CHAPTER V.

REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE DOGMA—_Concluded_.

IDEALISM, MATERIALISM, MONISM.

I. Idealism—Different forms of idealism: subjective idealism, objective idealism: The whole of existence resolved into a mode of mental existence—Value of idealism considered from point of view of the religious sentiment—Most specious of contemporary idealisms: Possibility of universal progress on the hypothesis of radical spontaneity and of “freedom”—Reconciliation between determinism and the conception of freedom—Moral idealism as a possible substitute for religious sentiment: Dependence of the universe on the principle of goodness.

II. Materialism—Difficulty in defining absolute materialism: Matter—The atom—Nebular hypothesis—Hydrogen—Necessity of supplementing materialism by some theory of the origin of life—The latest conception of materialism: Conception of infinite divisibility and infinite extensibility.

III. Monism and the fate of worlds—Current of contemporary systems toward monism—Scientific interpretation of monism—The world conceived monistically as a becoming and as a life—Scientific formulæ for life—Progress consists in the gradual confusion of these two formulæ—That the rise of morality and religion can be accounted for without the presupposition of any final cause—Metaphysical and moral expectations in regard to the destiny of the world and of humanity it may be founded on scientific monism—Facts which appear to be inconsistent with these expectations—Pessimistic conception of dissolution that is complementary to the conception of evolution—Is the immanence of dissolution demonstrable?—Natural devices for the perpetuation of the “fittest”—Rôle of intelligence, of numbers, etc.—Calculation of probabilities—Is eternity _a parte post_ a ground of discouragement or of hope—Probable existence of thinking beings in other worlds: the planets, possibility of the existence of beings superior to man—Survival of the conception of gods—Hypothesis of intercosmic consciousness and of a universal society.

IV. Destiny of the human race—The hypothesis of immortality from the point of view of monism—Two possible conceptions of immortality—Eternal or untemporal existence and continuation of life in some superior forms—I. Hypothesis of eternal life—its function in antique religions, in Platonism, and in the systems of Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer—Eternal life and the subsistence of the individual—Distinction made by Schopenhauer and various other philosophers between individuality and personality—Eternal life problematical and transcendent—Aristocratic tendency of the theory of eternal life—Hypothesis of conditional immortality—Criticism of the hypothesis of conditional immortality; incompatibility of this notion with that of divine goodness—II. Hypothesis of a continuation of the present life and its evolution into some superior form—What sort of immortality the theory of evolution permits us to hope for—Immortality of one’s labours and conduct—True conception of such immortality—Its relation to the laws of heredity, atavism, natural selection—Immortality of the individual—Objections drawn from science—Protestations of affection against the annihilation of the person—Resulting antinomy—III. Modern opposition between the conception of _function_ and the conception of simple substance, in which ancient philosophy endeavours to find a proof of immortality—Peripatetic theory of Wundt and modern philosophers on the nature of the soul—Immortality as a continuation of function, proved not by the simplicity, but by the complexity of consciousness—Relation between complexity and instability—Three stages of social evolution—Analogy of conscience with a society, collective character of individual consciousness—Conception of progressive immortality—Last product of evolution and natural selection: (1) No necessary relation between the compositeness and complexity of consciousness and its dissolubility: indissoluble compounds in the physical universe—(2) Relation between consciousnesses, their possible fusion in a superior consciousness—Contemporary psychology and the religious notion of the interpenetration of souls—Possible evolution of memory and identification of it with reality—Palingenesis by force of love—Problematic character of those conceptions and of every conception relative to existence, of consciousness, and the relation between existence and consciousness—IV. Conception of death appropriate to those who, in the present state of evolution, do not believe in the immortality of the individual—Antique and modern stoicism—Acceptance of death: element of melancholy and of greatness in it—Expansion of self by means of philosophical thought, and scientific disinterestedness, to the point of to some extent approving one’s own annihilation.

[Sidenote: The problem of the immanence of being.]

Naturalism consists in believing that nature, together with the beings which compose it, make up the sum total of existence. But even from this point of view there still remains the problem, what existence essentially is, and what special mode of existence is most typical. Is nature material, or mental, or both? The problem of the essence of being is one that cannot be escaped.

[Sidenote: The double-aspect theory.]

The theory that seems to-day to be dominant is the “double-aspect” theory—the theory of two inseparable correlatives subjective and objective, of consciousness and of motion. We have, as M. Taine[143] would say, two texts of the eternal book instead of one. The question is, which of the two texts is original and sacred? Sometimes that which is furnished by introspection alone, sometimes that which objective science endeavours to decipher, are respectively held to be primitive. Thence arise two opposed tendencies, not alone in psychological but in metaphysical speculation; the one toward idealism, the other toward materialism; the one toward what lies within, the other toward what lies without. But these two aspects may and should be conceived as possessing a certain unity; there is an inevitable tendency in the human mind to follow out two converging lines to their point of intersection. There are, therefore, three forms of naturalism: idealism, materialism, monism. These three constitute the three genuine systems of thought from which theism, atheism, and pantheism are respectively derived.

[143] M. Ribot holds the same doctrine.

_I. Idealism._

[Sidenote: Idealism defined.]

If the words thought and idea be interpreted as Descartes and Spinoza understand them, as designating the entire life of the mind, the sum total of the possible content of consciousness, idealism may be defined as the system which resolves all reality into thought, into psychical existence, insomuch that to be is to think or to be thought; to feel or to be felt; to will or to be willed; to be the object or subject of a conscious effort.

[Sidenote: Idealism and the religious instinct.]

It is evident that idealism is one of the systems which is capable of affording a certain satisfaction to the religious sentiment, because the religious sentiment is allied to the instinct for metaphysics, and the instinct for metaphysics finds itself at home among all things of the spirit, of thought, of the moral world. The foundation of theism, as we have said, is _moralism_; the belief, that is to say, that the true power in nature is mental and moral. God is simply a representation of this power, conceived as transcendent. Pantheism itself, after having divinized and materialized the universe and resolved all things, so to speak, into God, tends to become idealistic, to resolve God into the thought which has conceived Him, to deny Him all existence over and above that which He possesses in thought, and for thought, and by virtue of thought. According to the Hindu comparison, the human mind is like the spider that can build its mansion out of materials drawn from its own body, and then reabsorb them.

[Sidenote: Subjective idealism criticised.]

But how shall the mind itself, the central fund of thought that is the origin and end of all things, be conceived? Is it individual or impersonal? English subjective or egoistic idealism, as Mr. Huxley defines it in his “Life of Hume,” replies, that in spite of all demonstration to the contrary, the collection of perceptions which constitute our consciousness may be simply a phantasmagoria which, engendered and co-ordinated by the ego, unrolls its successive scenes upon a background of nonentity. Mr. Spencer retorts that, if the universe is thus simply a projection of our subjective sensations, evolution is a dream; but evolution may be formulated in idealistic quite as well as realistic terms: and a coherent dream is as good as reality. Subjective idealism is therefore difficult to refute logically; but in spite of that fact it will never have many followers. For this apparent simplification of the world is in reality a complication. For subjective idealism involves the ridiculous hypothesis of a chance agreement between the impressions of any given individual and of all other individuals: a difficulty much harder to explain away than the preliminary one of the simple reflection in us of an external world. Mental phenomena are always more complex than material phenomena.

The reduction of the external world to subjective terms, the explanation of the optical illusion of objectivity, demands a much greater display of vain ingenuity than any theory of simple perception. More than that, the least effort with the resistance that it encounters is a refutation of egoistic, or as the English again say, solipsistic idealism. In the fact of resistance, subjective sensation and the perception of an objective reality coincide. Even if the manner in which our sensations of resistance are combined in tridimensional space may be conceived as subjective, it is difficult to admit that the materials out of which the structure is made are, as it were, suspended in mid-air. To explain the fact of resistance requires us absolutely to pass beyond the limits of consciousness, for even in the cases in which the sensation of resistance seems to be due to hallucination, the cause of hallucination is always found to be some instance of actual resistance, of friction or stress inside the body. The mistake of a madman, who sees an unfamiliar form take shape and rise before his eyes, is not that of considering the power as existing outside of himself, but of locating it at the extremities of his nerves of touch; whereas it is really in his brain, at the point where the nerves intersect with the cerebral centres. He is right in his sense of the presence of an enemy, but wrong in the direction in which he looks for it.

[Sidenote: Truth in subjective idealism.]

We are obliged, therefore, to admit the hypothesis of a multitude of microcosms, of mine, of yours, of everybody’s, and of a single macrocosm the same for everybody. What is true is that between the great world and every little world there is an incessant communication, by means of which everything that passes in the one is echoed in the other. We live in the universe, and the universe lives in us. The statement is not metaphorical, but literal. If we could look into the consciousness of a school child, we should see a more or less faithful image of all the marvels of the world: skies, seas, mountains, cities, etc.; we should perceive the germ of every elevated sentiment, of every kind of complex knowledge that the human brain contains. If we could look into the consciousness of some great man—some thinker, some poet—the spectacle would be quite different. It would embrace the whole of the visible and invisible universe, with its facts and its laws; it would embrace what is best in the whole of humanity. If the traces left by experience on the nervous system could be read, like the writing in a book, the earth might disappear, and its image and history be handed down in certain chosen human brains.

[Sidenote: Realism destined to prevail.]

Active and practical humanity will always believe in realism to the extent of insisting that the world possesses an existence which is independent of any individual thought. We shall dwell no further on subjective idealism, which is more important as a metaphysical curiosity than for any comfort it gives to the religious sentiment.

[Sidenote: Objective idealism.]

Of objective idealism the same cannot be said. In objective idealism, too, all material existence is regarded as a mode of mental existence; being is identified either with the ideal law which presides over the development of the universe, or with the genuine foundation of our consciousness, our sensations, our desires. The world, as Emerson has said, is a precipitate of the soul.

[Sidenote: Criticised.]

This hypothesis is certainly one of those that may best serve as a substitute for theism, if theism should ever disappear. But idealism, thus understood, is open to the following objection: Is it of any special use to objectify the soul, if the existence of evil, which Plato identified with matter, is thereby left unchanged? It is in vain to translate evolution into psychic terms; no difficulty can be avoided by so doing. The mysterious imperfections of the exterior world are transported bodily into the mind; evil is spiritualized simply. Identifying things with the intellectual law which presides over their evolution in nowise excuses us from explaining why that law is in so many respects bad, and why the intelligence that directs the universe is so often self-contradictory and feeble.

[Sidenote: Objective idealism relatively capable of satisfying the moral instincts.]

In spite of this objection, which will, perhaps, never receive a sufficient reply, it is certain that, so far as our moral and social instincts are concerned, idealism offers us greater ground for hope than either of the remaining systems of thought. In spite of evil and pain, the desire of progress and of salvation, which is the basis of all religious speculation, may rely upon thought as its last resource. But thought, if the doctrine of objective idealism is to be made acceptable, must be understood as including not only intelligence, but also sentiment, desire, and volition, and, in effect, the purely intellectual idealism of a former time is at the present day being succeeded by an idealism that regards the will as the fundamental element in the universe.[144] Universal sensibility is an incident of universal power of will, whereas intelligence, properly so called, at least in so far as the function of intelligence is regarded as representation, is more superficial than sensibility or volition.[145] These three inseparable forms of psychic life[146] constitute the great forces to which moral and religious sentiment must always turn for support.

[144] See Schelling, Schopenhauer, Lotze, Wundt, Secrétan, MM. Ravaison, A. Fouillée, Lachelier, and, to a certain extent, M. Renouvier.

[145] See Schopenhauer, Horwicz, and M. Fouillée.

[146] See Wundt’s _Psychologie physiologique_.

[Sidenote: Hypothesis of moral progress immanent in the world.]

Idealism, thus understood, constitutes one of the most tempting of the solutions of the problem of evil. Optimism being, as we have seen, indefensible, and pessimism being a caricature, the most plausible religious and metaphysical hypothesis at the present day is the conception of a “possible progress owing to the radical spontaneity of all existing things.”[147] The will, according to this hypothesis, with its tendency to indefinite self-expansion, is _par excellence_ the primitive power, the central element in man and in the universe. Freedom of the will in man means the consciousness of this progressive power, which is immanent in all things, and this consciousness may be made the foundation of a moral being. This conception of freedom, which is reconcilable with determinism, becomes an additional motive among the other motives that govern man’s life, and tends to be realized by the very fact that it is conceived and desired. Through the intermediation of this conception, reality possesses a progressive freedom, that is to say, a power of constant union with the whole, and of moral enfranchisement. “In the beginning there obtains a universal antagonism among the forces of the universe, a brutal fatality, an infinite reign of shock and counter-shock, between blind and blindly driven beings; then there arises a progressive organization that makes the evolution of consciousness, and therefore of volition, possible; there arises a gradual union and fraternity among the particulars that constitute the universe. Ill-will, whether it originate in mechanical necessity or in intellectual ignorance, is transitory; good-will is permanent, radical, normal, and fundamental. To cultivate good-will in one’s self is to enfranchise one’s self from the individual and the transitory in favour of the universal and the permanent; it is to become truly free, and by that very fact to become truly loving.”[148]

[147] Alfred Fouillée, _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, 2d edition, pp. 353, 354, 356.

[148] Alfred Fouillée, _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, 2d edition, pp. 353, 354, 356.

[Sidenote: Reconciliation between freedom and determinism.]

Between progressive freedom thus conceived, and the determinism in the midst of which it progresses, there is no opposition; freedom and determinism constitute two aspects of one and the same process of evolution. Determinism essentially consists in a series of actions and reactions existing between other beings and ourselves; but these very actions and reactions constitute the manifestation of the development of our, and their, inner activities. And the source of activity in the universe is none other than an overflowing power, which is hostile to limitation, to impediment of every kind; is, in a word, none other than a self-realizing volition. Freedom, thus understood, may, therefore, be considered in the last resort as the origin of determinism and as one with it.[149] Necessity is, so to speak, the outer surface of freedom—the point of contact between two or more free agents. Freedom is inconceivable apart from a resulting determinism, for to be free is to possess power, is to act and to react, is to determine and to be determined. Determinism, on the other hand, that is to say, reciprocal action, is inconceivable apart from freedom, from internal action, from a spontaneous outbreak of power that tends to be free. So that one may say, without contradiction, that determinism envelops the world, and that free-will constitutes it.

[149] A. Fouillée, _op. cit._

[Sidenote: Ideal liberty the aim of the universe.]

If the shock of wills in the world is unusually brutal, the reason is that they are as yet but half conscious of their powers; as consciousness develops, contest will give way to concurrence. To avoid violent concussion with obstacles in the way, the free agent has less need of acquaintance with them than of acquaintance with itself. As there is nothing in the universe that is foreign to volition, there is nothing in the universe that is foreign to the ideal that every volition aims at. It is probable that life is always and everywhere accompanied by consciousness in some slight degree; and wherever consciousness exists, desire may exist. Nature’s device, as a contemporaneous poet has said, is “I aspire.” The human ideal is, perhaps, no more than the conscious formulation of this aspiration which is common to the whole universe. If so, it follows that ideal freedom is the limit of evolution, and that volition, which aims at ideal freedom, is the principle of it.[150]

[150] “The category of Real Existence does not seem reconcilable with the notion of liberty; the latter in its perfection must be conceived under the category of the Ideal, and in its imperfection under that of Becoming.”—A. Fouillée, _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, conclusion.

[Sidenote: Objections answered.]

