Ploughshare and Pruning-hook/Lecture 10
CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS
IMMORTALITY.
(1915.)
We are frequently told (more especially by those whose profession it is to preach belief in a revealed religion), that if man be not endowed with an immortal soul, then the game of life is not worth the candle. Incidentally we are warned that if the bottom were knocked out of that belief, morals would go to pieces and humanity would become reprobate.
Now I can imagine a similar sort of claim put forward in other departments of life for other pursuits which seem to their advocate to make life more appetising.
I can imagine sportsmen saying that without sport men would cease to be manly, morals and physique would deteriorate and life be no longer worth living. I can imagine the butcher saying that without meat, and the licensed victualler that without beer, men were of all things the most miserable. I have recently seen advertisements which say that only by supporting the cinema (made beautiful by the feet of Charlie Chaplin), can we hope to be victorious in the present war.
The assertion that man cannot do without certain things which, as a matter of fact, vast numbers of his fellows are constantly doing without—(and with no very marked set-back as regards health, efficiency, or general morals)—is a questionable way of forcing home conviction that these things or beliefs are indispensable. It is quite possible that beer, meat, the pursuit of game, the personality of Charlie Chaplin, and a belief in immortality are all alike capable of giving stimulus to the human soul (especially to those souls which have come by habit to depend upon them). But it is quite certain that other human souls have found without them sufficient stimulus to make life worth living. And though, against that fact, it may be argued that these unconsciously receive their driving force, their social and ethical standards, from those whose motive power they reject as superfluous, and that we, who do not go to see Charlie Chaplin on the films, are winning this war somewhat circuitously through the powers of those who do—the argument is hardly a convincing one, since it remains for ever in the nature of an unproved hypothesis.
But when the majority of those who believe in personal immortality are asked for the ground of their belief, it generally resolves itself into this: they have an intense individual conviction that it is so—so intense that to hold the contrary becomes "unthinkable." But that intense, individual conviction, over things we greatly care about, is a constant phenomenon of the working of the human mind, and is not limited to belief in a future state. To a convinced Liberal it is "unthinkable" that he should ever pass into such a state of mental annihilation as to become a Conservative. To a convinced Conservative it is unthinkable that he should fall from the grace which guides him into the slough of Liberalism. It is the same with Protestant or Catholic, with Socialist, Universalist, or Sectarian: conviction always presents an adamantine front to opposing forces and arguments—so long as it lasts.
The same phenomenon constantly occurs in the domain of the amative passion. The lover (if he be really in love), believes that his love will last for ever—that nothing can possibly change it; and all the evidence in the world that lovers of a like faith have too often lived to see the immortal dream put on mortality, will fail to convince him (while he is in the toils) that his own love is liable to any such change as theirs.
The reason is that strongly vitalised forces always carry with them a sense of permanence.
The vital spark (focused within us by strong conviction or emotion), is but an individually apprehended part of a great whole: for this thread of life passing through us has already stretched itself out over millions of years, and countless atavisms have touched it to individual ends which were not ours; the will to live has clung to it by myriads of adhesions, feelers, tentacles, and not by human hands alone (though our palms still moisten, and our arms fly upward to the imaginary branch overhead when danger of falling threatens us, because the instinct of our arboreal ancestry still prevails in us over reason). And through those atavisms, the struggle to secure survival for the family, the clan, the race, has left an impress which may very naturally convey from the general to the individual a sense of immortality.
For of all these constituent forces the majority knew and thought very little about death, except in their instinctive and spasmodic efforts to escape from it; and when at last man began to envisage death consciously and philosophically, straightway, with all these atavisms behind him, he belittled it with dreams of a future life.
It was as perfectly natural a thing to do as for the lover to declare that his love for his mistress was eternal and not merely for a season, since any lesser statement would fail to convey adequately the intensity of the force by which he was moved. Moreover, though in millions of individual cases the statement and the sincere belief that the love experienced will remain changeless and eternal, are contradicted by later fact, it is at least true that the passion itself is an ever-recurring phenomenon of life, and does, by its infinite recurrence and resurrection in form beyond form through evolving generations, present to finite minds an aspect of immortality. Just as the water we drink is an imperishable thing, though after drinking it we shall thirst again, so is that love, which satisfies the lover's soul, a principle of life extending illimitably beyond his own use for it. And if that be true about love, why should it not be true about life?
