay, that the obstacles which keep peoples apart are caducous, and that nations incessantly disappear and lose old elements and take on new. Why, merely from the fact that we love our own individuality, should we not consent to the same reasoning in regard to it; why should we wish to imprison it forever within the limits of the same individuality? If a nation dies, why should not a man? If it sometimes amounts to divination to cry out as one falls on the battlefield, “Finis patriæ!” does it any the less surely amount to divination to cry out in the presence of death, “Finis individuæ”? Could Kosciusko feel that he himself had a right to live when Poland and the ideas and beliefs to which he had devoted his life were no more?
Dignity of resignation.
A young girl, a relative of mine, on the point of death and unable to articulate, signified her wish for a piece of paper. When it was given to her, she began to write, “I do not want——” Death suddenly intervened and interrupted her volition before it could find expression in words; the thinking being and the expression of her thought seemed to be annihilated by the same blow. The child’s protest, like her life, was interrupted in the middle. Volition is powerless against death, and it is useless to stiffen one’s will against the final blow. On the contrary, man’s sole superiority in death consists in acceptance. Pascal’s conscious reed might not only be constrained to bend like any other reed, it might bend consentingly and respect the law that requires its death. Next to consciousness of his own power, the highest of man’s privileges is consciousness of the limits of his power, at least as an individual. Out of the very disproportion between the infinity that kills us, and the nothing that constitutes us, arises the sense of a certain greatness in us; we prefer to be stricken by a mountain rather than by a pebble; we should rather fall in a struggle against a thousand than in a struggle against one; so that intelligence, by measuring the greatness of our adversary, deprives us of regret at our defeat.
Desire to survive egoistic.
To desire to make the individual, who is more or less physical even in his moral nature, eternal, is, in the eyes of the man of science, a remnant of egoism. In his judgment, the human mind should accept the death of the individual by a species of intellectual devotion analogous to that with which we accept the death of our native country. Modern men of science may be defined as those who have no hope, ὁι μὴ ἔχοντες ἐλπίδα, as St. Paul said; we are individually of too small account in the eyes of science to live always individually.
But only when it relates to one’s self.
Ought we, therefore, to consent cheerfully to the sacrifice of self, and to die willingly for the benefit of the universal life? So far as one’s self is concerned, one can make the sacrifice lightly, but the annihilation of those one loves cannot be accepted by a conscious and affectionate being. It is in vain for scientific and philosophic stoicism to urge with Epictetus that it is natural for a vase, which is fragile, to break, and for a man, who is mortal, to die. The question still remains, whether what is natural and scientific ought, as the Stoics alleged, to satisfy my reason and my love. As a matter of fact, when one really loves another person, what one endeavours to love is not the element of fragility, the vase of clay, but the intelligence and the heart, which Epictetus declines to consider separately from their perishable accompaniments. One attaches one’s self to them as to something permanent; one corrects and transfigures nature itself, and passes in thought beyond the brutality of its laws, and therein lies, perhaps, the very essence of the love of another. If the laws of nature, after seeming for a moment to be suspended and vanquished by the force of one’s disinterested love, subsequently break the bond that holds them in check, is it surprising that one’s love should still hold out against them? It is not only pain that I experience at being baffled by the laws of nature; it is indignation, it is the sense of injustice. The Stoics regarded pain as a passive affection of the sensibility simply, but moral pain implies a struggle of the will against nature, and an effort, as they themselves admit, to correct it. It is on this ground that pain is not an evil; its rôle is incessantly to impose our moral and social ideal on our physical nature, to force it to perfect itself; pain is the principle of development in life, and if there exists a means of vanquishing death, it is perhaps by virtue of pain that we shall arrive at it. We are right, therefore, in rebelling against nature’s powers of life and death, in so far as she exercises them for the purpose of annihilating what is morally best in us and in others.
Love under the form of eternity.