I therefore conclude, that at heart you do not wish to eternalise your crude imperfect intellect, and that the sole method of getting an exalted and perfected intellect is to cultivate it here and now. Have you in the past obeyed reason and not passion or self-interest? Have you studied logic, history, and science with a sincere desire to do your political and social duty, and to free yourself from prejudice, error, superstition, and conceit? If not why should God suddenly endow you with a perfect intellect ready-made? Is it God's way in this world, to give excellencies unasked and unearned? Rest assured he will not do it at your dying hour. It is no particular merit in you to die; why should you be rewarded with a new intellect then?
Or, again, you may say that it is not so much your intellect that you wish to make immortal as it is your emotional nature, affection, etc. Love and friendship, you complain, are cut off by death and the tendrils of the heart die because they find nothing to cling to or rest upon. You would like to renew beyond the grave the love and sympathy that has made the earth-life endurable, and even beautiful. Now is this, in very truth, just so? Are you really satisfied with your devotion and love? Have not your outgoings of the heart been quite fickle, illogical, selfish, and calculating? Has not your love and gratitude been often a lively sense of benefits to come? Has your love to woman not been of the "Kreutzer-Sonata" type, a little better and more subtly-concealed perhaps, but at heart the same? If you are a woman have you been seeking to get or to give love, and has your little affection been but payment for protection and a home? Have you chosen true and noble friends and been true and noble to them? Has your charity been but alms-giving without kind sympathy and helpfulness? Have you as married folk, perhaps, been, as the cant phrase has it, "devoted to each other," but oblivious of the duty of affection toward the rest of the world,—grinning examples of égoisme à deux? Is your family a fetich, an enlarged sort of selfishness? Do you at heart care much for anybody except your own precious self? And a too exclusive love, even of the purest type may be sin in God's eyes. If you bind all your affection upon one weak life you risk a precious value upon too single and narrow an object, and deprive others of the sympathy that need it more. "Just wrapt up in one," as the sentimental jargon has it, is often if not always a pleasant way of great sin. Affection may become morbid—a disease, quite as well as any abuse or exaggeration of any other characteristic.
I take it that they who are the most satisfied with the strength, purity, and constancy of their love and emotional nature are precisely they that have neither actual strength, purity, and constancy of sentiment, and are thus accurately they that should not have immortality.
Lastly, if neither body, intellect, nor the affectional nature are such as you wish made eternal, are you any better contented with your moral nature? The question at once raises a smile. The feeling of our own ethical unworthiness has crystallised into the great Christian dogma of Christ's vicarious sacrifice. In the words of the old hymn, "Jesus died and paid it all, all the debt I owe." No man hoped to get to heaven on his own merits. Much of the zeal of religion has consisted in the joy of the belief that by a sleight-of-hand trick, a big sponge of forgiveness was wiped over the ethical debit and credit account by the lachrymose deity, whose occupation, as Heine said, was to forgive. History is one long monotonous list of man's sins and inhumanities. I think it probable that you will not urge the ethical aspect; I would leave that plea aside. We all know that we are very much like a lot of pigs, each after the most and best corn and the warmest bed. The amazing immorality of trying to get to heaven on another's merits was the most brazen example of how little heavenliness there was in the heaven-hunters and heaven-scalers. Of course the desire for heaven itself, the desire for one's happiness was immoral when conditioned upon the misery of others. Nature in this respect is better than man, denying him his childish materialistic desires and forcing him to wait for immortality until he can learn to live in the spirit and seek no selfish heaven.