For surely (put it thus), when across limited vision a thread passes, of which the eye can see neither the beginning nor the end, and when upon that thread, for the time being, the limited life hangs all its hopes, is it not quite natural for that clinging life to identify itself, through the closeness of its momentary contact, with the spiritually apprehended whole, and to identify with that concept of a general continuity its own present degree of individual consciousness. Moreover, in a world governed by cause and effect, it can hardly be predicated that the results either of love or hatred, individually indulged, are not, or may not be illimitable, even though the individual spirit be not there to preside consciously over their extended operations.
When, therefore, so much is true, when so many elements which pass through our lives have (by association), links and connections which to finite minds seem infinite, they may well impress us (by reason of the close identification established between us and them for the time being) with a sense that our own individual share and apprehension of them are addressed also to a universal goal.
"Universal," for surely mere continuity—a stretching out of length without corresponding breadth—ought not to be the limit of our claim. Yet it is significant that, in their demand for personal immortality, so many thinkers have found sufficient satisfaction in the idea of an extended survival through time into eternity, without making a corresponding demand for extension into unity through space. They are willing, that is to say, to put up for all eternity with those limitations of personality which they enjoy—the relations of meum and tuum upon which the possessive life of the senses is based, but not with those limitations (the prospect of which they do not enjoy), the termination of those same relationships imposed by death. It seems rather a one-sided way of doing things—this narrowing of the claim in a two-dimensional direction (one might almost say in a one-dimensional), yet it has been very generally done—I shall presently hope to show why—and most of our Western theology has built up our future hopes for us entirely on those lines. Personality, the sort of personality we have learned to enjoy, is based upon limitations. Abolish limitations in your conception of future life, and for the majority of those pious minds which now clamour for it as their due you abolish personality also; it is swallowed up not in death but in a life from which the individual power to focus and to enjoy has disappeared.
It is true that there has now begun, in modern socialistic Christianity, a yeasting of desire for an all round, or expansive, as well as a forward, or extensive personality after death; that an all-embracing and not merely an all-surviving consciousness is more and more predicated for the full satisfaction of man's spiritual need. But that was by no means the form of moral hunger which permeated primitive or mediæval Christianity, and sufficed, we are to suppose, to keep poor human nature from that depravity into which it will fall if belief in personal immortality is surrendered. Oregon, as we know, looked forward to finding in the nether groans of the damned a full completion of the orchestral harmonies of Heaven; and in the whole conception of immortality as it has illumined the path of the Church from its beginning down to quite modern times, individualism has been rampant. On that basis, so long as it satisfied his moral conscience, man did great things with it, making it shine as a great light by the unflinching witness which he bore to its efficacy through suffering and through martyrdom.
It is probably true that an individualistic form to the doctrine was then, and always will be, necessary to attract those whose lives have been run from a highly individualised stand-*point; and that, for them, death-bed consolation would hardly be achieved in the presentation of a doctrine so defined as to threaten annihilation to all the fetish worship and social values of the past.
"God would think twice," said a courtly French Abbé of the seventeenth century to a King's mistress who, upon her death-bed, was seized by spiritual qualms—"God would think twice before damning a lady of your quality." And no one who holds by class-distinctions really wishes to find in the New Jerusalem any abolition of that respect for persons or prejudices which has, in this world, been the main ground on which their self-esteem and their estimate of personality have been based.
To them the most "unthinkable" proposition would be not the contraction of the future world to narrower and more select limits than those of the one they know, but a future world conducted on any code of morals which had not their own entire approval and sanction.
