And similarly, it is surely disingenuous on our part to exalt as a moral emblem the instinct of ant and bee to subordinate the life of the individual to the general—if we deny to ant and bee the immortality by which alone such altruism can be recompensed; or if we are to believe that a clearer knowledge of their future lot would cause them in logic and reason to declare that life on those terms was not worth living, and that “to eat, drink, and die to-morrow” were better than to live longer and labour for a vain repetition of lives like their own indefinitely multiplied. It is ridiculous to impose the moral emblem unless you grant also the justifying conditions.
Because the bee and the ant live unconscious of their impending doom, are we, therefore, to regard them as a hoodwinked race, set to labour at the dictates of the Creative capitalist on terms which contain in them no adequate reward? Suppose, for a moment, that revelation could descend upon ants’ nest and hive, and tell these workers that beyond death the future held for them no store—that their immortality was the immortality not of individual but of race; and suppose that thereupon they all struck and went forth to die each singly in their own way—would that moral emblem impress us, do you think, as a thing worthy of imitation or of praise?
But why (let us think) is the predication of such an event so impossible and so grotesque? Is it not because the life, the individual life of ant or bee is so impregnated with that instinct of communalism which gives the species its distinctive character, that it is impossible to sunder them, or to imagine the individual capable (while in the social milieu) of pursuing individual ends alone, after a following, over millions of years, of life in the communal form. Life, the thread of life which runs through them, is too much engrained with communism for separatist principles ever again to prevail.
And surely it is the same with man. Individualism, separatism, self-obsessionism, though still present in the phenomena of existence, are more and more subject to qualifications from which they cannot escape. And even the most evil form of individualism has to be parasitic or predatory; it cannot exist alone; even against its will it becomes conditioned by other lives. And the communal sense of man, implicit within the innumerable forms of life through which he has evolved, will continue to lay its hold on the parasitic and the predatory, and will do so quite effectively on the basis of an evolutionary past, the tendencies of which were established before ever theological definitions came to give them impulse and strength.
Is it not almost ludicrous to suggest that that communal instinct will cease to play, if the hope of individual reward after death is withdrawn from the human race? Will man—because he is nobler than the beast, because at his best he does things more altruistic, more self-sacrificing, more self-forgetting, more self-transcending than any of these—do less nobly because he envisages destiny, which (if he see it as destiny) he will see as the logical outcome of evolutionary law?
It is possible, it is even probable, that all phases of theological thought have had their use in giving direction and stimulus to the human brain; if they have done nothing but stimulate rebellion against obscurantist authority they have had value of a positive kind. But we may go even further than this, for “everything possible to be believed,” says Blake, “is an image of truth.” And under many a concept, distorted by ignorance or guile, has lain a germ of the true life which draws man on to communal ends. In time that germ puts off the husk that seemed once (perhaps in some cases actually was) the protective armoury through which alone it could survive for the use of a later day. But though old reasons have been shed, the essential value has not changed; and often it is less by logic and reason than by the strong and subtle links of association that we preserve what is good of past credulities.
The doctrine of conscious immortality, however much belittled by its appeal to selfish individualism, has done a work for the human race. It has held the germ of an ideal for unity which is receiving a more universal interpretation to-day than the earlier theologians would ever have allowed, or than man, in his then stage of development, could have thought it worth while to hand on to his intellectual heirs. Perhaps only because he conceived it in just such a form have its values been preserved.
I am reminded in this connection of the method by which the wild swine of the New Forest were taught to obey the voice of the horn by means of which the swine-herd, called them back each night from their free roaming in the forest. The way he did it was this. Having first formed his herd, some four or five hundred strong, he penned them in a narrow space where water and warm shelter were to be found; and there, in the allotted enclosure, according them no liberty, he fed them daily to the sound of the horn. Food and music became a sort of celestial harmony to pig’s brain—when they heard the one, good reason was given them for expecting the other.
Presently, in a well-fed condition, they were set free to roam; and being full and satisfied they did not roam far; and at night the horn sounded them back to an ample meal, and continued to sound while again they ate and were satisfied.
So at last, by association, the horn came to have such a beneficent meaning that the mere sound of it sufficed to bring them back at nightfall to their appointed place of rest. They might roam for miles and miles during the day, but night and the sound of the horn brought them all back safe to fold. And when that habit had become established, they did not cease to return even though the swineherd no longer supplied the food which had first given music its charm to those savage breasts.