So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.
George Eliot.
There is an infinite pathos in these lines. Having lost her faith in a future life, George Eliot tries to find consolation in the thought that, when she has passed into nothingness—when she “joins the choir invisible”—she will have done something to ennoble the minds of those who come after her. But why should generation after generation of insect-lives waste themselves in raising and purifying the minds of the generations that follow, if all in turn pass into nothingness? The higher and purer men became, the more they would love their fellow-beings and the more they would shudder at the insensate pain and cruelty in the world—the physical torture they themselves endure, and the mental torture both of losing for ever those they love and of seeing the sufferings of others. One should act in conformity with one’s belief. Instead of thus adding greater pain and sorrow to each succeeding generation, the effort should be to coarsen and brutalize our natures, so that love, duty, and moral aspiration shall disappear, and we shall cease to be saddened by the appalling cruelty of our existence. Our lives should, in fact, correspond with the brutal, ugly and stupid scheme of the universe.
This is the direct answer to George Eliot, allowing her very important assumption that we have a duty towards others, including those who come after us. But this assumption is logically unwarranted, if at the end of our brief years we pass into nothingness and have no further concern with any living being. This brings us to a familiar train of argument. Why should we be irresistibly impelled to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others? And, apart from altruism, why should we develop our own higher attributes—why seek to ennoble our own selves, since those selves disappear? Why fill with jewels the hollow log that is to be thrown on the fire? Why are we swayed by a sense of honour, a desire for justice, a love of purity and truth and beauty, a craving for affection, a thirst for knowledge, which persist up to the very gates of death? To take an illustration of Edward Caird’s, is not the path of life which is so traversed like the path of a star to the astronomer, which enables him to prophesy its future course—beyond the end which hides it from our eyes? Otherwise, to use another simile, it is as though Pheidias spent his life sculpturing in snow.
(This does not mean, as the sceptic usually sneers, that the virtuous man merely desires a reward for his virtuous conduct. It is an inquiry why he is virtuous—what is a sane view of the scheme of the universe.)
In forming the conclusion that there was no possible future for man, George Eliot and an immense number of other thinkers of her time made also the vast assumption that there was nothing left to discover. Blanco White’s sonnet alone might have taught them the folly of such premature judgments. Or we may take an illustration, used by F. W. H. Myers, namely, the discovery that, far beyond the red and the violet of the spectrum or the rainbow, extend rays that have been (and will for ever be) invisible to our eyes. Since George Eliot’s time the Society for Psychical Research has during the last thirty-five years accumulated unanswerable evidence of survival after death.
Why are we weigh’d upon with heaviness,