We are told that the late Queen Victoria looked forward with very great interest to a future meeting with the Hebrew patriarchs, with Abraham, Moses, and Elijah, but hoped to be excused from any personal acquaintance with King David on account of his affair with Bathsheba. And when we realise how very often the hope of Heaven is really a species of self-love and self-applause, conditional on Heaven being what we ourselves want it to be, one is led to wonder whether the real condition for entry into that state of bliss may not prove to be the precise opposite, and whether the disciplinary motto upon its portal may not be those mystic words, hitherto attributed to another place, "All hope abandon ye who enter here." That, after all, is only a more emphatic way of stating what Christ Himself laid down as the path by which man should attain; that only those namely who were ready to lose life should find it. And I rather question whether our Christian individualists have, up till now, been honestly prepared to "lose life" in the full sense, without condition or reserve, and whether, (if they have not), they have yet attained the spiritual standpoint necessary to bring them within the terms of the promise.
So far I have dealt with the doctrine of immortality as presented to us from the individualistic basis alone. But, in some form or another, the doctrine of immortality belongs to many religions and schools (indeed, one might almost say to all) and has, therefore, most varied and even contradictory meanings attached to it. In some schools, as we have seen, it sets great store on the survival of the individual; in others individuality is held to be of small account—a diminishing rather than a persistent factor in the ultimate ends of life viewed as a whole.
I remember in that connection discussing with the late Father George Tyrrell, in the days before Rome's excommunication fell on him, the divergent views as to immortality of Christianity and Buddhism; and at that time he held that the superiority of the Christian faith lay in its insistence on the personal immortality, conscious and self-contained, of every human being. Some years later, a month before his death, we discussed the matter again; and I asked him then, in what degree, if at all, his view as to personal immortality had changed. His answer gave me a curious instance of those scientific analogies by which Modernism has been seeking to deliver the Roman Church from its mediæval entanglements.
"In the main," he said, "I have only changed in my apprehension of what 'personality' really is. Just as one may find in an hysterical subject five or six pseudo-personalities which reveal themselves in turn, each one of which is a character quite separately and consistently defined, but not one of them (however completely in possession for the time) a real person, so it seems to me must we regard all those limitations of 'personality' which find expression in individual form. There is only one true personality, and that is Christ; anything less than the one all-embracing whole is but a simulacrum, concealing rather than revealing the true substance and form."
I cannot pretend to give his actual words, but I believe that I have accurately stated the sense of them; and you will see, I think, that they go a long way toward the adaptation of the Christian to the Buddhistic standpoint. That tendency, I believe, we shall find more and more at work in the Christian Church as time goes on—not merely because by such a definition the doctrine will be better able to hold its own against the inroads of science—but because it gives also a better response to that socialising genius of the human race which is coming more and more to demand a perfect unity as the ultimate expression of good.
That, then, we shall probably find to be the future tendency of idealism. There remains, of course, the Rationalistic school of thought, by which the possibility of individual or personal survival after death is from first to last either absolutely denied or very severely discountenanced as an idea based upon wholly insufficient evidence.
Nevertheless, in some form or another, immortality, conscious or unconscious, personal or impersonal, is accepted by all schools alike; the scientific law of the conservation of energy being one form of it which human reason would now find it very difficult to deny.
Let us for one moment apply that law to our own individual lives and consciousness.
