Riddles of the Sphinx, by Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller

That's French for "the ancient system," as in the ancient system of feudal privileges and the exercise of autocratic power over the peasants. The ancien regime never goes away, like vampires and dinosaur bones they are always hidden in the earth, exercising a mysterious influence. It is not paranoia to believe that the elites scheme against the common man. Inform yourself about their schemes here.

Re: Riddles of the Sphinx, by Ferdinand Canning Scott Schill

Postby admin » Fri Apr 24, 2020 4:28 am

Part 3 of 3

§ 21. The preceding sections have shown that the logical grounds on which Pantheism was based are fallacious and unnecessary, and as it had already been shown to be equally valueless for religious, moral and scientific purposes, every possible basis and motive for asserting its validity has really been disposed of. Nevertheless there remains a strong metaphysical prejudice in favour of Pantheism which cannot be uprooted without an inquiry into the most fundamental question of metaphysics, viz., that whether existence is ultimately one or many.

If the ultimate oneness of all existence is maintained, the doctrine is Monism; if existence is asserted to be ultimately of two kinds, e.g., Matter and Spirit, it is Dualism; if plurality is asserted to be ultimate, it is Pluralism.

Of these, Monism has maintained a sort of preponderance, because it appeared simpler and more satisfactory to "the philosophic craving for unity." On the other hand, it is incurably pantheistic, and disposed to dissolve away all the distinctions between things.

Dualism, again, seemed able to preserve the all-important distinction between good and evil, for which Monism had left no room; but it harmonized neither with the apparent plurality of the world nor with the philosophic demand for unity.

Pluralism, lastly, had the advantage of departing least from the phenomena of the real world, but it seemed difficult to carry it out consistently.

Of these theories of ultimate existence, the intermediate theory of Dualism, which falls between two stools, may be rejected at once. It was virtually disposed of with the rejection of the ultimate difference of Matter and Spirit (ch. ix. § 16).

The real battle has to be fought out between the champions of the One and of the Many, between Monism and Pluralism. And contrary to the opinions of most previous philosophers, we are inclined to hold that the Many is a far more important principle than the One, and that Pluralism, consistently interpreted and properly explained, is the only possible answer to the ultimate question of ontology.

Monism, on the other hand, really has nothing to recommend it. It might indeed be possible to applaud the statement that philosophy aims at the unification of the universe, if it were not promptly made a pretext for asserting the reality of this unity, in the face of facts which deprive this so-called unity of all practical value, and reduce it from an assertion of a real oneness to that of a merely abstract unity. It would be more to the point if Monism could show a little more unanimity in the world, even at the expense of a little unity. And if more attention had been paid to the aiming at unity, the results would perhaps have been somewhat more satisfactory, and Monism might have recognized that a unity aimed at, and worth aiming at, is for that very reason not yet attained. If they had taken the trouble to interpret their theory strictly, Monists might have realized that though Monism would be an excellent theory when the world-process was ended, it is for this very reason quite inapplicable and extremely mischievous while it is still going on.

Then again, the supposed simplicity of Monism is a great delusion. It does not simplify the understanding of the world to deny plurality, in order to assert its abstract unity. Or if the One of Monism be taken as the unit of Number, it certainly requires an astonishing amount of simplicity to see any difficulty in passing from one to as many as are wanted. For how is it more difficult to assume many ultimate existences than one? One would have thought that when one was given, it was easy to count a thousand. If, therefore, the One of Monism is the unit of Number, the unity of ultimate existence is no simpler than its plurality, while if it is an abstract One, Monism is unable to explain plurality at all.

And unfortunately, Monism has no choice of evils; it is forced to interpret the One as an abstraction which excludes all plurality. No Monism can explain the existence of plurality: how the One became the Many, or how, having become, the Many can be distinguished from the One. For the One, being the sum total of existence, could generate the Many only out of itself, and however generated, their generation could not serve any purpose, nor could the Many really be independent of or distinct from the One. In whatever way we put it, the existence of the Many must be illusory: they are of the substance of the One, and can neither disown their parentage nor dissever themselves from the One which was and is and will be all things. The Many can have no real existence from the standpoint of the One, and no raison d'etre. For supposing even that the One found the single blessedness of eternity tiresome in the long run, and created a diversion by mysteriously "pouring itself out" into the world, there was yet no reason why plurality of types should not have sufficed, and this in no wise explains what is after all the real crux of plurality, viz., its indefinite multiplication of imperfect individuals under the same types, the lavish prodigality and meaningless repetition of the Many. Why were so many millions of fleas essential to the happiness or comfort of the Absolute? Would not a single specimen, nicely got up, have sufficed to show what absolute wisdom combined with absolute power could effect in the region of the infinitely little and infinitely disagreeable? Et mutato nomine de te, oh monistic philosopher, fabula narratur! [The change of name from you, oh monistic philosopher story!]

It appears here again that monistic Pantheism has to deny the reality of our world of Becoming and plurality. All systems which profess to explain the world from monistic principles have to make this transition from the One to the Many, and not one of them can make it intelligible.

They labour in vain to describe it by inexplicable and unintelligible processes, which severely tax their resources in the way of obscure metaphor. But in reality the gulf between the One and the Many can be bridged by no fair or valid means: nor has the self-sacrifice of monistic philosophers, who have discarded all restraints of prudence and consistency in order to precipitate themselves into it with a reckless devotion worthy of Mettius Curtius, availed to close the gulf.

§ 22. We may reasonably conclude, then, that Monism is a failure, that by assuming unity at the outset it incapacitates itself for the task of explaining phenomenal plurality, and a fortiori for the still higher task of really uniting the Many in a significant union.

But is Pluralism any better off? Pluralism, by assuming the ultimateness of plurality, does indeed avoid the difficulty which is so fatal to Monism. It starts with an immense advantage over Monism: it has no need to explain away the appearance of plurality. But unless its position is very carefully stated, with more precision and consistency than pluralist philosophers have hitherto bestowed upon it, it has considerable difficulty in explaining the possibility, not of the abstract unity it rejects, but of real union.

This difficulty may be elucidated by the example of the greatest of pluralist systems, that of Leibnitz, and the criticism upon it. Leibnitz asserted that the world was ultimately composed of spiritual beings, ''windowless monads," each of whom ideally included, but really excluded all others. And this statement in its natural sense might have been taken as a forcible expression of the fact that the mutually impenetrable consciousnesses of spiritual beings yet communicate through the common world of thought. But an unappreciative criticism could easily discover obscurities and flaws in Leibnitz's expressions. It was observed that if the monads were absolutely exclusive, they could not communicate at all, and hence no world could exist, nor plurality in it, and that Pluralism thus supplied its own refutation. If, on the other hand, the Leibnitzian conception of God as the Central Monad, including all the rest, was to be taken seriously, there was an end to the substantiality of the others, and here again Pluralism was abandoned.

Such criticism, though it disregards the spirit, if not the letter, of Pluralism, may serve at least to bring out the subtle way in which Pluralism includes and involves the unity of things.

It is absurd, in the first place, to suppose that Pluralism asserts the existence of the Many in a sense and under conditions which would destroy the very fact it is most anxious to explain. The exclusiveness and self-existence of the Many must not be so interpreted as to make nonsense of the whole position and to stultify the whole solution of the problem of plurality. For it is clear that if the Many were absolutely exclusive and incapable of having any connection or communion with one another, there would be no Many, and no Plurality could exist. Each monad would form a world by itself, would be a One as impervious to criticism and as unconscious of all outside influence as the One of Monism itself. Pluralism would be no better than Monism. When, therefore, Pluralism asserts that the Many as a matter of fact exist, it must be taken to have thereby implied that they are also capable of existing as many, i.e., the possibility of the interaction of the Many is implied in their very existence, and does not require any special proof.

And Leibnitz might well take for granted that as the Many do interact, they must also be capable of interacting, and that it was unnecessary to demonstrate that what actually existed was also capable of existing. He himself was far too well versed in Aristotelian philosophy to suspect that his critics would require him to justify the possibility of the potentiality, where the actuality was obviously given. To such criticism, from the Leibnitzian as from the Aristotelian standpoint, there could be but one answer; viz., that the potentiality was nothing without the actuality (ch. vii. § 17), and consequently that the One, as the possibility of their interaction, was nothing without the Many, and that the real reason of things must be sought in the Many.

Yet as this possibility of the interaction of the Many is the One, Pluralism is in a way based upon Monism: the Many presuppose the One. But not in any sense which can affect the substantiality of the Many. The One which is presupposed by Pluralism is the most meaningless of all things; it is a mere possibility of the interaction or co-existence of the Many; it is a mere potentiality which has no actual existence except as an ideal factor in a real plurality. It is the actual interaction of the Many that gives a meaning to the One; Monism becomes possible only when it has been included and absorbed in Pluralism. For if each of the many individual existences had never actually exerted its power of interacting with the others, no world would have existed. The terms "one" and "many" would have had no meaning, and there would have been no occasion for Monism to be invented in order to explain how the many could be one.

Monism is thus essentially parasitic in its nature; it is a theory which becomes possible only on the basis of the real fact of plurality. And it is equally dependent upon Pluralism for its further development. It is a theory parasitic also in this, that it construes the One on the analogy of the Many and after a fashion derived from its knowledge of the phenomenal world with its many substances; in other words, it hypostasizes it. But by this hypostasization it refutes itself; by treating as a real and transcendent substance this co-existence and possibility of the interaction of the Many, this immanent and impersonal ultimate nature of existence, it reduces the real world of existences, which it set out to explain, to absolute unreality. And all this in order to be able to assert the reality of a unity which, on its own showing, lies beyond all human thought and feeling! It would be a sufficient justification for Pluralism that it protects us against such absurdities.

§ 23. But Pluralism can do more than this: it not only vindicates the actual plurality of things, and explains how the unity implied in plurality may be treated without dissolving all reality in an unmeaning One, but it can assert unity in a higher sense, which no Monism can reach.

To assert the unity of the universe at present is to assert what is either trivial or false. If by unity is meant the abstract unity of the category of oneness, if unity means merely that in thinking "the universe" we must from the nature of our thought imply its oneness, or, again, if it means the possibility of the interaction of the Many, the statement is the most trivial and unimportant that can possibly be made. If by unity is meant something incompatible with plurality, it is false. If, again, a real unity is meant, it is false; for a real and complete union of the elements of the world does not exist. The interactions of things are not harmonious, they are not at one but at war.

But Pluralism can hold out to us a hope that such a real union may yet be achieved. The Many, who at present interact discordantly, may come not only to interact, but also to act together; and their perfect and harmonious interaction would realize the ideal of a true union, of a real unitedness, as far superior to the imperfect union of our present cosmos as the latter is to the abstract unity of the underlying One.

Thus, in a way, the One is Alpha and Omega: as the basis of the Many, it is the lowest and least of things; as their perfection and final harmony, it is the highest and last of things; but it is Pluralism alone that can distinguish between these two senses of unity, which Monism inextricably confounds.

Thus satisfaction is given to the legitimate claims alike of the One and of the Many, in a higher synthesis which transcends the extremes both of Pantheism and of individualism. Unity (in the sense of union) is admitted to be a higher ideal than plurality, but for that very reason it cannot be treated as real in an imperfect world. For the explanation of our existing world the first sense of the One is irrelevant, as being included in the mere fact of the world's existence, whereas the second is inapplicable, as being not yet attained. In the interpretation, therefore, of our world Pluralism is supreme; it is the only possible and relevant answer to the ultimate question of ontology. It is only by asserting existences to be ultimately many that we can satisfy the demands either of the Real or of the ideal.

And it is a mere prejudice to suppose that there is any intrinsic difficulty in the ultimate existence of many individuals; for the conception of ultimate existence is no more difficult in the case of many than of one. All thought must admit the ultimateness of some existence, admit a limit to the question of the origin or cause of existence; for otherwise it would have to confess to the absurdity that the ultimate cause of everything is nothing or unknowable (§ 1). But as we saw in chapter ii. (§ 5), our thinking faculty, when rightly interrogated, does not require such an infinite regress of reasons, but readily acquiesces in the self-evident, and the question as to the cause of existence as such is idle and invalid. Our inquiry must come to a stop somewhere, and this limit, the ultimate ground of existence, must be either the irrational or the self-evident and self-sufficient. Now of these alternatives, it has been made abundantly evident that monistic Pantheism adopts the former, and reduces the world to the irrational, to "the delirium of an insane God," whereas Pluralism, by uniting the Many in an eternal harmony, necessarily arrives at the latter, at a state in which the ever-present reality of perfection permits no question into what lies beyond and before the actual.