It has been objected to this idealist theory of evolution that progress implies an aim and the observance of certain principles in its attainment, while evolution does not.[151] But the precise object of the doctrine in question is to supply evolution with a name and appropriate principles, and to extend the notion of progress to the universe as a whole. It has also been objected to this somewhat panthelistic hypothesis (θέλος), that if everything is free, nothing is free.[152] This objection is not exact, for it would imply, in economics, for instance, that to increase everybody’s well-being would increase the well-being of nobody, or that if everybody equally should be impoverished, everybody would equally be enriched. To universalize a conception is one thing, to suppress it is another. The world cannot at the present day be conceived as distinct from the human race: the two are vitally and intimately related. Endow mankind with an unbiassed freedom of will, and Epicurus would be right in holding that indeterminism is the basis of all things.[153] Similarly, suppose mankind endowed with “a radical goodness of will, which is very distinct from freedom of the will, but nevertheless constitutes a sort of moral freedom in process of formation,”[154] and the germ of such goodness of will should be found in a more or less unconscious form throughout the entire universe. Before the human mind can really produce anything whatever, the whole universe must be like it in labour. Partisans of the theory of goodness of will as the basis of human morality are therefore logical in regarding it as more or less present in some degraded form throughout the whole of nature, even in beings in which intelligence has not yet made its appearance; and goodness of will in such cases is to be considered as accompanied by the obscure beginnings of responsibility, of implicit merit or demerit—one must return in effect to a sort of re-reading of the Hindu theory, according to which the several degrees that exist in nature represent so many stages in morality.

[151] M. Franck, _Essais de critique philosophique_.

[152] M. Franck, _op. cit._

[153] The author argued the point at length, in 1873, in his book on Epicurus. See also his _Morale anglaise_, 2 partie, pp. 385-386, 2d edition.

[154] A. Fouillée, _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, 2d edition.

[Sidenote: Moral idealism and the religious sentiment.]

_Hypotheses fingo_ is the mother of metaphysics. Moral idealism of the kind we have just epitomized from the pages of a contemporary author is decidedly no more than a hypothesis, and a hypothesis open to discussion; but it is assuredly the form of idealism that is least incompatible with the theory of evolution, and with the facts of natural history and of human history.[155] Moreover, it affords unusual scope for the religious sentiment, freed from its mysticism and transcendence. If the unknown activity which lies at the basis of the natural world has produced in the human race a consciousness of goodness, and a deliberate desire for it, there is reason to hope and to believe that the last word of ethics and metaphysics is not a negative.

[155] This form of idealism is equally compatible with the prevailing monistic doctrines, and is in some cases, as notably in that of M. Fouillée, confounded with them. See below.

[Sidenote: Religion interpreted in the light of this hypothesis.]

We have a number of times cited Schleiermacher’s definition of religion: the sense of our absolute dependence in regard to the universe and its principle. When the religious sentiment becomes transformed into a moral idealism its correct formula tends to be the inverse of the preceding: a sense of the dependence of the universe upon the determination that goodness shall prevail, of which we are conscious in ourselves and which we conceive to be or to be capable of becoming the directing principle of universal evolution. The notion of the moral and social ideal of freedom is, therefore, according to this doctrine, not a mere superficial accident in the universe, but a revelation and growing consciousness of the most fundamental laws of the universe, of the true essence of things, which is the same in all beings in different degrees and in diverse combinations. Nature represents an eternal ascent toward a more and more clearly conceived ideal, which dominates its progress from beginning to end. As one climbs a height to survey a mountain range, the snow-capped peaks rise silently and take their places side by side along the horizon; it seems as if the enormous masses rise in obedience to an immense effort which uplifts them; it seems as if their immobility is only apparent, and one feels borne aloft with them toward the zenith. The heroes in the Indian legend, when they were weary of life and of the earth, rallied their strength for a final effort, and hand in hand scaled the Himalayas, and the mountains bore them away into the clouds. Ancient peoples generally regarded the mountains as a transition between earth and sky; it was from the mountains that the soul, profiting by the impulse lent it by the last touch of earth, took its freest flight: the mountains constituted a pathway toward the open heavens. And that may be an element of profundity in these naïve ideas which ascribe to nature aspirations which are more properly human. Do there not exist in nature great unfinished sketches, hints and lines leading upward? Nature has done all that unconsciously, has blindly piled block on block of stone slowly toward the stars. It is man’s privilege to read a meaning into her work, to make use of her efforts, to employ past centuries as the materials out of which to build the future; by scaling the heights of nature man will reach the sky.

_II. Materialism._

Properly to estimate idealism it must be contrasted with its opposite, materialism.

[Sidenote: Materialism difficult to define.]

We shall say but a few words on the subject of pure materialism, because of all systems of thought materialism is the farthest removed from those which give rise to religious and to metaphysical theories. Absolute materialism is somewhat difficult to define, because matter is one of the vaguest of words. To aim at representing the ultimate elements of matter as wholly independent of thought, of consciousness, of life, is evidently chimerical; such an effort leads straight to the pure indeterminism of matter as conceived by Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel; to an indefinite dyad, to a theory of virtuality and of the identity of non-being. Also materialists are obliged to regard as determinate and material the primitive force of which the world constitutes simply a development. If, for example, according to the most recent theories, all matter should prove to be reducible to hydrogen, materialism would regard hydrogen as constituting a sort of material or substantial unity in the world. Variety would exist only in the forms displayed by the primitive element, hydrogen, or, if you prefer, pre-hydrogen.

[Sidenote: Materialism criticised.]

It must be confessed that this conception is somewhat naïve and nominalistic; the word material or chemical can never express more than the outside, than the exterior properties of the primordial element. The hydrogen atom itself is probably in a high degree composite, is itself probably a world of little worlds, held in place by gravitation. The very conception of an indivisible atom is philosophically infantine. Thomson and Helmholtz have shown that our atoms are little vortices of energy, and have succeeded in producing experimentally analogous vortices formed of vapour; for instance, of the vapour chlor-hydrate of ammonia. Each vortex is composed always of the same particles; no one particle can be separated from the others; each vortex possesses, therefore, a stable individuality. When the attempt is made to cut the vortices, they fly the blade or bend about it, and prove to be indivisible. They are capable of contraction, of dilation, of partial interpenetration and distortion, but never of dissolution. And certain men of science have thence inferred that we possess thus a material proof of the existence of atoms. And so indeed we do, providing an atom be understood to be something as complex, as little primordial, and as relatively enormous as a nebula. Atoms are indivisible as a nebula is indivisible by a knife blade, and the atom of hydrogen is about as simple as the solar system. To explain the universe by hydrogen is like explaining it by the sun and the planets. The rise of the actual world out of hydrogen can be conceived only on condition of ascribing to the alleged atoms of hydrogen something more than physicists and chemists know them to possess. Materialism, therefore, must enlarge its principle if it is to prove productive: enlarge, as Diderot would say, your atheism and your materialism.

[Sidenote: Must be supplemented by some theory to account for life.]

But the instant materialism is “enlarged,” the universal element must at once be regarded as alive and is not what is called brute matter. Every generation of physicists, as Mr. Spencer says, discovers in so called brute matter forces the existence of which the best informed physicist would some years previous have disbelieved. When we perceive solid bodies, sensitive in spite of their inertia to the action of forces, the number of which is infinite; when the spectroscope proves to us that terrestrial molecules move in harmony with molecules in the stars; when we find ourselves obliged to infer that the innumerable vibrations traverse space in all directions, the conception which is forced upon us is not that of a universe of dead matter but rather that of a universe everywhere alive; alive in the general sense of the word, if not in the restricted.[156] The notion of life is perhaps more human and more subjective, but after all more complete and concrete than the notion of movement and of force; for we cannot hope to discover the truth at any great distance from the subjective, since subjectivity is the necessary form in which truth appears to us.

[156] Mr. Spencer himself has a little forgotten this fact in a number of his own somewhat too mechanical constructions.

[Sidenote: Must be supplemented by some sort of mind-stuff theory.]

The second emendation to which materialism must submit, if it is to satisfy the metaphysical instincts of mankind, is to include in the primordial element not only life but some germ of mind. But primitive matter conceived as a force capable of living and ultimately of thinking is not what is scientifically and vulgarly regarded as matter, far less as hydrogen. The pure materialist, thumping the rotundity of the earth with his fist, and relying grossly on his sense of touch, cries: “Matter is everything,” but matter is analyzable into force, and force is simply a primitive form of life. Materialism therefore issues into a sort of animism; in the presence of the circling world, the materialist is obliged to say it is alive. Nor can he stop there; the world is force, is action, is life—and something more; for in and by me the world thinks. _E pur si pensa!_

[Sidenote: Passes readily into idealism.]

Behold us landed once more in idealism. And, indeed, as Lange and M. Taine have well shown, materialism easily passes to idealism; pure materialism results in an abstract mechanism, which is analyzable into the laws of logic and of thought. And the basis of this mechanism—atoms and motion—consists in enfeebled subtilized and rarefied tactual and visual sensations, taken ultimately as the expression of the final reality. The alleged foundation of objective reality is simply a residuum of our most essential sensations. Materialism is advocated in the name of positive science; but it, not less than idealism, belongs really to the poetry of metaphysics; its poetry is recorded simply in terms of atoms and motion, instead of in terms of the elements of consciousness. Materialistic symbols are more matter of fact, more neighbour to the visible reality, possess a wider compass and generality, but they are none the less symbols simply. Materialism is in some sort a tissue of metaphor in which scientific terms lose their scientific signification, and gain a metaphysical signification in its stead, transferred, as they are, to a domain that lies beyond the range of experience. The man of science who speculates thus upon the nature of things is, unknown to himself, a modern Lucretius.

[Sidenote: Materialism and the notion of infinity.]

And finally, materialism, properly so called, has been invaded by a notion which has been at all times peculiarly adapted to satisfy the metaphysical and religious aspirations of mankind; the notion of infinity, whether in the direction of greatness or the opposite. Men of science go to the trouble of estimating the number of molecules in a drop of water; they tell us that the thousandth part of a millimeter of water contains 228,000,000 molecules; they say that a pinhead contains the fourth power of 20,000,000 atoms, and that, if the atoms could be counted a billion every second, it would take 253,678 years to complete the task. But all such calculations are simply arithmetical _jeux d’esprit_. These figures, which are so great in appearance, really amount to nothing, and a grain of sand, no doubt, contains literally an infinite number of particles.

[Sidenote: Final breakdown of materialism.]

The argument against the notion of infinity, based on the logical impossibility of an infinite number, is not decisive;[157] it rests upon a begging of the question, namely, that everything in the universe is innumerable—that is to say, is capable of being precisely included within the limits of an intelligence like our own. Logic, on the contrary, insists that in homogeneous matter, like space, time, and quantity, there is no limit to the possibility of division and multiplication, and that, consequently, they may proceed beyond any given number. If so called “purely scientific” materialism does not admit that nature is coextensive with man’s conception of what is possible—if it denies the parallelism between thought and nature—it by that very fact denies also the rationality of nature, which is precisely the principle upon which every philosophy that pretends to be purely scientific ultimately relies. Whoever rejects the notion of infinity is obliged, in the last resort, to suppose a species of contradiction between the activity of the human mind, which is unable to stop at any given point, and nature, which stops, for no reason in particular, at a determinate point in time and space. The conception of infinity may be said to be forced upon materialism, and that very notion contains one of the antinomies against which intelligence, by the very fact of its employment, is ultimately brought to a standstill; it is precisely in the act of counting that intelligence achieves the conception of the innumerable; it is by exhausting every given quantity that it achieves the conception of the inexhaustible; it is by reaching ever beyond the limits of the known that it comes in touch with the unknowable; and all these conceptions mark the point where we feel our intelligence becoming feeble and beyond which our sight grows dim. Back of matter, which thought takes cognizance of, and back of thought, which takes cognizance of itself, lies infinity, which envelops both of them, and which seems the most fundamental aspect of matter itself. It was not without reason that the ancients called matter, abstractly considered, as independent of its diverse forms, the infinite ἄπειρον. Materialism thus leaves us, as other systems do, in the presence of that ultimate mystery which all religions have symbolized in their myths, and which metaphysics will always be obliged to recognize, and poetry to express, by the instrumentality of images.

[157] See Renouvier’s arguments and Lotze’s and Fouillée’s replies to them in the _Revue philosophique_.

[Sidenote: Apologue.]

By the seaside stood a great, upright mountain that pierced the sky like an arrow-head, and the waves beat upon its base. In the morning, when the first light of the sun touched the ancient rocks, they shivered, and a voice rose from the gray stones and mingled with the sound made by the blue sea; and mountain and wave conversed together. The sea said: “The heavens have been mirrored in my shifting waves a million years, and in all that time have held as high aloof from me and stood as motionless.” And the mountain said: “I have climbed toward the heavens a million years, and they are still as high above me as ever.” One day a ray of sun fell smiling upon the brow of the mountain, and the mountain questioned it on the distant heavens from which it came. The ray was about to reply, but was reflected suddenly from the mountain to the sea, and from a scintillating wave back to the heavens from which it came. And the ray is still _en route_ across the infinite, toward the nebulæ of Maïa, in the Pleiades, which were so long invisible, or toward some point farther still, and has not yet replied.

_III. Monism. The Fate of Worlds._

[Sidenote: Monism.]

The word infinite, ἄπειρον, which the ancients applied to matter, the moderns have applied to mind. The reason, no doubt, is that matter and mind are two aspects of one and the same thing. The synthesis of these two aspects is attempted by monism.

[Sidenote: Monism to-day prevalent.]

I. It is not our purpose here to pass judgment upon the theoretical pretensions of monism as a system of metaphysics. We observe simply that the trend of modern thought is toward this system. Materialism is simply a mechanical monism, the fundamental law of which is conceived as capable of being completely formulated in mathematical terms. Idealism is simply a monism the essential law of which is conceived as mental, as pertaining to the intelligence or to the will. This latter form of monism numbers many adherents in Germany and in England. In France it has been advocated by M. Taine, and we have just seen that it is maintained at the present moment under a somewhat different form by M. Fouillée, who regards it as a reconciliation of naturalism and idealism, and no doubt also as a possible reconciliation between what is essential in pantheism and in theism.[158] In our judgment the balance must be more evenly trimmed than the philosophers above cited have done, between the material and mental aspects of existence, between objective science and subjective, conscious knowledge. Monism, therefore, essentially consists simply in a hypothesis that combines the least questionable facts dealt with by science, those which are inseparable from the elementary facts of consciousness. The fundamental unity imported by the term monism is not to be confounded with Spinoza’s unity of substance, nor with the absolute unity advocated by the Alexandrians, nor with Spencer’s unknowable force, nor with anything in the nature of a final cause, such as is spoken of, for example, by Aristotle. Neither do we affirm the existence of any unity of figure and form in the universe. We are content to admit, by a hypothesis at once scientific and metaphysical, the fundamental homogeneity of all things, the fundamental identity of nature. Monism, in our judgment, should be neither transcendent nor mystical, but immanent and naturalistic. The world is one continuous Becoming; there are not two kinds of existence nor two lines of development, the history of which is the history of the universe.

[158] See the preceding chapter.

[Sidenote: The fundamental conception of philosophy is that of life.]