Just as the body is ever changing, and it is impossible to seize upon any hour when we could eternalise it, except at the undesirable death-hour, so it is the same in reference to intellect, love, and morality. There are no two days in life when we are the same. As to intellect we have little before adult life is reached, and most people have little after fifty or sixty years. It is proverbial that no one changes his opinion after that age, but lives on old prejudices and ideas. The mental powers get into ruts and habits, true reason being abrogated. As to love we laugh at our fickleness, and our habits and ideals of friendship get sordid as each year strips off the freedom and expansiveness of youth and the dear cold ghost of self is more exclusively worshipped. And our ethical standards change with each day's passing. We have at every hour to clutch ourselves by the throat and cry, "Stay! Who art thou?" And lo! while we ask our protean self the question, we have become another. We seek perpetuity of existence for something ever becoming other. We seek personal identity after death, but we have no personal identity before death: how then can we have it afterward? Do you not see that what makes you recognisable, different from other individuals, and what would make personal immortality possible depends upon the accidents of organisation,—depends firstly upon the bodily peculiarity, and secondly upon imperfections of mind that you do not wish to perpetuate? Twins sometimes wear a knot of ribbon as a signal whereby their friends may recognise them. Our faces and bodies are but such little symbols or signals that our souls have hung out for the day. Divest your best friend of his body and would you recognise him? Have you ever thought how the photograph of your friend's soul would look? If bodily form and imperfections make up the most of what we call individuality it becomes evident that in casting off imperfection we become less narrow, less individual. As you become freed from the cramping littleness of self-love and the bonds of self-gratification, as you rise into the life of the spirit, you find yourself less individual. One fitted for a true heaven would not care for the old immortality. What is good to carry over into the future life is not so much personal identity as personal non-identity, not so much the imperfections that make us individuals as the perfections that free us from individualism. We must lose our life to find it. We have overestimated the value of individuality. Self-consciousness has become hypertrophied, and the summum bonum of life is held to be the preservation of a little puckered-up individuality. This over-development of individualism is doubtless due to the fierce struggle man has had to elevate himself out of savagery. It has been possible only through excessive carefulness and love of the ego. The struggle for existence is now taking on class and corporate characteristics so that the common weal is an ideal quite as much as individual satisfaction and safety. Hence the exaggeration of personality may now return to something like a healthy normalism. As a natural outgrowth and consequence of this over-development of the individual consciousness, there came the absurd attempt to carry over into the after-life the same sort of existence that had been developed here,—consisting in a neglect of the actual world of one's descendants, an ignoring of death that ends the body and products of organisation, and a failure to see that a future life after death must be a life of the spirit, of perfections, and of the common life, not of peculiarities and imperfections. If this seems an aery height and a too rare air it argues against your preparation for the only desirable as well as the only possible kind of immortality. It argues against you just in the same way that your horror of death does. It is only participation in the divine life of the spirit that can see death as right and good. Death comes to shatter our baseless trust in the evanescent physical and teach us dependence upon the everlasting spiritual. They dread death whose life is of the physical type. God never gave to man a greater blessing, after life itself, than death, and nothing more strikingly proves the divine government of the world than the certainty of its coming to us all. If death is your enemy, life is not your friend. The brutal attempt to ignore the fact, the belief that the body with its pack of heathenish appetites and needs could push through death and come out fresh and renewed on the other side is the very insanity of individualism and the intoxication of materialism. The mourning, shudder, gloom, and horror of death,—God-sent if anything is—is practical pessimism and reckless atheism. Death's one lesson is that we must love and cultivate what he cannot touch. One who has lived a life of kindness and spirituality has no horror of death, and to him it has little mystery. But to him whose divinity has been self and whose religion the worship of his physiological senses, death must be the ugliest of enemies who is to rob him of his all. Did you ever notice how life is plastic and free when first fashioning for itself a body? "All heaven lies about us in our infancy." In youth we are unselfish, aspiring, and noble. As the years go by the power of the organisation, the material grows, and limits more and more the freedom of the spirit. Frankenstein turns upon its maker. With