Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social Subjects

by Laurence Housman

We are frequently told (more especially by those whose profession it is to preach belief in a revealed religion), that if man be not endowed with an immortal soul, then the game of life is not worth the candle. Incidentally we are warned that if the bottom were knocked out of that belief, morals would go to pieces and humanity would become reprobate.

Now I can imagine a similar sort of claim put forward in other departments of life for other pursuits which seem to their advocate to make life more appetising.

I can imagine sportsmen saying that without sport men would cease to be manly, morals and physique would deteriorate and life be no longer worth living. I can imagine the butcher saying that without meat, and the licensed victualler that without beer, men were of all things the most miserable. I have recently seen advertisements which say that only by supporting the cinema (made beautiful by the feet of Charlie Chaplin), can we hope to be victorious in the present war.

The assertion that man cannot do without certain things which, as a matter of fact, vast numbers of his fellows are constantly doing without—(and with no very marked set-back as regards health, efficiency, or general morals)—is a questionable way of forcing home conviction that these things or beliefs are indispensable. It is quite possible that beer, meat, the pursuit of game, the personality of Charlie Chaplin, and a belief in immortality are all alike capable of giving stimulus to the human soul (especially to those souls which have come by habit to depend upon them). But it is quite certain that other human souls have found without them sufficient stimulus to make life worth living. And though, against that fact, it may be argued that these unconsciously receive their driving force, their social and ethical standards, from those whose motive power they reject as superfluous, and that we, who do not go to see Charlie Chaplin on the films, are winning this war somewhat circuitously through the powers of those who do—the argument is hardly a convincing one, since it remains for ever in the nature of an unproved hypothesis.

But when the majority of those who believe in personal immortality are asked for the ground of their belief, it generally resolves itself into this: they have an intense individual conviction that it is so—so intense that to hold the contrary becomes “unthinkable.” But that intense, individual conviction, over things we greatly care about, is a constant phenomenon of the working of the human mind, and is not limited to belief in a future state. To a convinced Liberal it is “unthinkable” that he should ever pass into such a state of mental annihilation as to become a Conservative. To a convinced Conservative it is unthinkable that he should fall from the grace which guides him into the slough of Liberalism. It is the same with Protestant or Catholic, with Socialist, Universalist, or Sectarian: conviction always presents an adamantine front to opposing forces and arguments—so long as it lasts.

The same phenomenon constantly occurs in the domain of the amative passion. The lover (if he be really in love), believes that his love will last for ever—that nothing can possibly change it; and all the evidence in the world that lovers of a like faith have too often lived to see the immortal dream put on mortality, will fail to convince him (while he is in the toils) that his own love is liable to any such change as theirs.

The reason is that strongly vitalised forces always carry with them a sense of permanence.

The vital spark (focused within us by strong conviction or emotion), is but an individually apprehended part of a great whole: for this thread of life passing through us has already stretched itself out over millions of years, and countless atavisms have touched it to individual ends which were not ours; the will to live has clung to it by myriads of adhesions, feelers, tentacles, and not by human hands alone (though our palms still moisten, and our arms fly upward to the imaginary branch overhead when danger of falling threatens us, because the instinct of our arboreal ancestry still prevails in us over reason). And through those atavisms, the struggle to secure survival for the family, the clan, the race, has left an impress which may very naturally convey from the general to the individual a sense of immortality.

For of all these constituent forces the majority knew and thought very little about death, except in their instinctive and spasmodic efforts to escape from it; and when at last man began to envisage death consciously and philosophically, straightway, with all these atavisms behind him, he belittled it with dreams of a future life.

It was as perfectly natural a thing to do as for the lover to declare that his love for his mistress was eternal and not merely for a season, since any lesser statement would fail to convey adequately the intensity of the force by which he was moved. Moreover, though in millions of individual cases the statement and the sincere belief that the love experienced will remain changeless and eternal, are contradicted by later fact, it is at least true that the passion itself is an ever-recurring phenomenon of life, and does, by its infinite recurrence and resurrection in form beyond form through evolving generations, present to finite minds an aspect of immortality. Just as the water we drink is an imperishable thing, though after drinking it we shall thirst again, so is that love, which satisfies the lover’s soul, a principle of life extending illimitably beyond his own use for it. And if that be true about love, why should it not be true about life?