Has life convinced us that we are all self-contained persons? Through social contact we have undergone many changes, many damages, and many repairs. Parts of us have gone to other people, parts of other people have come, to us. We have shed and have absorbed quite as much spiritually as materially; and though through our material changes we retain a certain likeness, so that friends meeting us after a seven years' absence recognise us again in bodies no particle of which have they ever seen before; and though similarly we can recognise our inner selves across wider intervals of time, have we any reason to suppose that our identity is more fixed in the spiritual substance than in the material? For myself, I hope not. May one not prefer the idea of interchange between life and life, to the notion that one is to remain for ever fixed and self-possessed—a thing apart? The more we are compounded of other lives, the more we have contributed to the lives of others—the more can we recognise our entrance into the only eternal life that we can demonstrably be sure about, or that can (so it must seem to many of us), be sensibly desired or deserved. Is Eternal Bliss, in the individual sense, a more tolerable doctrine than eternal Hell-fire? Though, indeed, this latter may be but a scientific statement of fact perverted and made foolish by the theologians. For life, after all, is but a form of combustion for ever going on, and outside of it we know nothing. No doubt the atoms of our being, whether physical or spiritual, will forever form part of it; but I see no reason why our spirits should not be as diffused, through proper elemental changes, as our bodies are now being diffused from day to day; or why I should repine that I personally shall not always be there to preside over the operation and find it good. Even if, at the far end of this earth's history, everything is again to be reabsorbed in the heat and light out of which it came, I can trust the suns and planets to fulfil their mission of progress—or the will of God—quite as well as, or better than, in my own small sphere I can trust Constitutional Governments or Established Churches. And since these lesser lights, in their foolish and providential dealings, do not confound my faith, neither do the stars in their courses fight against it. Rather do they confirm me in my sense that even the most acute perceptions with which human life is endowed fail of themselves to justify me in any claim to a larger lease of life than can naturally belong to them; for I see in the universe things far greater than any individual man, doing service and sustaining the life of countless millions, (which without them could not live at all), without any prospect of so great a reward.
The eye of the sun itself is blind; and for ever, while it dazzles us with its light, blind it must remain. Nay, what need has it for sight at all, if in blindness it be able to fulfil its mission? And yet implicit within its vast energies, there lies the gift of sight. For that blind Eye of Heaven taught us to see; our substance came from it, our eyes were made by it, and without it was not anything made on earth that was made. And if, by this gift of sight, it has opened to us so vast a space for our understanding to dwell in—bestowing so huge a conception of life on this frail vessel of clay—if by so giving of itself through long aeons of time it has opened to us so much more than it knows itself, cannot we render back without grudging these shorter, frailer lives of ours, whose brevity, perhaps, is the very price required of us for their enjoyment, since without such limits our far-reaching comprehension of space and its possessions could never have been gained. Should there be any despair, or any depression in the thought that from the blind eye of day and from the powers of its heat was developed the human brain? For if from that apparent Blindness of our Universe came really the eyes of life by which we perceive all things, can we not commit our spirits back to its keeping with an equal trust that what lies ahead will be at least as good as what lies behind, though we be not there to see it?
But the law of the conservation of energy does not in the least satisfy the aspirations of those who are out for personal immortality in the individual sense. To these it seems a grievance that they should have been called into being for any end not wholly satisfying to that Ego which is now laying upon their consciousness the weight of its possessive limitations. This separative quality of the Ego is to them the whole principle of existence; without it they cannot see life. To them, life in any less focused or more diffused form would be no better than annihilation, an obvious setting-back of the evolutionary process by which creation has led step by step to that degree of self-consciousness realised in the human race.
Do not these objectors forget not merely how considerable a part of human nature already moves and has its being on the lines of a diffused and rather decentralised subconsciousness, but also how largely the genius of the human race has committed to such conditions of separation from all possible enjoyment by the Ego, some of the rarest gifts and highest efforts at self-realisation that the world has ever seen? It is a condition attaching to all the more permanent forms of expression in the arts, to everything that man designs and makes for the delight of the generations that come after. It is a condition willingly accepted by all who rejoice in their power to throw the influence of their personalities beyond the material uses of their own present existence. And in that willingness to lose out of themselves for future generations—to turn aside from mere physical enjoyment—the life-forces within them, in that willingness artist, poet, and thinker, have come far nearer to the finding of life than those who live indulgently for ends finished by their own absorption thereof.
Now it is the supporters of the individualistic school of thought who have generally urged that grave moral dangers would befall the human race were a belief in personal immortality to perish; and it is at least arguable (by minds that can only see values individually), that if man is not to be permanently rewarded or punished for his present and future conduct, he has no reason for conducting himself as a decent part of the social whole, and that it would be better for him to break out on entirely individual lines, live a short and merry life, and throwing all altruistic and ethical considerations to the winds, enjoy himself as much as he can while the material is to him.