But though this reconciliation of the One and the Many affords us once again a view of the ideal we have already twice caught sight of, once in discussing the relation of the individual to society (ch. viii. § 19), and once in analysing that of the part to the whole (§ 19), we must leave its elucidation to a later period (ch. xii.), and content ourselves for the present with settling the comparative merits of Monism and Pluralism. Irrespective of the hopes Pluralism holds out for the future, it is enough that it is superior in the present. Whatever the difficulties that beset the question of ultimate existence, they are the same for both, the same whether existence be ultimately one or many. And we are clearly bound in our inquiry to draw the line at a point where the conception of ultimate existence will throw light upon the phenomenal existence of our world. The world exists, and its existences are many; Pluralism admits the facts, and thereby affords a valid theory of the world; Monism cannot admit the facts, does not explain the world, and therefore is not a valid theory of ultimate existence or ontology.

§ 24. An elaborate investigation of the doctrine of the infinity of the Deity has been found necessary, but it was fully warranted by the magnitude of the issues involved, and of the results attained. For it ought to have resulted in a firm conviction that neither religion nor science nor philosophy has anything to gain rather than everything to lose by the assertion of this doctrine. It ought to be at length clear to all that the Pantheism which is arrived at by deifying the abstract category of the unity of the universe arises out of paralogisms and confusions, is unable to explain the interaction of existences which do not require it, and, were it conceivable, would plunge all speculative and practical philosophy into irredeemable chaos.

The assertion, therefore, of the finiteness of God is primarily the assertion of the knowableness of the world, of the commensurateness of the Deity with our intelligence. By becoming finite God becomes once more a real principle in the understanding of the world, a real motive in the conduct of life, a real factor in the existence of things, a factor none the less real for being unseen and inferred. For it is much that the Deity can once more be made the subject of inferences, that intelligible reasons can once more be given for the existence of God, and that the Kantian criticism of the "physico-theological proof" (ch. II. § 19) falls to the ground. And it is a sufficient concession to the instinctive humility of religious feeling to admit that the Deity is unknown to us as yet, that He is a God who "wears a fold of heaven and earth across His face"; we must not permit it to ascribe to Him the suicidal attribute of unknowableness.

And the discussion of the relations of Monism and Pluralism should have largely brought out also the nature of God's finiteness. The finiteness of God depends on the very attributes that make Him really God, on His personality, on His being, like all real beings, an individual existence. God is one among the Many, their supreme ruler and aim, and not the One underlying the Many. The latter theory makes the Many inexplicable and the One indifferent. God therefore must not be identified with Nature. For if by Nature we mean the All of things, then Nature is the possibility of the interaction of the ultimate existences, and of these God is one. And the existence of these ultimate existences explains also how God can be finite; He is limited by the co-existence of other individuals. And from His relations to these other existences, which we have called spirits (ch. ix. § 31), arise all the features of our world which were so insoluble a puzzle to Monism — its Becoming, its process, and its Evil — and in them also must be sought the explanation of the arrangement of the world down to its minutest detail. For as the existence of these spirits is an ultimate fact, God has no power to annihilate them; the most that can be done is to bring them into harmony with the Divine Will. And this is just what the world-process is designed to effect, this is just the reason why the world is in process. For if the divine power were infinite, it would be unnecessary to produce the harmony with the divine will by a long and arduous process. As it is not infinite, occasion arises for the display of intelligence and economy, for that adaptation of means to ends which has always been justly esteemed the surest ground of a belief in God. And this same limitation is also the general explanation of Evil; the world is evil because it is imperfectly harmonized with the divine will. And yet as God is not all things, He can be an ''eternal (or unceasing) tendency making for righteousness," and need not be, as on all other theories He must be, the responsible Author of Evil. For when once the identification of God with the whole of Nature is given up, the evil in the world may be due to that element in it which is not God, to the resistance of existences God cannot destroy and has not yet reconciled. And there are many points about the specific character of evil which bear out this interpretation.

§ 25. For let us compare the deductions from such a theory of the nature of Evil with the facts we find. We start with a number of spiritual beings struggling against and opposing the Divine Power, which may overpower, but cannot destroy them. What is to be done? To leave them in the full possession of their powers and intelligence would be to give them the power to do evil, to reduce the spiritual order to a chaotic play of wild antagonisms. To destroy them is impossible. But it is possible to do the next best thing, viz., to reduce their consciousness to the verge of non-existence. In such a state of torpor it would be possible to induce them to give an all but unconscious assent to the laws of the cosmos, and gradually to accustom them to the order which the divine wisdom had seen to be the best, and the best means to attain a perfectly harmonious co-operation of all existences. And as they grow more harmonized, a higher development of consciousness, and a higher phase of life becomes permissible. Nevertheless every advance in consciousness renders possible a correspondingly intense relapse into antagonism or Evil, nor will such relapses cease to be possible until a complete harmony of all existences has been attained.

Now do not the facts accurately correspond to this scheme? The history of the world begins with beings to whom we can hardly attribute any consciousness or spiritual character. This obliteration of consciousness is dependent on Matter, which has been recognized in the last chapter (ix. §§ 27, 28) as a mechanism for depressing consciousness. Out of these lowest and hardly conscious beings there are gradually evolved, in periods which to us appear almost "infinite," higher beings with a higher consciousness and higher powers. And on the whole they display progressively higher phases of association and social harmony. The abuse of their higher powers for evil purposes, on the other hand, though possible, is confined to very narrow limits. For the physical and social laws of life form an effectual system of checks upon the selfish lawlessness of individuals, and prevent evil-doing beyond a certain point. However evil the intentions of a refractory spirit may be, his actions must involve some degree of submission to the cosmic order. And not only is he forced to recognize this order, but in proportion as he fails to mould himself in accordance with it, he tends to lose his power of disturbing it, by reverting to a lower and less dangerous type.

To say that an evil-doer makes a beast of himself is true in more senses than one; for by his indulgence in his evil passions he tends to lose the higher consciousness which raises men above the beasts. His vices destroy his moral and intellectual perceptions even more surely than they do his body. For the lowest depth alike of ignorance and of wickedness is unconscious: the utterly degraded criminal has lost the moral and intellectual insight, the conscience and the intelligence, which the beast has not yet acquired. And even physically, could his life be prolonged, he would revert into an animal state. For as evil is anti-social, the extreme evildoer would be outcast from society, and so become unable to secure the manifold appliances of civilization. He would have to depend for his livelihood on his own unaided resources, on his strength of hand and fleetness of foot. His expression would be coarsened and animalized by his life. The higher mental activities would find no scope for their exercise, and the part of the brain by which they were expressed would be atrophied by disuse. For lack of the means of making clothing, he would have to grow a thicker covering of hair; for the lack of tools, he would have to develop his nails into claws.

Nor is it inconsistent with this view that more intelligent and cold-blooded wickedness maintains itself in society, and often too in honour. For it is just by its obedience to the laws, divine and human, by the moderation which, from self-regarding prudence, avoids offences which a superior power would surely punish, that such wickedness is possible. The criminality is confined to intentions, and not permitted to issue in overt acts. A bad man in a modern society is probably worse than a bad man 10,000 years ago, because his intelligence is higher. But his instincts will not be as brutal, nor his actions as outrageous as those of his predecessor. He will be more consciously selfish in the choice of his ends, but he will not be as ruthless and barbarous in the choice of his means. He will, e.g., beware of a free indulgence in manslaughter, for the conditions of civilized life render murder too dangerous a pastime. Physically, also, his conduct will be more prudent, for he will find that the more complex dissipations of modern life are more exhausting to his physical powers than the simpler debaucheries of the savage.

Thus Evil is impotent and infra-human, in our world at least, rather than superhuman. And such a character of Evil serves to further the world-process indirectly also. It makes the attitude of resistance to the Divine Purpose ridiculous, contemptible, and disgusting, as well as futile. The adversary of God is not a defiant fiend, armed with archangelic powers and irreconcilable in the intense consciousness of his undying hate, not the Demon we had been wont to fear, but the beast we had been wont to despise, a sordid swine, whose narrow outlook over the nature of things is limited by the barriers of his garbage, and the boundaries of his sty. And so the nature of our world confirms what we ought to have conjectured beforehand, viz., that the divine wisdom does not permit the world to be made a playground for devils, but imposes upon Evil disabilities which minimize its power to thwart the purposes of God and to affect the course of history.


§ 26. And so we find that Evil is that which resists the Evolution of the world, and fights a losing battle against the tendencies of things. It consists in this, that the end is not yet, that the purpose of the world-process is still being achieved, that the discordant elements are still being harmonized, and that hence what is cannot yet realize what ought to be.

But though on this account Evil is an inseparable element in our world, an ineradicable element in all existing things, yet from the beginning [x]7 and constrained chaotic wills into the scheme of cosmic order. But this cosmic order of perfect harmony is as yet unattained, and so the world contains a negative element of the unknowable, impersonal ("Matter"), indeterminate (''Becoming"), impermanent ("Time"), indefinite ("ignorance"), and imperfect (pain) — in short, of Evil; it is a world of Becoming and of Time, and not a true cosmos. But yet it is ever progressing towards perfection; Evil and imperfection is that which is ever vanishing away. It is impermanent itself and the cause of impermanence in the imperfect, the lawless and a-cosmic factor, which must be continually transcended and ultimately eliminated in the process towards perfect Being. And of that process all phenomenal things are transitory phases, that bear within them the curse of change and the seed of death, and we ourselves also must pass away. We are imperfect phases in the interaction between God and the Egos, the reflexes of relations that are not satisfactory or harmonious, and hence endure but for season. Hard then as is our lot, and bitter as are the pains the flow of Time and the impermanence of life inflict, it is yet not ill that the all-receiving gate of Death should open up to us a prospect of promotion into a more abiding state of being.

§ 27. Thus the complete account of man's relation to God is that our actual selves, and the world in which we live, are correlated results of an interaction between the Deity and ultimate spiritual beings or Egos, of whom we form the conscious part (ch. ix. §§ 22, 24). The imperfection and transitoriness of this world of ours is conditioned by the unsatisfactory and unstable nature of the relations between the Deity and the Ego, and to this also must be ascribed the all-pervading element of Evil.

But as the Deity is one factor in this interaction, i.e., in all things, there is within and throughout the world also an element of good, that makes for a more perfect harmony between God and the Egos, ourselves and the world. Thus God is immanent in all things, a constant, all-inspiring, ever-active Force. And yet God is not dissolved in the All, which was the heavy price paid by Pantheism for the immanence of its "God," but has also a real personality, a truer and transcendent existence for Himself. In this way we solve the old controversy of the transcendence or immanence of the Deity, by showing how God is in different ways both immanent and transcendent, and oppose to the Pantheistic Monism, which could not explain the world, a pluralistic Theism, which can.


§ 28. And if this doctrine seem at first somewhat to detract from the effective supremacy of God, and to shock the ears accustomed to an unthinking worship of the "infinite," and if the ascription of Evil to the limitation of God seem even to reduce His power to a shadow, let us reflect, and realize that omnipotence becomes impotence in the absence of resistance, that resistance also is the measure of power. Hence, though it may seem a task unworthy of the divine power to overcome the resistance of fools and beasts, it does not follow that the apparent is a true measure of the real resistance. For to impress on fools and beasts even a dim sense of the rationality of the scheme of things, is a task more difficult by far than to prevail over the dissent of superhuman intelligences. And besides, how do we know that this very contemptibleness in appearance of the obstacles to the world's progress (cp. § 25 s.f.) is not in itself an effective method of the divine guidance of the process, that it does not form part of the humorous element in things, of that subtle "irony of fate" and that gentle cynicism of nature's ways, which we so often fancy we can trace in the course of the world? We have hardly yet got the data for estimating the strength of the spiritual resistances to the divine purpose. It is only when we see how slowly the vast and incalculable power which is displayed in the order of the physical universe grinds small the obstacles to its purpose, how many millions of years were required to evolve man, how many thousands of years to civilize him, and how slow even now the stubborn obstinacy of unreason makes the ever-accelerating progress of the world — it is only when we observe and ponder on all this, that we may form some faint image of the strength of the spiritual resistances to the world-process, and obtain an idea of the grandeur of the Divine Purpose immensely more vivid and impressive than the vague hyperboles of an uncritical adulation of the infinite. The conception of the Divine Power as finite exalts the Deity, actually and morally, as far above an unintelligible infinite as modern astronomy has exalted our sense of the grandeur of the universe, as compared with the ancient fancies that the stars were set in the firmament to adorn our skies, or that the sun was "about the size of Peloponnese," and was put out every night in the "baths of Ocean."

