When, however, we have recognized the false sanction and the false ideal associated with it, we have still the more difficult problem of establishing the true. If Righteousness—to use that term for all kinds of action ethically right—is to be followed in the interests of life, how can it ever be required that much suffering, and even death itself may have to be faced for its sake? Man is a part of a Whole—in the effective realization of that conception all ethics is summed up—but he is also an individual. Why should the individual give way to the Whole if their interests seem to clash? In other words, though we have the contents, the static significance of the word ‘ought,’ we have still to find its dynamic significance, its cogency.
Every beast does what it ‘ought’ without any question, and this constantly involves acts of co-operation or self-sacrifice for the interests of the race. In man, ethical action has a greater value for life, simply because, unlike the beast, he is able to question its grounds and to forgo it if he chooses. He observes, as we have said, that the ‘long run’ or universal point of view is often in conflict with the individual point of view. “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die” is the extreme expression of the individual point of view. It has been called a ‘pig-philosophy,’ and if the expression is just, it is not because the pig will die to-morrow, for it will probably live as long as anything else, but because no matter how long it lives it is, qua pig, incapable of any other form of life.
But a man is capable of other forms of life, and to realize these he must keep the pig-life in check, not despising or disowning it, but restraining it, lest it should throw him out of harmony. Unchecked, it will do that in the long run; but what if he is to have no long run? Where the lower life can yield an hour of delight, why deny it for the sake of a higher life, if in the next hour both must end together?
I confess that I see no escape from the implied conclusion if the premiss is true. But if the view of life outlined in these pages be true, then this premiss is palpably false. Neither the higher nor the lower life can ever have any end, though no doubt they may pass into forms outside the category of Time, in which the terms beginning and end have no longer any meaning. Life is not dependent on its visible and tangible forms. The question here involved is one on which the drift of certain modern speculations in physics obliges us to dwell for a little.
The question of the present inhabitability of Mars or other planets has been much debated of late, pro and con. Opinions differ on this point; but there is a very general agreement among physicists that the state of the moon, cold, dead, and barren as a burnt-out cinder, must, by the equalization of energy, be sooner or later the necessary fate of every planet and of every sun in the universe. Science has thus apparently come to justify by its solemn verdict that cry of the Latin poet, more charged with the pathos of eternal death than perhaps any other human utterance:—
“Soles occidere et redire possunt:
Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.”[155]
The conditions under which life is possible will then no longer exist. One nothingness awaits the saint, the sage, the ox, the oak tree, and the fungus. “Life,” says Le Dantec, “has not always existed on the earth”; we are to regard it as merely “a surface accident in the history of the thermic evolution of the globe.”[156]
This remark, which is one that a thermometer might be expected to make if it could talk, is in Le Dantec’s mouth probably no more than a little rhetorical fling at orthodoxy, for it is really answered by his whole book. His main thesis is “the absence of all essential difference and all absolute discontinuity between living and not-living matter.” “A surface accident” can hardly be a reasonable description of a development thus prepared for in the essential nature of the substance of the world. But other physicists have lately cut deeper, and will not allow the suns of Catullus, even when cold, to set and rise again for ever. According to the very interesting and apparently well-supported speculations of Gustave Le Bon,[157] all matter is at present engaged in that process of disintegration of which radium offers the most conspicuous example. The energy which produces life and response of all kinds is explained as simply the result of this long, disintegrating process, and may be compared to the action of a released spring, seeking its state of quiescence and immobility.[158] When the process is complete, matter will be resolved into the primordial Something from which it somehow originated. And where will the saint and the sage, or anything that we can recognize as life, be then?