On paper that consideration may seem to hold strong ground; but when it is put into practice the facts of life are found to be overwhelmingly against it. For one thing excess and self-indulgence fail to produce enjoyment, for another the socialising of life by mutual aid tends quite obviously to the increase of comfort, safety, and happiness. And where apparently it does not is mainly at that point where rampant individualism grasps and warps it to its own ends, making the social organism subserve not the goodwill of the many but the ill-will of the few.
But the ethical argument about the bad effects of non-belief in personal immortality has been considerably discounted by the growing sensitiveness of the modern conscience—more especially among those who are in a serious sense "free-thinkers"—toward the social ills lying around us. Generally speaking, our sense of duty toward our neighbour is much more lively than it was in the mid-Victorian era; but our conviction of personal immortality is probably far less. The two things do not go together: the diminution of church attendance in the last fifty years has not worsened the conditions of labour.
It may, however, be argued that an instinct for immortality is still subconsciously at work within us, colouring our actions and directing us on right ethical lines. But if it be a subconscious direction which thus works in us for righteousness, it may equally be to a subconscious end. The subconscious impulse may merely be guiding us to a subconscious realisation which would not at all satisfy the advocates of conscious immortality after death. What works subconsciously can in all probability find satisfaction in a subconscious reward. The chemic processes of the stomach and of the blood, for instance, are largely subconscious in their operation; and their needs may be subconsciously appeased without the brain being told anything about it through the usual intermediaries of taste and mastication. We have a preference for a conscious performance of the functions of life which we have always been accustomed to perform consciously; but a very large proportion of our life-functions work themselves out subconsciously and independently of our will. Our hearts beat, our blood circulates, our nails grow, our stomachs digest, our wounds heal, whether we tell them to or no, and yet we are quite happy about them. We do not consider (because they operate by a volition of which we are unaware), that therefore we carry about with us a body of death from which our conscious ego must needs shrink in disgust—a dead heart, dead stomach, dead blood—that the unconsciousness which accompanies health is a state nearer to annihilation, and so less to be desired, than the pains accompanying functional disturbances.
When those things happen—functional disturbances—we are conscious of something more immediately relating to death than to life: it is because of local mortification that we become so much aware of things which our immortal part helps us to use unconsciously and without thought. Virtue itself, when engrained, tends to become instinctive and subconscious instead of an effort.
There is quite as much evidence, therefore, in our own bodies that unconsciousness is the real gate to immortal life, and the condition toward which all that is best and highest in us is seeking, as of the contrary teaching that increased self-consciousness is man's final goal. In the functional working of our own bodies an enormous amount of self-consciousness has been eliminated, and we do not for our happiness or self-realisation wish it restored to us; whole tracts and areas are immune from it, or only make a spasmodic grab at our consciousness when things go ill with them. "If you go on doing that," they say, when you misuse them, "we will make you know that we are here." And so you become conscious of them: but that doesn't make you happier. Yet in a sort of way, I suppose, a man would realise himself more completely if he had sciatica all over him, and could count up his nerves, and tell all his bones by the aches and pains attaching to them.
Now it is easy enough for a man to say (I think it was H. M. Stanley, the explorer, who did say so) that he would rather endure torment for all eternity than accept a state of annihilation. In thus protesting he is talking through his hat of something too far beyond human experience for the mind to realise. Toothache he has probably always found bearable, because he knew that in course of time it would end. On the other hand, sound dreamless sleep is probably not less bearable to him because during that sleep he has not a ghost of a notion that he will ever wake up again. He is carried, that is to say, every day of his life while in health, into a state closely resembling annihilation of consciousness, in which such annihilation has no terrors for him at all; he accepts it as a comfortable part of existence, and goes to it with delight when his faculties are tired. Its attractions for him would naturally be less while all his senses were alert and fresh.
But the waking man is not the whole man; the subconscious life, acquiescent to imposed conditions, occupies by far the larger part of him. He can, therefore, only predicate the inclinations of his waking hours; in sleep he may revert to a very strong affinity for that annihilation of self-conscious life against which, in his waking hours, he protests his dread.