Instead of endeavouring to resolve matter into mind or mind into matter, we recognize them both as united in this synthesis, which science itself (and science is a stranger to anything in the nature of moral or religious prejudice) is obliged to recognize: the synthesis known as _life_. Science tends every day still further to extend the domain of life, and there exists no fixed point of demarcation between the organic and the inorganic world. We do not know whether the foundation of life is _will_, or _idea_, or _thought_, or _sensation_, although in sensation we no doubt approach the central point; it seems to us probable simply that consciousness, which constitutes for us everything, should count for something in every mode of being, and that there is, so to speak, no being in the universe which is entirely abstracted from self. But, leaving these hypotheses to one side, what we can affirm with certainty is that life, by the very fact of its development, tends to engender consciousness; and that progress in life ultimately comes to be one with progress in consciousness, in which what is movement in one aspect is sensation in another. Considered from within everything, even the intellectual forms of time and space, is resolvable by the psychologist into sensation and desire;[159] and, considered from without, everything is resolvable by the physicist into emotion; to feel and to move seem to be the two formulæ that express the entire inner and outer universe, the concave and convex aspects of things; but to feel that one’s self moves is the formula that expresses self-conscious life which is still so infrequent in the great totality of things, but which is becoming increasingly more common. The very meaning of progress in life consists in what is expressed by the gradual fusion of these two. Life means, in fact, development toward sensation and thought.

[159] See the author’s study on _L’idée de temps_ (_Revue philosophique_, April, 1885).

[Sidenote: Life and activity.]

Side by side with the tendency which life thus displays to take possession of itself by consciousness, it seeks to widen the sphere of its operation by a more and more profound activity. Life is productivity. At the lowest stage of consciousness life leads only to the inner development of the solitary cell; at the highest stage of consciousness, life manifests itself in intelligent and moral productivity. Expansion, far from being opposed to the nature of life, is in harmony with its nature, is the very condition of life, properly so called, just as in generation the need to engender another individual results in that individual’s existence being, as it were, a condition of our own. The fact is that life does not consist in nutrition only, it consists in production, and pure egoism involves not an expansion of self but a diminution and mutilation of self. Also the individual, by the mere fact of growth, tends to become both social and moral.[160] It is this fact of the fundamental sociality of mankind which is the basis of the moral instinct, and of what is most profound and durable in the religious and metaphysical instinct. Metaphysical speculation, like moral action, thus springs from the very source of life. To live is to become a conscious, a moral, and ultimately a philosophical being. Life is activity in one or other of its more or less equivalent forms: moral activity, and what may be called metaphysical activity, that is to say, activity of thought, binds up the individual with the universe.

[160] See the author’s _Esquisse d’une morale_, p. 447, _et seq._

[Sidenote: No final cause in nature.]

Up to this point we have made no mention of anything in the nature of a final cause. Morality, in our judgment, is as independent as the so-called religious instinct of anything in the nature of a primordial end and aim. Morality in the beginning is simply a more or less blind, unconscious, or, at best, subconscious power. As this power becomes endowed with self-consciousness, it directs itself toward more and more rational objects: _duty_ is self-conscious and organized morality. Just as humanity moves blindly forward without in the first instance possessing any notion of its destination, so also moves nature.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Monism and the problem of destiny.]

All this being true, what is the destiny of mankind in the world? Does monism allow a place for the hopes on which the moral and metaphysical sentiments have always relied in their effort to save thought and good-will from the charge of vanity?

[Sidenote: Natural selection and the possible evolution of gods.]

If evolution may be conceived as possessing from the beginning a certain aim and as being on the whole providential,—a metaphysical hypothesis which unhappily is guiltless of the smallest trace of scientific induction,—it may also be conceived as resulting in beings capable of proposing to themselves a certain aim, and of dragging nature after them toward it. Natural selection would thus finally be converted into moral and, in some sort, divine selection. Such an hypothesis is, no doubt, as yet a rash one, but is at least in the direction of the trend of scientific thought, and it is not formally in contradiction with present knowledge. Evolution, in effect, can and will produce species and types superior to humanity as we know it; it is not probable that we embody the highest achievement possible in life, thought, and love. Who knows, indeed, but that evolution may be able to bring forth, nay, has not already brought forth, what the ancients called gods?

[Sidenote: Possibility of arresting process of dissolution.]

Such speculation offers a permanent support for what is best in the religious sentiment for sociality, not only with all living and knowing beings, but with the creatures of thought and superior power with which we people the universe. Provided such beings are in no sense anti-real, provided they might somewhere exist, if not in the present at least in the future, the religious sentiment may attach itself to them without check from the scientific sentiment. And in so doing it becomes one with the metaphysical and poetic impulse. The believer is transmuted into a philosopher or a poet, but into a poet whose poetry is his life, and who dreams of a universal society of real or possible beings who shall be animated to a goodness of will analogous to his own. The statement that Feuerbach proposed, of what is essential in moral and religious sentiment (the reaction of human desire on the universe), may then be interpreted in a higher sense as referring to a desire and a hope both that, first, the sociality with which we feel ourselves personally to be animated may, as biology would lead us to believe, be discovered in all beings that exist at the summit of universal evolution; and second, that these beings thus placed at the front by evolution, will one day succeed in securing what they have gained, in preventing dissolution, and that they may thereby permanently establish in the universe the love of social or rather universal well-being.

[Sidenote: The highest possible conception in the realms of morals.]

Thus understood, the religious sentiment may still be regarded as ultra-scientific, but no longer as anti-scientific. It is, no doubt, taking much for granted to suppose that beings who have arrived at a high degree of evolution may determine from that point on the direction that the evolutionary process is to take, but, after all, since we are unable to affirm with certitude that such is not or may not become the fact, the moral and social sentiment urges us to act in such manner as to turn as far as in us lies the process of evolution in that direction. If, as we have said, morality is a species of productivity, every moral being must turn his eyes toward the future, must hope that his work will not die, must watch over the safety of that portion of himself that he has delivered to someone else—of his love—by which not only he has devoted himself to others, but has made others in a sense his own; has acquired rights over them, has conquered them, so to speak, by subjecting himself to them. By labouring for humanity and for the universe with which humanity is bound up, I acquire certain rights over the universe. There arises between us a relation of reciprocal dependence. The highest conception of morals and metaphysics is that of a sort of sacred league between the higher beings of the earth, and even of the universe, for the advancement of what is good.

* * * * *

II. What scientific facts may be urged in bar of such hopes as to the destiny of the universe and of humanity?

[Sidenote: Immanence of dissolution.]

The most discouraging aspect of the theory of evolution is that of dissolution, which seems to be inevitably incident to it. From Heracleitus to Mr. Spencer, philosophers have regarded these two ideas as inseparable. But does evolution necessarily result in dissolution? Our experience, both of the life of individuals and of worlds, seems, so far as the past is concerned, to make for a reply in the affirmative. Our whole acquaintance has been with worlds which have gone or are going to shipwreck. When the corpse of a sailor is thrown into the sea, his friends take notice of the exact point of latitude and longitude at which his body disappeared in the ocean. Two figures on a bit of paper are all that exists of what was a human life. An analogous destiny may be supposed to be in reserve for the terrestrial globe and for humanity as a whole. They may some day sink out of sight in space and dissolve beneath the moving waves of ether; and at that period, if some neighbouring and friendly star observe us, it may take the latitude and longitude in infinite space of the point in the celestial abyss where we disappeared—the angle made by the last rays that left the earth; and the measure of this angle, made by two extinct rays, may be the sole trace to remain of the whole sum of human effort in the world of thought.

[Sidenote: Has been observed in the past only.]

Nevertheless, the duty of science being equally in its denials and in its affirmations to keep within the limits of certainty, it is important not to model our conception of the future too absolutely upon our knowledge of the past.

[Sidenote: The future may differ from the past.]

Up to the present time there has been no individual, nor group of individuals, nor world which has attained complete self-consciousness, complete consciousness of its life and of the laws of its life. We are unable, therefore, either to affirm or to demonstrate that dissolution is essentially and eternally incident to evolution by the very law of being: the law of laws is to us simply _x_. If thought is ever to understand the law of laws, it will be by realizing the law in its own person. And such a height of development is conceivable; if it is impossible to prove its existence, it is still more impossible to prove its non-existence. It may be that if complete self-consciousness, if complete consciousness is ever achieved, it will produce a corresponding power great enough to arrest the process of dissolution. Beings who are capable, in their infinite complication of movements in the world, of distinguishing those which make for evolution as against those which make for dissolution, might be capable of defeating the latter and of securing the unimpeded operation of the former. If a bird is to cross the sea it needs a certain breadth of wing; its destiny depends on some inches, more or less, of feathers. Seabirds that desert the shore before their wings have attained the proper strength are one after another engulfed in the waves, but when their wings are full grown they can cross the ocean. A world also needs, so to speak, a certain breadth of wing to secure its flight in infinite space—its fate depends on some small increments, more or less, in the development of consciousness; beings may one day be produced capable of traversing eternity without danger of being engulfed, and evolution may be established once for all in security against a recoil; for the first time in the onward movement of the universe a definitive result may be achieved. According to the profound symbolism of the Greek religion, time is the father of worlds. The power of evolution which the moderns regard as ruling over all things is the ancient Saturn who devours his offspring. Which of his children shall deceive him and vanquish him—what Jupiter shall some day prove strong enough to chain up the divine and terrible power that engendered him? The problem for him when he shall arise—for this god of light and intelligence—will be to check the eternal and blind impulse of destruction without at the same time arresting the impulse of productivity. Nothing, after all, can justify one in affirming scientifically that such a problem is forever insoluble.

[Sidenote: The inexhaustible resources of nature.]

The great resource of nature is number, the possible combinations of which are infinite and constitute the secret of the eternal mechanism of the universe. Fortuitous combination and selection, which have produced so many marvels in the past, may give rise to still greater marvels in the future. It is on that fact that Heracleitus, Empedocles, Democritus, and later the men like Laplace, Lamarck, and Darwin based their conception of the part played by chance in the universe, and of the point of union between luck and destiny. There is in the history of the world—as in the history of a people, a belief, or a science—a certain number of partings of the way, where the least impulse toward one side or toward the other suffices to destroy or to preserve the accumulated effort of centuries. We must happily have passed an infinity of such cross-roads to have attained our present point of development. And at each new point of the kind we encounter once more the same danger and run the same risk of losing everything that we have gained. The number of times that a fortunate soldier has evaded death will not make the next shot fired at him deviate a millimetre from its appointed path, but if our successes in the past are no guarantee of success in the future, our failures in the past do not constitute a definitive proof of failure in the future.

[Sidenote: Even chances that the future may not resemble the past.]

The gravest objection that can be urged against hopefulness, an objection which has hitherto not been sufficiently considered, and which M. Renan has omitted to deal with in his something too optimistic “Dialogues”—is that of the eternity _a parte post_, is the semi-abortion, the partial miscarriage of a universe which, throughout an infinite past, has proved itself incapable of a better world than this.[161] Still, if that fact constitutes a reason for looking with less confidence toward the future, it cannot be regarded as a ground for despair. An infinite past has proved to be more or less sterile, but an infinite future may prove to be otherwise. Even taking for granted the total miscarriage hitherto of the labours of humanity and of the infinity of extra-terrestrial beings who no doubt coöperate with us, there remains, so far as the future is concerned, mathematically one chance out of every two of success; and that is enough to debar pessimism forever of an ultimate triumph. If the mere chances of the dice, by which, according to Plato, the universe is governed, have as yet produced nothing but crumbling worlds and caducous civilization, a calculation of probabilities demonstrates that even after an infinite number of throws the result of the present cast or of the next cast cannot be foreseen. The future is not entirely determined by the past _which is known to us_. Future and past are reciprocally related and the one cannot be absolutely known without the other, and the one cannot be absolutely divined from a knowledge of the other. Conceive a flower in bloom at some point in infinite space—a sacred flower, the flower of thought: hands have been groping for it in every direction throughout an infinite past; some have touched it by chance and then lost it again before they could seize it. Is the divine flower never to be plucked? Why not? A negative answer would be simply the outcome of discouragement, not the expression of probability. Or conceive, once more, a ray of light following a straight line through space, not reflected by any solid atom or molecule of air, and an infinity of eyes in an eternal obscurity seeking for this ray, with no means of discovering how near to them or how far from them it may, at any moment, be. The ray pursues its way unimpeded, and innumerable open, ardent eyes long for it and sometimes seem to feel the presence of the luminous wave moving forward on its victorious course. Must their search eternally be vain? If there is no definitive reason for affirming it, there is still less any categorical reason for denying it. It is a matter of chance, the man of science might say; it is a matter, also, of perseverance and intelligence, would be added by the philosopher.

[161] See on this subject the author’s _Vers d’un philosophe_, p. 198.

[Sidenote: Positive evidence of ultimate success.]

The fact that we are to-day capable of stating such problems in regard to the destiny of the universe seems to indicate something like an advance in the direction of solving them; thought is unable to advance upon reality beyond a certain point; the conception of an ideal presupposes the existence of a more or less imperfect realization of it. In the tertiary period no animal speculated about the universal society. A true conception of the ideal, if the truth about the matter could be known mathematically, would be found to possess, in all probability, an enormous number of chances of being realized; properly to state a problem is to have begun to solve it. A purely mathematical calculation of the external probabilities of the case does not, therefore, express the real value in the domain of intelligence and morality, because in matters of intelligence and morality, possibility, probability, and the powers upon which the realization of the fact depends, lie in thought which is a concentration of inner and, so to speak, living chances.

[Sidenote: In especial when the infinity of space is taken into account.]