age men get narrow, cold, calculating; women snakey, scheming, cruel. The soul finds itself more and more the slave instead of the master, and by and by when the slavery becomes unendurable, it takes flight, and this you call death. It is the body's reward for insubordination. I think we deserve little sympathy for dying. Most of us have well-merited death before it comes—I speak, of course only of the death of those in life's afternoon. Few keep the young life pliant and free beyond the age of fifty. If people could see that life is the maker and moulder of organisation, and if they would seek immortality upon earth, I believe men might come to live a hundred years. Trees learn to live thousands of years, but they keep youth, and spring, and trust, and love, forever nestling with the birds among the rejuvenescent leaves of spring. We die not because the body is weak, but because it has become too strong. We die because there is no real continuance and strength in anything but the non-physical, and we have trusted in the physical. Matter without free life is inert, moved only from without: the dead body is simply matter without life. It is not the blacksmith's arm that is strong: without nerve-force it cannot raise an ounce, cannot raise itself. Whence the nerve-force? From the ganglionic gray cells of the spinal cord and brain. And whence these little gray cells? The dear stupid physiologist has now reached his limit, and you can confidently answer for him that it was Life created these things, Life that existed before muscles, nerves, and cells, and that slowly fashioned them; Life, an order of existence in no imaginable way analogous to, or to be confounded with matter or mechanics. There is in the history of thought no more ludicrous and dismal failure than the attempt to explain life in terms of mechanics. The hope of the materialist that science would prove his prejudice is torn to tatters. The children of the spirit are amazed at the bat-blind inability to see the fact,—to see that life is more certain and enduring than matter, soul than sense. The organs of the body are changed, diseased, die; the body itself dies; generations of bodies die, but like a containing cord of silk, on which all the glittering beads of flesh are strung, there is the soul, the life, ever the same, persisting unchanged through all change, giving unity to diversity, moulding, making, discarding, choosing, healing, working to far-away ends with blind, and dead, and obstinate materials. You love the flesh over-much and jealous life says to you, "Take it then, this so loved and wondrous flesh; me you have not loved,"—and lo! the dead body, useless, decaying, lies before you. Let no materialistic misreading of science hoodwink you into any blurring of the outlines between matter and life.[78] The two are as far apart as heaven and earth, are as dissimilar as thought can conceive,—perhaps in a final analysis, are the only two things of the universe. There is no fact of science showing the faintest warrant for confounding the two. Even Huxley calls materialism the most baseless of all dogmas. It will probably be found that there is but one element, of which all others are duplications and combinations, atoms being but centres of force. But life is irresolvable into any form of matter or mechanical energy. It is not only unthinkable that matter could originate life, but it is demonstrably absurd. No scientist to-day believes in spontaneous generation. Omne vivum ex vivo is an axiom. The plant has no nervous system and yet has every physiological function possessed by the human body. It has contractility, irritability, respiration, anabolism, catabolism, and reproductivity,—that is, it has spontaneous movement, it responds to stimulation, it breathes, it assimilates, it excretes, it begets its like,—and physiologically this is all you can do. Nay, more than this, even a drop of the jelly-like protoplasm that makes up the basis of all cell-structures, animal or vegetable, has also all of these qualities or powers.[79] There are bundles of wholly structureless, unorganised jelly that exhibit these capacities in a wonderful degree. There is, for instance, Hydra viridis, that has no eyes and yet sees, no brain or nerves and yet lies in wait for prey, pursues and fights, or flees from danger. Turned inside out it lives and digests its food as well as before. It holds live worms down with an improvised arm when they try to get out of its stomach. Any part reproduces all. Cut off the bottom of its stomach and it goes on eating, quite untroubled by the little accident,—and so on. A great, wise, blind man has defined evolution, or life, as the integration of matter and the dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the motion undergoes a parallel transformation. Some one else improved upon this by saying that it was "a change from a no-howish, untalkaboutable all-alikeness, to a some-howish and in general talkaboutable not-all-alikeness, by continuous something-elsifications and all-togetherations." Schelling said that life was the tendency to individuation. But the crystal or the planet shows that, and they are not living. As the hand cannot grasp itself, neither can life define itself. All definitions I have seen miss the essential and primal characteristics of spontaneous movement. But all definitions begin by begging the question,—assuming the thing explained. The truth is that