Life Everlasting

by John Fiske

To come back now to our primeval savage, when he sees in a dream his deceased comrade and mistakes the vision for a reality, his error is not concerned with the most fundamental part of the matter. The all-important fact is that this dreaming savage has somehow acquired a mental attitude toward death which is totally different from that of all other animals, and is therefore peculiarly human. Throughout the half-dozen invertebrate branches or sub-kingdoms, where intelligence is manifested only in its lower forms of reflex action and instinct, we find no evidence that any creature has come to know of death. There is a sense, no doubt, in which we may say that the love of life is universal. As a rule, all animals shun danger, and natural selection maintains this rule by the pitiless slaughter of all delinquents, of all in whom the needful inherited tendencies are too weak. But in the lower animal grades and in the vegetal world the courting of life and the shrinking from death go on without conscious intelligence, as the blades of grass in a meadow or the clustering leaves upon a tree compete with one another for the maximum of exposure to sunshine until perhaps stout boughs and stems are warped or twisted in the struggle. Among invertebrates, even when we get so high as lobsters and cuttlefish, the consciousness attendant upon the seizing of prey and the escape from enemies probably does not extend beyond the facts within the immediate sphere of vision. Even among those ants that have marshalled hosts and grand tactics there is doubtless no such thing as meditation of death. Passing to the vertebrates, it is not until we reach the warm-blooded birds and mammals that we find what we are seeking. Among sundry birds and mammals we see indications of a dawning recognition of the presence of death. An early manifestation is the sense of bereavement when the maternal instinct is rudely disturbed, as in the cow mourning for her calf. This feeling goes a little way, but not a great way, beyond the sense of physical discomfort, and is soon relieved by milking. Much more intense and abiding is the feeling of bereavement among birds that mate for life, and among the higher apes, and it reaches its culmination in the dog whose intelligence and affections have been so profoundly modified through his immensely long comradeship with man. Nowhere in literature do we strike upon a deeper note of pathos than in Scott's immortal lines on the dog who starved while watching his young master's lifeless body, alone upon a Highland moor:—

"How long didst thou think that his silence was slumber?
When the wind stirred his garment, how oft didst thou start!"

Yet even this devoted creature could have carried his thoughts but little way toward the point reached by our dreaming savage with his incipient ghost-world. More power of abstraction and generalization was needed. While the sight of the killing of a fellow-creature may arouse violent terror in the higher mammals below man, there is nothing to indicate that the sight of the dead body awakens in the dumb spectator any general conceptions in which his own ultimate doom is included. The only feeling aroused seems to vary between utter indifference and faint curiosity. Professor Shaler makes a statement of cardinal importance in this connection when he says: "If we should seek some one mark which, in the intellectual advance from the brutes to man, might denote the passage to the human side, we might well find it in the moment when it dawned on the nascent man that death was a mystery which he had in his turn to meet."[1]