Over and above infinity of number and eternity of time, a field of hopefulness lies in the immensity of space, which makes it irrational for us to judge too absolutely of the future of the universe solely from our experience of so small a portion of it as our solar, and even as our stellar system. Are we the only thinking beings in the universe? We have already seen that, without passing far beyond what science holds to be certain, one may even now reply in the negative. There very probably exists an infinity of cold or cooling stars, which have arrived at about the same point in their evolution as our earth; each of these stars is physically and chemically analogous to the earth, and they must have passed through analogous stages of vapourization, and condensation, and incandescence, and cooling. It is therefore probable that they have given rise to forms of organic life more or less analogous to those that we are acquainted with. In effect, the homogeneity of the organic matter of which our stellar system is composed (a fact which spectral analysis enables us to ascertain in regard to even the most remote stars) allows us to infer, by an induction which is not too improbable, a certain similitude in the most fundamental types of organic life. Analogous types of mineralization and crystallization must have given rise to analogous types of organization, although the number and richness of the forms that are possible increase as existence grows more complex. We do not see why the primordial protoplasm should in such and such a satellite of Sirius be especially different from that of our globe; nay, there may even obtain a certain cycle of forms and “living numbers,” as Pythagoras would say, that periodically recur. It is difficult in the actual state of science to conceive life as appearing except in some form of matter analogous to the cellule, and to conceive consciousness as otherwise than centralized in and manifesting itself by vibrations such as those to which our nervous systems are subject. Conscious life implies a society of living beings, a sort of social consciousness which the individual consciousness seems, in a sort, to presuppose. Organic and conscious life, the conditions of which are so much more determinate than those of inorganic life, must everywhere, in spite of differences in the circumstances, have assumed in the course of evolution forms that, in a number of respects, must have been analogous to animals and human beings such as we are familiar with. Perhaps the most general of the laws formulated by Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire on the correlation of organs might be found to hold good of the animals existing on the satellites of distant stars of the twentieth magnitude. In spite of the infinite variety of the flora and fauna of our globe, and the seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity that nature has displayed in varying their forms, it may reasonably be surmised that the difference between the types of life with which we are acquainted and those with which we are not acquainted is subject to certain considerable limitations. In spite of differences of temperature, of light, of attraction, of electricity, sidereal species, how different soever they may be from terrestrial species of living beings, must, by the necessities of the case, have been developed in the direction of sensitiveness and of intelligence, and have gone in that direction sometimes not as far as we, sometimes farther. Note also that even on our globe the excessively odd and monstrous types produced, like those of the tertiary period, as it were in obedience to a sort of apocalyptic imagination, have proved unable to maintain themselves. The most enduring species have generally been the least eccentric, the closest to a uniform and æsthetic type. It is not excessively improbable, therefore, that the universe contains an infinite number of human species analogous to humanity as we know it, in all essential faculties, although, perhaps, very different in the form of their organs and in the degree of their intelligence. They are our planetary brothers. Perhaps by comparison with us they are gods; and in that fact lies, as we have said, the kernel of possible or actual truth in the ancient beliefs in regard to the divine inhabitants of the skies.[162]

[162] To understand the enormous differences which, in spite of the analogies, may exist between the organization of the planetary or stellar beings and our own, it suffices to consider the immense variety which obtains among terrestrial species. Ants have already achieved an advanced state of society with their shepherd, labouring, and warrior castes. Suppose them to continue their intellectual development instead of halting at a mechanical life of instinct; they might arrive at a point of mental evolution analogous, _mutatis mutandis_, to that of such and such a human society; for example, that of the Chinese. Who knows, indeed, but that they might rule the earth by virtue of substituting number and intelligence for individual power? Their civilization would be in some sort Liliputian, and destined, no doubt, to exercise a smaller influence on the course of things than that of which physically stronger beings might prove capable; or, to pass from one extreme to the other, in the dreamland in which Fontenelle, Diderot, and Voltaire have laboured, conceive a race of human beings developed not from anthropoids, but from the next most intelligent members of the animal kingdom—from elephants. Scientifically, the supposition is not impossible, when it is considered that the elephant’s trunk is at once one of the strongest and most delicate organs of prehension known to us, and that to possess a well-developed brain and good organs of prehension are perhaps the prime requisites for success in the struggle for existence. A giant civilization, therefore, quite different from ours in externals, if not in essentials, might well have been achieved on the earth or on some neighbouring star. However repugnant to our instinctive anthropomorphism, we should familiarize ourselves with the thought that if evolution is subject to necessary laws, a simple series of accidents and favourable circumstances may give such and such a species the advantage over such and such another, and invert the comparative dignity of the two without the general onward movement of evolution being checked.

Moreover, the development of intelligence in a planet depends much less on the bodily form and number of the inhabitants than on the nature of their life; and as their life depends upon phenomena of heat, light, electricity, and the chemical modifications that they produce, it is these phenomena that in some sort decide the intellectual future of the planet. Kant threw out the suggestion that in an astronomic system, for example—in our solar system—the intellectual and moral perfection of the inhabitants increases with their aloofness from the central star, and thus follows a lowering of the temperature; but such a hypothesis is much too simple to account for so complex an effect, and one which is dependent upon many other things than temperature. What is probable, from the phenomena of life as we know them, is that thought could scarcely be developed either in a brazier or a glacier, and that a certain mean is a necessary condition of organic and intellectual development.

[Sidenote: Objections answered.]

But, it has been said, if other globes than ours are inhabited by intelligent and affectionate beings who live as we do upon the daily bread of science, these beings cannot be notably superior to us, or they would have given us before this time visible signs of their existence. To argue thus is not sufficiently to take account of the terrible power of space to imprison beings in infinite isolation. It may well be doubted whether beings of a relatively infinite intelligence, as compared with us, would not find their power unequal to dealing with such spaces as separate the stars. Our testimony on a question of the existence of such beings has no more value than that of a flower in the polar regions, or a bit of moss on the Himalayas, or a bit of weed in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, would have if it should declare the earth to be void of really intelligent beings on the ground that they had never been plucked by a human hand. If, therefore, the universe somewhere contains beings really worthy of the name of gods, they are probably so distant from us that they are as unaware of our existence as we are of theirs. They perhaps have realized our ideals, and the fact of that realization will perhaps remain unknown to us to the end.

[Sidenote: Possibility of discovering inhabitants in other spheres.]

It is to-day admitted that every thought corresponds to a certain kind of motion. Suppose that an analysis more delicate even than that of the spectrum should enable us to record and to distinguish, not only vibrations of light but the invisible vibrations of thought in distant worlds. We should, perhaps, be surprised to see that in proportion as the light and heat of the incandescent stars decrease, there by degrees arises consciousness, and that the smallest and most obscure stars are the first to produce it, whereas the most brilliant and enormous, like Sirius and Aldebaran, are the last to feel these subtler vibrations, but feel them ultimately with greater power, and develop a humanity with faculties and powers proportionate to their enormity.

[Sidenote: Slowness of spread of civilization from star to star.]

The total amount of space which is known to us, from our earth to the farthest nebulæ that the telescope renders visible, and to the dark depths beyond, is no more than a mere point as compared with the totality of the universe—supposing always that there is a totality. Eternity may, therefore, be necessary for progress to traverse the immensity of space, if one conceives progress (if such a thing exists at all) as starting from some one point of departure, from a sort of holy-land and elect people, and spreading from them out in all directions into the infinite. Modern science, of course, scarcely permits one to believe in so privileged a land. Illimitable nature scarcely possesses, after the fashion of God, exclusive election. If the ideal has been achieved in one place, it must also, in all probability, have been achieved in a number of others, although the wave of progress has not yet spread to us. Intellectual light travels less rapidly than solar and stellar light, and yet how long it takes a ray to come to us from Capricornus!

[Sidenote: Possibility of mind-acting on mind at a distance.]

In our inferior organisms, consciousness does not seem to pass from one living molecule to another unless they are contiguous in space; still, according to the most recent discoveries in regard to the nervous system, and to the propagation of thought by mental suggestion from a distance,[163] it is not contrary to the facts to conceive the possibility of a sort of radiation of consciousness through space by means of undulations of a degree of subtlety as yet unknown to us. It is not utterly unpermissible to conceive a society of consciousnesses not hemmed into some small corner of the universe, each in a narrow organism which is a prison, but communicating freely with each other throughout the whole expanse of space; it is not utterly unpermissible to conceive the ultimate realization of the ideal of universal sociality which constitutes the basis of the religious instinct. Just as out of a more intimate communication with individual consciousnesses there may arise upon our earth a sort of collective consciousness, so it is not ridiculous to suppose that there may arise, in an infinity of ages, a sort of intercosmic consciousness.

[163] See the _Revue philosophique_, 1886.

[Sidenote: Patience.]

God is patient because he is eternal, theologians are fond of saying. In an all-powerful being patience of evil would be a crime; patience, which can scarcely be ascribed with any propriety to God, belongs however most fitly to a being who is aware of his fundamental unity with the totality of things, and is conscious of his eternity as a member of the human species, as a member of the brotherhood of living beings of which the human species is simply an accident, as a part of the evolution of this globe in which conscious life itself at first appears as no more than an accident, and of the evolution of the vast astronomical systems in which our globe is no more than a point. Man may be patient because, as an inseparable part of nature, he is eternal.

_IV. The destiny of the human race and the hypothesis of immortality from the point of view of monism._

[Sidenote: Theory of evolution and death.]

Next to the fate of the universe, what interests us most vitally is the question of our own destiny. Religion consists for the most part in a meditation on death. If death were not an incident of life mankind would nevertheless be superstitious, but superstition would probably never have been systematized into religions. The mass of society possesses so slight an interest in metaphysics! A problem must bruise and wound them to attract their attention; and death prevents such problems. Will the gates of the valley of Jehoshaphat, through which the dead must pass, open on the heavens like a rainbow made of light and hope, like a joyous triumphal arch, or will it be low as the door of the tomb, and open upon infinite darkness? Such is the great question to which all religions have endeavoured to furnish a response. “The last enemy that shall be vanquished is death,” says St. Paul; perhaps that also represents the last secret that shall be penetrated by human thought. The ideas which tend to become dominant in modern philosophy seem, however, to exclude the notion of the perpetuity of the self. The conception of evolution principally is based on a theory of mobility, and appears to result in the dissolution of the individual, with even a greater certainty than in that of the species or the world. The individual form, and the species form, are equally unstable. On the walls of the catacombs may often be seen, roughly designed, the dove, bringing back to the ark the green bough, the symbol of the soul which has passed beyond the ocean and discovered the eternal harbour; at the present day the harbour recoils _ad infinitum_, before human thought; limitless open sea stretches away before it: where in the abyss of bottomless and limitless nature shall be found the branch of hope. Death is a wider void than life.

[Sidenote: The problem of life after death at the present day.]

When Plato approached the problem of destiny, he did not hesitate to launch out into philosophical hypotheses, and even into poetical myths. It is our present purpose to examine what are to-day the suppositions, or, if you choose, the dreams that may still be entertained as to the future by a sincere believer in the dominant philosophy of the present day, the philosophy of evolution. Given the present conception of nature, would Plato have found himself cut off from those beautiful expectations to the charm of which he said we ought to submit ourselves? In Germany, and in especial in England, it is not uncommon to endeavour to discover how much of the antique religious beliefs still subsists, and is, in however problematic and uncertain a form, involved in the scientific and philosophic hypotheses of the day. It is our purpose to undertake here an analogous inquiry in regard to immortality, recognizing how conjectural any attempt to solve the mystery of fate must be. Is it necessary to say that we make no pretensions to “demonstrating” either the existence or even the _scientific_ probability of a life after death? Our design is more modest; it is enough to show that the impossibility of such a life is not yet proven; even in the presence of modern science immortality is still a problem; if this problem has not received a positive solution, no more has it received a negative solution.

It is our intention further to consider what bold, and even adventurous hypotheses may be necessary to enable one to translate into philosophic language the sacred symbols of religion, or the destiny of the soul.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Death and idealism.]

I. There are two possible conceptions as to life after death; that of eternal existence and that of immortality, properly so called, or continuation and evolution of life under a superior form. The first conception corresponds more particularly to the idealistic theories of the world, which we have analyzed above, which, regarding the basis of things as an eternal thought, a thought of thought, believe that by identifying itself with it mankind might pass out of time into eternity. Thought, which seems at first no more than a reverberation and image of things, idealists believe, turns out in the last analysis to be the very reality of which all the rest of the world is but a reflection; but this conception of an eternal existence is not in the least incompatible with the philosophy of evolution, for evolution in time does not exclude a transcendent mode of existence out of time. Such an existence, however, remains essentially problematic; it corresponds to Kant’s Noumenon and Spencer’s Unknowable; according to this hypothesis, corporal death is simply a stage in physical evolution, and the final term to be attained by all beings is their fixation in the consciousness of eternity. This point of fixation, accessible to every thinking being, is to be attained only by the highest, most disinterested, impersonal, and universal thought possible.

[Sidenote: An eternal element in man.]

Such is the hope which lies at the bottom of the great religions, and the great idealistic systems of metaphysics. According to Plato there is nothing durable in us but what relates to the eternal, and to the universal, and is therefore of the same nature as they are. All the rest is eliminated by Becoming, by perpetual Generation, that is, by evolution. A flower is, in our eyes, a friend; it owes its colour and charm, however simple, to a ray of the sun; but this ray, to which our affection is due, is wholly impersonal; it creates the beauty of the flower, and passes on its way; and it is the sun that we should love, both for the ray and the flower. Too exclusive and limited affection is always based on some mistake, and is on that account perishable. It insists on our stopping at such and such a link in the infinite chain of causes and effects. It is the principle of the universe, it is the universal being that we must love, if our heart is big enough, and it is that love alone, according to Plato, which is eternal. Is not eternity the very form of existence in the intelligible world, in which Goodness is the sun and the Ideas are the stars? Christian neo-Platonists, over and above Time and its incessant mobility, have dreamed of an intemporal and immutable somewhat, that they call the life eternal: _Quæ enim videntur, temporalia sunt; quæ autem non videntur, æterna_. Spinoza has dealt with the same conception of an existence under the form of eternity, which does not exclude the perpetual development of changing modes. Kant also, by his word _Noumenon_, designated an intelligible, intemporal, transcendent somewhat, that lay beyond the scope of physical evolution. “The eternal evolution of the soul,” Schelling has said in his turn, “is not eternal in the sense that it possesses neither a beginning nor an end, but in that it bears no relation to Time.” And Schopenhauer, finally, believes in an intemporal, eternal will, which is distinguished from the will to live that belongs to time and to the evolution of temporal forms. “We willingly recognize,” says Schopenhauer, “that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is absolutely nothing to those who are still full of the desire of life, but for those in whom desire is annihilated what does our evil world, with its sun and its Milky Way, amount to? Nothing.” It is with these words that Schopenhauer closes his book. He brings us once more into the presence of _Nirvâna_, conceived not only as a refuge from life, but also as a refuge from death; as an existence that shall be placeless and timeless, and, so to speak, _utopian_ (in its primary intention) and _achronistic_.

[Sidenote: Is such immortality personal or not?]

But is this eternal life, the fact of which is, as we have seen, problematic, altogether impersonal or not? No certain reply can be given since we are as ignorant of the essence of individual being as of the essence of universal being, and consequently of the degree to which it is possible for individuality to subsist in universality. Schopenhauer, however, in his endeavour to ascribe to the individual a greater amount of reality than Plato allowed, opposed the principle of individuation to the natural individualities in which it manifests itself, and it may, indeed, be asked, whether genuine consciousness, genuine thought, and genuine volition do not at once pass beyond the individual, and preserve what is most essential in the individual. Individuality is always more or less physical, but it is possible that what makes individuality limited is not of the essence of personality, of consciousness; perhaps what is best in thought and will may become universal, without ceasing in the best sense to be personal like the Νοῦς of Anaxagoras.[164]

[164] At the very centre of one’s being, universality and personality increase side by side; that is to say, the greater the share of existence a being possesses, the greater the amount of existence that it is capable of sharing with other beings. Incommunicability or impenetrability represents the lowest degree of existence; natural existence, the existence of forces as yet blind and fatal, maintains by their mutual antagonism an equilibrium in a state of inertia and torpor ... The greater one’s self-appropriation by intelligence, the greater one’s power of taking possession of other beings by thought; the being that best knows itself best knows other beings ... the spirit, in so far as it is intelligent, should be open, penetrable, participable, and participant. Two minds, in so far as they are perfect, may interpenetrate each other by means of thought (A. Fouillée, _Philosophie de Platon_).

“We must distinguish,” M. Janet also says, “between personality and individuality. Individuality consists in all the external circumstances which distinguish one man from another—circumstances of time, place, organization, etc.... The root of personality lies in individuality, but it tends incessantly to withdraw from it. The individual is centred in himself; personality aspires to rise above itself. The ideal of individuality is egoism, the focussing of the whole in self; the ideal of personality is devotion, the identification of self with the whole. Personality, properly so called, is consciousness of the impersonal” (_Moral_, 573).

[Sidenote: No positive knowledge to oppose to hypothesis of immortality.]