there is no definition or explanation possible. The dualism of matter and life must be accepted. There is no monism can bridge the gulf between mechanics and life. Inorganic matter with its inherent forces and laws cannot be conceived as ever coming into or as passing out of existence. From all eternity it was as it is, and so it will remain. The physical universe shows no hint of design, no glimpse of freedom, no trace of intelligence, no suggestion of a maker or God. It has no power of choice, no spontaneous motion. But the merest speck of living matter is utterly and absolutely different. It may have eyes or no eyes, and yet it sees, ears or not and yet it hears, nerves or not and yet it feels and reacts, brain or not and yet it thinks and plans, and acts in accordance with intellectual resolves. The dead body of your child is most inconceivably different from the living body of an hour ago. The one fundamental mystery of the explainable world is why life seeks objectification in material forms, and why it seeks it with such vehemence and ardor. Life seems to bite at matter as if with famishing hunger. One wonders if from some other planet life is being suddenly starved out or banished by some catastrophe, and as a consequence there is thence an over-emigration of the hungry Huns upon our earth. Certain confused and confusion-breeding philosophers in the interests of a theoretical monism or pantheism pretend to find, or to believe that the organic is born out of the inorganic, that the physical world shows evidence of design, that life and mentality were implicate and latent in pre-existent matter. Yet they will accept the evidence against spontaneous generation derived from the fact that if you kill all organic life by intense heat and then exclude life from without you will never find life to arise. But it is plain that in the condensation of the dust of space into suns and planets all organic life was killed in the hottest of all conceivable heat. But as the planets cool, life appears. It must have come from without, and must therefore be an universal self-existent power. Why, or how, or whence life comes to us we do not know now, but the transcendent miracle is ever before our eyes: infinitely rich and free, life is filling, thrilling, surcharging every molecule of matter to which with wondrous power and ingenuity it can gain access. It covers every thousandth of an inch of the earth's surface, dives into the deepest ocean depths, fills the air as high as the mountain tops, ever unsatisfied, ever grasping up a million million renaissant forms, never resting, never baffled. Before this omnipresent god one stands in rapt amazement and worship. To matter, then, life first brought, and still ever brings the power of organisation, of adaptation, of spontaneous energy, and of movement. But when the death of the organisation takes place, the life that preceded and formed it is not lessened or affected. When the watch wears out does it prove that the watchmaker is dead? It is more rational to suppose that the watchmaker has kept on with his work, that he has made and will make many more watches, and I therefore judge that the life of each of us, that existed before our bodies, that formed our bodies, will still form other bodies after ours. The Oriental doctrine of the transmigration of souls is not to be accepted in its crude details, but it is doubtless a great truth. It is more rational and more consonant with what we know of life, than the theory of wasted life implicate in the barbaric notion of sending numberless millions of souls to hell to do nothing but suffer useless pain, and other millions to heaven to suffer (I use the word advisedly) useless pleasure. Any theory of immortality that rests upon the assumption of uselessness and waste may be quickly set aside. Just as matter and force are indestructible, various forms of force being interchangeable, so it must be with life. There must be a conservation of life-energy just as rigid, and this truth must remake and remould the whole conception of immortality. When a mechanical force disappears in one phase, it at once reappears in another aspect. So vegetable, animal, and mental life are but different aspects of life-force, and suffer no loss when transformed one into the other, or when the body disappears altogether. And as it is the inherent nature of force never to rest so there is no rest for life. Banishment of life to a heaven of inaction is as impossible as it is absurd.
[78] Those who think this view is the voice of faith and not of true science may profitably read a little book that has come to my notice since writing these pages: Life Theories and Religious Thought, by Lionel S. Beale.
[79] According to the latest scientific researches the dependence of all organisation upon life is more clearly shown than ever. My friend Dr. Edmund Montgomery twenty-five years ago, as a result of extended experiment and research, showed that the body of animals is not an aggregation of cells, the force of the whole being derived from the enslaving and utilising these subordinate organisms, but that the whole body is a single protoplasmic living connected mass or unit with functionally specialised parts. That this view is the scientific view of to-day and that the cell-aggregate theory is dead may be seen by consulting the article "Zelle," by Prof. Frommen in Eulenburg's Real-Encyclopädie der gesammten Heilkunde, 1890.
