The future life in the light of modern inquiry

Front matter

**

■V"N

THE FUTURE LIFE IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN INQUIRY

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. What is Immortality? 1

II. Immortality and the Modern Man 13

Chapter I What Is Immortality?

It is important at the outset to make clear the sense in which our terms are used. The pantheist, the positivist, and even the agnostic assert immortality no less fervently than the orthodox Christian, but it will be admitted that a conception so loose and featureless can hardly admit of argument. It is unfortunate that the word "immortality" has been used with such ambiguity that the problem has been obscured and a subject difficult enough in itself has been rendered still less amenable to thought.

A widespread popular usage interprets immortality as in a strict sense the life everlasting. But whether the soul will last forever is and must remain always a question for faith. Here knowledge and science are dumb. We know not what vicissitudes may be in store for the soul in

l

2 THE FUTUKE LIFE

the measureless reaches of infinite time. The survival of physical death might well raise the presumption or the hope that a being capable of surmounting such a barrier would also prove equal to any changes that may befall in the life to come. But beyond this we cannot go.

By immortality is here meant the survival of bodily death of that part of man which is called, variously, mind, soul, self, spirit, individuality, personality, or whatever other term may be held to be synonymous with these. The time-honoured word "soul" is as good as any other — if only we are careful to make sure of what we mean by it. Modern men cannot away with the notion that the "soul" is a mysterious entity, distinct from, and, so to say, standing over against thoughts, volitions, and feelings, itself knowing no change, while these, like the evershifting pictures of a magic-lantern, come and go and never continue in one stay. The more we try to grasp this entity, the more it eludes us. It is a metaphysical abstraction for which we can find no meaning or purpose : and so the psychologist refuses to recognize it and is content to leave it to the preacher and the scholastic philosopher. Today what we mean by the "soul" is simply a limited stream of thoughts, volitions, and feelings, partly conscious, partly subconscious, yet also a stream able to recall its past states, and to recognize these states as its own. This finite unitary consciousness is connected with a body in a relationship indescribably intimate. But both the psychical and physical elements imply a greater reality to which they belong and out of which they have emerged. If any reader feels that this view makes the soul too much of a mere phenomenon, perhaps the definition of a well-known man of science will prove more helpful : "The soul is that controlling and guiding principle which is responsible for our personal expression and for the construction of the body under the restrictions of physical condition and ancestry. In its higher development it includes also feeling and intelligence and will and is the storehouse of mental experience. The body is its instrument or organ, enabling it to conceive and to convey physical impressions, and to affect and be affected by matter and energy. When the body is destroyed, therefore, the soul disappears from physical ken; when the body is impaired, its function is interfered with and the soul's physical reaction becomes feeble and unsatisfactory. Thus has arisen the popular misconception that the soul of a slain person or of a cripple or paralytic, has been destroyed or damaged; whereas only its instrument of manifestation need have been affected. The kind of evils which really assault and hurt the soul belong to a different category." 1

It really does not matter, so far as the problem of immortality is concerned, how we define the soul, if only we refuse to reduce it to a function or a by-product of brain-processes. Our idea of the nature of the future life will indeed be affected by our conception of the spiritual content of the soul, but the fact of the future life is independent of all such theories.

Now, the question in which we are interested today is not, Is the soul endlessly existent? but, Does the soul survive the experience of death and preserve a sense of its identity? If and when we are able to answer this question in the affirmative, we may go on to enquire as to the nature and we may even speculate as to the conditions of the life beyond. The point to be emphasized just now T is that immortality means the individual's survival of death, the persistence of personal consciousness in spite of physical dissolution.

Many who are unable to believe in this con-

1 Sir Oliver Lodge: Mem <md the Universe, pp. 165, 166.

quest over death, cannot bear the thought that all the garnered treasures of human character are thrown to the dust heap, and hold that the moral and spiritual values attributed to the survival of personality can be retained and converted into an ethical inspiration by the posthumous working of our influence in the lives and characters of unborn generations. The solidarity of the race is indeed a truth which science has especially graven on the minds of modern men. No man stands alone. No life is lived unto itself alone. We are one with our environment. Our deepest convictions are shaped in part at least by men and women who have long since mouldered in their graves. And we, in turn, by our words and deeds, affect our contemporaries and shall affect those who come after us, for good or ill, for happiness or misery. It is, indeed, a solemn thought that every act we do leaves its mark upon the texture of our spiritual nature, and at the same time goes forth to work out its appointed consequences in the life of humanity. Our little lives like rivulets rush to swell the vast tide of the race's common life, each making its contribution to the mighty whole. All this is deeply, if tritely, true. In the oft-quoted lines of George Eliot, it has found noble expression:

"Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence : live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end with self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars And with their mild persistence urge man 's search To vaster issues."