Speculate as we may upon individual and universal being, we are all but brought face to face in the end with the same transcendental _x_. Such speculations, however, are not without a certain utility, that of impressing us afresh with the limits of our knowledge. A belief in a transcendent immortality, as Fiske says, can be defined only negatively, as a refusal to believe that this world is everything. The materialist maintains, Fiske says, that when we have described the entire universe of phenomena, of which we are capable of taking cognizance under the conditions of this life, the whole of the story has been told. Fiske himself believes, on the contrary, that the whole has not then been told.[165] We may at least say that it is _possible_ that the whole story has not then been told. But to pass from the possible to the probable, no conclusion of the kind can be considered satisfactory that is not based upon more positive reason, psychological or moral; unsupported metaphysical speculations leave the mind simply in the presence of a problem.

[165] Fiske, _The Destiny of Man_, p. 113.

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[Sidenote: The hypothesis of a conditional eternity.]

Theories in regard to an eternal life such as we above mentioned have always proved in history more or less aristocratic and inclined to limit the number of the elect. In Buddhism the sage alone is capable of achieving eternal existence, whereas all the rest of mankind are condemned to life in time and illusion. Spinoza recognizes eternity only in what he calls cognition of the third order, intellectual intuition and love. Such cognition belongs properly to the true philosopher only. The intelligence of the vulgar is passive and perishable. “The instant the vulgar cease ... to suffer,” says Spinoza, “they cease to exist.” And Goethe, too, was inclined to regard the eternal life as reserved for an aristocracy.

[Sidenote: Criticised.]

This theory of inequality is maintainable only in so far as it is based upon an actual ascertainment of the difference in progress displayed by different minds, and of the small number of those who achieve the heights of wisdom. The case is otherwise when such an observed fact of natural or moral inequality is converted into a divine right, and God is conceived as creating and desiring precisely such a state of things. The latter, however, is the alternative that modern Christian theologians have adopted in their effort to offer a re-reading of the sacred texts. In their judgment the good alone are immortal, or, rather, are immortalized by God; the others are damned, in the sense that they are totally annihilated—an interpretation of the dogma of eternal punishment that seems to them wholly to exculpate the Deity. Any such notion is based upon a metaphysical illusion. The hypothesis of traditional eternity is inconsistent with that of the existence of a creator, since it is forever impossible on that hypothesis, to escape the contradiction involved in the notion of a being’s creating only to destroy—of a being’s choosing among his creatures a certain number for condemnation to death. Annihilation is simply damnation palliated; it is the substitution of a celestial guillotine for the long miseries that have preceded. This theological hypothesis affords us no way out of the difficulties involved in the doctrine of divine sanction that lies at the heart of all religions; it is the sacrifice of Isaac, or of Jesus, in another form simply. Will it be said that, on the hypothesis of conditional immortality, the immoral being is alone responsible for his own death? Yielding to passion, or even to vice, cannot be assimilated to suicide, for in suicide one knows what one is doing and is responsible for it; one kills one’s self because one wishes to die; but one does not wish to die when one abandons one’s self to a passion; and, if the result therefore of so doing is annihilation, death comes upon one unforeseen and undesired, takes one by surprise, by a sort of divine ruse, and the responsibility for such annihilation lies and must lie with God. Moreover, how can there exist between two individuals of the same nature a sufficiently great natural or moral difference to justify the one’s being wholly annihilated, and the other’s being permitted to live _in æternum_? It may be said, with Plato in the “Republic,” that, if vice were a disease that is really mortal to the soul, it would kill it in this life. Its destructive influence would be felt long before the occurrence of death, which, so far as vice is concerned, is an accidental circumstance simply.

[Sidenote: Is incompatible with human fellowship.]

As the notion of conditional immortality is incompatible with the notion of an omnipotent, omniscient, sovereignly loving creator, so also is it with that of a society of souls, of a spiritual kingdom, from which a certain number of mankind would be excluded forever. An absolutely wicked and hateful soul, unpossessed of any element of humanity, not to say of divinity, and consequently unfit to live, is a pure figment of hate and amounts to transporting the caste of pariah into the celestial city. It is a contradiction in terms to enjoin us to universal charity toward all men without exception, and at the same time to wish us to consent to the absolute annihilation and damnation of some of them. We are naturally and morally too intimately related for certain of us to be condemned definitively to death without the rest of us being impeded on our upward course; we are bound to each other by our love of humanity like Alpine climbers by the cord that passes from waist to waist, and one of us cannot slip but that the rest of us feel it, nor fall without all of us falling. _Nihil humani alienum_; one heart beats in the bosom of humanity, and if it stops forever in a single human breast, it will stop forever in the breasts of those also who are supposed to be immortal. The best of us, those who would be fit to receive baptism into immortality, would do as the barbarous and pagan chief, who, after having washed away his sins in the holy water of the font, with salvation in his hand and Paradise before his eyes, demanded suddenly what would be the fate of his former companions who had died unconverted, and whether he should find them in heaven. “No,” replied the priest, “they will be among the miserable and the damned, and thou amongst the blessed.” “I will go, then, among the damned, for I wish to go where I shall find my companions in arms. Adieu!” And he turned his back upon the font.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

The hypothesis of conditional immortality can, therefore, be maintained only by eliminating from it the doctrine of a creator of absolute merit, of virtue, and of universal and infinite charity; thus diminished, it becomes a belief in a sort of natural or metaphysical necessity to which beings are subject according to their degree of perfection simply. This hypothesis is essentially anti-providential, and in harmony only with systems more or less analogous to that of Spinoza.

In general the notion of eternal life is altogether transcendent and a fit subject for mystical dreams only. Let us, therefore, abandon this high ground and descend to nature and experience. Instead of talking of eternity, let us speak of life after death and of an immortality not conditional, but conditioned by the laws of matter and of mind and attainable by everyone.

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[Sidenote: Does personality contain a permanent element?]

II. Let us take our stand in the beginning on positive experience, and consider what sort of immortality the philosophy of evolution permits us to hope for. There exists in the sphere of consciousness, so to speak, a series of concentric circles which lie closer and closer about an unfathomable centre, personality. Let us pass in review the diverse manifestations of personality and see if they contain any imperishable element.

[Sidenote: One’s works immortal.]

The most external, and, in some sort, the most observable aspect of mankind, consists in their works and actions. Where material works alone are concerned, such as a house that one has built, a picture that one has painted, a statue that one has modelled, it may be felt that the distance between the worker and the work is too great, and that immortality in one’s work is too much like a sort of optical illusion. But when intellectual and moral works are concerned, the effect and the cause are more nearly one; therein lies the element of truth contained in the highly impersonal and disinterested doctrine that one lives in one’s works. Intellectual and moral labours are more than their mere material effect. The good man’s highest wish is to live and live again in his good actions; the thinker’s highest wish is to live and live again in the thought that he has contributed to the inheritance of humanity. This doctrine may be found in almost all great religions and is capable of subsistence in the domain of pure science. According to the modern Buddhists of India a man’s actions are his soul, and it is this soul that survives his death, and transmigration of souls is simply the constant transformation of good into better, and evil into worse; the immortality of one’s soul is the immortality of one’s actions, which continue to operate forever in the world according to their original force and direction.

[Sidenote: Continuity of human effort.]

Generation after generation labours at the task, and passes the token of hope from hand to hand. _Heri meum, tuum hodie_, yesterday was mine and I spent it in doing good, but not enough good; to-day is thine: employ the whole of it, do not lose an hour of it; if an hour dies sterile, it is a chance lost of realizing the ideal. Thou art master of to-day; do what in thee lies to make to-morrow what thou wouldst have it, let to-morrow be always in advance of to-day, and the horizon that men see each fresh morning be brighter and higher than the one they saw before.

[Sidenote: Nothing lost.]

The action must be followed into its effects, or into the effect of those effects, and so on infinitely. Our conduct stretches away _ad infinitum_, beyond the reach of our knowledge. Even from the purely physical and physiological point of view, neither intended nor attempted goodness is ineffective, since both thought and desire develop the mind. The very notion of what is to-day chimerical corresponds to a real movement in our brains; it is a mental force which contains its element of verity and influence. We inherit not only what our fathers did, but what they could not do, what they attempted and did not achieve. We are still alive with the devotion and sacrifice of our ancestors, with the courage that perhaps they spent in vain, as we feel in the spring the breath of distant antedeluvian springs and the loves of the tertiary period.

[Sidenote: Failure in the past the guarantee of success in the future.]

The ability of the present generation has been made possible by the stumbling and mistakes of generations in the past; and this embryonic and successless past constitutes the guarantee of our future. In the moral, as in the physiological world, there are instances of fertility that are not yet explicable. Sometimes long after the death of the man who first loved her the woman brings forth a child that resembles him; and humanity may bring forth a civilization on the model of some ideal cherished in the past, even when the past seems to be buried forever, if the ideal contains some obscure element of truth and, by consequence, of imperishable force. What has once really lived shall live again, and what seems to be dead is only making ready to revive. The scientific law of atavism is a guarantee of resurrection. To conceive and desire the best is to attempt the ideal, is to predetermine the path that all succeeding generations shall tread. Our highest aspirations, which seem precisely the most vain, are, as it were, waves which, having had the power to reach us, have the power to pass beyond us, and may, by a process of summation with other waves, ultimately shake the world. I am satisfied that what is best in me will survive, perhaps not one of my dreams shall be lost; other men will take them up, will dream them over again in their turn until they are realized. It is by force of spent waves that the sea fashions the immense bed in which it lies.

[Sidenote: Death not inevitable.]

In effect, in the philosophy of evolution life and death are recognized as relative and correlative conceptions; life is in one sense death, and death is the triumph of life over one of its particular forms. Proteus in the fable could be prevented from changing his shape only by being caught in sleep, which is the image of death; thus it is in nature; fixed form is sleep, is death, is a pause in the eternal fluctuation of life. Becoming and life are alike formless. Form, individuality, species, mark a transitory stoppage in the channel of life; we can neither seize nor hold nature, except when it is laid asleep, and what we call death—my death or yours—is itself a latent pulse of universal life, like one of the secret vibrations that pass through the germ during the months of apparent inertia during which it is making ready for the later stages of its development. The law of nature is eternal germination. A man of science was one day holding a handful of wheat, that had been found in the tomb of an Egyptian mummy. “Five thousand years without sight of the sun! Unhappy grains of wheat, as sterile as death, of which they have so long been the companions, never shall their tall stalks bow beneath the wind on the banks of the Nile. Never? What do I know of life, of death?” As an experiment simply, without much hope of success, the man of science sowed the grains of wheat that he had recovered from the tomb, and the wheat of the Pharaohs received the caress of the sun, of the air, and came up green through the soil of Egypt, and bowed beneath the wind on the banks of the sacred and inexhaustible flood of the Nile. And shall human thought, and the higher life which stirs in us like the germ in the seed, and love that seems to sleep forever in the tomb, not have this reawakening in some unforeseen springtime, and not be brought face to face with eternity, which seems at present to be buried, once and for all, in darkness? What is death, after all, in the universe, but a lesser degree of vital heat, a more or less transitory lowness of temperature? Death cannot be powerful enough to hold life and its perpetual youth in check, and to prevent the infinite activity of thought and of desire.

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[Sidenote: Is a more personal immortality possible?]

III. Yes, I and my works shall survive; but is immortality in this sense sufficient to satisfy the religious sentiment? As an individual, what do science and the philosophy of evolution promise me or permit me to hope? A somewhat external and impersonal immortality is, as we have seen, possible; is anything in the nature of an internal or personal immortality likewise possible?

[Sidenote: Science answers in the negative.]

Assuredly, it is not of science that the individual can demand proofs of his permanence. The fact of generation is, in the eyes of the man of science, in and of itself a negative of individual immortality; the social instinct which opens our hearts to thousands of other beings emphasizes the negation, and the scientific and metaphysical instincts themselves, which cause us to take an interest in the sensitive world, in its laws and destinies, diminish, so to speak, our importance as limited individuals. Thought breaks the limits of the self in which it is confined, and our breast is too narrow to contain our heart. Oh, how rapidly one learns in science and in art to make small account of one’s self, and this diminution of self-esteem neither lessens one’s enthusiasm nor one’s ardour, but adds to them only an element of manly sadness such as a soldier might feel who says: “I count for but one in the battle, nay, for less than that, for but a hundred millionth, and if I should disappear the result of the contest would no doubt not be changed, and yet I shall stay and fight.”

[Sidenote: Counsels resignation.]

Scientifically considered, individuality is a sort of provisional native land, and one’s native land is a sort of magnified individual with a consciousness composed of ideas and sentiments, and one’s love for one’s country may be greater than one’s love for such and such an individual. Such a love does not prevent us from understanding that our country will not be immortal as a nation, that it will have its periods of growth and of decay, that the obstacles which keep peoples apart are caducous, and that nations incessantly disappear and lose old elements and take on new. Why, merely from the fact that we love our own individuality, should we not consent to the same reasoning in regard to it; why should we wish to imprison it forever within the limits of the same individuality? If a nation dies, why should not a man? If it sometimes amounts to divination to cry out as one falls on the battlefield, “_Finis patriæ!_” does it any the less surely amount to divination to cry out in the presence of death, “_Finis individuæ_”? Could Kosciusko feel that he himself had a right to live when Poland and the ideas and beliefs to which he had devoted his life were no more?

[Sidenote: Dignity of resignation.]

A young girl, a relative of mine, on the point of death and unable to articulate, signified her wish for a piece of paper. When it was given to her, she began to write, “I do not want——” Death suddenly intervened and interrupted her volition before it could find expression in words; the thinking being and the expression of her thought seemed to be annihilated by the same blow. The child’s protest, like her life, was interrupted in the middle. Volition is powerless against death, and it is useless to stiffen one’s will against the final blow. On the contrary, man’s sole superiority in death consists in acceptance. Pascal’s conscious reed might not only be constrained to bend like any other reed, it might bend consentingly and respect the law that requires its death. Next to consciousness of his own power, the highest of man’s privileges is consciousness of the limits of his power, at least as an individual. Out of the very disproportion between the infinity that kills us, and the nothing that constitutes us, arises the sense of a certain greatness in us; we prefer to be stricken by a mountain rather than by a pebble; we should rather fall in a struggle against a thousand than in a struggle against one; so that intelligence, by measuring the greatness of our adversary, deprives us of regret at our defeat.

[Sidenote: Desire to survive egoistic.]

To desire to make the individual, who is more or less physical even in his moral nature, eternal, is, in the eyes of the man of science, a remnant of egoism. In his judgment, the human mind should accept the death of the individual by a species of intellectual devotion analogous to that with which we accept the death of our native country. Modern men of science may be defined as those who have no hope, ὁι μὴ ἔχοντες ἐλπίδα, as St. Paul said; we are _individually_ of too small account in the eyes of science to live always _individually_.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: But only when it relates to one’s self.]