This extension of the law of the conservation of force to things biologic and psychic is a two-edged sword: it offers conclusive evidence of the fallacy of the materialist and unbeliever. There is no annihilation; your life at death not only may not stop but cannot stop. Life is as inextinguishable as physical force. On the other hand this sword deals the death blow to two equally shallow fallacies of believers. Just so sure as it insures the preservation of your life, of all that is worth preservation, just so sure it denies the possibility of preserving what was bound up with and produced by organisation,—that is individuality and personal identity. These things, if not entirely, are certainly largely the products of your peculiar physical and physiological organisation. Whatever is born of the flesh must perish with the flesh; what is born of the spirit shall inherit eternal life. But the profoundest and most distinguishing rebuke is given the unscientific, puerile, selfish assumption of the waste, loss, and uselessness of life involved in the old theory of heaven and hell. When from a chemical compound you take away and liberate one element or compound radicle, does it then shoot off into space, to "flock all by itself" for eternity? By no means! It at once rushes into a new combination with its nearest neighbor, quickly picking up again the round of its duty and function. The curious notion that after having done work in one body, life or souls should at once rush off to some far-away star, there to sing or howl for eternity was a childish absurdity. One wonders where even an omnipotent God could get material for such an amazing manufacture and loss of souls. The theory also forgot that logic demands that what should live forever in the future must perforce have lived forever in the past. A rope if it have one end, must have two ends. What, therefore have our souls been doing during this past eternity? The truth is that absolutely speaking there cannot be souls, but only soul. Life is a unit, and indivisible. The tiniest bit of bioplasm holds and represents all of life. Neither you nor it are separable from the whole. There may be education and progressive evolution of life as a whole but there can be no individual and selfish salvation apart from the salvation of all other souls. The idea that release from the body at once releases a soul from action, duty, and the work of life, is an illogicality that could have arisen in no mind conversant with the demonstrated law of the non-wastage of force in any work of energy elsewhere. Life is never tired; it is the body that requires rest not the spirit. The old doctrine of heaven, an eternity of laziness, was the sigh of the sluggish flesh whipped to ceaseless work by the unresting life. The desire of heaven was the desire of eternal death.
This extension of the idea of the non-wastage, the rigid conservation and interconvertibility of force to things of life, gains a new significance and grandeur when we consider that whatever proves the immortality of man proves the immortality of every other animal or vegetable form. The tree and horse have a soul quite as well as you, and must live after death quite as surely as you will. It is the flimsiest of conceits that makes men think they are endowed with a special sort of soul or divine life, different from that of animals or plants. Don't flatter yourself. God takes quite the same loving pains and care in the elimination of a leaf that he does of a brain-cell. Man is but a small part of the animal world, and the whole animal world is but a small part of the total life of the globe. Don't despise the vegetable kingdom: it can do something you cannot do—make living matter out of mineral substances. You could not live a day without the food furnished you by "your brothers, the plants." Hence if human life or souls cannot be sent off into space to do nothing, neither can the souls of animals and plants. If we are to have our heaven they must have theirs also. Does not this tangential theory begin to be clumsy and work with huge creakings and difficulties? It looks like reductio ad absurdum.
Not only is the tangential theory contradictory of all physical analogies and all known laws, but it is positively immoral. It is but a refined selfishness. Worldliness is none the less sinful because it is other-worldliness. If billions of souls could thus be wasted in an eternity of useless pain or pleasure, could thus, drunken with individuation, hug their own sweet ghosts for never-ending time—then were life a farce, the universe a huge meaningless machine for grinding out waste and useless souls. But if all life, past or future, is one and indivisible, purposive, educational, then the world becomes full of meaning and the face of the Father, Life, smiles out at us from every living thing. The faith of all good men that goodness is at the heart of things is justified. The Earth becomes our home, that we can love; our Father ever dwelleth here; we cannot be banished. When we have finished our task, when our body has worn out, tireless life, of which we are the children and heirs, gives us here and now other work to do.