True love should never be expressed in the language of time. We say: “I loved my father during his lifetime; I was deeply attached to my mother or my sister.” Why locate it in the past? Why not say always: “I love my father or my mother?” Does not, and should not, love lay claim to an eternal present?
Uniqueness of the individual.
How could one say to a mother that there is nothing truly and definitively alive, personal, unique, in the at once smiling and meditative eyes of the child she holds upon her knees; that the little being that she dreams of mature, and good, and great, is a simple incident in the life of the species? No; her child is not like any other that has ever lived or that ever will live; none other could possess that look. Nowhere among the generations of men can there exist a fac-simile of the beloved face before one. All nature does not possess the equivalent of the individual, which it can destroy, but not replace. It is not, therefore, without reason that love refuses to consent to the substitution of one individual for another, which constitutes the very movement of life; it cannot reconcile itself to the eternal whirl in the dust of being; it is bent on fixing life, on arresting the world in mid-progress. But the world does not stop at its bidding. The future calls to generation after generation, and this powerful force of attraction is also a force of dissolution. Nature gives birth by means of death, and the joy of new loves is composed of the fragments of the old.
The protest of love against death not limited to humanity.
This protest of love against death, against the dissolution of the individual, attaches also to the lower animals. A dog, it seems, has only a market value, and yet can I ever buy again one that shall be the equivalent of this one that has died before my eyes? He loved me with all the power of his unhappy being, and endeavoured to hold fast to me while he was slipping away, and I endeavoured to hold him fast. Does not every being that loves acquire a right to immortality? Yes; the ideal of affection would be to immortalize all conscious beings; nay, more, the poet who is delicately sensitive to the individuality of a flower, or a ray of coloured light, of the drop of dew that refracts it, would wish to immortalize all nature, would wish to view under the form of eternity the rainbow that quivers in a soap bubble; for can any two bubbles ever be the same? And yet, while the poet aims thus at holding everything fast, at preserving everything, at fixing his dreams, at enchaining the ocean of life, the man of science replies that the eternal flood must be allowed to pulsate, to engulf our tears and our blood, and that the world must be left free. For the man of science, the flux and reflux and progress of life are more sacred than the love of the individual.
Antagonism between love and science.
Thus, in the question of individual immortality, two great forces drag human thought in opposite directions. Science is inclined everywhere to sacrifice the individual in the name of natural evolution; love is inclined, in the name of a higher moral and social evolution, to preserve the individual. The antinomy is one of the most disquieting that the philosophic mind has to deal with.
The best in one may survive.