And the moral stimulus and emotional relief also of such a conception of the world-process ought to be immense. It represents us no longer as the helpless playthings of an infinite and infamous Deity, the victims of a senseless tyranny of an Omnipotence we can neither resist nor assist, purposely condemned to some idle task-work or equally unmeaning idleness in a purposeless world, that could achieve nothing the infinite might not have achieved without our sufferings and without our sorrows. We are now ourselves the subjects of the world's redemption; we can ourselves assist in our own salvation; we can ourselves co-operate with God in hastening the achievement of the world-process, co-operate in the sweet assurance that no effort will be rejected as too petty or too vain, that no struggle will lack divine support. It is beyond the scope of an essay like this to draw out in detail the practical consequences of theoretic principles, and to proceed to the exhortations of practical religion, but it is evident that it would be difficult indeed to imagine a creed more apt than this to fortify the best elements in the human soul, or to appeal more strongly to all the higher instincts of our nature.

§ 29. But perhaps it may be asked, if God is not identical with Nature, and if the interacting Many are the ultimate nature of things, why need we go beyond the phenomenal Many at all, and why complicate our scheme of things by a reference to a transcendent God and ultimate realities? Granted that the sum of things cannot fitly be called God, why do we require a God besides? Why should our Pluralism be theistic? Should we not do just as well by regarding the world as it appears as the world of ultimate reality, composed of interacting material beings, which can admit of no God that is not like it phenomenal?

The raising of this question is in reality merely one form of asking why we need to go behind the phenomenal. And the ultimate answer to it is that all science and all knowledge, every intelligible view of life, must go behind the phenomenal. Even the most materialistic and unspeculative science must do it to some extent, must form theories of the unseen and imperceptible, in order to account for appearances (cp. ch. iii. § 3). And so the philosophic ground for the existence of a God is of a precisely similar character to the scientific ground for assuming the existence of atoms or undiscovered planets. It is an inference to account for the actions of the apparent: we infer the existence of the unseen reality God, just as the astronomer inferred the existence of the unknown planet Neptune from the motions of the known planet Uranus. We infer it because there is no other reasonable way of accounting for the motions of the world.


That this is the case will easily appear, if we consider what are the characteristics of the world which directly necessitate the inference to the existence of a God.

It is agreed, in the first place, that if the phenomenal world is ultimate, the individual existences in it are alone real, and that it is a superstition to hypostasize their interaction as ''Nature" or "the All." Nature is not a reality superior to the individuals and capable of controlling their destinies, but simply the sum total of their interactions, and all the operations of nature must be explained by the capacities of the known individuals. Hence all the intelligence, reason, or purpose we discover in the world must be conscious intelligence, in some or other of its real existences. Even, therefore, if we could think such things as unconscious purpose or impersonal reason, even if all canons of valid thinking did not forbid us thus gratuitously to multiply entities, which no experience can suggest, there would be no room for them in our world. Whatever intelligence, therefore, is found to be active in the world must be due to the action of some real being.

But we do find in the world manifold traces of an intelligent purpose which is not that of any known intelligence. Intelligent observation of the course of events strongly suggests that there is ''a Providence that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will." And even strict science is forced to recognize this in the Evolution of the world. Here we have all things tending persistently and constantly in a single and definite direction. This tendency of things goes on while as yet no one had discovered it, it goes on although no one consciously aims at it, nay, in spite of the constant opposition of a large portion of the conscious intelligence of the world. But the idea that this constant tendency is due to any of the known intelligences of the world refutes itself as soon as it is stated; to suppose that atoms and amoebas could, at the time when they were the highest individuals in the world, direct its process towards the development of individuals in association (ch. viii.) is absurd. We have, therefore, in the world-process the working of an intelligence which not only guides the actions of the unconscious material existences, but overrules those of the conscious intelligences. The only possible inference from the fact of the constant and definite tendency of the world-process is that it is purposed by the intelligence of a real being, of a God, who, though not seen, is yet known by His action on the phenomenal world. And when it becomes possible to formulate the tendency of the world's Evolution in terms which appeal to our own intelligence, this inference as to the existence of God becomes as certain as any of our inferences can be.

And a similar conclusion follows from the elimination of evil and the contemplation of the moral aspects of the world-process. If we admit — and unless we are pessimists we must admit — that Good is gradually prevailing over Evil, that the world-process tends towards harmony, we must admit also that this improvement is neither inherent in the constitution of things nor yet due to the efforts of the known existences. It is not inherent in the constitution of things, for the present condition of the world sufficiently shows that in itself that constitution is perfectly compatible with the existence of disorder, conflict, and Evil, that the existence of the world is just as possible with a discordant as with a harmonious interaction of its parts. The constitution of things is equally consistent with a good and with a bad world, and hence cannot be regarded as the cause of the world's improvements. Nor can we ascribe it to the efforts of the known existences, in face of their ignorance of the good, and their frequent and lamentable failures to discover the conduct which really benefits them. The progress, therefore, of the world directly points to God as its author.

Thus a personal and finite, but non-phenomenal, God is the only possible cause that can account for the existence and character of the world-process, and the belief in God's existence is intimately bound up with the belief in the reality of the world-process.


Hence the method also of our proof of God's existence stands in the sharpest contrast with that of Pantheism. It is not based on a supposed necessity of hypostasizing the abstract formula of a logical unity of the universe, a unity indifferent to every content and intrinsically empty. It does not yield a God who is equally implied in every sort of world, without reference to its nature and its character, a God indifferent to the course of things, and without influence upon it, a God unknowable and unprovable. On the contrary, it proves His existence in the only way in which it has been evident, since Kant, that it could be proved (ch. ii. § 19), viz., not a priori, from the consideration of a world, as such, or of an abstract totality of reality, but a posteriori from the particular nature of this particular world of ours. And being an inference from real data it will permit the proof of something beyond mere existence (cp. ch. ii. § 3). The character and nature of God and of His purpose may be obscured in the gloom of our ignorance and degradation, but they are not intrinsically unknowable. And the divine education of the human race lies just in this, that in studying the nature and history of our world, we are spelling out the elements of God's revelation to men.

§ 30. It will be necessary to touch upon one more objection to the principles laid down in the preceding sections, not because it is very important in itself, but because it contains a certain amount of truth. The question may be asked, how does this view assure us that God is one and not many? In answer it would certainly have to be admitted that the unity of the divine person was not a matter of philosophic principle. If there are other reasons for holding that God is three, our theory offers no obstacle. For we cannot infer from the unity of the world's plan and working anything more than unanimity or harmonious co-operation in its cause. But if the world-process displays, as it surely does, perfect unity alike in its conception and its execution, there can certainly be no philosophic reason either for assuming a plurality of guiding intelligences. Still less would our experience of combined action in our world warrant such a hasty belief in its efficiency as would justify us in substituting a heavenly democracy for the monarchical rule of a single God. And so it will doubtless appear preferable to most minds to retain the unity of the Godhead, to which their feelings have grown accustomed, in a case where the assumption of plurality could not possibly serve any practical purpose. What is alone important is that the conception of the Deity sketched in this chapter should not be thought to afford any support to polytheism, with its discordant interferences and jealous animosities of conflicting deities; beyond that it is needless to dogmatize prematurely upon a subject which possesses neither theoretic nor practical importance.

§ 31. We have completed the second great stage of our journey by the investigation of man's relations to his cause, and of the whence of life. We have also traced the nature and origin of his present environment, and discovered that we are spiritual beings living in a spiritual universe; but the final question of the "whither?" of life yet remains to be solved in accordance with the results already attained, before we can formulate a complete answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx.

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Notes:

1 Personality being avowedly an ideal (ch. viii. § 19), the attribution of personality asserts merely that God is the perfection of the process whereby personal beings have arisen out of the lowest individualities of atoms. There is no objection, however, to the use of terms like supra-personal or ultra-personal, if we mean by them something including and transcending, rather than excluding, personality. For doubtless the personality of God transcends that of man as far as that of the highest man transcends that of the atom.

2 Or perhaps we should rather say "distinctness," for it is as a ratio essendi, and not as a ratio cognoscendi, that the distinction is important. It is important that God should be distinct from the world, but not that He should know Himself as such.

3 In his Essays on Religion (3rd ed.), p. 36 ff., p. 176 ff.

4 It is sufficient to show this in one case, for exemplo ab uno disce omnes, and we shall choose for that purpose one who is as certainly the frankest and clearest as he is the ablest of modern metaphysicians. E. von Hartmann is strongly and sincerely convinced that the world is a process, and that, too, a process of redemption. A redemption of what? Of the Absolute! For the Absolute is now no longer absolute, but a mere ci-devant Absolute, and requires to be redeemed from the deplorable consequences of a youthful faux pas. It created the world, or entered upon the world-process, in a fit of temporary insanity. Or,  as von Hartmann puts it more politely, when the absolute Unconscious is quiescent, its Reason is non-existent, and its Will is potential. Only, unfortunately, the Will is not in this condition guided by Reason, and so the Unconscious commits an irrational act of willing, and becomes actual. But by the nature of things (superior to the Absolute-Unconscious?), to will is to be miserable, and the Unconscious is supremely miserable. So it stirs up its Reason, and the Reason devises the world-process as a sort of homoeopathic cure of the misery of the Absolute, the end of which is to bring the Unconscious back into the quiescence from which it so rashly and irrationally departed. It is interesting to note in this, (1) the frank admission that the ultimate cause of the world's existence is the irrational, in this case an irrational act of Will; (2) that even when this has been assumed, it must be supposed also that for practical purposes of explaining the world, the infinite has ceased to be infinite. Not even when we have been told that the ultimate reason of things is something for which no reason can be given, can anything be made of the world except on the supposition that somehow this irrational Absolute has ceased to be infinite.

5 Cp. ch. vii. § 24. It may, perhaps, be objected to this illustration that to assume a content A is to Assume the finiteness of that content. And this is true, but the assumption is really first made when the world is supposed to have a meaning, i.e., a content expressible in terms of the All. For (owing to the finiteness of our minds?) all the conceptions of our thought imply finitude, and an infinite meaning is a meaning which means both this and that, i.e., is indeterminate, and so means nothing at all. If, therefore, we are to reason about the infinite at all, we can only do so in terms constantly implying finiteness, a fact which is significant enough to those who deny the reality of the infinite, though it may well drive its champions to despair.

6 The hectocotylus. It matters not that this independence of the parts endures only for a limited period, for the wholes also  which dispense with their parts are equally impermanent.

7 "And the plan of Zeus was working out its fulfilment." — Iliad
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Re: Riddles of the Sphinx, by Ferdinand Canning Scott Schill

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Part 1 of 2

CHAPTER XI. IMMORTALITY.

§ 1. At length we have come to the last of the great questions of life, viz., that of our Future. And in a way this is the most important of all questions. For the Past is irrevocable, the Present more or less calculable and provided for, but the whither of man is a mystery which each one of us will have to solve in his own proper person. Death must be experienced by all, and experienced alone, and may have to be experienced at any moment. It requires, therefore, unusual strength of soul or recklessness to ignore this ever-present problem of our future. Hence the question, of how to live in order to die well, has always seemed a question of primary importance to all who had any care of their future.

And yet mankind has always displayed a curious dread of really coming to close quarters with this question. It has always been hedged round with unreasoning awe and vague obscurities of mystic language. Whether it was believed that life continued or passed away, both parties have always shrunk from saying so in plain words, and treating their beliefs as facts. To this day the question of our future life or annihilation has remained a subject for violent prejudices and fierce animosities, for insensate hopes and fears, for declamations and denunciations, for confident assertions on either side of meaningless or ambiguous sophisms — for anything, in fact, rather than for calm consideration and dispassionate inquiry. Nothing, indeed, presents a more curious study in human psychology than the reckless violence with which both the adherents and the opponents of traditional doctrines concerning man's future have resented any attempts to approach the subject in the serious spirit of scientific philosophy. In times now happily past orthodoxy has been equally severe upon those who believed too little and too much, and burnt all misbelievers, whether atheists or magicians, at the same stake. In the future it seems possible that the lunatic asylums will be charged with the function of preventing inquiry into this question. But just at present the conflicting orthodoxies of science and religion are, by a rare felicity of the times, so nearly balanced that a philosophical investigation seems comparatively safe. And the first point such an investigation would have to consider is the reason for such an irrational attitude of men. Half the world profess to believe in a highly sensational and stimulating account of their future life. But its effect upon their conduct is disproportionately small. Insanity due to the fear of Hell contributes only a comparatively small quota to our madhouses. The hope of Heaven does not inspire to superhuman virtue. Of most cultivated Christians it may be safely said that their belief in Hell is practically a very faint and unimportant factor in their life, and that in Heaven fainter still. And they shrink with genuine reluctance, not fully accounted for by their latent consciousness of the difficulties of their beliefs, from all reasoning calculated to make them realize them.