And now a further word of comfort for those moral teachers who assure us that if once we let go the idea of personal immortality, with its accompanying implications of eternal reward or punishment, the conduct of the human race is bound to degenerate, and that man's only logical motto will then be, "Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die."
To refute that deduction we have but to remember that sociology is a thing of ancestry and evolution, and has committed us to a weight of facts against which precept and theory are powerless. We have only to look back into Nature to see how persistently (without, one must suppose, any promise of future reward after death) a contrary instinct emerges from the establishment of the social bond in nest and herd and hive. And why—if that emerging instinct leads on, in man's reasoned estimation, to foolishness—why do we so specially admire the communal life of ant and bee, and incline sometimes to wonder whether (behind so marvellous an order of altruistic energy) there be not concealed more and not less of spiritual apprehension than in the more individualistic forms of insect and animal life? And why, on the contrary, has the wise cuckoo become a sort of byword for the singular economy with which it has disentangled its life from care or responsibility?
It is surely very unfair thus to erect the cuckoo into a moral emblem for reprobation, if it is only doing by instinct, what man would do by reason and logic were the darkness of his own destiny made clear to him.
And similarly, it is surely disingenuous on our part to exalt as a moral emblem the instinct of ant and bee to subordinate the life of the individual to the general—if we deny to ant and bee the immortality by which alone such altruism can be recompensed; or if we are to believe that a clearer knowledge of their future lot would cause them in logic and reason to declare that life on those terms was not worth living, and that "to eat, drink, and die to-morrow" were better than to live longer and labour for a vain repetition of lives like their own indefinitely multiplied. It is ridiculous to impose the moral emblem unless you grant also the justifying conditions.
Because the bee and the ant live unconscious of their impending doom, are we, therefore, to regard them as a hoodwinked race, set to labour at the dictates of the Creative capitalist on terms which contain in them no adequate reward? Suppose, for a moment, that revelation could descend upon ants' nest and hive, and tell these workers that beyond death the future held for them no store—that their immortality was the immortality not of individual but of race; and suppose that thereupon they all struck and went forth to die each singly in their own way—would that moral emblem impress us, do you think, as a thing worthy of imitation or of praise?
But why (let us think) is the predication of such an event so impossible and so grotesque? Is it not because the life, the individual life of ant or bee is so impregnated with that instinct of communalism which gives the species its distinctive character, that it is impossible to sunder them, or to imagine the individual capable (while in the social milieu) of pursuing individual ends alone, after a following, over millions of years, of life in the communal form. Life, the thread of life which runs through them, is too much engrained with communism for separatist principles ever again to prevail.
And surely it is the same with man. Individualism, separatism, self-obsessionism, though still present in the phenomena of existence, are more and more subject to qualifications from which they cannot escape. And even the most evil form of individualism has to be parasitic or predatory; it cannot exist alone; even against its will it becomes conditioned by other lives. And the communal sense of man, implicit within the innumerable forms of life through which he has evolved, will continue to lay its hold on the parasitic and the predatory, and will do so quite effectively on the basis of an evolutionary past, the tendencies of which were established before ever theological definitions came to give them impulse and strength.
Is it not almost ludicrous to suggest that that communal instinct will cease to play, if the hope of individual reward after death is withdrawn from the human race? Will man—because he is nobler than the beast, because at his best he does things more altruistic, more self-sacrificing, more self-forgetting, more self-transcending than any of these—do less nobly because he envisages destiny, which (if he see it as destiny) he will see as the logical outcome of evolutionary law?
It is possible, it is even probable, that all phases of theological thought have had their use in giving direction and stimulus to the human brain; if they have done nothing but stimulate rebellion against obscurantist authority they have had value of a positive kind. But we may go even further than this, for "everything possible to be believed," says Blake, "is an image of truth." And under many a concept, distorted by ignorance or guile, has lain a germ of the true life which draws man on to communal ends. In time that germ puts off the husk that seemed once (perhaps in some cases actually was) the protective armoury through which alone it could survive for the use of a later day. But though old reasons have been shed, the essential value has not changed; and often it is less by logic and reason than by the strong and subtle links of association that we preserve what is good of past credulities.