It is therefore interesting to note that the first approaches, albeit remote ones, toward a realizing sense of death occur among those animals in which the beginnings of family life have been made, and the habitual exercise of altruistic emotions helps to widen the intelligence and facilitate the appropriation to one's self of the experiences of one's comrades and mates. Such is the case with permanently mated birds and with the higher apes, while the case of the dog, exceptional as it is through his acquired dependence upon man, has similar implications. Now I have elsewhere proved and repeatedly illustrated that the leading peculiarity which distinguished man's apelike progenitors from all other creatures was the progressive increase in the duration of infancy, which was a direct consequence of expanding intelligence, and was moreover the immediate cause of the genesis of the human family and of human society. It appears now that the realizing sense of death, such as we find it in untutored men of primitive habits of thought, has originated in the selfsame circumstances which have wrought the mighty change from gregariousness to sociality, from the general level of mammalian existence to the unique level of humanity. I have elsewhere called attention to the profoundly interesting fact that the notion of an Unseen World beyond that in which we lead our daily lives is coeval with the earliest beginnings of Humanity upon our planet. We may now observe that it adds greatly to the interest and to the significance of this fact, when we find that the very circumstances which tended to single out our progenitors, and raise them from the average mammalian level into Manhood, tended also to make them realize the problem of death and meet it with a solution. The grouping of facts now begins to make it appear that this primeval solution was but the natural outcome of the whole cosmic process that had gone before; that when nascent Humanity first eluded the burden of the problem by rising above it, this was but part and parcel of the unprecedented cosmic operation through which man's Humanity was developed and declared. The long and cumulative play of cause and effect which wrought the lengthening of the period of helpless babyhood and the correlative maternal care, and which thus differentiated the non-human horde of primates into a group of human clans, was attended by a strong development of the sympathetic feelings as it vastly increased the mutual dependence among individuals. During the same period the gradual acquirement of articulate speech was accompanied by a great increase in the powers of abstraction and generalization. These new capacities were applied to the interpretation of death, just as they were applied to all other things; and thus, in the very process of becoming human, our progenitors arose to the consciousness of death as something with which humanity has always and everywhere to reckon. From the earliest and most rudimentary stages of the process, however, the conception of death was not of an event which puts an end to human individuality, but of an event which human individuality survives. If we look at the circumstances of the genesis of mankind purely from the naturalist's point of view, it cannot fail to be highly significant that the mental attitude toward death should from the first have assumed this form, that the human soul should from the start have felt itself encompassed not only by the endless multitude of visible and tangible and audible things, but also by an Unseen World. In view of this striking fact it is of small moment that the earliest generalizations which in course of time developed into a world of ghosts and demons were grotesquely erroneous. Primitive theorizing is sure to be faulty and in the light of later knowledge comes to seem absurd and bizarre. Such has been in modern days the fate of the savage's ghost-world, along with the Ptolemaic astronomy, the doctrine of signatures, and many another sample of the "wisdom of the ancients." But the fact that primitive man mis-stated his relation to the Unseen World in no wise militates against the truth of his assumption that such a world exists for us.

To this question as to the truth of the assumption I shall return in the sequel. We have very briefly sketched the manner of its origination, and here we may leave this part of our subject with the remark that the belief in a future life, in a world unseen to mortal eyes, is not only coeval with the beginnings of the human race but is also coextensive with it in all its subsequent stages of development. It is in short one of the differential attributes of humanity. Man is not only the primate who possesses articulate speech and the power of abstract reasoning, who is characterized by a long period of plastic infancy and a corresponding capacity for progress, who is grouped in societies of which the primordial units were clans; he is not only all this, but he is the creature who expects to survive the event of physical death. This expectation was one of his acquisitions gained while attaining to the human plane of existence, and the interesting question in the natural history of man is whether it is to be regarded as a permanent acquisition, or is rather analogous to the organ that subserves, perhaps through long ages, an important but temporary purpose, after the fulfilment of which it dwindles into a rudiment neglected and forgotten.