The other half of the world is convinced that a future life is unprovable, if not impossible, and often prepared to argue this thesis at length. But it is even more reluctant to bring its a priori arguments to the test of practical experiment. And why should both parties agree in objecting to treat the subject like any other, as a question of supreme practical interest, to be settled by reasoning and investigation? Such conduct naturally raises doubts about the sincerity of men's professions of interest in the subject. In fact, it would not, in spite of the apparent paradox, perhaps be too much to say that a final establishment of the reality of a future life would prove highly inconvenient to all parties, and this inconvenience is the real reason of men's dislike to its investigation. The generality of men do not care enough about their future to welcome a belief which would make it really necessary to look far ahead, and they do not want to care about it.1 So it is extremely convenient to leave the future life in the realm of vague speculation, to be believed when desired, and to be disregarded when belief would suggest unpleasant reflections, in order to avoid regarding it as a fact to be steadily and consistently kept in sight. For a fact is something which must be faced, even though it may be very unpleasant to do so, but an opinion may be manipulated so as to suit the exigencies of the occasion.

§ 2. But this disregard of the future is often not only admitted but defended, on the ground that over-anxiety about the future is by no means to be recommended, and that a belief in another life is apt to lead to a neglect of this. Now, though it must be admitted that such excess of concern is possible, it is by no means probable that it will ever constitute a serious danger. The immediate pressure of the present makes such overpowering demands upon our attention that there is no real ground for the fear that men can ever to any extent become oblivious of the importance of this world, and least of all will they do so if they have rationally investigated the question of a future life. It is the fancy eschatologies which are uncritically accepted that do the mischief, and no rational doctrine which regards the future life as a natural continuation of the present is in the least likely to lead to an antagonism between the claims of the present and the future, different In kind or much greater in degree than that which already exists between the different sections of our life on earth (cp. ch. iv. § 7).

And so, although it is not possible that the question of a future life should ever be an absorbing and permanent occupation of the mind in the heyday of youth and in the vigour of life, while death seems a distant cloud on the horizon of reality, it must yet be regarded as a salutary and appropriate occupation in the leisure of declining years. For it is the only interest which can prevent the degeneration of the moral and intellectual nature in old age. Without it, when the active work of life is done, men become slothful. If they have nothing further to look forward to, there is no reason for employing their activities: the game is played out and they lag superfluous on the stage; the battle of life is over as far as they are concerned, and they must leave its conduct to more vigorous hands. They have become useless and intrinsically unimportant, unprofitable burdens of the ground at the best, or obstacles that obstruct the path of fitter men. And this feeling is both bitter and embittering; they relax too soon their efforts to preserve their powers of mind, and cling with demoralizing tenacity to whatever fragments of their former glories they can lay hold of. And so they become both intellectually torpid and morally exacting, and frequently cynical, with a cynicism which has lost even the consciousness of the ideals it controverts.

And all these demoralizing effects of a disbelief in their future are, it should be observed, quite independent of the emotional stimuli of hopes and fears. If men believed in a future life from which they neither hoped nor feared anything sensational, it would yet be a most salutary belief. For it would provide old age with an aim, and redeem it from the undignified futility it so often displays at present. And hence it would be of the greatest service not only to the individual but also to society, as tending to raise its moral and intellectual tone. Nothing would act as a more powerful tonic to improve the whole moral and spiritual condition of mankind than a belief which would induce men to realize more vividly the solemnity of the issues involved in human life.

Thus there are two advantages, at the very least, in the belief in a future life, which no other doctrine can offer; the motive it alone supplies for continuing the activity of life to the last, and the sense it engenders that life is not a fleeting, senseless, play of feverish appetites, to be hastily glutted with whatsoever pleasures each passing moment can afford, but must be consecrated to higher and more permanent aims, to activities which, it may be, will enrich us with a serener contentment even here, and certainly will prove an inexhaustible source of abiding bliss hereafter. And these advantages are a sufficient reason, alike on personal and on social grounds, for inclining favourably towards this belief.
But there are other reasons, no less forcible and more obvious.

One need not necessarily be violently enamoured of one's own life, or cherish any abject desire for personal continuance, in order to feel that if the chapter of life is definitely closed by death, despair is the end of all its glories. For to assert that death is the end of all beings, is to renounce the ideal of happiness (ch. iv. §§ 5-17), to admit that adaptation is impossible, and that the end of effort must be failure. And it is to poison the whole of life with this bitter consciousness. And further, it is finally to renounce the faith in the rationality of things, which could hardly be reasserted against so wanton a waste of energy as would be involved in the destruction of characters and attainments it required so much patient toil and effort to acquire. A good and wise man dies, and his goodness and his wisdom, his incalculable powers to shape the course of things for good, are wasted and destroyed. In the light of such a fact, we should have to put the worst construction alike upon the waste and the parsimony of nature elsewhere. They will both appear inexplicable freaks of a senseless constitution of things.

Hence we must reject the extremes on either side; we must refuse, not only to be terrified by maddening fears, to be intoxicated by unwarranted hopes, but also to be cajoled by a disingenuous rhetoric, which would persuade us of the superior dignity of unqualified negation. But if we preserve an attitude of critical moderation, there is little fear that reason will so far play us false as to commit us to any extravagant or unacceptable conclusions.

§ 3. But before we consider what reasons may be urged for or against the belief in immortality, we must examine with what reason that belief is sometimes based upon facts which would render all argument superfluous by directly establishing the existence of a future life.

It is one of the chief advantages of the assertors of a future life that they can bring forward direct evidence in its favour, whereas the doubts of their opponents must be inferential, and there can be no such thing as direct evidence against it. The ghost of Lord Lyttelton, in the famous story, might admonish his friend that his doubts were unfounded, but not even an Irishman could return to us with the assurance that there was no future life. If, therefore, the allegations that the dead do return are worthy of belief, if we can regard the tales of ghosts and spirits as scientifically adequate, they evidently settle the question.

Nor is there anything intrinsically absurd or impossible about this conception, or any reason to reject such stories, because of our preconceived notions, or on the ground of a misuse of the word supernatural. It is useless to assert that the supernatural is impossible, for if these stories are true, the facts to which they testify ipso facto cease to be supernatural. The inference to be drawn from these phenomena would simply be that we were mistaken in thinking that the change of death produced an absolute severance between us and the dead, and that there was no connection at all between our world and theirs. But if such intercourse is a fact, it is also possible and natural, and the laws and conditions thereof would be as capable of being determined as anything else. And it would surely be the most ridiculous of prejudices, or the most indefensible of lingering superstitions, to refuse to investigate scientifically so interesting a subject, on the ground that the evidence did not accord with our preconceptions as to what was appropriate and permissible conduct for the departed. What shall be said of the mental condition of those who assure us with one breath that they do not believe in the existence of spirits, but are quite sure that spiritism is false because spirits would never behave in the manner represented?

And yet this evidence, probably the vastest body of unsystematized testimony in the world, varying in value from the merest hearsay to the carefully recorded experience of the ablest and most competent men, is persistently put beyond the pale of science, and the isolated attempts to investigate it systematically have met with nothing but discouragement from the general public. The experience, e.g., of the Society for Psychical Research would afford a most curious commentary on the sincerity of men's supposed interest in a future life. Surely, if men had cared to have the question settled, they would not have allowed these phenomena to remain in doubt and perplexity from age to age, as a standing challenge to science and a standing reflection upon their desire for truth. We spend thousands of pounds on discovering the colour of the mud at the bottom of the sea, and do not grudge even the lives of brave men in exploring the North Pole — although there is obviously not the remotest prospect of establishing a trade in Manchester calicos with the Eskimos and polar bears — but we would not pay a penny, nor sacrifice the silliest scruple of a selfish reticence, to determine whether it is true that our dead do not pass wholly beyond our ken. And yet, with a tithe of the attention and study that has often been devoted to the most trivial and unworthy objects, the real nature of these "psychical" phenomena might have been explored — had it suited men to arrive at certainty on the subject.

But in any case our course is clear: as men of science we may deplore the apathy of mankind, as philosophers we must recognize that the present condition of the subject prevents us from treating these phenomena as admitted facts, on which it is possible to base inferences.

And from a philosophic point of view they possess in any case two defects. The first is that they are presented to us as mere facts. Now facts, we are apt to think, are mighty things, and able to force their way into all minds by sheer weight. But nothing could be more mistaken: a mere fact is a very feeble thing, and the minds of most men are fortresses which cannot be captured by a single assault, fortresses impenetrable to the most obvious fact, unless it can open up a correspondence with some of the prejudices within, and enter by a gate which their treasonable support betrays to the besieger. Or, to drop metaphor, the mind will either not receive, or gradually eject and obliterate elements which it cannot assimilate, which it cannot harmonize with the rest of the mental furniture, be they facts ten times over, and the occupation of the mind by facts is extremely precarious until reasons for them have been given which will reconcile them with the other constituents of the mind. Now the facts alleged are of a very startling character and run sharply counter to many old-established prejudices of most men, who are simply upset by them, shocked and perplexed, but quite unable to believe ''facts" which do not seem to fit into any reasonable scheme of things. Hence the assertion of facts does not dispense with the necessity of giving reasons.

And secondly, the facts are not in themselves adequate: they prove a future life, indeed, but not immortality.2

§ 4. It would be impossible, therefore, to avoid making the question of immortality one of reasoning, even if the reasoning should be as insufficient as that of the ordinary arguments on either side. And certainly we shall soon discover that most of these arguments are worthy of their origins in the prejudices of men, i.e., inconclusive and of little value. We must not expect then to find that the arguments in favour of a future life, whether based on authority or on reason, are either conclusive or secure.

To take, first, the most popular of these arguments, that which claims to base itself on the Christian religion. We shall find that though the traditions of the Christian Church apparently support the doctrine of a future life, its assurances are anything but explicit, and we must be easy to satisfy if we are content to accept them as conclusive. For it would be difficult to devise any eschatology more obscure, fragmentary and ambiguous than that of the traditional religion, or one which so ingeniously combines the defects of raising insoluble difficulties, and of yet leaving us without answer upon the most critical points.

The end and the origin of the soul are alike shrouded in perplexities which religious dogma makes no serious attempt to dispel. For instance, what happens to the soul after death? Does it sleep or is it judged? If it sleeps, — and to judge from the inscriptions of our graveyards this may claim to be the accepted view, — is not this an admission of the possibility of its annihilation at least for a season? And if for a time, why not for ever? Or if it is judged, what are the relations of this preliminary judgment to the Last Judgment?

Or, again, whence does the soul come? Does it exist before the body, is it derived from the souls or the bodies of its parents, or created ad hoc by the Deity?
Is Pre-existence, Traducianism, or Creationism the orthodox doctrine? The first theory, although we shall see that it is the only one on which any rational eschatology can be or has been based, is difficult, and has not been very prominent in religious thought, but the other two are alike impossible and offensive. And it would be difficult to decide which supposition was more offensive, whether that the manufacture of immortal spirits should be a privilege directly delegated to the chance passions of a male and a female, or that they should have the power at pleasure to call forth the creative energy of God. And however well the former theory may have agreed with the speculative views of the early Church, it would be well-nigh impossible now-a-days to distinguish it from materialism. And if the progress of science has rendered Traducianism untenable, has not the progress of moral insight done the same for Creationism? For it surely cannot explain the different dispositions and faculties of different souls by the varying excellence of the Creator's work, nor make the creation of souls with unequal endowments compatible with divine justice, even if it be supposed that the naturally inferior souls are judged by a more lenient standard. For how can a soul that has led the best life possible under very unfavourable conditions, has been, e.g., a good Fuegian, be adjudged worthy of heaven? If our life on earth has any educational value as a preparation for Heaven, the Fuegian would be utterly unfitted for any heavenly life, which could only make him supremely miserable; if it has not, he (and every one else) would have to be fitted for it by a miraculous fiat of the Deity.