Ought we, therefore, to consent cheerfully to the sacrifice of self, and to die willingly for the benefit of the universal life? So far as one’s self is concerned, one can make the sacrifice lightly, but the annihilation of those one loves cannot be accepted by a conscious and affectionate being. It is in vain for scientific and philosophic stoicism to urge with Epictetus that it is natural for a vase, which is fragile, to break, and for a man, who is mortal, to die. The question still remains, whether what is natural and scientific ought, as the Stoics alleged, to satisfy my reason and my love. As a matter of fact, when one really loves another person, what one endeavours to love is not the element of fragility, the vase of clay, but the intelligence and the heart, which Epictetus declines to consider separately from their perishable accompaniments. One attaches one’s self to them as to something permanent; one corrects and transfigures nature itself, and passes in thought beyond the brutality of its laws, and therein lies, perhaps, the very essence of the love of another. If the laws of nature, after seeming for a moment to be suspended and vanquished by the force of one’s disinterested love, subsequently break the bond that holds them in check, is it surprising that one’s love should still hold out against them? It is not only pain that I experience at being baffled by the laws of nature; it is indignation, it is the sense of injustice. The Stoics regarded pain as a passive affection of the sensibility simply, but moral pain implies a struggle of the will against nature, and an effort, as they themselves admit, to correct it. It is on this ground that pain is not an evil; its rôle is incessantly to impose our moral and social ideal on our physical nature, to force it to perfect itself; pain is the principle of development in life, and if there exists a means of vanquishing death, it is perhaps by virtue of pain that we shall arrive at it. We are right, therefore, in rebelling against nature’s powers of life and death, in so far as she exercises them for the purpose of annihilating what is morally best in us and in others.

[Sidenote: Love under the form of eternity.]

True love should never be expressed in the language of time. We say: “I loved my father during his lifetime; I was deeply attached to my mother or my sister.” Why locate it in the past? Why not say always: “I love my father or my mother?” Does not, and should not, love lay claim to an eternal present?

[Sidenote: Uniqueness of the individual.]

How could one say to a mother that there is nothing truly and definitively alive, personal, unique, in the at once smiling and meditative eyes of the child she holds upon her knees; that the little being that she dreams of mature, and good, and great, is a simple incident in the life of the species? No; her child is not like any other that has ever lived or that ever will live; none other could possess that look. Nowhere among the generations of men can there exist a fac-simile of the beloved face before one. All nature does not possess the equivalent of the individual, which it can destroy, but not replace. It is not, therefore, without reason that love refuses to consent to the substitution of one individual for another, which constitutes the very movement of life; it cannot reconcile itself to the eternal whirl in the dust of being; it is bent on fixing life, on arresting the world in mid-progress. But the world does not stop at its bidding. The future calls to generation after generation, and this powerful force of attraction is also a force of dissolution. Nature gives birth by means of death, and the joy of new loves is composed of the fragments of the old.

[Sidenote: The protest of love against death not limited to humanity.]

This protest of love against death, against the dissolution of the individual, attaches also to the lower animals. A dog, it seems, has only a market value, and yet can I ever buy again one that shall be the equivalent of this one that has died before my eyes? He loved me with all the power of his unhappy being, and endeavoured to hold fast to me while he was slipping away, and I endeavoured to hold him fast. Does not every being that loves acquire a right to immortality? Yes; the ideal of affection would be to immortalize all conscious beings; nay, more, the poet who is delicately sensitive to the individuality of a flower, or a ray of coloured light, of the drop of dew that refracts it, would wish to immortalize all nature, would wish to view under the form of eternity the rainbow that quivers in a soap bubble; for can any two bubbles ever be the same? And yet, while the poet aims thus at holding everything fast, at preserving everything, at fixing his dreams, at enchaining the ocean of life, the man of science replies that the eternal flood must be allowed to pulsate, to engulf our tears and our blood, and that the world must be left free. For the man of science, the flux and reflux and progress of life are more sacred than the love of the individual.

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[Sidenote: Antagonism between love and science.]

Thus, in the question of individual immortality, two great forces drag human thought in opposite directions. Science is inclined everywhere to sacrifice the individual in the name of natural evolution; love is inclined, in the name of a higher moral and social evolution, to preserve the individual. The antinomy is one of the most disquieting that the philosophic mind has to deal with.

[Sidenote: The best in one may survive.]

Should science be admitted to be wholly in the right, or must we believe that an element of truth exists in the social instinct which lies at the basis of affection, as there is a presentiment and anticipation of the truth in all great natural instincts? The social instinct possesses a greater value at the present day, because philosophers are beginning to consider even the individual as a society, and to recognize association as a universal law of nature. Love, which is the power of cohesion at its highest degree, is perhaps right in its desire for an element in the association between individuals. Its sole error is that of exaggerating its pretensions and of misplacing its hopes. After all, one must not be too exacting nor ask too much of nature. A true philosopher, even for those that he loves, should not shrink from proof by fire, and death is the flame that purifies while it consumes. If anything survives the ordeal that alone is much, and if what survives is precisely what is best in us, what more can be asked? One may break the vase, of which Epictetus speaks, but the perfume remains, and floats out into the air, and becomes, no doubt, ultimately indistinguishable, but still subsists.

[Sidenote: Sociology and the problem of immortality.]

The science which seems to offer the strongest opposition to the preservation of the individual is mathematics, which recognizes the existence of nothing in the world but variable and equivalent figures and abstractions. On the contrary, perhaps the most concrete of the sciences, sociology, recognizes everywhere groups of realities; sociology therefore cannot hold relations that arise out of association, nor the terms between which they exist, so cheap. Let us consider whether, from the point of view of a more complete and more concrete science, consciousness, which is the principle of personality, properly so called, necessarily and forever excludes the possibility of indefinite duration that all great sciences attribute to the spirit.

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[Sidenote: The basis of existence not substance but activity.]

III. Antique metaphysics gave too much attention to questions of substance, to considering whether the soul is simple or complex. The question amounts to whether the soul is made of indivisible or divisible material; it assumes as the basis of the phenomena of mind, an imaginary and in some sort extended substance. It was upon this doctrine of the simple substance that the demonstration of the immortality of the soul was founded. Evolutionist philosophy tends to fix our attention nowadays, not on the substance, but on the way the substance behaves, that is to say, in physical terms, on movements.[166] Consciousness is a certain action accompanied by a certain collective unity of movements. If it exists in a substance it is not the duration of this substance that interests us, but that of its activity, since it is that activity which constitutes our consciousness.

[166] “Whoever says that he cannot conceive an action without a substratum confesses by his very words that the alleged substratum which he conceives is a product of his imagination; it is his own thought that he is obliged to place as a support behind the reality of things. By a pure illusion of the imagination, after one has stripped off from an object the only qualities that it possesses, one affirms that something of it, one knows not what, still subsists.” (Schelling, _System of Transcendental Idealism_.)

“To be,” said Berkeley, “is to be this or that. Simply to be, without explanatory addition, is to be nothing; it is a simple conception, if not a word void of sense.”

“Berkeley’s object was to overthrow the hypothesis of a substance lying beyond the range of spirit, as an imperceptible support of the qualities of which our senses take cognizance.” (Félix Revaisson, _La Philosophie en France_, 9.)

See also M. Lachelier, _De l’Induction_.

[Sidenote: Continuity of existence means continuity of function.]

Wundt is one of the contemporary philosophers, who, after Aristotle, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant, has best shown the illusiveness of endeavouring to discover a simple substance underlying consciousness. It is only internal experience, he says, only consciousness itself, that comes to us guaranteed by immediate certainty. And this implies, he adds, “that all these substances which spiritualism regards as the basis of subjective or objective experience are of the highest degree of uncertainty, for in no experience whatsoever are they given. They are deliberate fictions, by the aid of which it has been attempted to explain the unity of experience.” The true explanation of this unity should be sought for elsewhere in continuity of function, and not in simplicity of substance. “The consecutive effects of anterior states combine with those which arise later; in this way there is caused a subjective continuity of states which corresponds to the objective continuity of movement, which is the condition of unity of consciousness.” The binding together of successive mental states is lacking in bodies, although they must possess the germ of action and of sensation. For this reason Leibnitz was right in saying that bodies are “momentary spirits,” which forget everything immediately, and know only a present, uncomplicated by a past or a future. Conscious life, on the contrary, by the very means of changing elements, realizes a continuity of mental functions, a memory of the past, a certain durability. This continuity is not a result of simplicity, but, on the contrary, of the higher complexity that belongs to mental functions. “On the physical side, as on the psychical side,” says Wundt, “the living body is a unity; this unity is not founded in simplicity but in compositeness of a high degree of complexity. Consciousness, with its multitude of combined states, is a unity analogous to that of the bodily organism. The absolute correlation between the physical and the psychical suggests the following hypothesis:[167] that what we call the soul is the internal aspect of what, in its external aspect, we call the body that contains the soul. This way of conceiving the problem of correlation inevitably leads us to the belief that the essence of reality is intellectual, and that the fundamental attribute of being is development or evolution. Human consciousness is the highest point of such evolution; it constitutes the nodal point in the course of nature where the world recollects itself. It is not as a simple being but as a product evolved out of innumerable elements that the human soul is, as Leibnitz says, ‘a mirror of the world.’”[168]

[167] This hypothesis is identical with that of monism.

[168] Wundt, _Psychologie_, vol. ii.

[Sidenote: The problem of immortality at the present day.]

From this modern point of view, which is a development of that of Aristotle,[169] the question of immortality amounts to asking how far the continuity of mental functions may be supposed to extend the continuity of one’s intellectual being, which is the subjective unity of a complex multiplicity aware of itself as such?

[169] See M. Ravaisson, _La Métaphysique d’Aristote_, vol. ii., and _Rapport sur la Philosophie en France_.

[Sidenote: Indissoluble material compounds.]

Note, first, that even in the external world we are not without examples of indissoluble compounds; certain simple atoms are compounds of this sort. The atom of hydrogen is a vortex of little worlds. Well, is there nothing indissoluble in the universe except so-called atoms, so-called physical “individuals,” and is it unpermissible to conceive, on the subjective side, individuals more worthy of the name, whose duration is guaranteed by the very fact of their complexity?

[Sidenote: Restatement of the problem.]

According to the reigning doctrines in physiology and experimental psychology, individual consciousness is, as we have said, a compound of the consciousnesses of all the cells that are united in the physical organism.[170] The individual, consisting thus of a society, the problem of death amounts to the question, whether there can exist an association, at once solid enough to endure forever, and flexible enough to adapt itself to the ever-shifting conditions of universal evolution.

[170] Association or grouping is the general law of organic and inorganic existence. Society, properly so called, is only a particular case, is only the most complex instance, of this universal law.... A consciousness is rather a _We_ than an _I_. It is capable of union with other consciousnesses and of forming, in conjunction with them, a more comprehensive and more durable consciousness, from which it receives and to which it communicates thought, as a star both borrows and communicates motion in the system to which it belongs. (Espinas, _Des Sociétés animales_, 128. See also M. Fouillée, _La Science sociale contemporaine_, l. iii.)

[Sidenote: The ideal type of association.]

This problem, be it observed in the first place, is precisely that which human societies are endeavouring to solve. At the lowest stage of social evolution solidity and flexibility are rarely united. Egypt, for example, was solid but not very progressive. A stage higher in the scale of evolution, in proportion as science advances and personal liberty comes to be recognized, civilization becomes both more solid and indefinitely flexible, and at some period in the future, when scientific civilization shall have once mastered the globe, it will possess a power that the most compact, and, in appearance, the solidest masses cannot equal; it will be firmer than the very pyramids, and will at the same time prove increasingly flexible, progressive, capable of adaptation to every variation in the environment. The synthesis of complexity and stability will then have been achieved. The very character of thought is increasing adaptivity, and the more intellectual a being is, the greater its power of displaying the qualities which are most advantageous under any given set of circumstances. The eye, which is more intellectual than the sense of touch, furnishes a power of adaptation to a wider and more diversified environment. Thought, which is more intellectual than sight, enables one to adapt one’s self to the universe itself, to the immensity of the stars, as well as to the infinite pettiness of the atoms in a drop of water. If memory is a masterpiece of intellectual record-taking, reasoning is a masterpiece of flexibility, of mobility, and of progress. So that, whether individuals or nations are in question, the most intellectual are those which possess at once the greatest amount of stability and of adaptability. The problem of society is to unite these two things, the problem of immortality is at bottom the same; the individual consciousness being, as we have seen, itself a society. From this point of view, it seems probable that the more perfect one’s personal consciousness is, the more absolutely it possesses both durability and a power of indefinite metamorphosis. So that, even admitting what the Pythagoreans insist upon, that consciousness is a number, a harmony, a musical chord, we may still ask whether certain harmonies may not become sufficiently perfect to endure forever without, on that account, ceasing to enter as elements into richer and more complex harmonies. A lyre might vibrate _ad infinitum_ without its several strings losing their respective tonalities amid the multitude of their variations. There ought to exist an evolution in the organization of consciousness as in the organization of molecules and living cells, and the most vital and durable and flexible combinations should possess the advantage in the struggle for existence.

[Sidenote: The last stage in the struggle for existence.]

Consciousness is a collection of associations of ideas, and, consequently, of habits, grouped about a centre; and we know that habits possess an indefinite duration; contemporary philosophy regards the properties of elementary material substances as habits, as instances of indissoluble association. A vegetable or animal species is a habit, a type of grouping and organic form which subsists century after century. It is not proved that mental habits may not in the course of evolution achieve a fixity and a durability of which we possess to-day no example. It is not proved that instability is the definitive and eternal characteristic of the highest functions of consciousness. A philosophic hopefulness in regard to immortality is founded on the belief that, in the last stages of evolution, the struggle for existence will become a struggle for immortality. Nature will then come to realize, not by virtue of simplicity, but of judicious complexity, a sort of progressive immortality, the final product of natural selection; and, if so, religious symbols will have been simply an anticipation of this final period. We shall have wings to support us in our flight through life, Rückert says, wings to support us in our flight past death; but the bird does not learn to fly immediately nor at once; the hereditary habit of flight must have been acquired and developed by the species because of the advantage it brings with it in the struggle for existence. Survival, therefore, must not be conceived as completed at a bound, but as slowly perfected by a gradual and continuous lengthening of the average span of life. It must be shown, however, that such a survival would constitute a superiority, not only for the individual, but for the species.

[Sidenote: Psychology and the communion of souls.]

And now let us consider consciousnesses in their relations to each other. Contemporary psychology tends to the doctrine that different consciousnesses, or if you prefer, different aggregates of states of consciousness, may combine, and even interpenetrate, somewhat analogously to what theologians mean by communion of souls. And if so, it is permissible to ask whether, if consciousnesses can interpenetrate, they may not some day come to possess a continuity of existence; may not be able to hand on their existence to each other, and to communicate to each other a new sort of durability instead of remaining, as Leibnitz says, more or less momentary; supposing always that such durability would be advantageous to the species.

[Sidenote: Possible frequency of the phenomenon.]

Mystical intuitions sometimes contain a certain presentiment of the truth. St. Paul tells us that the heavens and the earth shall pass away, that prophecies and languages shall pass away, but that one thing shall not pass, and that is charity, or love. If this doctrine is to be interpreted philosophically, the bond of continual love, which is of all bonds the least primitive and the most complex, must be conceived as capable of ultimately becoming the most durable of bonds, and as tending progressively to embrace a larger and larger proportion of the whole number of the inhabitants of the celestial city. It is by what is best, what is most disinterested, most impersonal, and most loving in one, that one achieves communion with the consciousness of another, and such disinterestedness must coincide ultimately with disinterestedness in others, with others’ love for one’s self; and there will arise thus a possible fusion of souls, a communion so intense that as one suffers in the bosom of another, so, too, one may come to live in the heart of another. To be sure, we have passed here into the limits of dreamland, but it is to be remarked that such dreams are extra-scientific, and not anti-scientific.

[Sidenote: Vision of the ideal society.]

