Outspoken Essays

by William Ralph Inge

'And I shall thereupon
Take rest, ere I be gone
Once more on my adventure brave and new.'

The question here raised is whether there is such a thing as reincarnation. This belief, so widely held at all times by eminent thinkers, and sanctioned by some of the higher religions, cannot be dismissed as obsolete or impossible. But if it is put in the form, 'Will the same self live again on earth under different conditions?' it may be that no answer can be given, not only because we do not know, but because the question itself is meaningless. The psycho-physical organism which was born at a certain date and which will die on another date is compacted of idiosyncrasies, inherited and acquired, which seem to be inseparable from its history as born of certain parents and living under certain conditions. It is not easy to say what part of such an organism could be said to maintain its identity, if it were housed in another body and set down in another time and place, when all recollection of a previous state has been (as we must admit) cut off. The only continuity, it seems to me, would be that of the racial self, if there is such a thing, or of the directing intelligence and will of the higher Power which sends human beings into the world to perform their allotted tasks.

The second objection, which, as I have said, is closely connected with the first, is that idealism offers us a merely impersonal immortality. But what is personality? The notion of a world of spiritual atoms, 'solida pollentia simplicitate,' as Lucretius says, seems to be attractive to some minds. There are thinkers of repute who even picture the Deity as the constitutional President of a collegium of souls. This kind of pluralism is of course fundamentally incompatible with the presuppositions of my paper. The idea of the 'self' seems to me to be an arbitrary fixation of our average state of mind, a half-way house which belongs to no order of real existence. The conception of an abstract ego seems to involve three assumptions, none of which is true. The first is that there is a sharp line separating subject from object and from other subjects. The second is that the subject, thus sundered from the object, remains identical through time. The third is that this indiscerptible entity is in some mysterious way both myself and my property. In opposition to the first, I maintain that the foci of consciousness flow freely into each other even on the psychical plane, while in the eternal world there are probably no barriers at all. In opposition to the second, it is certain that the empirical self is by no means identical throughout, and that the spiritual life, in which we may be said to attain real personality for the first time, is only 'ours' potentially. In opposition to the third, I repeat that the question whether it is 'my' soul that will live in the eternal world seems to have no meaning at all. In philosophy as in religion, we had better follow the advice of the Theologia Germanica and banish, as far as possible, the words 'me and mine' from our vocabulary. For personality is not something given to start with. It does not belong to the world of claims and counter-claims in which we chiefly live. We must be willing to lose our soul on this level of experience, before we can find it unto life eternal. Personality is a teleological fact; it is here in the making, elsewhere in fact and power. So in the case of our friends. The man whom we love is not the changing psycho-physical organism; it is the Christ in him that we love, the perfect man who is struggling into existence in his life and growth. If we ask what a man is, the answer may be either, 'He is what he loves,' or 'He is what he is worth.' The two are not very different. Thus I cannot agree with Keyserling, who in criticising this type of thought (with which, none the less, he has great sympathy) says that 'mysticism, whether it likes it or not, ends in an impersonal immortality.' For impersonality is a purely negative conception, like timelessness. What is negated in 'timelessness' is not the reality of the present, but the unreality of the past and future. So the 'impersonality' which is here (not without warrant from the mystics themselves) said to belong to eternal life is really the liberation of the idea of personality. Personality is allowed to expand as far as it can, and only so can it come into its own. When Keyserling adds, 'The instinct of immortality really affirms that the individual is not ultimate,' I entirely agree with him.

The question, however, is not whether in heaven the circumference of the soul's life is indefinitely enlarged, but whether the centre remains. These centres are centres of consciousness; and consciousness apparently belongs to the world of will. It comes into existence when the will has some work to do. It is not conterminous with life; there is a life which is below consciousness, and there may be a life above consciousness, or what we mean by consciousness. We must remind ourselves that we are using a spatial metaphor when we speak of a centre of consciousness, and a temporal one when we ask about a continuing state of consciousness; and space and time do not belong to the eternal world. The question therefore needs to be transformed before any answer can be given to it. Spiritual life, we are justified in saying, must have a richness of content; it is, potentially at least, all embracing. But this enhancement of life is exhibited not only in extension but in intensity. Eternal life is no diffusion or dilution of personality, but its consummation. It seems certain that in such a state of existence individuality must be maintained. If every life in this world represents an unique purpose in the Divine mind, and if the end or meaning of soul-life, though striven for in time, has both its source and its achievement in eternity, this, the value and reality of the individual life, must remain as a distinct fact in the spiritual world.