Image
Picture of a Fuegian (possibly a Yaghan) by ship's artist Conrad Martens during a visit of HMS Beagle.

Fuegians are one of the three tribes of indigenous inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. In English, the term originally referred to the Yaghan people of Tierra del Fuego. In Spanish, the term fueguino can refer to any person from the archipelago.

-- Fuegians, by Wikipedia


But in this case, what is the use of earth-life, and why should not everybody be at once transmuted into an angel or devil, according as it pleased God to predestinate him? Does it convey an ennobling view of God's action to call in the aid of needless miracle in order to make good the original injustice of an unjustifiable inequality, and is it well to save the divine justice at the expense of the spiritual value of life?

From these and similar difficulties it will be seen that it is not merely the mania for making "concessions to science" that has more than once prompted "liberal" divines to undertake the proof that a belief in a future life was not an essential part of Christianity. And, indeed, they may be admitted to have established that there is no logical necessity for this doctrine within the system of the traditional religion, nor even any explicit affirmation of the continuance of all individuals. On the contrary, the Scriptures contain many passages which implicitly and explicitly deny it, and compare man to "the beasts that perish." And the positive assertions of Scripture are all inconclusive. Thus, e.g., no conclusion evidently can be drawn from the resurrection of Christ. For it is impossible to argue from the bodily resurrection of a divine being to the continuance of the soul of ordinary men. If there is one thing certain, it is that our future life cannot be similar to the resurrection and ascension into a super-terrestrial sphere of the terrestrial body of Christ. Whatever else we do when we die, we leave our bodies in our sepulchres. Nor need the specific promises of Heaven or Hell made to individuals in special cases be held to establish a universal rule.

Thus it appears that the traditional religion not only does not give us any serviceable information concerning any future life, but does not even secure us our fancied heritage of Heaven or of Hell. And once this is realized, it surely becomes evident that it cannot be accepted in any sense as conclusive of the matter under discussion.

§ 5. We may consider next two closely allied grounds for the belief in a future life, viz., its assertion on the ground of its practical or moral necessity, or of its being a postulate of feeling. These are probably the favourite bases for the hope of immortality among those who cherish it, but neither of them is conclusive.

It does indeed at first sound a persuasive and attractive line of argument to say that there can be no retribution of good and evil if there is no future life, and that the belief in it is therefore a practical necessity, if there is to be any reason or justice in the order of things.

But what if the constitution of things admit neither of reason nor of justice, and hence be unable to recognize any such moral necessity? What if things be inherently irrational and perverse?
That all should come right in the end is an assumption we can by no means make as a matter of course, but only with the utmost difficulty (cp. ch. v. § 2), and until it is established the argument from moral necessity is simply arguing in a circle. And even when it is admitted, as in a sense we have admitted it (§ 2, s.f ), it can never be admitted as an independent and substantive argument. It must always result from a general view of the world, which has previously established its rationality. And this is precisely what most of those that make use of this plea neglect to do. They make an appeal to moral necessity, although their systems have left no room for morality, for the distinction of Good and Evil. If, as is the case in the pantheism of the infinite (ch.x. §10), or in the atheism of Buddhism, the distinction of Good and Evil is merely phenomenal and really unmeaning, we have no business to expect from the All any perception of the "moral necessity" of bestowing a future life upon us.

Again, the assertion of a future life as a postulate of feeling seems to require something like universality in the feeling. But not only have we been led to observe phenomena (§§ 2 and 3), which throw considerable doubt on the genuineness of the alleged desire for immortality, but the history of Hinduism shows that under certain circumstances the prospect of the continuation of life may actually come to be pretty universally regarded with horror and detestation, and that the loss of personal existence by absorption into the Absolute may become the highest object of desire. Nor can human nature be utterly different in the West; and if among us the desire for annihilation is less prominent, it is not because it is there less reasonable. For surely it must indicate a deplorable lack either of imagination or of real belief if men who admit that if there is a future life they have merited the severest punishment — and there must be many such — can prefer the torments of eternal damnation to the cessation of life. Not only, therefore, does the argument from feeling involve the somewhat dubious thesis that men desire continuance at any price, but it also has first to posit the rationality of things. The constitution of things must not be so wantonly perverse as to baulk us of the satisfaction of our desires.

And even granting this, and granting, as we may perhaps do, that the desire for immortality has played an important and beneficial part in furthering the progress of the world, we are not yet assured of a personal immortality. It may be that our feelings are not destined to utter disappointment in their ultimate form, but that we were yet mistaken as to the real drift of our present desires. It may be that what would really satisfy them will be attained, and yet prove something considerably different from what we now desire.

Yet we may concede to this plea a certain amount of truth. It would truly be an outrage upon our conviction of the rationality of things if a feeling so deep-seated should prove groundless, if a feeling which has played so important and increasingly important a part in the Evolution of the world should not stand in some essential relation to the aim of the world-process.

§ 6. And lastly, all arguments drawn from the simplicity and unity of the soul are dangerous and fallacious (cp. ch. ii. §§ 20, 21). They rest upon an untenable dualism which inevitably raises insoluble questions as to the relations of body and soul, and the nature of the bond which connects them. For such dualism lends countenance to the idea that the connection between body and soul is extraneous and mechanical, that each might exist without the other, and yet be what it is. It is incompatible with the view which we have seen to be the only intelligible account of matter, and the only adequate reply to materialism (cp. ch. ix. §§ 26-28), viz., that matter exists only for spirits, and that the soul is the soul of a particular body, the internal reflex of a spiritual interaction of which the body is the external expression. And as in this dualism the body is the obvious and visible partner, whereas the soul is neither, there is an easy transition to a denial of the invisible soul and the crassest materialism.

And the dualism of body and soul is not only physically incompetent to account for the facts, but also, to a hardly less degree, psychologically. The conditioning of certain activities of the soul by the body is so manifest and irresistible, that a distinction between the ''bodily feelings," engendered in the soul by its connection with the body, and its own proper feelings, must be made, even though the unity and simplicity of the soul is thereby sacrificed. The bodily feelings are then regarded as transitory, and produce the distinction between the mortal and immortal "parts of the soul," and this distinction destroys the human personality. For, with any strictness and consistency, more and more of our psychical activities must be extruded from the immortal part of the soul, until it is suddenly discovered that all our activities are indelibly stamped with the impress of mortality, and the "immortal part" is left as an empty shell from which all content has been extracted, which has no feeling that anyone ever feels or is capable of feeling, and is nothing the continuance of which human feeling can possibly desire. And then the last step is inevitable: as all the attributes which express the individuality of the soul have been abstracted from, nothing remains to distinguish one person's soul from that of another; and so the immortal part is declared to be the Universal Soul, in which all the individual souls partake and which is one and the same for all. And whereas the personal individual souls are transitory, the impersonal Universal Soul is eternal: as a principle of metaphysics the unity of Soul is after a fashion maintained, even while personal immortality is declared a delusion. Such is the doctrine of immortality which is the genuine and logical outcome of every dualistic view of the relations of body and soul, and the history of philosophy shows that it may be read into, or developed out of, every dualistic system.3 But whatever its philosophic merits, and as to these what has been said about Pantheism will mutatis mutandis be applicable, it is pretty clear that the eternity of Universal Soul is not what men bargained for, nor anything that men desire, or perhaps ought to desire; it may or may not be an excellent doctrine philosophically, but it will hardly do duty instead of a personal immortality.

§ 7. And the arguments against the possibility of a future life are equally inconclusive.

The most popular of these is also the most worthless; for the different forms of materialism are fatal only to the mistaken dualism which regards body and soul as separable entitles. They do not touch the idealist view which refutes the materialist inference from the facts by the reply that the connection of "body" and ''soul" is at least as well explained by regarding Matter as a phase of the content of Spirit as vice versa (cp. ch. ix. § 28).

§ 8. And idealism also enables us to see the inconclusiveness of the phenomena of death, which form a silent but continual protest against the belief in a future life, all the more forcible because it appeals to some of our deepest feelings at times when our powers to resist the impression are weakest.

He would indeed be a strangely constituted man who did not in the presence of his beloved dead feel the unanswerable impressiveness of death, the utter and irretrievable severance which its agency effected. And no argument or consolation can get over the fact that whether or not the dead continue to exist, they are lost to the survivors, and that the ties which bound them to their earthly environment are broken. For whatever mysteries the future may hold in store, no future meeting, no recognition even, can resume the thread or restore the sweetness of the human relations death has severed, or assure us that under conditions wholly different the charm of human relationships will be renewed.

Though, therefore, we must thus renounce whatever hopes we may have based on impure and imperfect relations rather than upon the highest and purest of spiritual sympathies, we must yet resist the impression of this spurious self-evidence of the finality of death, and reassert against the impulses of agonized feeling that the apparent need not be the real.
And thus we may come to realize that our view of death is necessarily imperfect and one-sided. For we contemplate it only from the point of view of the survivors, never from that of the dying. We have not the least idea of what death means to those that die. To us it is a catastrophic change, whereby a complex of phenomenal appearances, which we call the body of the dead, ceases to suggest to us the presence of the ulterior existence which we called his spirit. But this does not prove, nor even tend to prove, that the spirit of the dead has ceased to exist. It merely shows that he has ceased to form part of our little world, to interact, at least in the way in which we had been accustomed, with our spirits. But it is at least as probable that this result is to be ascribed to his having been promoted or removed, as to his having been destroyed.

And for such suppositions nature offers us manifold analogies. It would be a change similar to that whereby a being which had lived the earlier stages of its life in the water, by a sudden change in its organization, took to living in the air, and this we know is the case with many insects.
Hence it was not by a mistaken fancy that the butterfly was at all times regarded as the type of immortality. For the analogy is really fairly complete: in both cases there occurs an apparently catastrophic change in the mode of life, a breach in the continuity of existence, a passing into a new environment with very different functions and conditions. And in both cases also there is left behind an empty shell to deride the fears of those who cannot understand that identity can be preserved through all the transformations of metamorphosis. To judge by the first appearance of the cast-off slough, we should deem the change, of which we see the symbol, to have been that of death, and yet we now know that it indicates a fresh phase of life. Is it then so bold a conjecture that by the time when we know as much of the spiritual aspects of existence as we now do of the physical, the dead body may seem a shell as empty as the chrysalis from which the butterfly has flown, and as sure a token of release into a wider sphere of life?

But, it may be urged, is there not the great difficulty that the chrysalis is empty, while the organization of the dead body remains intact, and that we can trace the development of the butterfly in the chrysalis, while we cannot see how the spirit is prepared for its new life, as its old body gets worn out with age: the change in the one case only seems catastrophic, in the other it really is.

Such objections owe their undeniable plausibility to the deficiencies of our knowledge and the grossness of our perceptions. But for these there might be some hope of our understanding that from a spiritual point of view the dead body is really just as empty as the chrysalis, a meaningless mass of machinery, from which the motive force has been withdrawn; but as its emptiness is spiritual, and not visible and palpable, we fail to see the parallelism.

And so again it might be, if we lived more wisely, that the body would not be outworn before the spirit wearied of its life on earth, or before it had prepared for itself a spiritual tenement, with which, at the summons of the angel of death, it would soar aloft as gladly as the butterfly.

But yet again, it may be asked, if death is but change, why should the complex of phenomena we call the body be left behind to decay and to pollute a world from which the spirit has departed? But what would such critics have? Would they prefer that men at death should silently vanish away, and be dissolved into air like ghosts? Would this be a more satisfactory mode of effecting one's exit? And does not, after all, the objection on the ground of the decay of the body rest upon a misconception? There is no reason why the body should not be preserved: death, as we now know, has nothing to do with the decay of the body. For decay is a phenomenon of life, not of death, of the life of the micro-organisms that live upon the bodies of the dead. And is there not a certain symbolic fitness in the persistence for a season of the body in the phenomenal world in which the spirit worked, and which its action will affect as long as that world remains? It forms, as it were, a symbol of a spiritual agency whose spiritual development has taken other forms, and left this shell behind in its advance to higher phases of existence.

