These considerations may allay a little our first terror and despair. When we really understand that the world is not damned by the evil in it, we shall be ready to see it in its true light as a challenge to our heroisms. Not how evil came into the world, but how we are going to get it out, becomes the problem. Not by brooding over the hopeless, but by laying plans for the possible will we shoulder our true responsibility. We shall find then that we had no need of despair. We were on the right track. When the world that we were tracking down turned at bay, he threatened more than he was able to perform. Not less science but more science do we need in order that we may more and more get into our control the forces and properties of nature, and guide them for our benefit. But we must learn that the interpretation of the world lies not in its mechanism but in its meanings, and those meanings we find in our values and ideals, which are very real to us. Science brings us only to an “area of our dwelling,” as Whitman says. The moral adventure of the rising generation will be to learn this truth thoroughly, and to reinstate ideals and personality at the heart of the world.
Our most favorable battle-ground against evil will for some time at least be the social movement. Poverty and sin and social injustice we must feel not sentimentally nor so much a symptom of a guilty conscience as a call to coöperate with the exploited and sufferers in throwing off their ills. Sensitiveness to evil will be most fruitful when it rouses a youth to the practical encouragement of the under-men to save themselves. Youth to-day needs to “beat the gong of revolt.” The oppressed seldom ask for our sympathy, and this is right and fitting; for they do not need it. (It might even make them contented with their lot.) What they need is the inspiration and the knowledge to come into their own. All we can ever do in the way of good to people is to encourage them to do good to themselves. “Who would be free, himself must strike the blow!” This is the social responsibility of modern youth. It must not seek to serve humanity so much as to rouse and teach it. The great moral adventure that lies still ahead of us is to call men to the expansion of their souls to the wide world which has suddenly been revealed to them.
Perhaps with that expansion youth will finally effect a reconciliation with life of those two supremest and most poignant of adventures: the thoughts that cluster around sex, and the fears and hopes that cluster around death, the one the gateway into life, the other out of it. Youth finds them the two hardest aspects of life to adjust with the rest of the world in which we live. They are ever-present and pervasive, and yet their manifestations always cause us surprise, and shock us as of something unwonted intruding in our daily affairs. They are the unseen spectres behind life, of which we are always dimly conscious, but which we are always afraid to meet boldly and face to face. We speak of them furtively, or in far-away poetical strains. They are the materials for the tragedies of life, of its pathos and wistfulness, of its splendors and defeats. Yet they are treated always with an incorrigible and dishonest delicacy. The world, youth soon finds, is a much less orderly and refined place than would appear on the surface of our daily intercourse and words. As we put on our best clothes to appear in public, so the world puts on its best clothes to appear in talk and print.
Men ignore death, as if they were quite unconscious that it would sometime come to them, yet who knows how many pensive or terrible moments the thought gives them? But the spectre is quite invisible to us. Or if they have passions, and respond as sensitively as a vibrating string to sex influences and appeals, we have little indication of that throbbing life behind the impenetrable veil of their countenances. We can know what people think about all other things, even what they think about God, but what they think of these two adventures of sex and death we never know. It is not so much, I am willing to believe, shame or fear that keeps us from making a parade of them, as awe and wonder and baffled endeavors to get our attitude towards them into expressible form. They are too elemental, too vast and overpowering in their workings to fit neatly into this busy, accounted-for, and tied-down world of daily life. They are superfluous to what we see as the higher meanings of this our life, and irritate us by their clamorous insistence and disregard for the main currents of our living. They seem irrelevant to life; or rather they overtop its bounty. Their pressure to be let in is offensive, and taints and mars irrevocably what would otherwise be so pleasant and secure a life. That is, perhaps, why we call manifestations of sex activity, obscene, and of death, morbid and ghastly.
In these modern days we are adopting a healthier attitude, especially towards sex. Perhaps the rising generation will be successful in reconciling them both, and working them into our lives, where they may be seen in their right relations and proportions, and no longer the pleasure of sex and the peace of death seem an illegitimate obtrusion into life. To get command of these arch-enemies is an endeavor worthy of the moral heroes of to-day. We can get control, it seems, of the rest of our souls, but these always lie in wait to torment and harass us. To tame this obsession of sex and the fear of death will be a Herculean task for youth in the adventure of life. Perhaps some will succeed where we have failed. For usually when we try to tame sex, it poisons the air around us, and if we try to tame the fear of death by resigning ourselves to its inevitability, we find that we have not tamed it but only drugged it. At certain times, however, our struggles with the winged demons which they send into our minds may constitute the most poignant incidents in our adventure of life, and add a beauty to our lives. Where they do not make for happiness, they may at least make for a deepening of knowledge and appreciation of life. Along through middle life, we shall find, perhaps, that, even if untamed, they have become our allies, and that both have lost their sting and their victory,—sex diffusing our life with a new beauty, and death with a courageous trend towards a larger life of which we shall be an integral part.
