Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death Part 34

All omens point towards the steady continuance of just such labour as has already taught us all we know. Perhaps, indeed, in this complex of interpenetrating spirits our own effort is no individual, no transitory thing. That which lies at the root of each of us lies at the root of the Cosmos too. Our struggle is the struggle of the Universe itself; and the very G.o.dhead finds fulfilment through our upward-striving souls.

CHAPTER X

EPILOGUE

?d??e? t?? ?? ???? p??se????sa ?a?? ?a? e?e?d??, ?e??? ??t?a e ?a?

??pe??, ? S???ate?, ??at? ?e? t??t?t? f???? ??????? ?????.--???t????

???t??.

The task which I proposed to myself at the beginning of this work is now, after a fashion, accomplished. Following the successive steps of my programme, I have presented,--not indeed all the evidence which I possess, and which I would willingly present,--but enough at least to ill.u.s.trate a continuous exposition, and as much as can be compressed into two volumes, with any hope that these volumes will be read at all.[211] I have indicated also the princ.i.p.al inferences which that evidence immediately suggests. Such wider generalisations as I may now add must needs be dangerously speculative; they must run the risk of alienating still further from this research many of the scientific minds which I am most anxious to influence.

This risk, nevertheless, I feel bound to face. For two reasons,--or, I should perhaps say, for one main reason seen under two aspects,--I cannot leave this obscure and unfamiliar ma.s.s of observation and experiment without some words of wider generalisation, some epilogue which may place these new discoveries in clearer relation to the existing schemes of civilised thought and belief.

In the first place, I feel that some such attempt at synthesis is needful for the practical purpose of enlisting help in our long inquiry.

As has been hinted more than once, the real drag upon its progress has been not opposition but indifference. Or if indifference be too strong a word, at any rate the interest evoked has not been such as to inspire to steady independent work anything like the number of coadjutors who would have responded to a new departure in one of the sciences which all men have learnt to respect. The inquiry falls between the two stools of religion and science; it cannot claim support either from the "religious world" or from the Royal Society. Yet even apart from the instinct of pure scientific curiosity (which surely has seldom seen such a field opening before it), the mighty issues depending on these phenomena ought, I think, to const.i.tute in themselves a strong, an exceptional appeal. I desire in this book to emphasise that appeal;--not only to produce conviction, but also to attract co-operation. And actual converse with many persons has led me to believe that in order to attract such help, even from scientific men, some general view of the moral upshot of all the phenomena is needed;--speculative and uncertain though such a general view must be.

Again,--and here the practical reason already given expands into a wider scope,--it would be unfair to the evidence itself were I to close this work without touching more directly than hitherto on some of the deepest faiths of men. The influence of the evidence set forth in this book should not be limited to the conclusions, however weighty, which that evidence may be thought to establish. Rather these discoveries should prompt, as nothing else could have prompted, towards the ultimate achievement of that programme of scientific dominance which the _Instauratio Magna_ proclaimed for mankind. Bacon foresaw the gradual victory of observation and experiment--the triumph of actual a.n.a.lysed fact--in every department of human study;--in every department save one.

The realm of "Divine things" he left to Authority and Faith. I here urge that that great exemption need be no longer made. I claim that there now exists an incipient method of getting at this Divine knowledge also, with the same certainty, the same calm a.s.surance, with which we make our steady progress in the knowledge of terrene things. The authority of creeds and Churches will thus be replaced by the authority of observation and experiment. The impulse of faith will resolve itself into a reasoned and resolute imagination, bent upon raising even higher than now the highest ideals of man.

Most readers of the preceding pages will have been prepared for the point of view thus frankly avowed. Yet to few readers can that point of view at first present itself otherwise than as alien and repellent.

Philosophy and orthodoxy will alike resent it as presumptuous; nor will science readily accept the unauthorised transfer to herself of regions of which she has long been wont either to deny the existence, or at any rate to disclaim the rule. Nevertheless, I think that it will appear on reflection that some such change of standpoint as this was urgently needed,--nay, was ultimately inevitable.

I need not here describe at length the deep disquiet of our time. Never, perhaps, did man's spiritual satisfaction bear a smaller proportion to his needs. The old-world sustenance, however earnestly administered, is too unsubstantial for the modern cravings. And thus through our civilised societies two conflicting currents run. On the one hand health, intelligence, morality,--all such boons as the steady progress of planetary evolution can win for man,--are being achieved in increasing measure. On the other hand this very sanity, this very prosperity, do but bring out in stronger relief the underlying _Welt-Schmers_, the decline of any real belief in the dignity, the meaning, the endlessness of life.

