IMMORTALITY.
If you sit down in the quiet of your own room and calmly ask yourself what it is in reference to a life after death that you really desire and what you may reasonably expect, you will probably be surprised to find what a blank your mind is upon the subject. I doubt if you will find that you inwardly desire it, in the same manner, for example, that you desire wealth, or fame, or beauty. You have grown up in the belief that it is right to desire and believe, but that, you know, is quite a different affair from actual yearning.
Nearly every one puts the thought aside as beyond solution. One says, "My thinking will not change the fact nor my longing bring it about. The duty of the passing day is all I can fulfil." Under this cover of postponed examination the world has grown as indifferent to the question as it was formerly engrossed by it. Fear of offending delicate sensibilities and established beliefs keeps the doubter and modifier silent; whilst the extreme of the omnivorous believer is set over against the out-and-out denier. But the great majority of people are neither believers nor disbelievers, but indifferentists—slowly settling toward an agnostic non-committalism that is destructive of all intellectual and moral earnestness.
It is my conviction that this abrogation of curiosity and examination is a most culpable and dangerous fact. If we live after death it is of tremendous importance; if we do not it is of no less vital import, and the belief, the disbelief, or the evasion is of the most constant influence, unconsciously, subtly, upon every thought and act of every day's living.
Suppose now we divest ourselves of the creeps and shudders usually accompanying a discussion of death and immortality, and fearlessly test the common dogma with a little analysis in the light of scientific research and reason. Let us suppose you are a believer: what is it you believe? You desire: what is it you desire, and how far is your desire feasible? You are convinced: but what is the truth? If possible, in what way and to what extent is a future life possible? If attainable, by whom and by what means? Moreover, the kind of belief makes all the difference in the world. I have read somewhere about an African chief who killed his wife's lover, and was defeated at last by his wife's unswerving belief in immortality, she committing suicide in order to join her lover. But the chief was equal to the emergency and he in turn killed himself in order to follow the pair and break up their tête-à-têtes in the other world! It all depends upon what you propose doing with a future life after you get it. You might just as well be digging clams on this earth as "singing Hosannas around the throne" in heaven.
Do you believe in or fervently desire what, with splendid bravery and abandon the old creed called "the resurrection of the body"? Terrible counter-queries arise: At what age in your life would you choose as best representing the ideal body for your resurrection? Would you prefer your body as it was when you were a child, when youthful, when mature, or when old? Moreover, it is changing every minute, this body. It is estimated that something like five million blood-corpuscles die every second of your life. Even the two or three pounds of minerals in one's bones are only a little more permanently fixed. All component parts are undergoing change every instant: they soon become grass, grain, or tree, passing again into others' bodies, and so on forever. Is it the form and feature you desire to preserve and not the constituent particles? But form and feature change every day or year, and are as impossible to fix as the atoms themselves. Indeed, is not the whole matter put beyond choice by the evident fact that unless by the fiat of an extramundane deity the only moment possible to fix the bodily form in the mould of eternity would be the death-moment? And yet this were the most undesirable of all seasons, since at that hour the body is in the weakest, most useless, and most wretched condition of all the hours it has served us. Supposing therefore, that you are so in love with your own body that you would wish to call it into life again and for forever, we see at once that no moment or phase of development could be chosen, except perhaps the dying moment, the least desirable of all, and that the particles of one's body have served their turn in myriad other bodies each having an equally valid claim to his "property." Besides this the absurdity of the whole is emphasised by the crushing fact that all the organic matter of the world has been used over and over for bodies and the earth has not enough hydrocarbons to fit out again with bodies a small fraction of the souls that have lived upon it. Doubtless the combined weight of all the organic bodies that have lived on the earth would be many times the total weight of the globe including its minerals, elements, and gases. It may be frankly admitted that no bodily resurrection is possible.
And it is as certainly undesirable. The old dogma was the crudest materialism, wholly unworthy of the credence of those who pretended to believe that God was a spirit, and that they were his children. The belief in bodily resurrection was a natural concomitant of the age of sensualism before the mind and spirit had risen to their modern heritage. The desire for such a resurrection stamps the person with a self-confessed imperfection of mental and moral development. The impossibility of such a resurrection is one of many proofs that life is no sensualist at heart and that ideality is the final outcome, the trend of actuality. Nature compels us to take wings though the sluggish Psyche lingers lovingly in the pretty little cocoon of materiality she has built about herself.
Is it perhaps your understanding, reason, or intellect that you desire to perpetuate forever? Frankly, now, are you so in love with your mental outfit? In your more modest and sane hours are you not sadly conscious how very imperfect it is? While we are young and very conceited we may be filled with self-satisfaction and trust in our own judgment, but as the years drag by, we, looking back over the past, grow more and more conscious that our intellect is not to be trusted. Think of the interminable series of blunders of which your life is the record! How poorly you have misjudged people and circumstances! How your reason has fooled you many times and again! How many illusions and delusions you have lived through! With what sad clearness you now see your former stupidities, and with what blindness you fail to see your present ones! Looking about you, you find others equally as gifted as yourself holding your opinions as loathsome. Looking above you, you see the most intellectual and the most educated diametrically opposed in their opinions of God, man, and nature. Two great men, two brothers learned and trained in dialectic and logic, soon grow apart. One becomes a cardinal of the Romish church, accepting papal infallibility and a thousand such absurdities, the other as firmly convinced that the fallacies of the English church are God's gospel. Looking below you, you see the great mass of men wrecking their minds and lives upon a thousand outrageous beliefs and prejudices. There is no sadder spectacle in the world than this that the people love error. But each one with imperturbable conceit is convinced that he sees better and plainer than another. Every partisan democrat or republican has no sort of doubt that he is right about every financial or governmental measure, though he has never studied finance, history, or political economy five minutes. He does not dream that he is a dupe of the lousy politicians and of his own lack of intellect. All history is a tangle of such poverty-stricken intellection. One can but be amazed at the proneness of everybody to see things and do things every way but the right way. And this is the kind of a mental equipment you would stamp with the seal of eternity!
Possibly you may protest that it is a more perfect and purified intellect that you wish. Ah, yes, but that would not be your intellect. You want to be made over, made into another person. That would not be your immortality but that of another. That would imply that it is pure intellect and perfect, in the abstract, that you are interested in. Have you shown much interest in that sort of intellect in the past? If you wish such an immortality of a perfected intellect you must certainly possess it before it can be made everlasting.
Perhaps, again, you will say that it is the ever-progressive ever-growing intellect you desire. This is subterfuge. That is not what you wish but what you would take in default of your first choice. Lessing said that if God held out to him absolute truth in one hand and in the other the everlasting search for truth he would choose the latter. But the condition of everlasting search would be the condition of everlasting imperfection of intellect. Lessing's choice seems to me impious.