To matter, this tremendous cosmical game of incarnation can mean nothing. We see the dead flesh break up into simpler chemical forms and the atoms finally spin off unaltered by their flesh-dance, again to be caught up by the mystic and unseen Master, again to be pressed into organic forms,—forms that like empty sea-shells only show where life has been. And so on forever. But to life some educative purpose must be operative through it all. Life that made eyes must see more than eyes; life that made brains must know more than brains. There is doubtless pain and strain; but is there to be no ultimate justification? We may catch glimpses of reasons. Do we not see an increase both of quantity and quality of life in geologic times? Is life trying to do away with death and heredity? Are they but makeshifts, death but a discarding of too obstinate material? Birth but a retempering and reworking of the same material? Heredity but the temporary means of passing life and its experiences onward until death and birth shall be found unnecessary in a growing command of chemical and physical forces that shall banish old age out of the world? There is no inherent reason why a body should grow decrepit. If it can be made to preserve its suppleness for fifty years why not for a thousand? It may transpire that the dream of an elixir of life may come true through scientific progress despite the savage death-blow given it by Brown-Séquard. The more sin, selfishness, and wrong there is the shorter is the average length of human lives. If you will look into the rich and awful science of statistics you will find proof of this in every class of society. When we apply ourselves to enrich and lengthen our life-time with the same zeal we now use in killing each other—when the endowments of the world's scientific schools equal the cost of the world's armies then there will be a very different life-table found in the insurance-offices.
Finally with mournful echoing recurrence comes the old question: How much of individuality persists and passes untouched through death's fingers? How far does the graduate life carry with it the results of experience? I would answer: all that you ought to desire, all that is best, all that you will want when you fully understand how little and poor is individuality and that there is something including it and far better. I have a strange inability, personally, to understand the to me absurd hunger after personal identity. It appears to me a childish obtuseness of character. The great and glorious freeness and largeness of life, the decentralised, impersonal quality of it seems to be unappreciated. I do not see how people can fail to understand that personal identity is not only impossible, does not exist now and here, but that the desire of it is the renunciation of progress. We grow and advance only by change, only by breaking up identity and becoming other. Think also of the lack of identity or individuality in nature. There is no personality and individualism there, and yet there is something that includes personality and is much more. There is will, consciousness, intelligence, life,—but not identity or individuality. So the life that is the heart of us invites us to leave our little self and find a larger self. Religion is our yes to that invitation. Materialism and pessimism is the saying no to it. The immortality that is alone possible or desirable is the losing our life, the individual identity-loving life, again to find it as the impersonal but richer, deeper life of nature and God. God denies you an immortality of individualism and identity because he loves you so well that he refuses you your crude childish desire in order to offer you something infinitely better. People do not seem to see how narrow, small, and partial is the dissociate speck of the individual, and that as an individual progresses in all the virtues of character he evermore becomes proportionally less individual and less centralised, always more like the divine prototype of his impersonal father, Life. The love of individualism is the love of imperfection. This may to some seem a hard doctrine. It is not perhaps an easy task for the butterfly to break its way out through the million-fold bonds of its cocoon, but when risen into the large air and sunshine does it regret the birth-struggle? They who think they are being cheated of reality for a metaphysic illusion will find in breaking through the bonds of flesh that they also have brought with them splendid wings for rising in the no less real but rarer air of spiritual trust in life. It is not that we love less the thousand ties of flesh, home and kindred, but that in recognising the paternity and fraternity of all life, we find love commensurate with that life. I do not think there was any cold stony harshness in the face of Jesus when he uttered those most profoundly significant of all words, "Who is my mother, and who are my brethren? Whosoever shall do the will of my Father, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother." What a recall to the common life of the spirit! What unity with the common life based upon loving obedience to the will of the Father. What a wonderful rebuke of the love of individualism. He did not love his mother less but humanity more. The more we rise into that impersonal atmosphere the more are we careless of the fate of personal identity. The composite photograph shows the fundamental and enduring quality, the average feature. In a certain sense life and history are taking humanity's composite photograph; but, inordinately-loving individualism, each sitter conceitedly demands that his own picture be left untouched and unblurred by that of the others, and that his poor little portrait shall stand alone and forever—precisely what the divine photographer does not wish and will not permit. Obstinacy persists and God smashes the negative to the ground with the unanswerable argument called death. Because it is more than metaphor that in any ways your body may be likened unto a photographer's negative: created, for example, by the in-flashing of a heavenly ray of light among the highly unstable chemicals of matter; useless, except as an intermediate step to a clearer showing of the character; black and invisible unless shone through by the pure light of life and love; fragile as glass,—and lastly the poor, weak, shadowy, dead counterfeit of a throbbing, marvellous, living reality. The hunger for an immortality of the body, of the senses, the lust of immortality, is, in empty fatuousness, only comparable to the mania of a crazy photographer interested only in his negatives, and who never "develops" one, or to the foolishness that values photographs more than the friends themselves. If we once get our spiritual eye fixed upon the deep reality and