The postulate of Immortality has a certain dignity and worth. The discussion of future life must, however, be kept within the possibilities of law and phenomena. Religious views, such as those of Priestley, by their appeal to the miraculous debase the notion of Immortality itself. Talk of an immortal essence, and a mortal essence is meaningless, for unless the same identical person, with his unique character and memory, persists, then our conception of immortality is of little or no value. The idea of an indestructible spiritual substance is not any better or more acceptable. Our notion of a future life must be based upon the inherent and inalienable rights of the moral person to persistence and to chances of further development or progress. Although we must beware of losing ourselves in vain speculations, which really empty our thought of all its content, Renouvier claims that we are quite entitled to lay down hypotheses.
The same general laws which we see in operation and which have brought the universe and the beings in it to the stage of development in which they now are may, without contradiction, be conceived as operating in further developments after the change we call bodily death. There is no incongruity in conceiving the self-same personality continuing in a second and different organism. Renouvier cites the case of the grub and the butterfly and other metamorphoses. In man himself he points to organic crises, which give the organism a very different character and effect a radical change in its constitution. For example, there is the critical exit from the mother’s womb, involving the change from a being living in an enclosure to that of an independent creature. When once the crisis of the first breath be passed the organism starts upon another life. There are other crises, as, for instance, the radical changes which operate in both sexes at the stage of puberty. Just as the personality persists in its identity through all these changes, may it not pass through that of bodily death?
The Stoics believed in a cosmic resurrection. Substituting the idea of progress for their view of a new beginning, Renouvier claims that we may attain the hypothesis that all human history is but a fragment in a development incomparably greater and grander. Again, we may conceive of life in two worlds co-existing, indeed interpenetrating, so that the dead are not gone far from us into some remote heaven.
But, whatever form we give to our hypothesis regarding progress into another existence beyond this present one, Renouvier does not easily allow us to forget that it must be based upon the significance of freedom, progress and personality supported by moral considerations. Even this progress is not guaranteed, and even if it should be the achievement of some spirits there is no proof that it is universal. Our destiny, he finally reminds us, lies in our own hands, for progress here means an increased capacity for progress later, while spiritual and moral indifference will result finally, and indeed, necessarily, in annihilation. Here, as so often in his work, Renouvier puts moral arguments and appeals in the forefront of his thought. Progress in relation to humanity’s life on earth drew from him an appeal for the establishment of justice: progress in a further world implies equally a moral appeal. Our duty is to keep the ideal of progress socially and individually ever before us, and to be worthy of immortality if it be a fact, rather than to lose ourselves in the mistaken piety of “other- worldliness.” About neither progress can we be dogmatic; it is not assured, Renouvier has shown, and we must work for it by the right use of our freedom, our intelligence and our will.
III
No thinker discussed the problem of progress with greater energy or penetration than Renouvier. The new spiritualist group, however, developed certain views arising from the question of contingency, or the relation of freedom to progress. These thinkers were concerned more with psychological and metaphysical work, and with the exception of Fouillée and Guyau, they wrote little which bore directly upon the problem of progress. Many of their ideas, however, have an indirect bearing upon important points at issue.
In Ravaisson, Lachelier and Boutroux, we find the question of teleology presented, and also that of the opposition of spirit and matter. From the outset the new spiritualism had to wrestle with two difficulties inherent in the thought of Ravaisson. These were, firstly, the reconciliation of the freedom and spontaneity of the spirit with the operations of a Divine Providence or teleology of some kind; and, secondly, the dualism assumed in the warfare of spirit and matter, although spirit was held to be superior and anterior to matter. This last involved a complication for any doctrine of progress, as it required a primitive “fall” to account for matter, even a fall of the Deity himself. This Ravaisson himself admits, and he thinks that in creating the world God had to sacrifice some of his own being. In this case “progress” is set over against a transcendental existence, and is but the reawakening of what once existed in God, and in a sense now and eternally exists. Progress there is, claims Ravaisson, towards truth and beauty and goodness. This is the operation of a Divine Providence acting by attracting men freely to these ideals, and as these are symbols of God himself, progress is the return of the spirit through self-conscious personalities to the fuller realisation of harmony, beauty and love—that is, to the glory of God, who has ever been, now is, and ever shall be, perfect beauty, goodness and love.
Thus, although from a temporal and finite standpoint Ravaisson can speak of progress, it is doubtful if he is justified in doing so ultimately, sub specie æternitatis. To solve the problem in the way he presents it, one would need to know more about the ultimate value and significance of the personalities themselves, and their destiny in relation to the Divinity who is, as he claims, perfect harmony, beauty and love. It was this point, so dear to an upholder of personality, which had led Renouvier to continue his discussion of progress in relation to history as generally understood, until it embraced a wider field of eternal destiny, and to consider the idea of a future life as arising from, and based upon, the conception of progress. It is this same point which later perplexes Bergson, when he recognises this self-conscious personality as the ultimate development of the évolution créatrice, and so constituting in a sense the goal of the spirit, although he is careful to state that there is no finalism involved at all. Ravaisson stands for this finalism, however, in claiming that there are ends. He does not see how otherwise we could speak of progress, as we should have no criterion, no terminus ad quem; all would be simply process, not progress.
“Détachement de Dieu, retour à Dieu, clôture du grand cercle cosmique, restitution de l’universel équilibre, telle est l’histoire du monde.” Such is Ravaisson’s doctrine, much of which is akin to, and indeed re-echoes, much in Christian theology from St. Augustine, with his idea of an eternal and restless movement of return to the divinity, to the Westminster divines in their answer to the important query about the chief end of man, which they considered to be not only to glorify God but to enjoy Him for ever. This last and rather strange phrase only seems to have significance if we conceive, in Ravaisson’s manner, of beauty, truth and goodness as expressions or manifestations of the Divinity to whom the world-process may freely tend.
For Lachelier the universal process presents a triple aspect, mechanism which is coupled with finalism and with freedom. These three principles are in action simultaneously in the world and in the individual. Each of us is at once matter, living soul and personality—that is, necessity, finality and freedom. The laws of the universe, so far from being expressed entirely by mechanical formulae, can only be expressed, as Ravaisson had claimed, by an approach to harmony and beauty, not in terms of logic or geometry. All this involves a real progress, a creativeness, which differs from Ravaisson’s return, as it were, to the bosom of God.