But the very efforts of poet and philosopher to array in alluring colours the hope of posthumous influence in the life of posterity as a substitute for personal continuance after death, are themselves proofs of the deep-seated longing which is denied. And the more we examine the proposed exchange the more we see that it is a case of giving us a stone when we ask for bread. For the assumption is that the history of the race is one of continuous and unmodified progress. But as Professor Eoyce has pointed out, temporal progress is only one aspect of the temporal order. "For in Nature, too, nothing recurs. The broken china will not mend. The withered flowers bloom no more. The sun parts forever with its heat. Tidal friction irrevocably retards the revolution of the earth/ ' And again : i i Remember w T e have lost, beyond earthly recall, the Greeks, and the constructive genius of a Shakespeare or of a Goethe; and these are, indeed, for us mortals, simply irreparable loss." Thus progress and decay, evolution and disintegration, are alike laws that govern the history of the individual and the race. Not only so, but if any dictum of science is to be relied on, it is that which prophesies that "our racial destiny is to strive and to starve to death in everdeepening gloom." In other w T ords, w r e are asked to devote our moral energies with w T holesouled ardour to the work of helping a race which is as evanescent as a colony of ants, and of confining all our interests to a world which will one day roll on in its orbit as though men and ants had never been.

Such a theory of immortality makes the sacrifice of the individual irrational and unjustifiable. The heroic millions who in the Great War have laid down their lives for freedom — what of them? Do you say that they have contributed their share to the progress of the world, that the good cause will triumph because of their sacrifice and that this is their reward? What matters it that they lapse into nothingness, if only the ultimate victory of right be achieved? The answer is, that our moral consciousness protests against such a decree. We ask and cannot but ask that somewhere and some time these brave spirits shall witness and share in the triumph of that righteousness of which they were the organs and instruments. And here we return to the ever-present question of the worth of personality. Man, says Kan^ is an end in himself and cannot be used as st means to an end. But on the theory we are controverting, man is of no intrinsic account. All life, the living individuals of today, and of the farthest bounds of time, must appear, in this view, utterly contemptible. Why should I sacrifice myself for others, if the others are, like myself, the children of a fleeting day, doomed to the same pitiful fate? It is no reproach to human nature to say that few will be found to rejoice in such a quixotic enterprise. The " immortal dead" were once indeed unique centres of experience, but they are now annihilated and while some of their thoughts may persist, they do not "live again," no more than the stone lives again (to borrow Huxley's illustration) in the wavelets which it makes when flung into the sea.

More recently, poetic thought has sought to find a substitute for personal continuance after death in a mystic absorption in the totality of being, or God. William Watson conceives the great divine event awaiting humanity to be universal euthanasia — a reabsorption in the Universal Spirit.

"When from this threshold of being, these steps of

the Present, this precinct, Into the matrix of life, darkly, divinely resumed, Man and his littleness perish, erased like an error

and cancelled, Man and his greatness, lost in the greatness of

God." 1

Now, wherein consists man's real greatness? Is it not in the fact that he is the creator of character, a unique self-conscious centre of feeling and will? This is the inner core of man's essence. It is this that differentiates him from the brute creation and constitutes him a person. For man so conceived to disappear or be lost "in the greatness of God" would mean a tragedy, obscuring in gloom the divine character and the spiritual worth of man. What kind of a God must we suppose Him to be Who having called into being a creature such as man, endowed with individuality and all the unrealized possibilities of a divine nobleness, should waste all this spiritual treasure, the grandest product of creative energy, by quenching the light of conscious reason and affection in "the

1 Hymn to the Sea.

vast darkness of the Godhead"? Francis Thompson's intuition pierces the sophism with unerring insight :

" Ah ! is Thy love indeed A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed Suffering no flowers, except its own to mount?"

Certainly the interests of ethics and religion are bound up with the denial of any renunciation of man's true selfhood. His annihilation means a loss to the moral order, for the good realized in character ceases to be ; it means also a loss to God, for a being whom He has summoned into friendship with Himself is no more. In some real and true sense God needs man, even as man needs God. Every soul has to God the value of a realized purpose, an increase of goodness in the universe. But this conviction is fatal to the thought that a physical episode, such as death, can put a term to the love and self -giving which constitute the true greatness and glory of the Divine.

