Should science be admitted to be wholly in the right, or must we believe that an element of truth exists in the social instinct which lies at the basis of affection, as there is a presentiment and anticipation of the truth in all great natural instincts? The social instinct possesses a greater value at the present day, because philosophers are beginning to consider even the individual as a society, and to recognize association as a universal law of nature. Love, which is the power of cohesion at its highest degree, is perhaps right in its desire for an element in the association between individuals. Its sole error is that of exaggerating its pretensions and of misplacing its hopes. After all, one must not be too exacting nor ask too much of nature. A true philosopher, even for those that he loves, should not shrink from proof by fire, and death is the flame that purifies while it consumes. If anything survives the ordeal that alone is much, and if what survives is precisely what is best in us, what more can be asked? One may break the vase, of which Epictetus speaks, but the perfume remains, and floats out into the air, and becomes, no doubt, ultimately indistinguishable, but still subsists.
Sociology and the problem of immortality.
The science which seems to offer the strongest opposition to the preservation of the individual is mathematics, which recognizes the existence of nothing in the world but variable and equivalent figures and abstractions. On the contrary, perhaps the most concrete of the sciences, sociology, recognizes everywhere groups of realities; sociology therefore cannot hold relations that arise out of association, nor the terms between which they exist, so cheap. Let us consider whether, from the point of view of a more complete and more concrete science, consciousness, which is the principle of personality, properly so called, necessarily and forever excludes the possibility of indefinite duration that all great sciences attribute to the spirit.
The basis of existence not substance but activity.
III. Antique metaphysics gave too much attention to questions of substance, to considering whether the soul is simple or complex. The question amounts to whether the soul is made of indivisible or divisible material; it assumes as the basis of the phenomena of mind, an imaginary and in some sort extended substance. It was upon this doctrine of the simple substance that the demonstration of the immortality of the soul was founded. Evolutionist philosophy tends to fix our attention nowadays, not on the substance, but on the way the substance behaves, that is to say, in physical terms, on movements.[166] Consciousness is a certain action accompanied by a certain collective unity of movements. If it exists in a substance it is not the duration of this substance that interests us, but that of its activity, since it is that activity which constitutes our consciousness.
Continuity of existence means continuity of function.
Wundt is one of the contemporary philosophers, who, after Aristotle, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant, has best shown the illusiveness of endeavouring to discover a simple substance underlying consciousness. It is only internal experience, he says, only consciousness itself, that comes to us guaranteed by immediate certainty. And this implies, he adds, “that all these substances which spiritualism regards as the basis of subjective or objective experience are of the highest degree of uncertainty, for in no experience whatsoever are they given. They are deliberate fictions, by the aid of which it has been attempted to explain the unity of experience.” The true explanation of this unity should be sought for elsewhere in continuity of function, and not in simplicity of substance. “The consecutive effects of anterior states combine with those which arise later; in this way there is caused a subjective continuity of states which corresponds to the objective continuity of movement, which is the condition of unity of consciousness.” The binding together of successive mental states is lacking in bodies, although they must possess the germ of action and of sensation. For this reason Leibnitz was right in saying that bodies are “momentary spirits,” which forget everything immediately, and know only a present, uncomplicated by a past or a future. Conscious life, on the contrary, by the very means of changing elements, realizes a continuity of mental functions, a memory of the past, a certain durability. This continuity is not a result of simplicity, but, on the contrary, of the higher complexity that belongs to mental functions. “On the physical side, as on the psychical side,” says Wundt, “the living body is a unity; this unity is not founded in simplicity but in compositeness of a high degree of complexity. Consciousness, with its multitude of combined states, is a unity analogous to that of the bodily organism. The absolute correlation between the physical and the psychical suggests the following hypothesis:[167] that what we call the soul is the internal aspect of what, in its external aspect, we call the body that contains the soul. This way of conceiving the problem of correlation inevitably leads us to the belief that the essence of reality is intellectual, and that the fundamental attribute of being is development or evolution. Human consciousness is the highest point of such evolution; it constitutes the nodal point in the course of nature where the world recollects itself. It is not as a simple being but as a product evolved out of innumerable elements that the human soul is, as Leibnitz says, ‘a mirror of the world.’”[168]
The problem of immortality at the present day.
From this modern point of view, which is a development of that of Aristotle,[169] the question of immortality amounts to asking how far the continuity of mental functions may be supposed to extend the continuity of one’s intellectual being, which is the subjective unity of a complex multiplicity aware of itself as such?