Let us conceive ourselves as existing in this problematical, though not impossible, epoch when individual consciousnesses shall have achieved a higher degree of complexity and of subjective unity, and along with them a power of more intimate communion than they possess to-day, without the fact of that communion altogether breaking down the bounds of personality. They will communicate thus with each other, as the living cells in the same body sympathize with each other, and contribute each to form the collective consciousness; they will be all in all, and all in every part. And indeed one may readily conceive means of communication and of sympathy, much more subtle and direct than those which exist to-day among different individuals. The science of the nervous system is in its earliest stages; we are acquainted as yet with exaltation as a state of disease only, and with suggestion at a distance as an incident merely of hypnotism; but we already begin to be dimly aware of a whole world of phenomena that go to show the possibility of a direct communication between different, and even under certain circumstances of a sort of reciprocal absorption of two personalities. Some such complete fusion of two consciousnesses, that however still preserve their individuality, is to-day the dream of love which, as one of the greatest of social forces, ought not to labour in vain. Supposing the power of communion with other consciousnesses gradually to develop, the death of the individual will manifestly encounter a greater and greater resistance on the part of the several minds with which such an individual is in communication. And, in any event, the minds with which an individual is in communication will tend to retain an increasingly vivid, and, so to speak, living memory of him. Memory at the present day is simply an absolutely distinct representation of a certain being—an image, as it were, vibrating in the ether after the original has disappeared. The reason is that there does not as yet exist an intimate solidarity and continuous communication between one individual and another. But it is possible to conceive an image which would be scarcely distinguishable from the object represented; would be the sum of what such and such an object means to me; would be, as it were, the prolongation of the effect of another consciousness on my consciousness. Such an image might be regarded as a point of contact between the two consciousnesses involved. Just as in generation the two factors combine in a certain third, which represents them both, so such an animated and beloved image, instead of being passive, would constitute a component part of the collective energy and purpose of one’s being; would count for one in the complex whole that one calls a mind or a consciousness.

[Sidenote: Personal immortality.]

According to this hypothesis, the problem would be, to be at once loving enough and beloved enough to live and survive in the minds of others. The individual, in so far as his external accidents are concerned, would disappear; but what is best in him would survive in the souls of those he loves who love him. A ray of sunlight may for a time record upon a bit of dead paper the lines of a face that no longer exists among the living; nay, human art may go farther, and impart to canvas or to stone the minutest resemblances to human life; but art has not yet succeeded in imparting a soul to Galatea. Love must be added to art to achieve that miracle—men must love each other so completely that they become identified in the universal consciousness. When that consummation has been reached, each of us will live completely, and without loss, in the love of our fellows. The power of love is not limited, like that of light, to giving permanence to the outward appearances of life; it is capable of lending stability to life itself.

[Sidenote: Elimination of death.]

Separation on such an hypothesis would be as impossible as in the case of those atomic vortices of which we spoke above, which consisted each in a single individual, in the sense that no force could break them up into their elements; their unity lay not in their simplicity, but in their inseparability. Just so in the sphere of consciousness, a manifold of conscious states may conceivably form a luminous ring that can neither be broken nor extinguished. The atom, it has been said, is inviolable, and consciousness may come to be inviolable _de facto_.

[Sidenote: Triumph of love.]

Nay, one’s secondary and reflected life in the minds of other people might even come to be more important than the original of which it is a copy, insomuch that a gradual process of substitution might take place, a substitution of which death would simply mark the definitive and tranquil accomplishment. We might feel ourselves, even in this life, entering into possession of an immortality in the hearts of those who love us. Such an immortality would be a species of new creation. Morality, and religion even, are in our judgment simply the outcome of moral productivity; such an immortality would be simply an ultimate manifestation of the same thing. And if it were once achieved, the opposition that the man of science to-day perceives between the continuation of the species and the immortality of the individual would have disappeared in a final synthesis. Death closes one’s eyes, but love stands by to open them again.

[Sidenote: Complete survival of the individual.]

The point of contact might thus be found between life and immortality. At the beginning of evolution, death was the end of the individual and the light of consciousness ended in obscurity. By virtue of moral and social progress, one’s friends tend to remember one after death with increasing intensity and for longer and longer periods; the image that survives the original fades only by degrees, and more and more slowly, as the course of evolution advances. And it may be that, at some time in the future, the memory of beloved beings will so mingle with the life and the blood of each new generation, and will be so passed on from one to the other, that it will become a permanent element in the current of conscious existence. Such a persistent memory of the individual would be a gain in power for the species, for they who remember love more dearly than they who forget, and to love dearly is advantageous to the species. It is not, therefore, unpermissible to conceive a gradual increase in the faculty of memory by natural selection. The day may come when the individual will survive in as detailed and complete a fac-simile of what he was in his lifetime as can well be imagined, and death may become less significant than a period of absence; love will endow the beloved object with the mystery of eternal presence.

[Sidenote: Exemplified to-day in isolated cases.]

Even at the present day individuals here and there are sometimes so deeply loved that it is doubtful whether or no what is best in them does not survive their death, and their minds, unhappily subject to the weaknesses of humanity and unable as yet to break through the limitations of the physical organism, do not really succeed, by virtue of the love that surrounds them, in achieving an almost complete immortality even before their death. It is in the hearts of those who love them that they really live, and in all the world the corner that it really concerns them to be able to call their own lies in the affections of two or three people.

[Sidenote: Destined to become common.]

This phenomenon of mental palingenesis, which is at present isolated, may gradually come to be extended to the whole of the human species. Immortality may be an ultimate possession acquired by the species, as a whole, for the benefit of all of its members. Every individual consciousness may come to survive as a constituent part in a more comprehensive consciousness. Fraternity may, at some time in the future, be universal, render soul transparent to soul, and the ideal of morals and of religion be realized. Every soul will be reflected and mirrored in every other; although it will not suffice for that purpose simply to look into each other’s eyes unless one’s heart positively shines through them. One must project one’s own image into the mirror of the sea, if one is to find it there.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Possibility of a still more literal immortality.]

It must, of course, be admitted that, if such speculations do not positively stretch away beyond the limits of possibility, they certainly do stretch away beyond the limits of actual science and experience, but precisely what renders all such hypotheses uncertain renders them also forever possible: namely, our irremediable ignorance of the basis of consciousness. Whatever discovery science may make in regard to consciousness and its conditions, it will never ascertain its essence, nor, consequently, the limits of its possible subsistence. Psychologically and metaphysically considered, what are conscious action and volition? Nay, what is unconscious activity, what is force, what is efficient causality? We do not know, we are obliged to define subjective activity and power in terms of objective motion, that is to say, in terms of their effect, and it will always be permissible for a philosopher to deny that motion, as a simple change of relations in space, constitutes the whole of an action, and that there are no uncaused movements, no relations between non-existent terms. And, if so, how are we to know precisely to what extent activity is essentially enduring as the emanation of a subjective power of which motion is, as it were, the visible sign, and of which consciousness is the immediate and intimate “apprehension.” Neither word nor act expresses all of us, something always remains unsaid, and will, perhaps, remain unsaid to the end of our lives—and beyond. It is possible that the foundation of personal consciousness is a power as incapable of being exhausted by any amount of activity as of being confined to any variety of forms.

[Sidenote: Can never be disproved.]

In any event the matter is, and always will be, a mystery, which arises from the fact that consciousness is _sui generis_, is absolutely inexplicable, and at bottom forever inaccessible to scientific formulæ and a fit subject, therefore, of metaphysical hypotheses. Just as being is the supreme genus, _genus generalissimum_, in the objective world, so consciousness is the supreme genus in the subjective world; so that no reply can ever be given to these two questions: What is being, and what is consciousness? Nor, therefore, to this third question, which depends upon the two preceding: Will consciousness continue to exist?

On an old dial, in a town in the south of France, may be read the legend: _Sol non occidat!_ May the light not fail! Such is, indeed, the proper epilogue to _fiat lux_. Of all things in this world light is the one upon which we are most dependent; it, of all things, should have been created once for all, εἰς ἀεί; should pour down from the heavens through all eternity. And the light of the mind, which is more powerful than the light of the sun, may ultimately succeed in eluding the law of destruction which everywhere in the book of nature immediately follows the law of creation, and then only will the command, _fiat lux_, have been accomplished. _Lux non occidat in æternum!_

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Stoicism the last resort.]

IV. But, it will be asked, what consolation and encouragement is there in all this for those who do not feel the charm of these remote hypotheses concerning the outer limits of existence, for those who see death in all its brutality, and lean, as you yourself probably do, in the present state of the theory of evolution, somewhat toward purely negative conclusions? What can be said to them when they stand, as they believe they do, on the brink of annihilation? Nothing better could be said than the simple and somewhat unfeeling words of the ancient Stoics, who, be it remarked also, were themselves disbelievers in the immortality of the individual: “Be not a coward!” Deeply in the wrong as Stoicism was in the presence of death, in its insensibility to the pain of love which was the condition of its power and of its progress among mankind, when it interdicted attachment and commanded impassibility, it was right when it recommended insensibility to one’s own death. A man needs no other consolation than to feel that he has lived a complete life, that he has done his work, and that mankind is not the worse, nay, is perhaps the better for his having existed; and that whatever he has loved will survive, that the best of his dreams will somewhere be realized, that the impersonal element in his consciousness, the portion of the immortal patrimony of the human race, which has been intrusted to him and constitutes what is best in him, will endure and increase, and be passed on, without loss, to succeeding generations; that his own death is of no more importance, no more breaks the eternal continuity of things, than the shivering of a bit of a hand-glass does. To gain a complete consciousness of the continuity of life is to estimate death at its proper value, which is perhaps that of the disappearance of a kind of living illusion. Once more, in the name of reason, which is capable of understanding death, and of accepting it as it accepts whatsoever else is intelligible—be not a coward!

[Sidenote: Dignity of resignation.]

More than that, despair is grotesque because it is useless; cries and groans, at least such as are not purely reflex, originally served their purpose in the life of the species of arousing attention or pity, or of summoning aid; it is to the fact that it was once useful that the existence and propagation of the language of pain are due; but as there is no help against the inexorable, and no pity to be asked for in a matter that is in harmony with the interests of the totality of things and conformable to the dictates of our own thought, resignation alone is the proper attitude of mind, or rather a certain inner assent, or still better, a smile of detachment and intelligence and comprehension, and interest even in our own extinction. What is beautiful in the natural order of things cannot definitively excite despair.

[Sidenote: Of considering one’s own case impersonally.]

If anyone who has experienced the pangs of death should make light of the sort of consolation here referred to, we reply that we are not ourselves speaking in absolute ignorance of the visage of the supreme moment. We have ourselves had occasion more than once to look death in the face, less often no doubt than a soldier in active service; but we have had more time to consider it at our ease, and we have never found reason to desire that it should be veiled by an irrational belief. It is better to see and to know the truth; it is better not to tread the brink of the precipice with bandaged eyes. To disguise death is to pay it too great a compliment. We have had more than one example of it under our eyes. We have seen our grandfather, who, by the way, was himself not a believer, stricken down by successive attacks of apoplexy, and he said to us, smiling in the intervals of his pain, that he felt but one regret, and that was that so many superstitions should be in existence, and that Catholicism in particular (it was at that time when France was aiding the Papacy) should still be in power. Note also that the progress of science—in especial, of physiological and medical sciences—tends to increase the number of instances in which death is foreseen and is waited for almost with serenity. The least stoical of mankind sometimes feel the inclination toward an act of heroism, which, though in a measure forced upon them, is nevertheless not without its dignity. In the course of certain cases of protracted disease, such as consumption or cancer, the patient, if he possesses the necessary scientific qualifications, can calculate the probabilities of his life and determine within a few days at what time he will die. Bergot, whom I knew, was such a patient; Trousseau was another, and there have been many more. Knowing one’s self to be condemned, feeling one’s self to count for but one in the infinity of the universe, one can consider one’s self and one’s progress toward the unknown in a sense impersonally.

[Sidenote: Sudden death a blessing.]

If such a death is not without its bitterness, it is nevertheless the one which, of all others perhaps, is likely to prove attractive to a philosopher, to a mind with a passion for clearness, for foresight, for comprehension. For the rest, in the majority of cases, death takes its victims in the height of their vigour, in the midst of the struggle for existence; it is a matter of a few hours, like birth; its very suddenness renders it less redoubtable to the majority of mankind, who find it comparatively easy to be brave in the presence of a danger that is brief, and they hold out against the supreme enemy with the same obstinate courage that they would display against any other. On the contrary, when death approaches slowly, and deprives us of our strength by degrees, and each day leaves us in possession of something less than the day before, another source of consolation is open to us.

[Sidenote: Decline in interest in life with decline in vitality.]

It is a law of nature that diminution of vitality brings with it a proportionate diminution of desire; a man cares less keenly for what he feels himself less capable of attaining. Illness and old age always make us set less value upon the joys of which they deprive us which they first render bitter and then impossible; and the last joy of all, that of bare existence, is as subject to the law as its predecessors. Consciousness of one’s inability to live brings with it inability to desire to live; it becomes a burden to draw one’s breath. One feels one’s self dispersing, falling into dust, and no longer possessing the strength to check the process of decay. Moreover, egoism declines with declining strength; as we approach the grave we gain a power of estimating ourselves more nearly at our just value, of understanding that a faded flower has no right to live; that, as Marcus Aurelius said, “a ripe olive _ought_ to fall from the tree.” One sentiment alone survives, a sense of weariness, of extreme weariness. We long for rest, long to relax the tension of life, to lie at ease, to have done with it once for all. Oh! to be no longer on one’s feet. The dying well know the supreme joy of looking forward to their last resting place! They no longer envy the interminable file of the living whom they perceive, as it were in a dream, vainly marching and countermarching upon the surface of the earth where they sleep. They are resigned to the solitude and abandonment of death. They are like travellers in the desert—worn with fever, and fatigue, and unwilling to make another step in advance; they are no longer borne up by the hope of revisiting familiar skies; they are unable to surmount the remaining difficulties of the way and request their companions to leave them, to march on without them, and, stretched upon the sand, watch without a tear, without a desire, the departing caravan creeping away toward the horizon.

[Sidenote: Persistence of curiosity.]

Naturally, some of us will always shrink before death, and wring our hands, and lose our self-possession. Some temperaments are subject to vertigo, to a horror of abysses, and in especial to a horror of the great abyss toward which all paths converge. Montaigne counsels such people to throw themselves blindly over the verge; others counsel them to fix their eyes till the end on some small mountain flower in the crevice of the rock. The manliest of mankind will give their attention to the depths of space and to the heavens, will fill their hearts with the immensity of the universe, will magnify their souls to the limits of the abyss, will subdue the rebellious individuality in themselves before it is forcibly subdued for them, and will scarcely be aware of the precipice till they have fairly passed beyond its brink. And for the philosopher, who is essentially a worshipper of the unknown, death possesses the attraction of novelty; birth only excepted, it is the most mysterious incident in life. Death has its secret, its enigma, and we are haunted by a vague hope that, as the final touch of irony, it may be revealed to us at the last moment; that the dying, according to the ancient belief, divine it and close their eyes only to shield them from an intolerable brightness. Man’s last agony and his last pulse of curiosity are one.

INDEX.

