On paper that consideration may seem to hold strong ground; but when it is put into practice the facts of life are found to be overwhelmingly against it. For one thing excess and self-indulgence fail to produce enjoyment, for another the socialising of life by mutual aid tends quite obviously to the increase of comfort, safety, and happiness. And where apparently it does not is mainly at that point where rampant individualism grasps and warps it to its own ends, making the social organism subserve not the goodwill of the many but the ill-will of the few.
But the ethical argument about the bad effects of non-belief in personal immortality has been considerably discounted by the growing sensitiveness of the modern conscience—more especially among those who are in a serious sense “free-thinkers”—toward the social ills lying around us. Generally speaking, our sense of duty toward our neighbour is much more lively than it was in the mid-Victorian era; but our conviction of personal immortality is probably far less. The two things do not go together: the diminution of church attendance in the last fifty years has not worsened the conditions of labour.
It may, however, be argued that an instinct for immortality is still subconsciously at work within us, colouring our actions and directing us on right ethical lines. But if it be a subconscious direction which thus works in us for righteousness, it may equally be to a subconscious end. The subconscious impulse may merely be guiding us to a subconscious realisation which would not at all satisfy the advocates of conscious immortality after death. What works subconsciously can in all probability find satisfaction in a subconscious reward. The chemic processes of the stomach and of the blood, for instance, are largely subconscious in their operation; and their needs may be subconsciously appeased without the brain being told anything about it through the usual intermediaries of taste and mastication. We have a preference for a conscious performance of the functions of life which we have always been accustomed to perform consciously; but a very large proportion of our life-functions work themselves out subconsciously and independently of our will. Our hearts beat, our blood circulates, our nails grow, our stomachs digest, our wounds heal, whether we tell them to or no, and yet we are quite happy about them. We do not consider (because they operate by a volition of which we are unaware), that therefore we carry about with us a body of death from which our conscious ego must needs shrink in disgust—a dead heart, dead stomach, dead blood—that the unconsciousness which accompanies health is a state nearer to annihilation, and so less to be desired, than the pains accompanying functional disturbances.
When those things happen—functional disturbances—we are conscious of something more immediately relating to death than to life: it is because of local mortification that we become so much aware of things which our immortal part helps us to use unconsciously and without thought. Virtue itself, when engrained, tends to become instinctive and subconscious instead of an effort.
There is quite as much evidence, therefore, in our own bodies that unconsciousness is the real gate to immortal life, and the condition toward which all that is best and highest in us is seeking, as of the contrary teaching that increased self-consciousness is man’s final goal. In the functional working of our own bodies an enormous amount of self-consciousness has been eliminated, and we do not for our happiness or self-realisation wish it restored to us; whole tracts and areas are immune from it, or only make a spasmodic grab at our consciousness when things go ill with them. “If you go on doing that,” they say, when you misuse them, “we will make you know that we are here.” And so you become conscious of them: but that doesn’t make you happier. Yet in a sort of way, I suppose, a man would realise himself more completely if he had sciatica all over him, and could count up his nerves, and tell all his bones by the aches and pains attaching to them.
Now it is easy enough for a man to say (I think it was H. M. Stanley, the explorer, who did say so) that he would rather endure torment for all eternity than accept a state of annihilation. In thus protesting he is talking through his hat of something too far beyond human experience for the mind to realise. Toothache he has probably always found bearable, because he knew that in course of time it would end. On the other hand, sound dreamless sleep is probably not less bearable to him because during that sleep he has not a ghost of a notion that he will ever wake up again. He is carried, that is to say, every day of his life while in health, into a state closely resembling annihilation of consciousness, in which such annihilation has no terrors for him at all; he accepts it as a comfortable part of existence, and goes to it with delight when his faculties are tired. Its attractions for him would naturally be less while all his senses were alert and fresh.
But the waking man is not the whole man; the subconscious life, acquiescent to imposed conditions, occupies by far the larger part of him. He can, therefore, only predicate the inclinations of his waking hours; in sleep he may revert to a very strong affinity for that annihilation of self-conscious life against which, in his waking hours, he protests his dread.
And now a further word of comfort for those moral teachers who assure us that if once we let go the idea of personal immortality, with its accompanying implications of eternal reward or punishment, the conduct of the human race is bound to degenerate, and that man’s only logical motto will then be, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.”
To refute that deduction we have but to remember that sociology is a thing of ancestry and evolution, and has committed us to a weight of facts against which precept and theory are powerless. We have only to look back into Nature to see how persistently (without, one must suppose, any promise of future reward after death) a contrary instinct emerges from the establishment of the social bond in nest and herd and hive. And why—if that emerging instinct leads on, in man’s reasoned estimation, to foolishness—why do we so specially admire the communal life of ant and bee, and incline sometimes to wonder whether (behind so marvellous an order of altruistic energy) there be not concealed more and not less of spiritual apprehension than in the more individualistic forms of insect and animal life? And why, on the contrary, has the wise cuckoo become a sort of byword for the singular economy with which it has disentangled its life from care or responsibility?
It is surely very unfair thus to erect the cuckoo into a moral emblem for reprobation, if it is only doing by instinct, what man would do by reason and logic were the darkness of his own destiny made clear to him.