When we have acclimated ourselves to youth, suddenly death looms up as the greatest of dangers in our adventure of life. It puzzles and shocks and saddens us by its irrevocability and mystery. That we should be taken out of this world to which we are so perfectly adapted, and which we enjoy and feel intimate with, is an incredible thing. Even if we believe that we shall survive death, we know that that after-life must perforce be lived outside of this our familiar world. Reason tells us that we shall be annihilated, and yet we cannot conceive our own annihilation. We can easier imagine the time before our birth, when we were not, than the time after our death, when we shall not be. Old men find nothing very dreadful in the thought of being no more, and we shall find that it is the combined notion of being annihilated, and yet of being somehow conscious of that annihilation, that terrifies us, and startles our minds sometimes in the dead of night when our spirits are sluggish and the ghoulish ideas that haunt the dimmest chambers of the mind are flitting abroad. We can reason with ourselves that if we are annihilated we shall not be conscious of it, and if we are conscious we shall not be annihilated, but this easy proof does not help us much in a practical way. We simply do not know, and all speculations seem to be equally legitimate. If we are destined to assume another form of life, no divination can prophesy for us what that life shall be.
On the face of it the soul as well as the body dies. The fate of the body we know, and it seems dreadful enough to chill the stoutest heart; and what we call our souls seem so intimately dependent upon these bodies as to be incapable of living alone. And yet somehow it is hard to stop believing in the independent soul. We can believe that the warmth dissipates, that the chemical and electrical energies of the body pass into other forms and are gradually lost in the immensity of the universe. But this wonder of consciousness, which seems to hold and embrace all our thoughts and feelings and bind them together, what can we know of its power and permanence? In our own limited sphere it already transcends space and time, our imaginations triumphing over space, and our memories and anticipations over time: this magic power of the imagination, which transcends our feeble experience and gives ideas and images which have not appeared directly through the senses. We can connect this conscious life with no other aspect of the world nor can we explain it by any of the principles which we apply to physical things. It is the divine gift that reveals this world; why may it not reveal sometime a far wider universe?
It is this incalculability of our conscious life that makes its seeming end so great an adventure. This Time which rushes past us, blotting out everything it creates, leaving us ever suspended on a Present, which, as we turn to look at it, has melted away,—how are we to comprehend it? The thin, fragile and uncertain stream of our memory seems insufficient to give any satisfaction of permanence. I like to think of a world-memory that retains the past. Physical things that change or perish continue to live psychically in memory; why may not all that passes, not only in our minds, but unknown to us, be carried along in a great world-mind of whose nature we get a dim inkling even now in certain latent mental powers of ours which are sometimes revealed, and seem to let down bars into a boundless sea of knowledge. The world is a great, rushing, irreversible life, not predestined in its workings, but free like ourselves. The accumulating past seems to cut into the future, and create it as it goes along. Nothing is then lost, and we, although we had no existence before we were born,—how could we have, since that moving Present had not created us?—would yet, having been born, continue to exist in that world-memory. We do not need to reëcho the sadness of the centuries,—“Everything passes; nothing remains!” For even if we take this world-memory at its lowest terms as a social memory, the effects of the deeds of men, for good or for evil, remain. And their words remain, the distillation of their thought and experience. This we know, and we know, moreover, that “one thing at least is certain,” not that “this life dies”—for that has yet to be proved—but that “the race lives!” Nature is so careless about the individual life, so careful for the species, that it seems as if it were only the latter that counted, that her only purpose was the eternal continuation of life. And many to-day find a satisfaction for their cravings for immortality in the thought that they will live in their children and so on immortally as long as their line continues.
But we have a right to make greater hazards of faith than this. Might it not be that, although nature never purposed that the individual soul should live, man has outwitted her? He has certainly outwitted her in regard to his bodily life. There was no provision in nature for man’s living by tillage of the soil and domestication of animals, or for his dwelling in houses built with tools in his hands, or for traveling at lightning speed, or for harnessing her forces to run for him the machines that should turn out the luxuries and utilities of life. All these were pure gratuities, devised by man and wrested from nature’s unwilling hands. She was satisfied with primitive, animal-like man, as she is satisfied with him in some parts of the world to-day. We have simply got ahead of her. All the other animals are still under her dominion, but man has become the tool-maker and the partial master of nature herself. Although still far from thoroughly taming her, he finds in the incessant struggle his real life purpose, his inspiration, and his work, and still brighter promises for his children’s children. For the race lives and takes advantage of all that has been discovered before.