I do not overlook the existence of divers theological systems in which the attitude toward a future life is very different from that with which our Christian education has made us familiar. We sometimes hear such systems cited as exceptions to the alleged universality of the human belief in immortality. The Buddhist looks forward through myriads of successive sentient existences to a culminating state of Nirwana, which if not actual extinction is at least complete quiescence, the absolute zero of being. It hardly needs saying, however, that Buddhistic theology, though it may have arrived at such a zero through long flights of metaphysical reasoning, is nevertheless based in all its foundations upon the primitive belief in man's survival of death. Sometimes it is said that the Jews of the Old Testament times had no proper conception of immortality. It can hardly be maintained, however, that such stories as that of the conversation at Endor between the living Saul and the dead Samuel could emanate from a people destitute of belief in a life after death. In point of fact ancient Jewish thought abounds in traces of the primitive ghost-world. It is only by contrast with the glorious and inspiring Christian development of the belief in immortality that the earlier dispensation seems so jejune and meagre in its faith. There was little to arouse religious emotion in the dismal world of flitting shadows, the Sheol or Hades from which the Greek hero would so gladly have escaped, even to take the most menial position in all the sunlit world. Greek and Hebrew thought, in what we call the classic ages, stood alike in need of religious revival. The mythic lore of the Greek mind had flowered luxuriantly in æsthetic fancies, while the spiritual life of Judaism languished amid strict obedience to forms and precepts. The far-reaching thoughts of Greek philosophers and the lofty ethics of Hebrew preachers were divorced from the primitive ghost-world, even as the mental processes of the modern scholar are separated by a great gulf from those of the woman who comes to scrub the floor. The advent of Christianity fused together the various elements. The doctrine of a future life was endowed with all the moral significance that Jewish thought could give to it, and with all the mystic glory that Hellenic speculation could contribute, so that the effect upon men was that of a fresh revelation of life and immortality through the gospel. Grotesque and hideous features also were brought in from the ghost-worlds of the classic ages, as well as from that of the Teutonic barbarians, and the result is seen in mediæval Christianity. At no other time, perhaps, has the Unseen World played such a leading part in men's minds as in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of our Christian era, in the age that witnessed the culmination of sublimity in church architecture, in the society whose thought found comprehensive expression in the "Summa" of St. Thomas, as the thought of our times is expressed in Spencer's "First Principles," in an intellectual atmosphere, which just as it was about passing away was depicted for all coming time in the poem of Dante. It was a time of spiritual awakening such as mankind had never before witnessed, but it was also an age of new problems, an age wherein the seeds of revolt were thickly germinating. The nature and constitution of the Unseen World had been too rashly and too elaborately set forth in theorems born of the slender knowledge of primitive times, and the growing tendency to interrogate Nature soon led to conclusions which broke down the old edifice of thought. In the sixteenth century came Copernicus and administered such a shock to the mind as even Luther's defiance of the papacy scarcely equalled. In recent days, when Bishop Wilberforce reckoned without his host in trying to twit Huxley with his monkey ancestry, our minds were getting inured to all sorts of audacious innovations, so that they did not greatly disturb us. For its unsettling effects upon time-honoured beliefs and mental habits the Darwinian theory is no more to be compared to the Copernican than the invention of the steamboat is to be compared to the voyages of Columbus. We are in no danger of overrating the bewilderment that was wrought by the discovery that our earth is not the physical centre of things, and that the sun apparently does not exist for the sole purpose of giving light and warmth to man's terrestrial habitat. We need not wonder that in conservative Spain scarcely a century ago the University of Salamanca prohibited the teaching of the Newtonian astronomy. We need not wonder that Galileo should have been commanded to hold his tongue on a topic that seemed to cast discredit upon the whole theology that assumes man to be the central object of the Divine care.