There is another substitute for personal continuance after death which some modern theologians offer us and which in much of present-day preaching obscures the real issue. Personal immortality is left shadowed with doubt, but in order to make good this deficiency, strong

WHAT IS IMMOETALITY? 11

emphasis is laid on " eternal life." Many an unsuspecting hearer imagines that when "eternal life ' ' is held up before him as the true goal of all his strivings, he is being exhorted to live a life not limited by death but as permanent as the life of God Himself. What is meant, however, is quite irrelevant to the notion of personal persistence in a life beyond the grave. The phrase is intended to mark a quality of soul attainable here and now — a sense of dominion over the world, an experience of victory over the troubles and vexations of our earthly existence. It is a present ethical and religious experience and one may have it without thereby entertaining any hope for a life after death. Bailey in his "Festus" has brought out the thought:

a

We live in deeds not years, in thoughts not breaths, In feelings, not in figures on a dial. ' '

In its highest sense "eternal life" means fellowship with God evidenced in a life of brotherly love and service. As a New Testament writer puts it: "This is eternal life, that they know Thee, the only real God, and He Whom Thou hast sent." * "We know we have crossed from death to life, because we love the brotherhood ; and he who has no love [for his brother]

1 John xvii, 3.

remains in death." 1 So far, however, is this profound truth from being incompatible with the idea of personal immortality that it rather points beyond itself and suggests the ultimate victory of the soul over death, the swallowing up of all that threatens man's destiny, in an abounding and ever-growing life. We may well argue that if "eternal life" means the present consciousness of God, an episode in the history of the physical organism will not avail to quench this consciousness in darkness.

1 1. John iii, 14 (Moffatt's translation).

Chapter II Immobtality And The Modern Man

There is, perhaps, no more significant revelation of the spiritual trend of our age than the revived interest in the riddle of human destiny. Even before the war, in many circles where it was supposed the question was settled for all intelligent persons in the negative, old questionings began to stir afresh, and the discovery was made that the matter was not settled, that the human spirit was girding itself for a fresh attack on the ancient problem: If a man die shall he live again? But, undoubtedly, the war with its cruel losses has stirred in millions of hearts with unwonted poignancy the old cravings to know whether " those we call the dead are breathers of an ampler day," and whether there are grounds for believing that spirit will yet flash to spirit some signal of mutual recognition. Today as never before men and women are searching their minds to discover where they really stand in regard to this most vital and momentous question. Amid the crash of falling kingdoms, the passing away of those near to us and most dear, the darkening shadows of social revolution, in short, the utter insecurity of all finite interests, we ask for some enduring reality, some abiding rock on which we can build the fabric of our spiritual life. The experience of many soldiers at the front is that also of many of their friends who remained at home. Face to face with death, either personally or vicariously, these persons have discovered that their religious faith or view of life was a mere tradition which broke down under the pressure of a terrible experience. They have awakened as from a pleasant dream, to discover — what ? A world full of doubt, denial, uncertainty, at best of vague and elusive hopes. There are many persons who w r ould describe their mental state as "an aspiration sometimes approaching almost to a faith, occasionally and for a few moments rising into a trust, but never able to settle into the consistency of a definite and enduring creed.' '

But whatever may be the situation in the world at large, surely inside our Christian Churches this faith is kept fresh and living, and here, if nowhere else, death can be faced in calmness and peace in the assured confidence that it marks only a transition to a fuller and a richer life. Alas I this is far from being the case, as any one with knowledge of the facts can testify. Too often blank uncertainty ending in bitter despair unhinges the mind and throws the inner world into confusion. There are, of course, many exceptions, but these will be found almost wholly confined to the few who can accept the Christian revelation in childlike faith or whose spiritual intuitions are undimmed by the shadows of the abstractive intellect. The refusal to accept any truth on authority, the rise and dominance of the higher criticism, the uncertain note of the educated teacher of religion, and the crude phantasies of the uneducated evangelist — all these and other influences in a lesser degree are responsible for the present failure of faith in immortality in the Christian world. Indeed it must be confessed with pain that the most unw r avering assurances of the immortal hope do not as a rule come from the professed champions of Church and Creed but from men whose main interests lie elsewhere. Take, for example, the following statement of a well-known man of science : "We shall certainly continue to exist, we shall certainly survive. Why do I say that? I say it on definite scientific grounds. I know that certain friends of mine still exist, because I have talked with them ... I have conversed with them as I could,