There are many, of course, who readily accept this limitation of view; who are willing to let earthly activities and pleasures gradually dissipate and obscure the larger hope. But others cannot thus be easily satisfied. They rather resemble children who are growing too old for their games;--whose amus.e.m.e.nt sinks into an indifference and discontent for which the fitting remedy is an initiation into the serious work of men.

A similar crisis has pa.s.sed over Europe once before. There came a time when the joyful navete, the unquestioning impulse of the early world had pa.s.sed away; when the worship of Greeks no more was beauty, nor the religion of Romans Rome. Alexandrian decadence, Byzantine despair, found utterance in many an epigram which might have been written to-day. Then came a great uprush or incursion from the spiritual world, and with new races and new ideals Europe regained its youth.

The unique effect of that great Christian impulse begins, perhaps, to wear away. But more grace may yet be attainable from the region whence that grace came. Our age's restlessness, as I believe, is the restlessness not of senility but of adolescence; it resembles the approach of p.u.b.erty rather than the approach of death.

What the age needs is not an abandonment of effort, but an increase; the time is ripe for a study of unseen things as strenuous and sincere as that which Science has made familiar for the problems of earth. For now the scientific instinct,--so newly developed in mankind,--seems likely to spread until it becomes as dominant as was in time past the religious; and if there be even the narrowest c.h.i.n.k through which man can look forth from his planetary cage, our descendants will not leave that c.h.i.n.k neglected or unwidened. The scheme of knowledge which can commend itself to such seekers must be a scheme which, while it _transcends_ our present knowledge, steadily _continues_ it;--a scheme not catastrophic, but evolutionary; not promulgated and closed in a moment, but gradually unfolding itself to progressive inquiry.

Must there not also be a continuous change, an unending advance in the human ideal itself? so that Faith must shift her standpoint from the brief Past to the endless Future, not so much caring to supply the lacunae of tradition as to intensify the conviction that there is still a higher life to work for, a holiness which may be some day reached by grace and effort as yet unknown.

It may be that for some generations to come the truest faith will lie in the patient attempt to unravel from confused phenomena some trace of the supernal world;--to find thus at last "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." I confess, indeed, that I have often felt as though this present age were even unduly favoured;--as though no future revelation and calm could equal the joy of this great struggle from doubt into certainty;--from the materialism or agnosticism which accompany the first advance of Science into the deeper scientific conviction that there is a deathless soul in man. I can imagine no other crisis of such deep delight. But after all this is but like the starving child's inability to imagine anything sweeter than his first bite at the crust. Give him but _that_, and he can hardly care for the moment whether he is fated to be Prime Minister or ploughboy.

Equally transitory, equally dependent on our special place in the story of man's upward effort, is another shade of feeling which many men have known. They have felt that uncertainty gave scope to faith and courage in a way which scientific a.s.surance could never do. There has been a stern delight in the choice of virtue,--even though virtue might bring no reward. This joy, like the joy of Columbus sailing westward from Hierro, can hardly recur in precisely the same form. But neither (to descend to a humbler comparison) can we grown men again give ourselves up to learning in the same spirit of pure faith, without prefigurement of result, as when we learnt the alphabet at our mother's knees. Have we therefore relaxed since then our intellectual effort? Have we felt that there was no longer need to struggle against idleness when once we knew that knowledge brought a sure reward?

Endless are the varieties of lofty joy. In the age of Thales, Greece knew the delight of the first dim notion of cosmic unity and law. In the age of Christ, Europe felt the first high authentic message from a world beyond our own. In our own age we reach the perception that such messages may become continuous and progressive;--that between seen and unseen there is a channel and fairway which future generations may learn to widen and to clarify. Our own age may seem the best to us; so will their mightier ages seem to them.

"'Talia saecla' suis dixerunt 'currite' fusis Concordes stabili Fatorum numine Parcae."

_Spiritual evolution_:--that, then, is our destiny, in this and other worlds;--an evolution gradual with many gradations, and rising to no a.s.signable close. And the pa.s.sion for Life is no selfish weakness, it is a factor in the universal energy. It should keep its strength unbroken even when our weariness longs to fold the hands in endless slumber; it should outlast and annihilate the "pangs that conquer trust." If to the Greeks it seemed a ??p?ta??a--a desertion of one's post in battle--to quit by suicide the life of earth, how much more craven were the desire to desert the Cosmos,--the despair, not of this planet only, but of the Sum of Things!

Nay, in the infinite Universe man may now feel, for the first time, at home. The worst fear is over; the true security is won. The worst fear was the fear of spiritual extinction or spiritual solitude; the true security is in the telepathic law.