A

Absoluteness of primitive faith, 139 Adler, Felix, 367 All-embracing unity, modernity of concept of, 39 Alviella, M. Goblet d’, 254, 277, 352 Amiel, 378, 466 Analysis, effect of, on emotions, 461; destroys irrational joys only, 466 Ancestor worship, 47 Animal’s prayer, 74; religion in lower, 76 Animate and inanimate, obviousness of distinction between, 49 Animism, priority of, 52; dualistic, 82 Anomy, religious, 374 Antagonism between wealth and population, 315 Arnold, Matthew, 23, 92, 143, 156, 174, 189, 247, 259 Art, and religion, 414; necessary reforms in, 418 Asceticism, 211, 473 Asia, danger from, 321 Association, ideal type of, 392 Augustine, Saint, 147 Aurelius, Marcus, 360

B

Baudelaire’s criminal, 406 Baudrillart, 324, 332 Beneficent error, 14 Bentham, 403 Bertillon, M., 324, 337 Bost, Pastor, 184 Buddhism, 362 Byron, 407

C

Caro, M., 387 Catholicism, 203, 244, 247 Cause, conception of God as first, 88 Celibacy, 306; tax on, 336 Charity, intolerance a perverted, 147, 400 Christianity, 359, 362; main strength of, 180; the error of, 196; and communism, 240 Civilization, menace to modern, 318 Clergy, impropriety of suppressing the, 274 Colenso, Bishop, 357 Commune, The, 244 Communism and Christianity, 240 Compensation, notion of, 75 Comte, A., 109 Confessional, the, 248 Conservatism, feminine, 7 Constant, Benjamin, 146 Conway, Moncure, 167 Cosmism, 365 Creation hypothesis, 102, 433 Credulity, feminine, 29 Crimes of French Revolution and Commune not due to non-religion, 244 Criminal, Baudelaire’s, 406 Criminology and religion, 241

D

Darwin, 295 Dead, cult for the, 410 Defect of French mind, 20 Definition, by Schleiermacher and Feuerbach, of religion, 3 Delirium, 82 Dependence of religion upon morality, 192 Determinism, concept of, 72; reconciliation between indeterminism and, 484 Diderot, 222 Dissolution, possibility of arresting, 497 Divine and human love, conflict between, 201 Divine Providence, notion of a, 85; futility of doctrine of, 440 Divinization, 69 Doctrine of Divine Providence, futility of, 440 Dogma, unfitness as material for education of religions, 272 Dogmatism and intelligence, 150 Doubt, Morality of, 382 Dreams, 67, 82 Dualistic animism, 82 Duty of civilized races to multiply, 319

E

Ecstasy, religious, 222 Education, unfitness of religious dogma as material for, 272; by the priesthood, 273, 282; moral, 280; husband responsible for wife’s, 310 Egoism and mysticism, conflict between, 204 Eighteenth century view of miracles, 91 Espinas, 526 Essence of religion, 1, 10 Ethical Culture Society, 367 Evil of belief in a Divine Providence, 97 Evil, problem of, 433 Experiment in miracles, 158

F

Fainting, 82 Faith, absoluteness of primitive, 139; complete intellectual rest, incident to, 142; willfully blind, 143; transformation of inevitable, 234 Fall of man, doctrine of the, 439 Family, religion of the, 322 Fanaticism, possible scientific, 395 Father’s duty in regard to religious instruction, 286 Feminine credulity, 297; conservatism, 297; timidity, 298 Féré, M. Ch., 462 Fetichism, 44, 48, 65 Fetichistic monism, primitive metaphysics a, 81 Feuerbach’s definition of religion, 3 First cause, concept of God as, 88 Fiske, Mr. John, 452, 455, 512 Force, use of justifiable, 146 Fouillée, M. Alfred, 7, 37, 435, 484, 485, 493, 526 France, proposal to Protestantize, 249; gradual improvement of, 322 French, mind, its defect, 20; Revolution, 250; gaiety, 268

G

Gaiety, French, 268 Ghosts, 83 Gift, notion of, 75 God, conceived as first cause, 88, 431; as ordered, 104; as creator, 432; responsible for evil, 433; His omnipotence, 442; hypothesis of, a non-omnipotent, 443; disanthropomorphization of concept of, 452; possible evolution of by natural selection, 496 God, love of, 131; belief in, falls with belief in devil, 165; love of, on the wane, 205 Goethe, 377, 400 Grace, doctrine of, 200

H

Hartmann, Von, 39, 108, 109, 464 Hasheesh, use of, defended, 223 Havet, M., 355 Hellenism, 261 Henneguy, Felix, 290 Henotheism, 27, 39, 108 Hindu tolerance, 32 History and religion, 158 Human and divine love, conflict between, 261 Humanity, religion of, 365 Humanization, 68 Husband responsible for wife’s education, 310 Huxley, 480 Hysteria, 83

I

Ideal type of association, 392 Idealism, 479 Incuriosity of primitive man, 51 Indeterminism, reconciliation between determinism and, 484 Individualism, religious, 12 Infinite, concept of the, 34 Inheritance, injustice of present law of, 338 Initiative, sentiment of personal, 98 Instinct, religious, 40, 229; of self-preservation and sociality, 44 Instruction, father’s duty in regard to, 286 Insurance and religion, 161 Intolerance, incident to faith, 144; a perverted charity, 147 Invisible, suffering from the, a modern malady, 35 Immanence of conscious life in nature, 66 Immortality, importance of concept of, 119

J

Javal, M., 337, 341 Jerome, Saint, 355 Jesus, 134, 187, 356 Junqua, Dr., 183

K

Kant, 195, 380, 433, 447

L

Lange, 415, 490 Laveleye, M. de, 249, 252, 284 Lenormant, M., 285 Leopardi, 468 Lethargy, 82 Liberal Protestantism, 182 Littré, 277, 288 Livingstone, 302 Love, conflict between divine and human, 201; a cerebral stimulant, 307; makes for sanity, 308; of mankind, future of, 399 Love of God, 131; on the wane, 205 Lower animals, religion in, 76 Luther, 193

M

Mainlaender, Phillipp, 458 Malthusianism, 317; fallacy of, 317; in France, 325 Marvellous, primitive man’s faith in the, 137 Materialism, 488 Maternity, girls should be trained for, 333 Medical knowledge, progress of, and religion, 162 Ménard, M. Louis, 249, 289 Metaphysics, primitive, a fetichistic monism, 81; scope of, 383; instability of, 389; present direction of, 424 Michelet, 249, 320 Mill, John Stuart, 173, 442, 461 Mind stuff, 490 Misoneism, 125 Miracles, conception of, 87; not frauds, 90; eighteenth century view of, 91; but illusions, 92; experiment in, 128; in modern times, 353 Modesty, nature or, 301 Mohammedanism, 257, 361 Molinari, M. de, 409 Monism, 493 Montesquieu, 329 Moral sentiment defined, 7 Moralism, 426 Morality and religion, 114, 241, 362; dependence of religion upon, 192; essence of, 197; apart from religion not hard to teach, 402 Mormonism, 358 Müller, Max, 24, 49, 233 Mystery, fear of thunder due to sense of, 62 Mysticism a perversion, 132; conflicts with egoism, 204; and asceticism, 211; and women, 299

N

Natural phenomena non-existent for primitive man, 64 Natural selection, evolution of gods by, 496 Nature a society, 55; seeming menace of conscious life in, 66; love of, 421; inexhaustible resources of, 500 Neo-Christianity, 184 Neutrality, propriety in religious affairs of state, 277 Newman, Cardinal, 247 Newman, Mr. Francis, 351 Nirvâna, 473 Nonotte, Abbé, 327 Non-religion defined, 8; the goal of religion, 167; not responsible for the crimes of the French Revolution and the Commune, 244 Novelty, persistent in the world, 470

O

Omnipotence, God’s, 442

P

Pantheism, 452 Panthelism, 55 Paraphysics, religion primarily a, 79 Parents, not protected against ingratitude, 334; should be taxed inversely to number of children, 337 Parvé, M. Steyn, 283 Pascal, 202, 440 Pattison, Mark, 365 Paul, Saint, 356 Paul, Vincent de, 399 Personal initiative, sentiment of, 98 Pessimism, 457; an optical illusion, 468 Pillon, M., 249 Polydemonism, 85 Population, antagonism between wealth and, 315; importance of, 316; inability of priest to cope with question of, 327; decrease of, encouraged by the church, 328 Positivism, 24, 109, 365 Possession, 83 Prayer, the animal’s, 74; kinds of, distinguished, 217; durable element in, 217; highest form of, 225 Priest and prophet, antagonism between, 128 Priesthood, origin of, 126; education by the, 273, 282 Primary instruction and religion, 159 Primitive man, incurious, 51; unaware of natural phenomena as such, 64; and novelty, 125; and the marvelous, 137 Primitive metaphysics, a fetichistic monism, 81 Problem of evil, 433 Prophet and priest, antagonism between, 128 Protestantism, 152, 167, 252; liberal, 182 Providence, notion of a Divine, 85; evil of belief in, 97; futility of doctrine of, 440

R

Realism, 482 Reconciliation between determinism and indeterminism, 484 Relics, belief in, 86 Religion, essence of, 1, 10; and science, difference between, 3; Feuerbach’s definition of, 3; Schleiermacher’s definition of, 3, 487; of natural origin, 22; and superstition, 78; primarily a paraphysics, 79; morally retrograde, 114; and physiology, psychology, and history, 158; and primary instruction, 159; and development of commerce, 160; and insurance, 161; and progress of medical knowledge, 162; tends toward non-religion, 167; dependent upon morality, 192; and crime, 241; not essential to morality, 241; deserted by genius, 355; of humanity, 365; and art, 414 Religious individualism, 12; instinct, 40, 229; ecstasy, 222; instruction, father’s duty in regard to, 286 Renan, 17, 23, 40, 119, 126, 158, 172, 227, 232, 236, 306, 321, 373 Renouvier, 249 Revelation, essence of faith in, 140 Réville, M., 49, 114, 128, 417 Revolution, French, 244, 250 Richet, M., 337 Romanes, George, 62

S

Sanction, superfluity of religious, 405 Scepticism, feebleness of, 376 Schelling, 524 Schleiermacher’s definition of religion, 3, 487 Schoolmaster, importance of the, 277 Schultz, Professor Hermann, 184 Science and religion, difference between, 3 Secrétan, M., 437 Secularism, 365 Self-preservation, and sociality, instincts of, 44 Sentiment, definition of moral, 7 Sermon, transformation of the, 416 Shadows, 82 Sin, morbid preoccupation with, 213 Socialism, 369 Sociality, and self-preservation, instincts of, 44 Society for Ethical Culture, 367 Sociomorphism, religion a, 2 Somnambulism, 83 Special Providence, 440; mankind to be its own, 450 Spencer, Herbert, 44, 384, 427, 451, 490 Spinozism, 454 Spirit, genesis of concept of, 82 Stoicism, 520 Strauss, 23, 417, 431 Suffering from the invisible, a modern malady, 35 Suicide, as a resource, 472 Superstition and religion, 78 Symbolism, 9

T

Taine, 227, 479, 490, 493 Tax on celibacy, 306 Theism, 429 Theresa, Saint, 134 Thunder, sense of mystery responsible for fear of, 63 Timidity, feminine, 298 Tolerance, 149; Hindu, 32 Totality, concept of, 39 Transformation of the sermon, 416 Trent, Council of, 141

U

Unity, modernity of concept of an all-embracing, 39 Universal Providence, 441

V

Vernes, M. Maurice, 281, 283 Verrier, Dr., 344

W

Wealth, antagonism between population and, 315 Wife, husband responsible for education of, 310 Women and mysticism, 299; importance of early education of, 309 Worship of ancestors, 47; public, 126; subjective, 130

Z

Zoölatry, 47

THE END.

Transcriber’s note

Words in italics have been surrounded with _underscores_ and small capitals have been replaced with all capitals. The footnotes have been renumbered and placed directly after the paragraph they belong to.

Minor errors in spacing, capitalization etc. have been corrected without note. Missing accents in the sidenotes have been added to be consistent with the main text. Also the following changes have been made, on page

5 “as” added (just as he might offend a fellow-man) 18 “adverversaries” changed to “adversaries” (the mistake of despising their adversaries) 45 “puisant” changed to “puissant” (what is puissant and powerful) 48 footnote anchor added (the phenomena of the external world.[19]) 64 “unaquainted” changed to “unacquainted” (they are unacquainted with the external world) 157 “terrestial” changed to “terrestrial” (the celestial or terrestrial phenomena which) 163 “neigbours” changed to “neighbours” (their more innocent neighbours) 167 “Protestanism” changed to “Protestantism” (Inconsequence of liberal Protestantism) 191 “abhorence” changed to “abhorrence” (theory of nature’s abhorrence) 207 “considerble” changed to “considerable” (a considerable hold on human life) 215 “mimimize” changed to “minimize” (in order to minimize the necessity) 241 “Watt” changed to “Wat” (Pastoureaux and Jacques in France and Wat Tyler in England) 298 “sentitiment” changed to “sentiment” (dominated not by reason but by sentiment) 304 “cherubin” changed to “chérubin” (l’interrogation anxieuse de chérubin) 304 “Songs” changed to “Song” (reading the Song of Songs) 335 “étre” changed to “être” (être à la charge de ses enfants) 337 “corveé” changed to “corvée” (the last vestige of the _corvée_) 337 “celibat” changed to “célibat” (sur le célibat en France) 347 “anxiom” changed to “axiom” (If there is one axiom that fathers ought to) 389 “esthetique” changed to “esthétique” (Problèmes de l’esthétique contemporaine) 399 “Budhism” changed to “Buddhism” (Buddhism and Christianity have headed) 453 “asscribes” changed to “ascribes” (unity that it ascribes to the world) 477 “Hydrogene” changed to “Hydrogen” (hypothesis—Hydrogen—Necessity of), also in the table of contents 533 “Pyschologically” changed to “Psychologically” (Psychologically and metaphysically considered) 542 “Reconcilation” changed to “Reconciliation” (Reconciliation between determinism and indeterminism) 542 “Socialty” changed to “Sociality” (Sociality, and self-preservation) 462 “Fréré” changed to “Féré” (One may say, with M. Féré, that people in good) 539 “Comtes” changed to “Comte” (Comte, A., 109) 539 “Feurbach” changed to “Feuerbach” (by Schleiermacher and Feuerbach) 541 “Lavelaye” changed to “Laveleye” (Lavelaye, M. de, 249, 252, 284) 541 “ascetism” changed to “asceticism” (and asceticism, 211) 541 “Panthelism, 55-453” changed to “Pantheism, 452” and “Panthelism, 55” 541 “Parve” changed to “Parvé” (Parvé, M. Steyn, 283)

and in footnote number

36 “Epicure” changed to “Épicure” (See the author’s _Morale d’Épicure_) 40 “Societe” changed to “Société” (Actes de la Société helvét. des sc. nat.) 44 “a’une” changed to “d’une” (Esquisse d’une morale) 78 “embarassment” changed to “embarrassment” (remarks in the former a progressive financial embarrassment) 85 “sécondaire” changed to “secondaire” (l’instruction primaire, secondaire et supérieure) 87 “Lenornant” changed to “Lenormant” (M. Lenormant undertook to publish a translation) 139 “Fréré” changed to “Féré” (M. Ch. Féré, _Revue philosophique_, July, 1886.).

Otherwise the original was preserved, including inconsistencies in spelling, hyphenation and capitalisation, also possible errors in foreign languages. No italics were used in the sidenotes, this has not been changed. The index has not been checked for errors in alphabetization or pagenumbers. Additional: M. Janet, mentioned in footnote 164 is probably Paul Janet, “La Morale”.