“In the main,” he said, “I have only changed in my apprehension of what ‘personality’ really is. Just as one may find in an hysterical subject five or six pseudo-personalities which reveal themselves in turn, each one of which is a character quite separately and consistently defined, but not one of them (however completely in possession for the time) a real person, so it seems to me must we regard all those limitations of ‘personality’ which find expression in individual form. There is only one true personality, and that is Christ; anything less than the one all-embracing whole is but a simulacrum, concealing rather than revealing the true substance and form.”
I cannot pretend to give his actual words, but I believe that I have accurately stated the sense of them; and you will see, I think, that they go a long way toward the adaptation of the Christian to the Buddhistic standpoint. That tendency, I believe, we shall find more and more at work in the Christian Church as time goes on—not merely because by such a definition the doctrine will be better able to hold its own against the inroads of science—but because it gives also a better response to that socialising genius of the human race which is coming more and more to demand a perfect unity as the ultimate expression of good.
That, then, we shall probably find to be the future tendency of idealism. There remains, of course, the Rationalistic school of thought, by which the possibility of individual or personal survival after death is from first to last either absolutely denied or very severely discountenanced as an idea based upon wholly insufficient evidence.
Nevertheless, in some form or another, immortality, conscious or unconscious, personal or impersonal, is accepted by all schools alike; the scientific law of the conservation of energy being one form of it which human reason would now find it very difficult to deny.
Let us for one moment apply that law to our own individual lives and consciousness.
Has life convinced us that we are all self-contained persons? Through social contact we have undergone many changes, many damages, and many repairs. Parts of us have gone to other people, parts of other people have come, to us. We have shed and have absorbed quite as much spiritually as materially; and though through our material changes we retain a certain likeness, so that friends meeting us after a seven years’ absence recognise us again in bodies no particle of which have they ever seen before; and though similarly we can recognise our inner selves across wider intervals of time, have we any reason to suppose that our identity is more fixed in the spiritual substance than in the material? For myself, I hope not. May one not prefer the idea of interchange between life and life, to the notion that one is to remain for ever fixed and self-possessed—a thing apart? The more we are compounded of other lives, the more we have contributed to the lives of others—the more can we recognise our entrance into the only eternal life that we can demonstrably be sure about, or that can (so it must seem to many of us), be sensibly desired or deserved. Is Eternal Bliss, in the individual sense, a more tolerable doctrine than eternal Hell-fire? Though, indeed, this latter may be but a scientific statement of fact perverted and made foolish by the theologians. For life, after all, is but a form of combustion for ever going on, and outside of it we know nothing. No doubt the atoms of our being, whether physical or spiritual, will forever form part of it; but I see no reason why our spirits should not be as diffused, through proper elemental changes, as our bodies are now being diffused from day to day; or why I should repine that I personally shall not always be there to preside over the operation and find it good. Even if, at the far end of this earth’s history, everything is again to be reabsorbed in the heat and light out of which it came, I can trust the suns and planets to fulfil their mission of progress—or the will of God—quite as well as, or better than, in my own small sphere I can trust Constitutional Governments or Established Churches. And since these lesser lights, in their foolish and providential dealings, do not confound my faith, neither do the stars in their courses fight against it. Rather do they confirm me in my sense that even the most acute perceptions with which human life is endowed fail of themselves to justify me in any claim to a larger lease of life than can naturally belong to them; for I see in the universe things far greater than any individual man, doing service and sustaining the life of countless millions, (which without them could not live at all), without any prospect of so great a reward.
The eye of the sun itself is blind; and for ever, while it dazzles us with its light, blind it must remain. Nay, what need has it for sight at all, if in blindness it be able to fulfil its mission? And yet implicit within its vast energies, there lies the gift of sight. For that blind Eye of Heaven taught us to see; our substance came from it, our eyes were made by it, and without it was not anything made on earth that was made. And if, by this gift of sight, it has opened to us so vast a space for our understanding to dwell in—bestowing so huge a conception of life on this frail vessel of clay—if by so giving of itself through long aeons of time it has opened to us so much more than it knows itself, cannot we render back without grudging these shorter, frailer lives of ours, whose brevity, perhaps, is the very price required of us for their enjoyment, since without such limits our far-reaching comprehension of space and its possessions could never have been gained. Should there be any despair, or any depression in the thought that from the blind eye of day and from the powers of its heat was developed the human brain? For if from that apparent Blindness of our Universe came really the eyes of life by which we perceive all things, can we not commit our spirits back to its keeping with an equal trust that what lies ahead will be at least as good as what lies behind, though we be not there to see it?
But the law of the conservation of energy does not in the least satisfy the aspirations of those who are out for personal immortality in the individual sense. To these it seems a grievance that they should have been called into being for any end not wholly satisfying to that Ego which is now laying upon their consciousness the weight of its possessive limitations. This separative quality of the Ego is to them the whole principle of existence; without it they cannot see life. To them, life in any less focused or more diffused form would be no better than annihilation, an obvious setting-back of the evolutionary process by which creation has led step by step to that degree of self-consciousness realised in the human race.
Do not these objectors forget not merely how considerable a part of human nature already moves and has its being on the lines of a diffused and rather decentralised subconsciousness, but also how largely the genius of the human race has committed to such conditions of separation from all possible enjoyment by the Ego, some of the rarest gifts and highest efforts at self-realisation that the world has ever seen? It is a condition attaching to all the more permanent forms of expression in the arts, to everything that man designs and makes for the delight of the generations that come after. It is a condition willingly accepted by all who rejoice in their power to throw the influence of their personalities beyond the material uses of their own present existence. And in that willingness to lose out of themselves for future generations—to turn aside from mere physical enjoyment—the life-forces within them, in that willingness artist, poet, and thinker, have come far nearer to the finding of life than those who live indulgently for ends finished by their own absorption thereof.
Now it is the supporters of the individualistic school of thought who have generally urged that grave moral dangers would befall the human race were a belief in personal immortality to perish; and it is at least arguable (by minds that can only see values individually), that if man is not to be permanently rewarded or punished for his present and future conduct, he has no reason for conducting himself as a decent part of the social whole, and that it would be better for him to break out on entirely individual lines, live a short and merry life, and throwing all altruistic and ethical considerations to the winds, enjoy himself as much as he can while the material is to him.