We may conceive matter, then, as being constantly fanned up into the heat of life, i.e. as elaborating forms into which consciousness can enter and through which it can act. And we observe that consciousness, when it has found a suitable form, can act on it and improve it. Two questions now arise. The first is: Why should consciousness have need of these forms at all? And the second is: If it has this need, what becomes of the individual consciousness when the form has grown finally cold in death and is resolved into its inorganic elements?
To the first question I cannot suggest any answer, except the obvious one that an individual consciousness must have some forms through which it can have relations with things not itself. In the world, as we have it, it is generally true—it would be unwise to venture any absolute statement on the subject—that consciousness only enters into relation with another consciousness, or with matter, by means of the peculiarly organized form of matter which we call a brain. I must leave the question there. Thought and research, and the advance in physical organization which I have referred to, may, in the near or distant future, throw further light upon it. It is not a difficulty, but it is certainly a mystery.
As regards the second question, that of personal immortality, all we are justified in concluding on the negative side is that when a certain body and brain have perished, consciousness can express itself through that form no more. But consciousness itself cannot be less indestructible than everything else that exists. We may, so far as I can see, either conceive an individual consciousness at death as being resolved into the general consciousness from which it sprang, even as the matter composing any organic being is resolved into inorganic matter, or we may suppose that, having won and consolidated its selfhood by what it has done and what it has endured in the flesh, the selfhood is thenceforth capable of an independent existence under forms at present beyond our ken.
Either of these conceptions implies what we call the ‘immortality’ of the soul, the real and permanent significance of the experiences of the soul. Here a little further elucidation may be desirable. I have spoken of the possibility of the soul or self being resolved into something which one can only describe as a general spiritual substance related to individual souls as matter in general is related to particular material organisms. But the parallel with matter must not be pushed too far. A material organism, being composed of different substances, can be disintegrated. But consciousness cannot, strictly speaking, suffer disintegration, for it has no different substances into which to disintegrate. It can, however, as we see, appear in the form of a number of different personalities; and this, the normal existing condition, is the psychical analogue to physical disintegration. If these personalities are again to merge into one impersonal consciousness, the process would not be comparable to disintegration; it would be the very reverse; it would be reintegration; and the process, therefore, implies nothing resembling the loss or dissipation of any form of psychic being.
Further, we have to observe that when a material organism perishes and is disintegrated, there is, so far as we can see, an utter and complete end of it. The human brain, for example, quite apart from its association with a consciousness, has in the course of its development and activity gone through a marvellous chain of processes, in which electric and molecular force, undulations, radiations, and probably other physical factors of which we have no conception at present, have played a part. Yet when the brain dies and is resolved into so much ammonia, phosphorus, carbon, gases, and what not, these elements differ in no whit from other ammonia, phosphorus, and carbon in the world. For any ulterior purpose they are neither better nor worse; they are wholly unchanged, by all the extraordinary history which they have passed through under the spell of life. This is equally true of the elements, nervous and other, of any living being. But the physical system of every living being below man is organized for two ends only: (1) the upkeep, during its lifetime, of its own physical powers; (2) the reproduction and multiplication of its kind.[139] When an organism has fulfilled these functions, it is justified; the object of life has been attained. These functions, of course, persist in man, but he has added to them many others; his brain has to serve him for ethics, art, philosophy, religion, and is therefore organized with a subtlety quite unknown in the animal world. Here, then, is a kind of organic action which has no significance whatever except in relation to consciousness. If it have none there it has none at all, it is absolutely irrational and futile. Now the molecular and other action of a beast’s brain has reference to its physical life, and it passes on this physical life to its descendants. But the action, or a great part of the action, of a man’s brain has reference to his consciousness, and of this he passes on at most the potentiality. A lion’s cub is a lion; a philosopher’s child is not necessarily or even probably a philosopher. That path of development, whatever we may say about the lion, must have its goal elsewhere. We must, if the universe is not irrational, believe that in some way consciousness, whether after the death of the body it persists in individual form or not, carries forward into the new state the results of its experiences, its acquisitions, its losses, in the bodily relation. These are not transitory, not indifferent; “great or small they furnish their parts toward the soul.”
The reader will have probably noticed that one consideration of the greatest moment has been left untouched. I have spoken of matter and consciousness as of two separate things, and of the former as prior to the latter. This is a form of thought imposed upon us by the space and time relations by which our being is conditioned. But it is evident that the interaction of the two cannot be fortuitous. We cannot suppose that matter pursued its long course of evolution, refining and subtilizing at every stage to admit more and more of the activity of consciousness, in total disconnexion with that consciousness. The two must be co-ordinated in some higher synthesis. Could we escape from the limitations of our thought we should see them, therefore, not as two, but one, and we should see that the meanest form of being has an aspect in which it belongs to eternity.
CHAPTER VIII
THE ETHICAL CRITERION