Let me draw out my meaning at somewhat greater length.

As we have dwelt successively on various aspects of telepathy, we have gradually felt the conception enlarge and deepen under our study. It began as a quasi-mechanical transference of ideas and images from one to another brain. Presently we found it a.s.suming a more varied and potent form, as though it were the veritable ingruence or invasion of a distant mind. Again, its action was traced across a gulf greater than any s.p.a.ce of earth or ocean, and it bridged the interval between spirits incarnate and discarnate, between the visible and the invisible world. There seemed no limit to the distance of its operation, or to the intimacy of its appeal.

?? ???s?? ?? ??t??s?? ?? ?e??? ???.

This Love, then, which (as Sophocles has it) rules "beasts and men and G.o.ds" with equal sway, is no matter of carnal impulse or of emotional caprice. Rather it is now possible to define Love (as we have already defined Genius) in terms which convey for us some new meaning in connection with phenomena described in this work. Genius, as has been already said, is a kind of exalted but undeveloped clairvoyance. The subliminal uprush which inspires the poet or the musician presents to him a deep, but vague perception of that world unseen, through which the seer or the sensitive projects a narrower but an exacter gaze. Somewhat similarly, Love is a kind of exalted but unspecialised telepathy;--the simplest and most universal expression of that mutual gravitation or kinship of spirits which is the foundation of the telepathic law.

This is the answer to the ancient fear; the fear lest man's fellowships be the outward and his solitude the inward thing; the fear lest all close linking with our fellows be the mere product of the struggle for existence,--of the tribal need of strength and cohesion;--the fear that if love and virtue thus arose, love and virtue may thus likewise perish.

It is an answer to the dread that separate centres of conscious life must be always strangers, and often foes; their leagues and fellowships interested and illusory; their love the truce of a moment amid infinite inevitable war.

Such fears, I say, vanish when we learn that it is the soul in man which links him with other souls; the body which dissevers even while it seems to unite; so that "no man liveth to himself nor dieth to himself," but in a sense which goes deeper than metaphor, "We are every one members one of another." Like atoms, like suns, like galaxies, our spirits are systems of forces which vibrate continually to each other's attractive power.

All this as yet is dimly adumbrated; it is a first hint of a scheme of thought which it may well take centuries to develop. But can we suppose that, when once this conception of the bond between all souls has taken root, men will turn back from it to the old exclusiveness, the old controversy? Will they not see that this world-widening knowledge is both old and new, that _die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen_? that always have such revelations been given, but develop now into a mightier meaning,--with the growth of wisdom in those who send them, and in us who receive?

Surely we have here a conception, at once wider and exacter than ever before, of that "religious education of the world" on which theologians have been fain to dwell. We need a.s.sume no "supernatural interference"

no "plan of redemption." We need suppose only that the same process which we observe to-day has been operating for ages between this world and the next.

Let us suppose that whilst incarnate men have risen from savagery into intelligence, discarnate men have made on their part a like advance. Let us suppose that they have become more eager and more able to use, for communication with earth, the standing laws of relation between the spiritual and the material Universe.

At first, on such a hypothesis, certain automatic phenomena will occur, but will not be purposely modified by spirit power. Already and always there must have been points of contact where unseen things impinged upon the seen. Always there would be "clairvoyant wanderings," where the spirit of _shaman_ or of medicine-man discerned things distant upon earth by the spirit's excursive power. Always there would be apparitions at death,--conscious or unconscious effects of the shock which separated soul from body; and always "hauntings,"--where the spirit, already discarnate, revisited, as in a dream perceptible by others, the scenes which once he knew.

From this groundwork of phenomena developed (to take civilised Europe alone) the oracular religion first, the Christian later. The golden gifts of Crsus to Delphi attested the clairvoyance of the Pythia as strongly, perhaps, as can be expected of any tradition which comes to us from the morning of history.

And furthermore, do we not better understand at once the uniqueness and the reality of the Christian revelation itself, when we regard it as a culmination rather than an exception,--as destined not to destroy the cosmic law, but to fulfil it? Then first in human history came from the unseen a message such as the whole heart desired;--a message adequate in its response to fundamental emotional needs not in that age only, but in all ages that should follow. _Intellectually_ adequate for all coming ages that revelation could not be;--given the laws of mind, incarnate alike and discarnate,--the evolution, on either side of the gulf of death, of knowledge and power.

No one at the date of that revelation suspected that uniformity, that continuity of the Universe which long experience has now made for us almost axiomatic. No one foresaw the day when the demand for miracle would be merged in the demand for higher law.

