In stating constructively the doctrine of immortality we must assign altogether secondary importance to the metaphysical arguments from the nature of the soul. It is sufficient to show, as has already been done, that the soul is not so absolutely dependent on the body, that the dissolution of the one must necessarily involve the cessation of the other. Such arguments as the indivisibility of the soul and its persistence can at most indicate the possibility of immortality.
The juridical argument has some force; the present life does not show that harmony of condition and character which our sense of justice leads us to expect; the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer; there is ground for the expectation that in the future life the anomalies of this life will be corrected. Although this argument has the support of such great names as Butler and Kant, yet it will repel many minds as an appeal to the motive of self-interest.
The ethical argument has greater value. Man’s life here is incomplete, and the more lofty his aims, the more worthy his labours, the more incomplete will it appear to be. The man who lives for fame, wealth, power, may be satisfied in this life; but he who lives for the ideals of truth, beauty, goodness, lives not for time but for eternity, for his ideals cannot be realized, and so his life fulfilled on this side of the grave. Unless these ideals are mocking visions, man has a right to expect the continuance of his life for its completion. This is the line of argument developed by Professor Hugo Münsterberg in his lecture on The Eternal Life (1905), although he states it in the terms peculiar to his psychology, in which personality is conceived as primarily will. “No endless duration is our goal, but complete repose in the perfect satisfaction which the will finds when it has reached the significance, the influence, and the value at which it is aiming” (p. 83).
More general in its appeal still is the argument from the affections, which has been beautifully developed in Tennyson’s In Memoriam. The heart protests against the severance of death, and claims the continuance of love’s communion after death; and as man feels that love is what is most godlike in his nature, love’s claim has supreme authority.
There is a religious argument for immortality. The saints of the Hebrew nation were sure that as God had entered into fellowship with them, death could not sever them from his presence. This is the argument in Psalms xvi. and xvii., if, as is probable, the closing verses do express the hope of a glorious and blessed immortality. This too is the proof Jesus himself offers when he declares God to be the God of the living and not of the dead (Matt. xxii. 32). God’s companions cannot become death’s victims.
Josiah Royce in his lecture on The Conception of Immortality (1900) combines this argument of the soul’s union with God with the argument of the incompleteness of man’s life here:—
“Just because God is One, all our lives have various and unique places in the harmony of the divine life. And just because God attains and wins and finds this uniqueness, all our lives win in our union with Him the individuality which is essential to their true meaning. And just because individuals whose lives have uniqueness of meaning are here only objects of pursuit, the attainment of this very individuality, since it is indeed real, occurs not in our present form of consciousness, but in a life that now we see not, yet in a life whose genuine meaning is continuous with our own human life, however far from our present flickering form of disappointed human consciousness that life of the final individuality may be. Of this our true individual life, our present life is a glimpse, a fragment, a hint, and in its best moments a visible beginning. That this individual life of all of us is not something limited in its temporal expression to the life that now we experience, follows from the very fact that here nothing final or individual is found expressed” (pp. 144-146).
R. W. Emerson declares that “the impulse to seek proof of immortality is itself the strongest proof of all.” We expect immortality not merely because we desire it; but because the desire itself arises from all that is best and truest and worthiest in ourselves. The desire is reasonable, moral, social, religious; it has the same worth as the loftiest ideals, and worthiest aspirations of the soul of man. The loss of the belief casts a dark shadow over the present life. “No sooner do we try to get rid of the idea of Immortality—than Pessimism raises its head.... Human griefs seem little worth assuaging; human happiness too paltry (at the best) to be worth increasing. The whole moral world is reduced to a point. Good and evil, right and wrong, become infinitesimal, ephemeral matters. The affections die away—die of their own conscious feebleness and uselessness. A moral paralysis creeps over us” (Natural Religion, Postscript). The belief exercises a potent moral influence. “The day,” says Ernest Renan, “in which the belief in an after-life shall vanish from the earth will witness a terrific moral and spiritual decadence. Some of us perhaps might do without it, provided only that others held it fast. But there is no lever capable of raising an entire people if once they have lost their faith in the immortality of the soul” (quoted by A. W. Momerie, Immortality, p. 9). To this belief, many and good as are the arguments which can be advanced for it, a confident certainty is given by Christian faith in the Risen Lord, and the life and immortality which he has brought to light in his Gospel.
In addition to the works referred to above, see R. K. Gaye, The Platonic Conception of Immortality and its Connexion with the Theory of Ideas (1904); R. H. Charles, A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel, in Judaism and in Christianity (1899); E. Pétavel, The Problem of Immortality (Eng. trans. by F. A. Freer, 1892); J. Fiske, The Destiny of Man, viewed in the Light of his Origin (1884); G. A. Gordon, Immortality and the New Theodicy (1897); Henry Buckle, The After Life (1907).
(A. E. G.*)