We are sometimes inclined to think, with a natural regret, that the conditions of life in the eternal world are so utterly unlike those of the world which we know, that we must either leave our mental picture of that life in the barest outline, or fill it in with the colours which we know on earth, but which, as we are well aware, cannot portray truly the life of blessed spirits. To some extent this is true; and whereas a bare and colourless sketch of the richest of all facts is as far from the truth as possible, we may allow ourselves to fill in the picture as best we can, if we remember the risks which we run in doing so. There are, it seems to me, two chief risks in allowing our imagination to create images of the bliss of heaven. One is that the eternal world, thus drawn and painted with the forms and colours of earth, takes substance in our minds as a second physical world, either supposed to exist somewhere in space, or expected to come into existence somewhen in time. This is the heaven of popular religion; and being a geographical or historical expression, it is open to attacks which cannot be met. Hence in the minds of many persons the whole fact of human immortality seems to belong to dreamland. The other danger is that, since a geographical and historical heaven is found to have no actuality, the hope of eternal life, with all that the spiritual world contains, should be relegated to the sphere of the 'ideal.' This seems to be the position of Höffding, and is quite clearly the view of thinkers like Santayana. They accept the dualism of value and existence, and place the highest hopes of humanity in a world which has value only and no existence. This seems to me to be offering mankind a stone for bread. Martineau's protest against this philosophy is surely justified:

'Amid all the sickly talk about "ideals," it is well to remember that as long as they are a mere self-painting of the yearning spirit, they have no more solidity than floating air-bubbles, gay in the sunshine and broken by the passing wind. You do not so much as touch the threshold of religion, so long as you are detained by the phantoms of your thought; the very gate of entrance to religion, the moment of its new birth, is the discovery that your gleaming ideal is the everlasting real.'[94]

But though our knowledge of the eternal world is much less than we could desire, it is much greater than many thinkers allow. We are by no means shut off from realisation and possession of the eternal values while we live here. We are not confined to local and temporal experience. We know what Truth and Beauty mean, not only for ourselves but for all souls throughout the universe, and for God Himself. Above all, we know what Love means. Now Love, which is the realisation in experience of spiritual existence, has an unique value as a hierophant of the highest mysteries. And Love guarantees personality, for it needs what has been called otherness. In all love there must be a subject and an object, and a bond between them which transcends without annulling their separateness. What this means for personal immortality has been seen by many great minds. As an example I will quote from Plotinus' picture of life in the spiritual world. This writer is certainly not inclined to overestimate the claims of separate individuality, and he is under no obligation to make his doctrine conform to the dogmas of any creed.

'Spirits yonder see themselves in others. For there all things are transparent, and there is nothing dark or resisting, but everyone is manifest to everyone internally, and all things are manifest; for light is manifest to light. For everyone has all things in himself and sees all things in another, so that all things are everywhere and all is all and each is all, and infinite the glory.'[95]

This eternal world is about us and within us while we live here. 'Heaven is nearer to our souls than the earth is to our bodies.' The world which we ordinarily think of as real is an arbitrary selection from experience, corresponding roughly to the average reaction of life upon the average man. Some values, such as existence, persistence, and rationality, are assumed to be 'real'; others are relegated to the 'ideal' Under the influence of natural science, special emphasis is laid on those values with which that science is engaged. But our world changes with us. It rises as we rise, and falls as we fall. It puts on immortality as we do. 'Such as men themselves are, such will God appear to them to be.'[96] Spinoza rightly says that all true knowledge takes place sub specie æternitatis. For the πνευματικοϛ the whole of life is spiritual, and, as Eucken says, he recognises the whole of the spiritual life as his own life-being. He learns, as Plotinus declares in a profound sentence, that 'all things that are Yonder are also Here below.'

Is it then the conclusion of the whole matter that eternal life is merely the true reading of temporal life? Is earth, when seen with purged vision, not merely the shadow of heaven, but heaven itself? If we could fuse past, present, and future into a totum simul, an 'Eternal Now,' would that be eternity? This I do not believe. A full understanding of the values of our life in time would indeed give us a good picture of the eternal world; but that world itself, the abode of God and of blessed spirits, is a state higher and purer than can be fully expressed in the order of nature. The perpetuity of natural laws as they operate through endless ages is only a Platonic 'image' of eternity. That all values are perpetual is true; but they are something more than perpetual: they are eternal. These laws are the creative forces which shape our lives from within; but all the creatures, as St. Augustine says in a well-known passage, declare their inferiority to their Creator. 'We are lower than He, for He made us.' Scholastic theologians interposed an intermediary which they called ævum between time and eternity. Ævum is perpetuity, which they rightly distinguished from true eternity. Christianity is philosophically right in insisting that our true home, our patria, is 'not here.' Nor is it in any place: it is with God,'whose centre is everywhere and His circumference nowhere.' There remaineth a rest for the people of God, when their warfare on earth is accomplished.