The soul's desires for personal immortality is one of the aspects of the soul's "possessive" instinct. The soul desires to "possess" itself—itself as it exactly is, itself in its precise and complete "status quo"—without interruption for ever. But love has a very different desire from this. Love is not concerned with time at all—for time has a "future"; and any contemplation of a "future" implies the activity of something in the soul which is different from love, implies something which is concerned with outward events and occurrences and chances. But love is not concerned with outward events, whether past or future. Love desires eternity and eternity alone. Or rather it does not "desire" eternity. It is eternity. It is an eternal Now, in which what will happen and what has happened are irrelevant and unimportant.
All this offers us an intelligible explanation of a very bewildering phenomenon in human life. I mean the instinctive disgust experienced by the aesthetic sense when men, who otherwise seem gentle and good, display an undue and unmeasured agitation about the fate of their souls.
Love never so much as even considers the question of the fate of the soul. Love finds, in the mere act of loving, a happiness so profound that all such problems seem tiresome and insignificant. The purpose of life is to attain the rhythmic ecstasy of all love's intrinsic potentialities. This desire for personal immortality is not one of love's intrinsic potentialities. When a human soul has lost by death the one person it has loved, the strength of its love is measured by the greater or less emphasis it places upon the problem of the lost one's "survival."
The disgust which the aesthetic sense experiences when it encounters a certain sort of mystical and psychic agitation over the question as to whether the lost one "lives still somewhere" is a disgust based upon our instinctive knowledge that this particular kind of inquiry would never occur to a supreme and self-forgetful love. For this enquiry, this agitation, this dabbling in "psychic evidences," is a projection of the baser nature of the soul; is, in fact, a projection of the "possessive instinct," which is only another name for the original inert malice.
In the "ave atque vale" of the Roman poet, there is much more of the absolute quality of great love than in all these psychic dabblings. For in the austere reserve of that passionate cry there is the ultimate acceptance, by Love itself, of the tragedy of having lived and loved at all. There is an acceptance of that aspect of the "vision of the immortals" which implies that the possessive instinct has no part or lot in the eternal.
The inhuman cruelties which have been practised by otherwise "good" men under the motive of "saving" other people's souls, and the inhuman cruelties which have been practised by otherwise "good" men under the motive of saving their own souls, have, each of them, the same evil origin. Love sweeps aside, in one great wave of its own nature, all these doubts and ambiguities. It lifts the object of its love into its own eternity; and in its own eternity the ultimate tragedy of personal separation is but one chord of its unbroken rhythm.
The tragedy of personal separation is not a thing which love realizes for the first time when it loses the object of its love. It is a thing which is of the very nature of the eternity in which love habitually dwells. For the eternity in which love habitually dwells is its vision of the tragedy of all life.
This, then, is the original revelation of the complex vision. The soul is confronted by an ultimate duality which extends through the whole mass of its impressions. And because this duality extends through every aspect of the soul's universe and can be changed and transformed by the soul's will, it is inevitable that what the world has hitherto named "philosophy" and has regarded as the effort of "getting hold" of a reality which exists already, should be named by the complex vision the "art of life" and should be regarded as the effort of reducing to harmony the unruly impulses and energies which perpetually transform and change the world.
CHAPTER V.