This newer scientific temper is not confined, as I believe, to the denizens of this earth alone. The spiritual world meets it, as I think our evidence has shown, with eager and strenuous response. But that response is made, and must be made, along the lines of our normal evolution. It must rest upon the education, the disentanglement, of _that_ within us mortals which exists in the Invisible, a partaker of the undying world. And on our side and on theirs alike, the process must be steady and continuous. We have no longer to deal with some isolated series of events in the past,--interpretable this way or that, but in no way renewable,--but rather with a world-wide and actual condition of things, recognisable every year in greater clearness, and changing in directions which we can better and better foresee. This new aspect of things needs something of new generalisation, of new forecast,--it points to a provisional synthesis of religious belief which may fitly conclude the present work.

PROVISIONAL SKETCH OF A RELIGIOUS SYNTHESIS

????? ?st?? ?d?? ??e??a ????a?

e?s?? ?p? ????a ??de? ?? ??? ?e???? te?e?t??, ??de? de d??sd?t?? ?????.

--PINDAR.

I see ground for hoping that we are within sight of a religious synthesis, which, although as yet provisional and rudimentary, may in the end meet more adequately than any previous synthesis the reasonable needs of men. Such a synthesis cannot, I think, be reached by a mere predominance of any one existing creed, nor by any eclectic or syncretic process. Its prerequisite is the actual acquisition of new knowledge whether by discovery or by revelation--knowledge discerned from without the veil or from within--yet so realised that the main forms of religious thought, by harmonious expansion and development, shall find place severally as elements in a more comprehensive whole. And enough of such knowledge has, I think, been now attained to make it desirable to submit to my readers the religious results which seem likely to follow.

With such a purpose, our conception of religion should be both profound and comprehensive. I will use here the definition already adopted of religion as the sane and normal response of the human spirit to all that we know of cosmic law; that is, to the known phenomena of the universe, regarded as an intelligible whole. For on the one hand I cannot confine the term to any single definite view or tradition of things unseen. On the other hand, I am not content to define religion as "morality tinged with emotion," lest morality _per se_ should seem to hang in air, so that we should be merely gilding the tortoise which supports the earth.

Yet my definition needs some further guarding if it is to correspond with our habitual use of language. Most men's subjective response to their environment falls below the level of true religious thought. It is scattered into cravings, or embittered by resentment, or distorted by superst.i.tious fear. But of such men I do not speak; rather of men in whom the great pageant has inspired at least some vague out-reaching toward the Source of All; men for whom knowledge has ripened into meditation, and has prompted high desire. I would have Science first sublimed into Philosophy, and then kindled by Religion into a burning flame. For, from my point of view, man cannot be too religious. I desire that the environing, the interpenetrating universe,--its energy, its life, its love,--should illume in us, in our low degree, that which we ascribe to the World-Soul, saying, "G.o.d is Love," "G.o.d is Light." The World-Soul's infinite energy of omniscient benevolence should become in us an enthusiasm of adoring co-operation,--an eager obedience to whatsoever with our best pains we can discern as the justly ruling principle--t? ??e??????--without us and within.

Yet if we form so high an ideal of religion,--raising it so far above any blind obedience or self-seeking fear that its submission is wholly willing, and its demand is for spiritual response alone,--we are bound to ask ourselves whether it is right and reasonable to be religious, to regard with this full devotion a universe apparently imperfect and irresponsive, and a Ruling Principle which so many men have doubted or ignored.

The pessimist holds the view that sentient existence has been a deplorable blunder in the scheme of things. The egotist at least _acts_ upon the view that the universe has no moral coherence, and that "each for himself" is the only indisputable law. I am sanguine enough to think that the answer to the pessimist and the egotist has by our new knowledge been made complete. There remains, indeed, a difficulty of subtler type, but instinctive in generous souls. "The world," such an one may say, "is a mixed place, and I am plainly bound to do my best to improve it. But am I bound to feel--can any bribe of personal happiness justify me in feeling--_religious enthusiasm_ for a universe in which even one being may have been summoned into a sentiency destined to inescapable pain?"

The answer to this ethical scruple must be a matter largely of faith. If indeed we knew that this earthly life was all, or (far worse) that it was followed for any one soul by endless pain, we could not without some moral jugglery ascribe perfection of both power and goodness to a personal or impersonal First Cause of such a doom. But if we believe that endless life exists for all, with infinite possibilities of human redress and of divine justification, then it seems right to a.s.sume that the universe is either already (in some inscrutable fashion) wholly good, or is at least in course of becoming so; since it may be becoming so in part through the very ardour of our own faith and hope.