This unsettling of men's minds was of course indefinitely increased by the revolt of Descartes against the scholastic philosophy, by Newton's immense contributions to physics, and by such discoveries as those of Harvey, Black, and Lavoisier, which showed by what methods truth could be obtained concerning Nature's operations, and how different such methods were from those by which the accepted systems of theology had been built up. The result has been wholesale skepticism directed against everything whatever that now exists or has ever existed in the shape of an ancient belief. This result was first reached in France about the middle of the eighteenth century, when the thoughts of Locke and Newton were eagerly absorbed in a community irritated beyond endurance by social injustice, and in which the church had done much to forfeit respect. Thus came about that violent outbreak of materialistic atheism which, in spite of its generous aims and many admirable achievements, is surely one of the most mournful episodes in the history of human thought. The French philosophers set an example to three generations; the note struck by Diderot and Buffon and D'Alembert continued to resound until the scientific horizon had become radiant in every quarter with the promise of a brighter day, and its echoes have not yet died. It was but lately that the voice of Lamettrie was heard again from the lips of Strauss and Buechner, and even to-day we may sometimes be entertained by a belated eighteenth century naturalist who is fully persuaded that his denial of human immortality is an inevitable corollary from the doctrine of evolution. Indeed the progress of scientific discovery has been so rapid since the time of Diderot, its achievements have been so vast, its results so multifarious and so dazzling, that it has well-nigh absorbed the attention of the foremost minds. The dogmas of theology seem stale and empty, the speculations of metaphysics vain and unprofitable, in comparison with the fascinating marvels of chemistry and astronomy, of palæontology and spectrum analysis; and it is natural that we should rejoice over the methods of research that are enabling us thus to wrest from Nature a few of her long guarded secrets, and to make up our minds to have nothing to do with conclusions that are not obtained or at least verified by such scientific methods. Daily we hear sounded the praises of observation, of experiment, of comparison; we are warned against long deductions, since the strength of any chain of arguments is measured by that of its weakest link, and experience is perpetually teaching us, to our vexation and chagrin, that what reason says must be so is not so, that facts will not fit hypothesis. The more things we try to explain, the better we realize that we live in a world of unexplained residua. Away, then, with all so-called truths that cannot be tested by weights and measures, or other direct appeals to the senses! Your modern philosopher will have nothing of them. His system is composed, from start to finish, of scientific theorems. As for the higher speculations, the deeper generalizations, in which philosophy has been wont to indulge concerning the aim and meaning of existence, he waves them away as profitless or even mischievous. The world is full of questions as pressing as they are baffling. As I once heard Herbert Spencer say, "You cannot take up any problem in physics without being quickly led to some metaphysical problem which you can neither solve nor evade." It was in order to secure philosophic peace of mind that Auguste Comte undertook to build up what he called Positive Philosophy, in which the existence of all such problems was to be complacently ignored,—much as the ostrich seeks escape from a dilemma by burying its head in the sand. In a far more reverent and justifiable spirit the agnostic like Huxley or Spencer acknowledges the limitations of the human mind and builds as far as he may, leaving the rest to God.

In the fervour of this modern reliance upon scientific methods, we are warned with especial emphasis against all humours and predilections which we may be in danger of cherishing as human beings. In a new sense of the words we are reminded that "the heart of man is deceitful and desperately wicked," and if any belief is especially pleasant or consoling to us, forthwith does Science lay upon us her austere command to mortify the flesh and treat the belief in question with exceptional disfavour and suspicion. Thus there has grown up a kind of Puritanism in the scientific temper which, while announcing its unalterable purpose to follow Truth though she lead us to Hades, takes a kind of grim satisfaction in emphasizing the place of destination.

Now there can be no sort of doubt that this rigid and vigorous scientific temper is in the main eminently wholesome and commendable. In the interests of intellectual honesty there is nothing which we need more than to be put on our guard against allowing our reasoning processes to be warped by our feelings. Nevertheless in steering clear of Scylla it would be a pity to tumble straight into the maw of Charybdis, and it behooves us to ask just how far the canons of scientific method are competent to guide us in dealing with ultimate questions. Science has given us so many surprises that our capacity for being shocked or astounded is well-nigh exhausted, and our old unregenerate human nature has been bullied and badgered into something like humility; so that now, at the end of the greatest and most bewildering of centuries, we may fitly pause for a moment and ask how fares it, in these exacting days, with that Unseen World which man brought with him when he was first making his appearance on our planet? And what has science to say about that time-honoured belief that the human soul survives the death of the human body?

The position that science irrevocably condemns such a belief seems at first sight a very strong one and has unquestionably had a good deal of weight with many minds of the present generation. Throughout the animal kingdom we never see sensation, perception, instinct, volition, reasoning, or any of the phenomena which we distinguish as mental, manifested except in connection with nerve-matter arranged in systems of various degrees of complexity. We can trace sundry relations of general correspondence between the increasing manifestations of intelligence and the increasing complications of the nervous system. Injuries to the nervous structure entail failures of function, either in the mental operations themselves or in the control which they exercise over the actions of the body; there is either psychical aberration, or loss of consciousness, or muscular paralysis. At the moment of death, as soon as the current of arterial blood ceases to flow through the cerebral vessels, all signs of consciousness cease for the looker-on; and after the nervous system has been resolved into its elements, what reason have we to suppose that consciousness survives, any more than that the wetness of water should survive its separation into oxygen and hydrogen?