Faith in human immortality stands or falls with the belief in absolute values. The interest of consciousness, as Professor Pringle-Pattison has said in his admirable Gifford Lectures, lies in the ideal values of which it is the bearer, not in its mere existence as a more refined kind of fact. Idealism is most satisfactorily defined as the interpretation of the world according to a scale of value, or, in Plato's phrase, by the Idea of the Good. The highest values in this scale are absolute, eternal, and super-individual, and lower values are assigned their place in virtue of their correspondence to or participation in these absolute values. I agree with Münsterberg that the conditional and subjective values of the pragmatist have no meaning unless we have acknowledged beforehand the independent value of truth. If the proof of the merely individual significance of truth has itself only individual importance, it cannot claim any general meaning. If, on the other hand, it demands to be taken as generally valid, the possibility of a general truth is acknowledged from the start. If this one exception is granted, the whole illusory universe of relativism is overthrown. To deny any thought which is more than relative is to deprive even scepticism itself of the presuppositions on which it rests. The logical sceptic has no ego to doubt with. 'Every doubt of absolute values destroys itself. As thought it contradicts itself; as doubt it denies itself; as belief it despairs of itself.' It is not necessary or desirable to follow Münsterberg in identifying valuation with will. He talks of the will judging; but the will cannot judge. In contemplating existence we use our will to fix our attention, and then try conscientiously to prevent it from influencing the verdict. But this illegitimate use of the word 'will' does not impair the force of the argument for absolute values.
Now, valuation arranges experience in a different manner from natural science. The attributes of reality, in our world of values, are Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. And we assert that we have as good reason to claim objective reality for these Ideas as for anything in the world revealed to our senses. 'All claims on man's behalf,' says Professor Pringle-Pattison, 'must be based on the objectivity of the values revealed in his experience, and brokenly realised there. Man does not make values any more than he makes reality.' Our contention is that the world of values, which forms the content of idealistic thought and aspiration, is the real world; and in this world we find our own immortality.
But there could be no greater error than to leave the two worlds, or the two 'judgments,' that of existence and that of value, contrasted with each other, or treated as unrelated in our experience. A value-judgment which is not also a judgment of existence is in the air; it is the baseless fabric of a vision. Existence is itself a value, and an ingredient in every valuation; that which has no existence has no value. And, on the other side, it is a delusion to suppose that any science can dispense with valuation. Even mathematics admits that there is a right and a wrong way of solving a problem, though by confining itself to quantitative measurements it can assert no more than a hypothetical reality for its world. It is quite certain that we can think of no existing world without valuation.
'The ultimate identity of existence and value is the venture of faith to which mysticism and speculative idealism are committed.'[93] It is indeed the presupposition of all philosophy and all religion; without this faith there can, properly speaking, be no belief in God. But the difference between naturalism and idealism may, I think, be better stated otherwise than by emphasising the contrast between existence and value, which it is impossible for either side to maintain. Naturalism seeks to interpret the world by investigation of origins; idealism by investigation of ends. The one finds the explanation of evolution in that from which it started, the other in that to which it tends. The one explains the higher by the lower; the other the lower by the higher. This is a plain issue; either the world shows a teleology or it does not. If it does, the philosophy based on the inorganic sciences is wrong. And the attempt to explain the higher by the lower becomes mischievous or impossible when we pass from one order to another. In speaking of different 'orders,' we do not commit ourselves to any sudden breaks or leaps in evolution. The organic may be linked to the inorganic, soul to the lower forms of life, spirit to soul. But whether the 'scale of perfection' is a ladder or an inclined plane, new categories are necessary as we ascend it. And unless we admit an inner teleology as a determining factor in growth, many facts even in physiology are hard to explain.
If the basis of our faith in the world-order is the conviction that the Ideas of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are fully real and fully operative, we must try to form some clear notion of what these Ideas mean, and how they are related to each other. The goal of Truth, as an absolute value, is unity, which in the outer world means harmony, in the intercourse of spirit with spirit, love; and in the inner world, peace or happiness. The goal of Goodness as an absolute value is the realisation of the ought-to-be in victorious moral effort. Beauty is the self-recognition of creative Spirit in its own works; it is the expression of Nature's own deepest character. Beauty gives neither information nor advice; but it satisfies a part of our nature which is not less Divine than that which pays homage to Truth and Goodness.
Now, these absolute values are supra-temporal. If the soul were in time, no value could arise; for time is always hurling its own products into nothingness, and the present is an unextended point, dividing an unreal past from an unreal future. The soul is not in time; time is rather in the soul. Values are eternal and indestructible. When Plotinus says that 'nothing that really is can ever perish' (ἁπολεἱται οὑδεν τὡν ὁντων), and when Höffding says that 'no value perishes out of the world,' they are saying the same thing. In so far as we can identify ourselves in thought and mind with the absolute values, we are sure of our immortality.
But it will be said that in the first place this promise of immortality carries with it no guarantee of survival in time, and in the second place that it offers us, at last, only an impersonal immortality. Let us take these two objections in turn, though they are in reality closely connected.
We must not regard time as an external, inhuman, unconscious process. Time is the frame of soul-life; outside this it has no existence. The entire cosmic process is the life-frame of the universal Soul, the Divine Logos. With this life we are vitally connected, however brief and unimportant the span and the task of an individual career may seem to us. If my particular life-meaning passes out of activity, it will be because the larger life, to which I belong, no longer needs that form of expression. My death, like my birth, will have a teleological justification, to which my supra-temporal self will consent. When a good man's work in this world is done, when he is able to say, without forgetting his many failures, 'I have finished the work that Thou gavest me to do,' surely his last word will be, 'Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace'; not, 'Grant that I may flit for a while over my former home, and hear what is happening to my country and my family.' We may leave it to our misguided necromancers to describe the adventures of the disembodied ghost—
'Quo cursu deserta petiverit, et quibus ante
Infelix sua tecta supervolitaverit alis.'
The most respectable motive which leads men to desire a continuance of active participation in the affairs of time is that which Tennyson expresses in the often-quoted line, 'Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.' We may feel that we have it in us to do more for God and our fellow-men than we shall be able to accomplish in this life, even if it be prolonged to old age. Is not this a desire which we may prefer as a claim? And in any case, it is admitted that time is the form of the will. Are we to have no more will after death? Further, is our probation over when we die? What is to be the fate of that large majority who, so far as we can see, are equally undeserving of heaven and of hell? To these questions no answer is possible, because we are confronted with a blank wall of ignorance. We do not know whether there will be any future probation. We do not know whether Robert Browning's expectation of 'other tasks in other lives, God willing,' will be fulfilled.