There is no reason, therefore, why we should take the phenomenon of death as conclusive of the matter, or regard it as inconsistent with the conception of a spiritual process of purification by means of the gradations of existence. For if such be the essential meaning of the world-process, it is evident that no indefinite stay can be made in any one stage, and indeed none could permanently meet the spiritual requirements. It is, moreover, pretty obvious in our case that long life is by no means an unmixed blessing: for by an intelligent mind the lessons of life are soon learnt, and while the social environment remains what it is, the experience of a protracted life is apt only to engender a conviction that all is humbug, a cynical disbelief in all ideals and the possibility of realizing them.

§ 9. Such considerations may tend to counteract the overwhelming impressiveness of the fact of death, but they only demonstrate the possibility of a future life. And moreover, though death makes the strongest appeal to our feelings, the doctrine of a future life involves a difficulty far more serious in the eyes of reason. This difficulty arises out of the impossibility of fixing the point at which immortality begins, either in the beginning of the individual's life or in that of the race. It seems so utterly impossible to attribute an immortal, or indeed any sort of consciousness, to the material rudiments of our individual existence; and the modern doctrine of the descent of man makes it almost as impossible to do so in the case of the race. The union of two minute particles of Matter is the historical origin, at all events, of all conscious beings; and at what point in the historical development can we introduce a transition from the material existence of the germs, which exists only for consciousness, to the spiritual existence of an immortal consciousness?4 Or again, if all living beings have been propagated from living protoplasm, and if man is but the highest of the animals, but does not differ from them in kind, how can we, in the infinite gradations of spiritual evolution, draw a line anywhere to separate men or animals who possess immortal souls from those that do not? It would seem that they must all be treated alike; either all animals are immortal or none. And yet, while some might welcome a belief in the immortality of the higher animals, e.g. of dogs, how could any one admit the immortality of an amoeba? And even if our generosity rose to the absurd pitch of admitting it, how could we carry this belief into practice? how should we discern the immortality of beings which possess so little individuality? Is every leaf or cell of a tree, and every segment of a zoophyte — in short, every part of an organism which under favourable conditions is capable of independent existence — an immortal individual? If so, can we multiply immortal souls by dividing a jelly-fish? Surely, when once the question is definitely raised that we must be just as immortal as the germs and protoplasms from which we sprang, the answer our reason must give is that immortality is a foolish dream.

§ 10. It is to be feared that reflections like these present almost insuperable obstacles to the belief in a future life in modern minds. But if they can be answered, their very difficulty would make the answer the more satisfactory. Yet no attempt at answering the difficulty can be successful which does not realize where its real point lies. Its essence lies in the fact that whereas consciousness and the conscious life of spiritual beings is a matter of degree, it seems impossible to admit degrees of immortality. It seems as though a being must either have a future life or not, must either be immortal or perish utterly. But if the lowest passes into the highest forms of consciousness by a continuous development, it is nowhere possible to draw a line of demarcation, and to assert the immortality of man without admitting that of the amoeba.

To assert the continuance of spiritual beings, therefore, it would be requisite to assert gradations of immortality. We must somehow distinguish between the case of the embryo and the adult, between the highest man and the lowest animal. We must, in short, discover degrees in a spiritual evolution corresponding to the degrees of the physical evolution.


§ 11. Now, though these postulates may at first sight appear strange and impossible, yet if we discard ancient prejudices, they will not perhaps prove incapable of fulfilment. We require, in the first place, a careful analysis of the conditions on which a future life depends.

To have a real meaning, immortality must be personal immortality; i.e., it must involve in some sort the persistence of the "I" which in this life thinks, and feels, and wills. It must preserve our personal identity, i.e., there must be continuity of consciousness between the Self of this life and of the next. The Buddhist doctrine of "Karma,'' of a person who is the resultant of one's actions, but does not share any part of one's consciousness, is a miserable compromise between the desires to deny the eternity of personal suffering (for to Buddhism to exist is to suffer), and to retain the moral stimulus of a belief in a future life. But it falls between two stools, and does not satisfy the conditions of a genuine future life. For it is impossible to regard the person who inherits one's Karma as identical with oneself, or to feel a responsible interest in his fate. His connection with the man whose Karma moulds his character and predestines his circumstances seems purely arbitrary, and due to a tyrannous constitution of things whose procedures we are not called upon to endorse.

And, to a less degree, the same defect of failing adequately to preserve the sense of personal identity in its doctrines of the future life, is observable also in the current religious eschatology, and is probably one of the chief reasons of its practical ineffectiveness. We are led to think of the breach in continuity as too absolute, and feel little real concern in the angel or demon whom the catastrophe of our death produces in another world.

If, then, a future life without self-identity is a meaningless mockery, let us inquire on what self-identity depends. And the answer seems plain that it primarily depends on nothing else than memory. It is only by means of memory that we can identify ourselves with our past; it is only by memory that we can hope to enjoy the fruits of present efforts in the future. If every morning on awaking we had forgotten all that we ever did, if all the feelings, thoughts, hopes, fears and aspirations of yesterday's self had perished overnight, we should soon cease to regard to-morrow's self as a personage in whom it was possible to take any rational interest, or for whose future it was necessary or possible to provide. We take an interest in our own future, because we believe that we can forecast the feelings of the future self, because we believe that the future self which enjoys the fruits of our labours will be conscious of its past, because, in a word, its welfare is organically connected with that of our present self. Thus, to all intents and purposes, self identity, and with it immortality, depend on memory.

§ 12. But memory is a matter of degree. Here, then, we have the key to a theory of immortality which will admit of graduation. If we can conceive a future life, the reality of which depends on memory, it will admit of less or more. And if, as seems natural, the extent to which the events of life are remembered depends largely on the intensity of spiritual activity they implied, it follows that the higher and intenser consciousness was during life, the greater the intensity of future consciousness. Hence the amoeba or the embryo, with their infinitesimal consciousness, will possess only an infinitesimal memory of their past after death. And this for a twofold reason: not only must the impress life produces upon so rudimentary a consciousness generate only a very faint memory, but the contents also of life will present little that is capable of persisting and worthy of being retained. Thus the lowest phases of spiritual existence will have nothing to remember, and hardly any means of remembering it. We cannot, therefore, ascribe to them any vivid or enduring consciousness of their past lives, and yet need not deny it altogether. They have a future life, but it is rudimentary.

This view will open up to us an alternative to utter extinction or fully conscious immortality
, and we shall no longer be haunted with that nightmare of orthodoxy, the vision of "little children, a span long, crawling in hell." But by a self-acting arrangement the condition of consciousness hereafter will accurately correspond to its attainments here. Just in proportion as we have developed our spiritual powers here will be our spiritual future. Those who have lived the life of beasts here, a dull and brutish life that was redeemed by no effort to illumine the soul by spiritual enlightenment, will be rewarded as "the beasts that perish." They will retain little of what they were, their future life will be brief and faint. On the other hand, we need not hesitate to attribute to the faithful dog, whom the strength of pure affection for his master has lifted far above the spiritual level of his race, at least as much immortality as to the brutal savage, whose life has been ennobled by no high thoughts and redeemed by no elevating feeling.5 Those, again, whose activities have been devoted to the commission of evil deeds, that burn their impress on the soul, will be haunted by their torturing memory. Those who have trained and habituated themselves to high and noble activities, who have disposed their thoughts towards truths which are permanent and their affections towards relations which are enduring, will rise to life everlasting, and will have actions worthy of memory to look back upon. The cup of Circe, the debasing draught of forgetfulness, which turns men into beasts, and renders them oblivious of their divine destiny, will pass from them. And they will be capable of remembering their past life, glad to retrace the record of great and noble deeds and lofty aspirations, the promise of a spiritual progress they have since nobly fulfilled. Nor will the memory of the past fade until it pleases them to forget it in the ecstasy of still sublimer activities. Thus each of us will be the master and maker of his own self and of his own immortality, and his future life will be such as he has deserved.

§ 13. But it may be objected that memory does not last for ever, and that hence a future life depending on it would endure but for a season. And the fact that this and several other objections might be brought against the views we have hinted at, should admonish us of the necessity of dropping the negative method of criticizing inconclusive arguments, and proceeding at length to a connected account of a positive doctrine. It may be a salutary and necessary discipline to begin at the beginning as it appears to us, to start with the obvious difficulties which a subject presents to our first attack; but after such efforts have cleared the ground, we must learn to discover the real root of the matter, and discuss it in its logical and not in its historical order. Hence it is necessary to supplement the results of critical discussion of perplexities by a systematic exposition, beginning with a statement of the ultimate positive ground of the doctrine of immortality.
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Re: Riddles of the Sphinx, by Ferdinand Canning Scott Schill

Postby admin » Sun Apr 26, 2020 8:58 am

Part 2 of 2

§ 14. The only absolutely secure basis either for the assertion or for the denial of immortality must be metaphysical. It is only the all-devouring One of Monism which can make the permanent existence of the Many impossible; it is only the plurality of ultimate existences which can ultimately make it possible. The ultimate self-existence of spirits, the doctrine that existences are many, spirits uncreated, uncaused, that are and ever have been and can never cease to be, is the only metaphysical ground for asserting the immortality of the individual. And this metaphysical ground we have secured by the preference given to Pluralism over Monism (ch. x. §§ 21-23), and by our account of the Transcendental Ego as the reconciliation of idealism and science and as the explanation of the material world (ch. ix. §§ 22, 24, 26-31).

Now what is the bearing of our metaphysics on the question before us? It follows necessarily and at once from the pluralistic answer given to the ultimate question of ontology that the ultimate existences are eternal and immortal, and this assertion also applies to the Transcendental Egos that underlie our phenomenal selves. In some sense, therefore — to the extent to which we are to be identified with ultimate existences and transcendental Egos — it is absolutely certain that we are immortal. And further, as the whole world-process is a process taking place in the interaction between the Egos and the Deity, the different stages of material evolution must correspond to different phases of that spiritual interaction. Parallel, therefore, to the physical evolution, there runs a spiritual evolution, related to it as meaning and motive to outward and visible manifestation. And there is no reason why this process should not be the development, not of Spirit in general, but of particular spirits, why a single Ego should not pass through the succession of organisms and developments of consciousness, from the amoeba to man, and from man to perfection. This gives, as it were, the spiritual interpretation of the descent of man from the beasts, and at the same time assures him of his due and proportionate share in the immortality of the ultimate spirit.

§ 15. But though the plurality of ultimate existence affords the only safe and sure ground for metaphysical immortality, it is too remote from the phenomena of our world to be at once appealed to in settling the nature of our future life. It is necessary to make out the connection of the metaphysical with the physical, and it is just on the subject of this connection that considerable variety of doctrine might prevail. We may admit without derogating from the substantial truth of our principles, that our data are as yet too inadequate for us to regard speculations concerning the connection of our present selves with the ultimate spirits as more than probable guesses, to be ratified or modified by the course of future discovery. Hence, though it may be laid down generally that the ultimate spirits manifest themselves in the phenomenal, it is yet necessary to ask what is the relation of such an eternal spirit to its successive phases, which form our phenomenal existences, and in what sense can these be said to have a future life? Upon the answer to this question it will depend whether we can continue to speak of our future life in any ordinary sense.

Now that the insufficiency of our data renders the question a difficult one, it would be affectation to deny. And the reflection that with a little more knowledge the greatest obscurities would seem plain and self-evident fails also to assist our fainting imagination. But we may perhaps convey some idea of the facts by the aid of a simile.

If the world-process aims at impressing the divine image upon the hard metal of the Ego, then each phenomenal life may be supposed to stamp some faint impression on its substance. And as the impressions are multiplied, they gradually mould the Ego into the required shape, and each successive impress, working upon material already more completely fitted into shape, produces a more definite impression of itself, and also fashions more definitely that which it impresses. As the material comes nearer to its final shape its resistance becomes less, and each impress produces fewer features which must be erased as divergent from the ideal. Or, in other words, the spiritual value of the lower stages of consciousness is small; they produce their effect only by their repetition and multiplication. But as the higher grades of individuality are reached, the spiritual significance of a single phenomenal life is intensified, and it leaves a more enduring mark upon the nature of the spirit. If, therefore, we ask in what sense the phenomenal phases of the spirit's development persist and continue, we must answer generally, that they persist as factors in the development. The future lives of the spirit are the resultant of its past. But the individual impress of a single life persists only in so far as it has coincided with the course of spiritual development. So, too, the impressions produced by single blows upon a coin persist only in so far as their shape coincided with that to be ultimately produced; the individual divergences and eccentricities of a single impress are obliterated by their multiplication. Thus in a way, the good, i.e., the action in the line of upward development, would be immortal, however humble the sphere in which it was enacted: the good character would persist even when it was absorbed and included in a higher stage of development, for such development would only be the natural and necessary development of the highest aspirations of the lower life.