unity hidden by the Maia-veilings of individuality and flesh, the cravings of our weak hearts for eternal continuance of our little bundle of littlenesses, would fall away from us as softly as the wayward longings of childhood. We could then see that it is the quality of all life, the progressive purity, power, and increase of life in the abstract, that become all-important. Religion would become the love and veneration of Life the Father of us; morality the cheerful obedience of the individual to that Father; Heaven the re-entrance of the individual life into the great unity. Much of the old religion was irreligious; its God a far-away dead abstraction, not a living, ever-present love; its immortality was at heart a desire for death, its spiritualism at heart a barbaric materialism. To this death of faith and irreligious religion, comes the sympathetic study and love of nature—that is, science—and reveals to us the opulence of life, the infinity of intellect in nature, the inexhaustibleness of her resources and of her diversity, her beauty, and her splendor. The old materialistic degradation of religion forefelt its doom would come from this spiritualistic revivification, and the devotees cried out against science as atheistic. And science found some foolish enemies in her own camp who, misreading their divine book, joined in the cry—"Nothing but mechanics." It was a dismal short-lived croak. We now see that not only are science and her workers religious, but without scientific knowledge there can be no adequate idea or practice of religion. You can't love God unless you love and know what he is doing in this universe. The man who in a walk goes neglectfully and obliviously by a million mysteries and wonders that God has been toiling to eliminate for ages,—such a man cannot lay much claim to God's friendship. If we love our friend, we have some interest in the deepest concern of his life. The foolishest of all fears is the fear that science is somehow going to destroy all good things of faith and life. In truth it reveals all good things. It demonstrates and manifests both God and immortality,—God as the Father of all life, immortality as the surety of the conservation and non-wastage of that life. Much of the fear of science, is as I have said the fear of the old materialistic religion in presence of the larger faith that burns up its beloved errors. They who had been promised and had argued themselves into a groundless belief in the value and immortality of a bundle of sensual appetites, selfish desires, and imperfections saw far in advance that any large study of life and nature would dash their wretched faith to atoms. And science has overridden this unfaithful faith. "He that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." This is as true scientifically as it is true morally and religiously.
It requires but a little study of neurology and psychology to give demonstration to this truth. The products of organisation die with disorganisation. Most, if not all, of what people mean by individuality and personal identity is a product of organisation, is an accident of incarnation. Children are similar to each other; they are lovable partly because idiosyncrasy and individualism haven't yet developed. As we grow older we cultivate individuality, until the very old are usually angular, cranky, individual with a vengeance! Death, thank heaven, is the end of that, the certainty of a non-eternalising of the imperfect. Birth is a new trial. Incarnation and reincarnation are the ever-renewed work of Life. Through the laws of heredity, through physiology, sociology, and biology, science is tirelessly illustrating to us how all life holds together, how individualism is valueless, and sacrificed to the common weal. There is no escape, sensual or supersensual from the world's great common life. The old selfish dream of a heaven apart from incarnation, from doing and becoming was a pitiful mistake. You cannot clutch your cake of happiness and like a spoiled child run into the attic of heaven to eat it alone. Life will see to it that you do not slip off. And if you have been born again of the spirit you will have no such desire, but will beg for kindred work upon the old earth-home.
In the meantime the conclusion is clear: to love and aid the work of our master Life we need not wait for death. We may not seek our own salvation; it is no matter whether you and I are saved or not. The reincarnation of life is our work here and now. It took you twenty years to fashion out of a microscopically-small speck of unorganised protoplasm your body and brain. Within us we are to keep that organisation from cramping and binding the life,—keep life as large and free and pliant as possible. Outside of us the incarnation goes on as well, and every person you influence either for good or for ill, thus by the fact, becomes a product of your incarnating work. Every day you have a hundred opportunities to give, without lessening your own supply, some of your own life, to increase the quantity and to elevate the quality of the general stock of the world's life. Help the young, they inherit the world and will use it well or ill according to your teaching and example. Stop cruelty to animals, they are your brothers, filled with the same life as your own; fight the political ruin we are preparing for ourselves by partisanship, bribery, and class-legislation; discourage war and intemperance and lessen the tyranny of the strong and wealthy. Wage a ceaseless war to the death against luxury, the poison that is eating and rotting the hearts of all of us; love trees, meadows, clear brooks, the mountains and silences of Nature. Love, not so much your own or another's individual life, as Life itself. There is otherwise no immortality.
The divine story tells us that after measureless suffering and self-purification, Buddha had gained the right to enter Nirvana. With compassion filling his heart he put his merited reward aside and resolved to remain without to teach and to help until every child of earth should have become his disciple, and until every disciple should have entered Nirvana before him. Such must be the resolve of every true lover of life and of every right seeker after immortality.
GEORGE M. GOULD.
SOME QUESTIONS OF PSYCHO-PHYSICS.[80]
SENSATIONS AND THE ELEMENTS OF REALITY.
[80] This article is the substance of a private communication from Prof. Ernst Mach to the Editor of The Monist—published in the present form with Prof. Mach's consent. Translated from Professor Mach's MS. by Thomas J. McCormack.
I have read Dr. Carus's article "Feeling and Motion"[81] with care, and have also perused Clifford's essay on "The Nature of Things in Themselves." Let me attempt to present the points in which our agreements and differences consist.