J

-l converse through a telephone with any one in this audience now. Being men of cultivated mind they have given proofs that it is really they, not some impersonation, not something emanating from myself. They have given definite proofs. Some of these proofs have been published. Many more will have to be withheld for a time, but will ultimately be published. I tell you with all the strength of conviction that I can muster that the fact is so, that we do persist, that people still take an interest in what is going on, that they still help us, that they know far more about things than we do, that they are able from time to time to communicate. ' ' x Now what strikes the reader in this confession is not the reference to the spiritistic theory of communication so much as the ringing tone of clear and assured conviction. However this certainty is gained, it is simply invaluable. It means a new world for the man who has won it. It cannot but bring to life an ethical stimulus, consolation amid discouragement and defeat, a coherence and an intelligibility otherwise impossible. Yet were one to stand up in a Christian pulpit and proclaim a future life with a like assurance, he would be listened to with polite incredulity on the part of very many and

1 Sir Oliver Lodge: Science and Religion, p. 25.

IMMOETALITY AND MODERN MAN 17

would find himself regarded as St. Paul was y by the Athenians — something of an enthusiast. Ruskin in his preface to "The Crown of Wild Olive" makes the strikingly true observation that "if you address any average modern English company as believing in an Eternal life, and endeavour to draw any conclusions, from this assumed belief, as to their present business, they will forthwith tell you that what you say is very beautiful, but it is not practical. If, on the contrary, you frankly address them as unbelievers in Eternal life, and try to draw any consequences from that unbelief, — they immediately hold you for an accursed person, and shake off the dust from their feet at you." How is this to be explained? Why is it that the average church-goer resents the unqualified affirmation of a life beyond the grave? Doubtless to some extent he is influenced consciously or unconsciously by the prevailing habits of thought already referred to ; but there is another reason. Strange as it may appear, the average professor of religion prefers that the future life should not be discussed except in a form which convention should dictate, and convention prescribes that this form be no more than a pious aspiration. Listen to the startling assertion of a distinguished American divine: "A degree of agnosticism touching the future life is tolerable to religious men today, which would have been quite intolerable in other days. It is not an accident that in modern sermonic literature the subjects of heaven and hell bulk far less largely than they once did. In the absence of experimental proof few present-day thinkers are able to count immortality as other than a more or less well-grounded hope." 1 The situation is a curious one. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that many good church-going people are afraid that the belief may turn out to be true. We have an exact parallel in the widespread ^j repugnance to the preaching of that fundamental change of moral and spiritual outlook which goes by the popular name "conversion." This doctrine, it is held, is suitable for the degraded or vicious classes, for men and women of an emotional type, perhaps, who have been flagrant sinners or transgressors of social law, but quite inapplicable to law-abiding, respectable citizens, to the educated and the conventionally "good." But now it was precisely to these latter classes that Christ preached the doctrine, and it was their aversion to it that drew from Him His denunciation of Pharisee and

1 A. C. McGiffert : The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas, p. 163.

Sadducee. Here, then, are two great religious ideas which provoke annoyance and resentment

W on the part of many apparently religious persons, and the question is : Why? The more one turns the matter over in one's mind, the more the conviction grows that the same psychological cause is at work in both cases. Many turn away from certainty of a future life and from the demand which brooks no denial for a profound transformation of their minds, for the same reason; acceptance of either idea would inevitably lead to a far-reaching disturbance of

^ their normal, every-day lives, to a complete reconstruction of their moral and social world. But as the years pass, the dull weight of custom, the inert, mechanical, and automatic force of convention, makes such a reversion of their normal existence a task to be evaded with all the stratagems at their command. Hence they make a compromise. They will not deny that within limits the Christian theory of repentance has its rights, but it must not interfere unduly with the claims of use and wont. So, too, with the idea of a future life. That also must not be denied, yet it must not be asserted, as if it were a fact like the law of gravitation, or like any of the data of experience, because if it were so asserted and accepted, they would be com-

20 THE FUTUKE LIFE

pelled to regard themselves and those about them in an altogether different light. They would awake to the claim of unsuspected duties and tasks. They would see their every act to be fraught with a significance unimaginably great. To escape such a revolution the idea of immortality must be lessened of its dynamic meaning, and its revolutionary power must be kept in check.