And this mode of spiritual progression is not an arbitrary conjecture of our fancy concerning a transcendent sphere of which we know nothing; it is the law of all life even now. It is the law whereby all organisms take up and assimilate what they can utilize, i.e., what serves their purposes, and reject what they cannot;
it is the law whereby the world-process preserves what promotes its purpose, viz., the good, and dissolves the rest away. And this law may be traced throughout all individual and social progress. To be impressed by any experience requires the previous attainment of a certain correspondence between the agent and the patient; to be persistent, the impression must be not only congenial to the nature impressed, but consonant with the line of its development. A lasting impression, in other words, is one which is important to us, not only for a moment but for the course of our history; if it runs counter to our nature and our history, its influence is rapidly obliterated. And so with events that had little intrinsic importance, i.e., little spiritual significance, they are forgotten and their effect is evanescent. For memory is not indiscriminate: it selects what is significant and thus preserves it: and yet again all the experience that moulds the character, though it may be forgotten, has not wholly perished, for it persists in the resultant habits. And what is true of impressions is true also of persons and of actions; in social progress also it is emphatically not true that "the evil that men do lives after them." Like a polluted stream, the course of history runs itself clear of the errors and crimes of the unconscious or unwilling human instruments of the divine purpose: the blindness and perversity of its champions cannot stop the progress of a good cause. On the other hand, it is vain to struggle against the spirit of the ages and the necessities of evolution; neither virtue nor genius can prop a falling cause. Christianity triumphed in spite of the murder of Hypatia; but Demosthenes could not save Athens, nor Hannibal Carthage, and Cato could not recall the ghost of Roman freedom by the blood of his self-sacrifice. Force may effect reactions that run counter to the course of things, but they soon pass away, and leave no trace behind. How much remained of the constitution of Sulla, or of the restored rule of the Bourbons, twenty years after its institution?

Thus all the elements of the lower phases of life that are capable of development are transformed into the higher, and the continuous thread of consciousness is never broken. And this continuity of the phases of consciousness is really sufficient to secure also the identity of the self, for though self-identity depend on memory, it is not necessary that the memory should be perfect. It is not necessary that we should remember all we did ten years ago in order to feel ourselves the same persons now as then, nor need we expect to remember all we feel now in order to identify ourselves with ourselves ten years hence. The continuity of the chain of consciousness suffices to constitute the identity, even though from any given point the remoter links have passed out of sight ; and hence a future life may in a sense be ascribed to all conscious beings.

Nevertheless it is not until the higher stages of individuality and spiritual development are reached that the phenomenal self of any single life, i.e., the memory of its past, can be supposed to form a predominant, or even an important, factor in the total or final consciousness of the Ego, or one that can display any great permanence. The lower phases of Evolution do not generate sufficient psychical energy to attain to any considerable degree of immortality. For as we saw (§ 12), the continuance of life depends on memory, and memory on the intensity of the impression thoughts and feelings make upon the soul, and on the whole the capacity to receive impressions corresponds to the degree of spiritual development.


But how does all this apply to man? Shall we assert that man has reached a sufficient height of spiritual evolution so that the human soul, the phenomenal self of our earth-life, persists as human? Certainly man has in many cases shown such capacity for thoughts more than human, for a ''love that is stronger than death," that it would seem monstrous to deny him the intensity of consciousness which substantially preserves his personality. And yet, when we look upon the sordid lives of others, whose outlook is limited to the grossest features of this world, we cannot but feel that the persistence of their personalities would be only an obstacle to the development of their spirit. And so it will perhaps seem a probable compromise to make the aspirations of the soul, i.e., the fitness of the phenomenal self to adapt itself to the conditions of a higher spiritual life, the test of immortality, and to suppose that the desire of continuance, whether widely or exceptionally felt, affords a fairly adequate measure of personal survival. We need not suppose that personal immortality will be forced on those whose phenomenal self has not desired it nor prepared itself to survive death, and who make no effort to preserve the memory of their past, nor yet that those should be baulked who have really and intensely desired it. And for these latter the practical outcome of this doctrine cannot be formulated more truly and more concisely than in the maxim of Aristotle, [x]6 bidding them "as far as possible to lead the life of immortality" on earth, i.e., to live constantly in communion with the ideal, and in co-operation with the aim of the world's evolution.

§ 16. Such are the outlines of a theory of immortality which would meet the main difficulties of the subject, and explain how a future life can admit of gradations proportioned to the grades and conditions of consciousness.
But our account would be incomplete if it did nothing to elucidate several points not yet touched upon. The easiest misconception, e.g., to fall into would be that of regarding the Ego as a reality different from the self. It has already been remarked, and must here be emphasized again, that the Ego is not a second and alien consciousness concurrent with and distinct from the selves (cp. ch. ix. § 22). The self or selves (ch. ix. § 23) are simply the actually conscious part of the Ego, which represents the potentialities of their development on the one hand and their primary and pre-cosmic condition on the other. The Ego is both the basis of the development and its end, but within the process the selves alone are real. For as will be shown in the next chapter, both the precosmic basis and the post-cosmic end, though necessarily implied in and inferred from the cosmic process, belong to a radically different order of things from our present world of Becoming, and the Ego does not as such enter into the cosmos. Even if, therefore, we adopted a supposition which may perhaps commend itself from a moral point of view, that after death, in the intervals, as it were, of its incarnations, the Ego recovered a fuller consciousness and the memory of all its past lives, these lucid intervals, though they might produce great moral effects, would not in themselves form part of the phenomenal development, and the latter would appear to be continuous from phase to phase of phenomenal consciousness.

§ 17. Secondly, we must consider some of the objections likely to be made to a doctrine involving the pre-existence of the soul, although no apology should really be needed. For no rational argument in favour of immortality can be devised that will not tell as strongly in favour of the pre-existence as of the post-existence of the soul, and this has been fully recognized by all rational defenders of immortality from the time of Plato downwards. It would in fact, as we saw in § 4, be hard to defend the only alternative theories of Traducianism and Creationism without a high degree of either moral obliquity or intellectual obtuseness.

And in addition to the somewhat negative merit of being the only possible theory, it is one which has been becoming progressively more credible. In early times, while our earth was regarded as the centre of the universe and the only abode of intelligent beings, the theory of pre-existence and transmigration was liable to be discredited by very homely objections. The limitation of the total number of available souls would either limit, or be refuted by, the increase of population, while their confinement to a single world precluded the idea of anything like a real progress of the individual souls. They had to be reincarnated in our world, until, as the history of the Hindus and Buddhism showed, the doctrine of transmigration, with its endless round of purposeless re-births, became a terror such that men eagerly grasped at the idea of annihilation as a release from the vicissitudes of life. But now the knowledge of the plurality of worlds has relieved the doctrine of the first difficulty, while the theory of the ascent which is strangely nick-named that of the descent of man, and of the transformations of animals into men, shows that the process of transmigration is not devoid of the elements of progress. Is it not curious, again, that whereas nothing has brought more ridicule upon the belief in metempsychosis than its inference that the souls of men had previously animated the bodies of animals, this very pedigree of the human soul should have been rendered credible and probable by the discoveries of modern science? If the Darwinian theory of descent compels us to assert that the soul of man has been developed out of the souls of animals, what difficulty remains in the supposition that each individual soul has passed through the stages of this same development?

And again, the objection to pre-existence, on the ground of our failure to remember anything about our past lives, has distinctly diminished in cogency. We have learnt too well what a curiously uncertain thing memory is to attach much weight to its disabilities. For, in the first place, the absence of memory may be perfectly accounted for teleologically on grounds of adaptation. The memory of such a past as we should probably have had would have been a most troublesome equipment, a most disabling burden, in the battle of life. For the recollection of our past faults and past failures would, in the present state of our spiritual development, be a most fatal obstacle to the freshness and hopefulness with which we should encounter life's present problems. Whatever, therefore, may be the case hereafter, it seems clear that the cultivation of a wise forgetfulness was the condition of spiritual progress in the past; a short memory was necessary, if the burden of unbearable knowledge was not to crush our spirit.

Secondly, in the face of the growing evidence of how the right manipulations may revive the memory of what seemed to have perished beyond recovery (cp. ch. ix. § 28 s.f.), it would be rash indeed to assert that the progress of experimental psychology should not, by some as yet undiscovered process, enable us actually to remember our past.

And lastly, it should be observed that whatever the evidential value of our obliviousness of our past lives, it applies equally to the earlier portions of our present life. No one has any but second-hand evidence of the earlier stages of his existence on earth; our belief in our birth rests upon testimony, and is confirmed by inference; we believe the tales of our entry into the world, because we perceive that we must have come into it somehow. And the inference as to our pre-existence is of a precisely similar kind, though, it may be, of inferior certainty (cp. ch. X. § 29). So also we believe the testimony of our reason as to our past existence, because there is no other mode of accounting for our present existence; we believe in pre-existence, because it is the only reasonable inference from the observed facts.

§ 18. But there remains one very real and serious objection to our eschatology, as to all theories of pre-existence, and indeed to all belief in a future life. This is the conflict between it and the conception of heredity. If our parents fashion our bodies for us, and if our souls are the souls of our particular bodies, how can the immortal spirit enter them from without? If our character and circumstances are the inherited results of the past action of our parents, how can they be the result of the past action of our Ego, and the reward of conduct in a previous life?

The difficulty is a real one, and must not be trifled with or evaded. It will not do to deny the fact of heredity, and still less to limit its scope by distinguishing that part of the soul which is inherited from that which pre-exists. The one device would display only our scientific ignorance, the other our metaphysical incompetence (cp. § 6).

But perhaps, we may say, the dilemma in which the objection seeks to place us is a false one, and the alternatives of "either fashioned by our parents or by our spirit" are not so exclusive as they might at first sight appear. For why should we not be fashioned both by our parents and by our own past, in different ways? The possibility of this solution appears at first somewhat of a mystery, but we ought by this time to have acquired a sufficient distrust of pseudo-mysteries not to jump at the conclusion that any difficulty we can formulate is beyond the bounds of the human reason.

For, admitting the general doctrine that the character of the offspring is inherited from the parents, we may raise the question of what determines the particular mixture which constitutes a particular character. The parents possess an indefinite number of potentialities that may possibly be inherited, and these, again, may be commingled in an indefinite number of ways. But the character actually inherited is a definite combination of these potential qualities, and what determines the way in which it is actually combined? It is not enough to know generally that the parents supply the materials of the new combination; we must know also what arranges the materials in a definite order.

Now if we supposed that this proportion in which the various dispositions of the parents entered into the character of the offspring was really determined by the character of the spiritual entity which the parents were capable of providing with a suitable organism, we should at all events have devised a method which rendered pre-existence compatible with heredity. For there is no apparent break in the chain of natural causes: the whole character of the offspring is inherited from the parents. But as the limits within which heredity is possible are very wide, the spiritual selection is supposed to work within them. And as no direct evidence can ever prove that an indefinite number of other combinations would not have equally well satisfied the conditions of all the physical factors, it is clear that our theory can never be disproved by the facts of heredity. On the contrary, it might perhaps serve to explain some of its most perplexing physical aspects, such as the origination of the so-called "accidental variations" which play so important a part in biological history. At present the variations which produce a man of genius or generate a new species, are to science utterly inexplicable; for that is the meaning of "accidental." The constitution of the parents no doubt renders them possible, for else they would not occur, but it in no wise explains them. For they are cases which border upon the impossible, and what is wanted is some explanation of how and why these exceptional possibilities are occasionally realized, and how the forces which resist any divergence from the normal combinations are occasionally overcome. And we delude ourselves if we suppose that we have cast any light upon the subject by adducing the parallel of exceptional combinations in the realm of mathematical probabilities. For in throwing dice, e.g., no one combination is in itself any more probable than any other, nor is there any force acting so as to make the succession of 1, 2, 5 any easier than three sixes. It is only because there are so many more of the combinations we call ordinary possible, that they occur more frequently, and no greater energy is required to throw ten sixes in succession than to throw any other series.

