then comes death. And what after death? Man returns to Nature, which delights to receive him, and identifies him with her own mysterious self. Hither, too, come all the myriad things which had once emanated from the womb of the same all-producing mother. This in reality means that man and all other creatures return to nothingness. This is the dreamless sleep wherewith our life is rounded—this is the end of all our woe and misery, to be
—“Swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night
Devoid of sense and motion.”
There is at least one passage in which Lao-tzŭ seems to speak of a life after death,[55] but this passage presents great difficulties, and perhaps refers only to the “fancied life in others’ breath” by which a man though dead is not lost. That man loses his individuality and that he loses his existence are two doctrines strongly opposed to Lao-tzŭ. The individual is everything with the one, nothing with the other.[56] As to the immortality of the soul, this is a doctrine of which many other excellent philosophers before the rise of Christianity had little or no conception. We are wont to regard the theory of the soul’s mortality as dismal and hopeless; yet Lao-tzŭ holds out the hope of annihilation or at least of absorption into universal Nature as the highest reward for a life of untiring virtue. Few, he says, understand the matter; and few as yet even understand the meaning of the immortality of the soul. The belief that the soul is mortal no less than the opposite belief seems to lead to the possession of a calm, contented spirit, and an indifference to the things of this life. The strange but eloquent words of the Hydriotaphia on this subject will form the closing sentence of this chapter:—“And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God, and ingression into the divine shadow, they have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven; the glory of the world is surely over, and the earth in ashes unto them.”[57]
[1] See chs. 2, 38, and compare the words of Pascal—“la vraie morale se moque de la morale, c’est a dire que la morale du jugement se moque de la morale de l’esprit qui est sans règle.” Pensées, Art. xxv., 56.
[2] Æneid, B. 7, vs. 203–4.
[3] Compare Carlyle,—“Already to the popular judgment, he who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspect,” &c. Essay on Characteristics. So also Emerson writes—“Our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our will.” Essays, Vol. I., p. 119.
[4] See chs. 18, 38.
[5] The words of Cato in Cic. De Senectute.