But this method of dealing with a great principle brings its own Nemesis. "When, through some painful bereavement, the soul is awakened to the need for certainty, for some satisfying conception of the world into which the loved one has passed, nothing offers that can stand the scrutiny of the anxious heart, beset, as it is, with a host of questions 'that now clamour for an answer. How intently the mind strains into the darkness and vacancy to catch a gleam of living light! Where are the dead? How can they exist without a body? What is the meaning of resurrection? When will it be and how? Do the departed pass to the judgment of God immediately after death, or do they wait in a disembodied state for a public and formal assize at the last day? Do they inhabit other worlds? If so, as these worlds are constantly perishing, must not discarnate spirits migrate from world to world? How are we to conceive of the employments of those who have passed over? Are they near at hand or remote from us? Shall there be a meeting between loved ones again and mutual recognition or will not those who have passed over first have advanced to higher planes where the weakness or immaturity of those who come later may not reach? What kind of a sphere is it into which has gone that tender and loving spirit so dear to us on earth? Will there be friendly faces to offer a welcome to the newcomer ? Or is it an infinite void where in utter loneliness the spirit lives out its life shut up with the memories of its past? And when the intellect fails to create new perplexities, the imagination conjures up a myriad phantoms to terrify and to confuse.

The lesson such experiences should teach us is to get face to face with this problem and to come to terms with it. Sooner or later the hour when we shall be forced to face it will befall us, and then we may be in no condition to summon our souls to order and certainly we shall have lost the spiritual benefits of self-discipline and preparation. What a pathetic and even tragic circumstance is the fact that around us are thousands of men and women who all their lifetime are subject to bondage through fear of death either for themselves or for others ! And yet no true or worthy life can be lived till fear is trampled underfoot. We can do our work in peace and dignity only when we can say with Victor Hugo : " Death is not the dreary finish to life; it is its prolongation; my work is only begun, ' ' or with Emerson : l ' All that I have seen leads me to trust 1 God for what I have not seen. ' '

Outside religious circles, there are great varieties of attitude toward our problem. To begin with, there are the indifferent who hardly ever think of the matter and who spend no little energy in keeping it at arm's length. Why worry, they say, about death till death comes? One world at a time. We shall know all about it time enough; just now business and home, art and science, politics and social life can fill every moment. This appears to be a state of mind as unscientific as it is unnatural and impermanent. It is unnatural, for man is in essence a moral being, that is, he acts with a view to an end, to the accomplishment or enjoyment of something in the future. If man is not this, he is no better than the non-rational animal. The future to "a being of large discourse, able to look before and after," has a significance for the present, whether that future is only ten minutes ahead or ten years or a possible eternity. Indeed the present has no meaning except with a view to the future. Says Pascal: "The immortality of the soul is a thing which concerns us so mightily, which touches us so deeply, that it is necessary to have lost all feeling in order to be indifferent about it. All our actions and thoughts must take different paths according as there will be or will not be eternal goods to be hoped for, so that it is impossible to do anything with intelligence and judgment if it is not regulated by the view of that point which ought to be our final object." 1 Poets and moralists have often compared human life to a journey. Is it a sign of sound judgment or of prudence to entertain no curiosity about how the journey will end, whether in a black gulf of oblivion or in shining fields, and happy company and a sense of freedom and refreshment? But normal or abnormal, such a condition of mind is not fixed. It is at the mercy of a thousand accidents. At any moment the indifferent soul may be smitten by mortal loss, and awake to the agony of a parting that seems eternal. We may be believers or sceptics, but indifferentists we cannot permanently be.

1 Pensties.

There are others who while not indifferent to the life beyond the grave are content to say: "I do not know." Huxley, who invented the word "agnostic" to describe this mental attitude, maintained that as a scientific man he was unable either to affirm or to deny immortality. If any one says that the mind persists after the dissolution of the brain, the pure scientist must ask, How do you know? On the other hand, if any one denies such persistence, again the question must be, How do you know? Theoretically, such a position is tenable, practically it is not. Huxley himself could not carry his doctrine through amid the sad realities of experience. In reply to a letter of Charles Kingsley, who wrote him words of comfort on the loss of a dear child, the man of science flung over his agnostic doctrine and took refuge in a wondrous faith. ' ' The ledger of the Almighty, ' ' he wrote, "is strictly kept, and every one of us has the balance of his operations paid over to him at the end of every minute of his existence." Of course, he leaves himself open to his own query : How do you know? Are the pessimists all wrong? Are there no monstrous wrongs inflicted on the innocent? In a world such as this, given over to intolerable miseries, to bitter sufferings that often fall on the noblest and the most self-sacrificing of their kind, what scientific justification is there for the doctrine that the Almighty pays to every man at the end of every minute of his existence exactly what he deserves? Yet at bottom Huxley is right. God is just and in the end His justice will be manifested to every moral intelligence in the universe. But this is not the language of science. It is the prophetic insight of faith. Huxley solved the problem practically for himself by taking Aristotle's advice. He lived as if he were immortal. His ethics was the ethics of an eternal being. In other words, he was an agnostic in name only, though his contemporaries in the heat of conflict often misunderstood him.