For Renouvier, as for Kant, the chief arguments for survival are based on considerations of a moral character, upon the demands of the moral ideal for self- realisation, for the attainment of holiness or, more properly, “wholeness.” This progress can only be made possible by the continued existence after bodily death of the identical personality, unique and of eternal worth in the scheme of things, capable of further development than is possible amid the conditions of life as we know it.
We must, however, present to ourselves Immortality as given by the development of appearances in this world of phenomena, under the general laws with which we are acquainted to-day, thus correcting the method of Kant, who placed Immortality in a noumenal world. The salvation of a philosopher should not be of such a kind. We must treat Immortality as a Law, not as a miracle. The thinker who accepts the latter view quits the realm of science—that is, of experience and reason—to establish a mystic order in contradiction with the laws of nature. The appeal to the “supernatural” is the denial of nature, and the appellant ruins his own case by his appeal. If Immortality is a fact, it must be considered rationally.
Is Death—that is, the destruction of individuals as such, or the annihilation of personalities—a reality? Renouvier reminds those who jeer at the doctrine of Immortality that “the reality of death (as so defined) has not been, and cannot be, proved.” Our considerations must of necessity be hypothetical, but they can be worthy of rational beings. We must then keep our hopes and investigations within the realm of the universe and not seek to place our hope of immortality in a region where nothing exists, “not even an ether to support the wings of our hope.”
Renouvier’s general considerations led him to view all individuals as having a destiny in which their individuality should be conserved and developed. When we turn in particular to man, these points are to be seen in fuller light. The instinctive belief in Immortality is bound up with his nature as a thinking being who is capable of setting up, and of striving after, ends. This continual striving is a marked characteristic of all human life, a counting oneself not to have attained, a missing of the mark.
The human consciousness protests against annihilation. At times this is very keenly expressed. “At the period of the great aspirations of the heart, the ecstasy of noble passions is accompanied by the conviction of Immortality. Life at its highest, realising its richest personality, protests, in virtue of its own worth, and in the name of the depths of power it still feels latent in itself, against the menace of annihilation.”[[12]] It cries out with its unconquerable soul:
“Give me the glory of going on and not to die!”
[12] Psychologie rationnelle, vol. 2, p. 249.
Renouvier finds a further witness in the testimony of Love—that is to say, in nature itself arrived at the consciousness of that passion in virtue of which it exists and assuring itself by this passion, of the power to surmount all these short-comings and failures. Love casteth out fear, the dread of annihilation, and shows itself “stronger than death.” Hope and Love unite in strengthening the initial belief in Immortality and the “will to survive.”
Renouvier admits that this is a priori reasoning, and speedily a posteriori arguments can be brought up as mighty battering-rams against the fortress of immortal life, but although they mav shake its walls, they are unable to destroy the citadel. Nothing can demonstrate the impossibility of future existence, whereas the whole weight of the moral law and the teleological elements at work in the universe are, according to Renouvier, in favour of such a belief.
Morality, like every other science, is entitled to, nay obliged to, employ the hypothesis of harmony. Now in this connection the hypothesis of harmony (or, as Kant styled it, the concurrence of happiness and virtue necessary to a conception of order) finds reinforcement from the consideration of the meaning and significance of freedom. For the actual end or purpose of freedom is not simply the attainment of perfection, but rather the possibility of progress. Immortality becomes a necessary postulate, reinforced by instinct, reason, morality, by the fact of freedom, and the notion of progress. Further, Renouvier feels that if we posit death as the end of all we thereby give an absolute victory to physical evil in the universe.