The doctrine of conscious immortality, however much belittled by its appeal to selfish individualism, has done a work for the human race. It has held the germ of an ideal for unity which is receiving a more universal interpretation to-day than the earlier theologians would ever have allowed, or than man, in his then stage of development, could have thought it worth while to hand on to his intellectual heirs. Perhaps only because he conceived it in just such a form have its values been preserved.
I am reminded in this connection of the method by which the wild swine of the New Forest were taught to obey the voice of the horn by means of which the swine-herd, called them back each night from their free roaming in the forest. The way he did it was this. Having first formed his herd, some four or five hundred strong, he penned them in a narrow space where water and warm shelter were to be found; and there, in the allotted enclosure, according them no liberty, he fed them daily to the sound of the horn. Food and music became a sort of celestial harmony to pig's brain—when they heard the one, good reason was given them for expecting the other.
Presently, in a well-fed condition, they were set free to roam; and being full and satisfied they did not roam far; and at night the horn sounded them back to an ample meal, and continued to sound while again they ate and were satisfied.
So at last, by association, the horn came to have such a beneficent meaning that the mere sound of it sufficed to bring them back at nightfall to their appointed place of rest. They might roam for miles and miles during the day, but night and the sound of the horn brought them all back safe to fold. And when that habit had become established, they did not cease to return even though the swineherd no longer supplied the food which had first given music its charm to those savage breasts.
And, similarly, I doubt not, that, though all hope of material profit or reward be withdrawn from man's mind, that call of the horn which he has heard of old will still bring his spirit to the resting-place at the appointed time; nor will he wish either to shorten his days or debase his pleasures because the horn has ceased to provide the meal which it once taught him to expect.
Do not let anything I have said be taken as suggesting that the spiritual forces of man's nature may not be conserved, transmuted, re-assimilated, or re-distributed, as surely and with as little waste as are the material elements of life which pass through disintegration and decay into new forms. The processes by which such changes are wrought may be, and may ever remain, a mystery to human sense. There may be yet in the making a new order or plane of evolution by which the process will be quickened and perfected. Soul of man may be in the making, though it may be very far removed from that aspect of individualism with which the anthropomorphic tendencies of theology have burdened it. But—whether life thus rises by unknown law to further ends, or whether it passes out, like the life of leaves, into the general decay with which autumn each year fertilises the bed of mother earth—of one thing I would ask you to be confident—that the bandying of words and theories, and the discussion, tending this way or that, of man's destiny after death, are not in any way likely to alter or to undo those forward-driving forces and communal desires with which, from an inheritance of so many millions of years, the life of humanity has become endowed. The will to live will still lift up the race and carry it forward to new ends, whether man thinks he sees in death the end of his personal existence, or only a new and a better beginning. And whether he claims or resigns that prospect of reward he will never be able to rid himself of the sense which revives after all failures and crimes, that man is his brother-man—or be able to refrain at his best from laying down his life, without calculation of personal benefit to himself, so that others may live.
The highest manifestations of human genius, the most perfected forms of self-realisation in art, in literature, and science, have been given to us—and will continue to be given to us—independent of any bargain that name and identity shall for ever remain attached thereto while posterity enjoys the benefit. The artist might foresee that his name would, in a brief time, become dissociated from his work, and his memory blotted out from the book of the living; he would produce it all the same. The reformer might know that his motives would be aspersed, that his name would become after death a spitting and a reproach; but, for the sake of the cause he believed in, he would still be willing to die a dishonoured death and leave a reprobated name, to a world that had failed to understand.
That is human nature at its best; and you will not change it or endanger it through any increased doubt thrown by modern thought or science on the prospect of conscious immortality after death. For whether we recognise it or not, a subconscious spirit, not perhaps of immortality but of unity, permeates us all; and for furtherance and worship of that which his soul desires, the spirit of man will ever be ready to work and strive, and to pass unconditionally into dust—if that indeed be the condition on which he holds his birthright in a life worth living.