But a case of heredity is totally different. The forces tending to reproduce in the offspring something like the average character of the race must preponderate so enormously, that the resistance to any marked divergence from it must be incalculably great, and increase in geometrical proportion the more marked the divergence becomes. That is to say, it is immensely more difficult to throw the rare combination, not merely because there are so many more of the ordinary ones, but because far more force is required, because the dice are so cogged as to make it nearly impossible. Hence it is useless to appeal to the calculus of probabilities as to a deus ex machina to help us out of the difficulty: we must recognize that every case of variation requires a definite and relatively very powerful force to produce it. But where is this force to come from? Surely not from the physical conditions of generation? For these do not vary greatly in the generation of a genius and of a duffer. And besides, how should minute differences of times and seasons and temperature and manner, etc., have such disproportionate psychical effects?

But let us indulge science in these a priori prejudices, and admit that in some way, not to be further explained, the physical circumstances at the time of generation determine with which out of an indefinite number of possible characters the offspring is to be provided. Even so the question we have raised will only recur in another form, and we must ask what determines generation to take place at the particular moment when it will result in a particular character of the offspring. For here again the field of selection is extremely wide, and it would surely be an immensely impressive fact that a moment's delay or precipitation may make all the difference, for good and for evil, in the natural endowment of the offspring.

So we must, from the strictly physical point of view, answer, that the circumstances which determine at which out of all possible moments generation shall take place, depend on another set of ulterior circumstances. And if the questioner pertinaciously inquires again on what these circumstances in their turn depend, he must be told, on another set of circumstances, and these again on another, and so on indefinitely, until we realize that we have unwittingly launched forth into an infinite regress of causes, which deludes us with a semblance of explanation, but baffles all attempts to arrive at a real and final answer. And then, if we have the courage really to think out the question, and do not give up the pursuit of truth faintheartedly as soon as our imagination wearies and our attention is relaxed, the perception may begin to dawn upon us that physical causation in the phenomenal sphere is not, perhaps, the only, nor ultimately the most satisfactory, mode of explaining a fact.  

§ 19. It is quite possible for the same event to be conditioned in two different ways, teleologically and historically, by a reason as well as by what we somewhat ambiguously call a cause. And it is only human inconsistency which sees any difficulty in this. For it is nothing but inconsistency, to limit teleological causation by reasons to conscious human action, and to refuse to extend it to all things, i.e., to deny the complete parallelism of the processes of nature and of our minds, while we yet assert their partial parallelism by asserting the existence of physical causation. For the assertion of the reality of causation assumes this similarity of mind and nature to some extent; and if we must assume it in some form to make science possible, why should we not assume it in its complete form, and thereby do away with the difficulties in which our inconsistent assumptions involve us? If cause is a category of the human mind which we attribute to nature, why should we not, while we are about it, attribute it in its complete form as the final cause, in which it is no longer a category which refutes itself?
There may be some ground for objecting to final causes from a thoroughly sceptical point of view, which does not admit that the world of appearances is commensurate with our thought (cp. ch. iii. § 11); but from the standpoint of science, which admits this assumption, such an objection surely strains at gnats while swallowing camels (cp. ch. vii. § 6).

§ 20. And it would be ridiculous affectation to assert that we are not perfectly familiar with several such instances of double causation. Our daily life supplies abundant examples of actions which are physically caused by one set of persons and teleologically by another. The man who publishes a report of the discovery of fabulously rich gold mines, with the purpose of attracting immigrants, is at least as truly the cause of the resulting "rush" as the leg-muscles of the gold diggers. And so everything in the nature of a plan, plot, or device for influencing the action of others implies agents who consciously or unconsciously give effect to the purposes of others. But the phenomenon can be studied most clearly and unmistakably in post-hypnotic suggestions. It is suggested to a hypnotized subject that he is to do a certain action on awaking: when he awakes, he has no memory of the suggestion, but executes the order, if it be not one palpably absurd and repugnant to his habits, without the slightest suspicion that it has been in any way determined by any extraneous cause: on the contrary, if inquiries are made, he will even proceed to give reasons for doing what he did, which would satisfy everyone who was not aware of the real cause of the action in the hypnotic suggestion.7 And such examples should make us realize, however much we may struggle against the admission, that our causes are always reasons,8 and must be so from the constitution of our minds, and that with a moderate amount of ingenuity a great variety of reasons can be given for any action. It is therefore a mere superstition to suppose that we ever arrive at the knowledge of a physical cause so absolute that it does not admit of an alternative. Hence, as soon as any considerable interests are involved, it will always be possible to support them with a show of reason, and the only error of such reasonings often is that they are esteemed mutually exclusive.

And it is not merely in the phenomena of daily life and of psychical science that we are familiar with the reality of double causation, but no less in the religious doctrine of an over-ruling Providence, i.e., of an agency which shapes the course of natural causation in accordance with a preconceived purpose.

But the philosophic truth which underlies all these facts and all these beliefs is one and the same — that of the ultimate supremacy of the final cause. It is this superiority of the final cause which preserves the conception of causation from self-refutation, and which can alone give a real explanation of the world-process. For it is only as the gradual realization of some pre-existent purpose that the process has any real meaning.

§ 21. These considerations open up several ways in which pre-existence is compatible with heredity.

In the first place, as the ultimate explanation of everything is teleological, i.e., relative to the end of the world-process, the parents must be in the last resort held to transmit certain qualities to their offspring in order to further the development of the pre-existent spirits. For the parents are such as they are, their parents are such as they are, and so on, everything is such as it is, until the metaphysical or first cause of the world-process is reached, which is also its final cause, and acts in a certain way in order to promote that process.

And secondly, it is possible to conceive that just as the hypnotic operator can affect the will of his subjects without their knowledge, so the spiritual entity influences the parents so to fashion the organism of the offspring as is required by its nature and its needs.

Thus the assertions that we are descended from angels and ascended from beasts, that we are, (a) phases in the development of ultimate spiritual entities, (b) the resultants of the historical development of our ancestors, do not clash, for they formulate the process from different points of view. And not only do they not clash, but they supplement each other: they are both of them, in their own way, valid and indispensable.
The second statement will continue to be the most serviceable for most of the ordinary purposes of life, and in the view of a physical science which is not concerned to raise the question of the ultimate nature of things and the final meaning of its own assertions. But the first will be the truest and completest, because metaphysical statement, and that most expressive of the highest aspirations of our moral nature. And it will enable us not merely to accept heredity as a fact, but also to understand it, to give a rational interpretation of the part it plays in the scheme of things.

§ 22. For when heredity is considered, not in abstract isolation as a scientific fact, but in its connection with the totality of things, it will be found to be only an extreme manifestation or illustration of the metaphysical principle of the solidarity of things.


This principle, of which the highest generalization of physics, the all-sustaining force of gravity, forms one of the lowest instances, may be traced in its manifold applications throughout the sphere of sociology. The present throughout depends on the past, alike in the case of the social organism collectively and of its members individually. We inherit the institutions, the material and intellectual products of the labours of our ancestors collectively, just as surely as we inherit their bodies individually, and posterity in its turn will inherit the conditions of life such as we have made them. And perhaps the spiritual inheritance of the social environment is hardly less important than the physical heritage which is directly transmitted. And thus the significance and raison d'etre of heredity would lie in its emphasizing in the most impressive way, in a way that none can fail to feel, this solidarity of all living beings, this continuity of the world-process, and in forcing us to realize what we saw in chapter viii. is the great law of that process, viz., that the individual must be developed in and by a social medium, and is in every way dependent on it, dependent on it for his very existence in the world. But though we regard the teleological significance of heredity to be its assertion of the solidarity of the spiritual universe, this is no reason why we should deny that there may also be spiritual affinities of a special and personal nature, underlying and inspiring the physical fact of relationship. For it seems probable that the grouping of men in their social environment is as little accidental and devoid of spiritual significance as the whole process of that environment, and if so, our relationship to our family, nation, race, etc., points to more intimate spiritual connections than those which exist with beings who are excluded from these ties. The ties of kindred and our whole position in the social world, we may be sure, result from the hidden action of spiritual affinities, and are as little the work of lawless chance as the grouping of the stellar spheres in obedience to the attractions of the physical universe.

§ 23. And this hint of closer and more exclusive spiritual connections may serve to introduce the subject of the last difficulty in the relation of the Ego to the phenomenal self which it will be necessary to discuss. We recognized in chapter viii. (§ 14) that the idea of individuality was scarce distinguishable in the lowest grades of being, and that even in man it was far from being completely realized (ch. viii. § 18). We admitted further, in § 9 of this chapter, that the indistinctness of individuality, especially in the lower organisms, was a serious obstacle to the attribution of immortality to them. Hence the question presents itself whether a single Ego corresponds to each quasi-individual, or whether several phenomenal organisms may not be the concurrent manifestations of the same Ego?

The answer given to this question is not of course a matter affecting ultimate metaphysical principles, and it would be quite admissible to answer it by a mon liquet from a scientific point of view, but it yet seems preferable on aesthetic grounds to deny that in beings with a scarcely developed consciousness an ultimate spirit need correspond to each phenomenal quasi- individual. And the analogy of the "secondary selves" within ourselves (cp, ch. viii. § 18) will enable us to understand how several relatively-separate streams of consciousness can co-exist within the same entity, and how unsafe it is to argue from temporary exclusiveness to ultimate distinctness. We may hold, then, that the individual cells of a tree or the individual polypes of a zoophyte are the "secondary selves" of the lower organisms; nor need the fact that they possess distinct physical organizations and are under the proper conditions capable of spatially separate existence, perplex us when we reflect that Space was not found on analysis to be an ultimate reality (ch. ix. § 10).

It is more interesting to consider to what extent this equivalence of a plurality of phenomenal existence to a single ultimate existence may be traced in human beings. That it affords a plausible explanation of the perplexing phenomena of multiplex personality has been already mentioned (ch. viii. § 18, ix. § 23).

§ 24. And perhaps we may discover indications tending towards the same conclusion in the deepest and most momentous distinction of the social life, the distinction of Sex.

Sex is in itself a mark of imperfect individuality, for neither men nor women are sufficient for themselves or complete representatives, either physically or spiritually, of humanity. A distinction, therefore, whereby the unity of the human spirit is rent in twain by the antithesis of contrary polarities, presents a problem well worthy of the deepest philosophic thought, and one which physiological explanations do little to elucidate. Historically, Sex is a differentiation of digestion (cp. ch. iv. § 12), but even a biologist will sometimes find it hard to regard it historically. Hence it has, at all times and from the most various principles, seemed to men, from Plato down to the late Mr. Laurence Oliphant, that in the fact of Sex they were face to face with the traces of a disruption of the original unity of the human spirit, or, as we might perhaps amend it, of a unity not yet attained.

But the significance of Sex and the metaphysics of Love form a subject too large and too contentious for an essay like ours, and our discussion of it is only intended to elucidate its relations to the doctrines we have propounded, and not to contain a full and scientific account of the matter. It may be that the distinction of sex will pass away in a higher stage in the evolution of spirit than the present, even as it came into being at a lower, and that in the kingdom of heaven there will be no marrying or giving in marriage. It may be that the feelings themselves afford the surest evidence of the lack of unity in their longing for union, and that the desire of perfect love of transcending itself and "at one with that it loves in one undivided Being blending"9 is the metaphysical ideal of which vulgar passion is but a feeble reflexion and caricature. It may be that this desire for the merging of one personality in another (Verschmelzungs-sehnsucht, as v. Hartmann calls it) is the specific differentia which, by the consentaneous testimony of poets and philosophers, distinguishes love from other forms of affection, and that it is the emotional impulse which foreshadows the formation of coalesced existences of a higher order than our present partial and imperfect selves. It may be that there is truth in such speculations, and even that they explain points which would otherwise have remained obscure, such as, e.g., the great development of romantic love at the very time when the growth of reason might have been supposed to render its stimulus even more unnecessary than it is among animals and savages for the maintenance of the race, and to make its essential illusion, the fusion of two spirits into one, seem more of an impossibility. On all these points there will be great differences of opinion, arising largely from the facts that most people feel even more confusedly than they think, that they mean very different things by the term love, and that love is generally, and perhaps necessarily, a very mixed feeling (including very often, e.g., an element of that aesthetic feeling which in its purity manifests itself as the worship of the Beautiful); but it will hardly be profitable here to combat the objections which easily suggest themselves, and which make up by their obviousness for what they may be lacking in profundity. Thus to dismiss the philosophy of love by saying that "they shall be one flesh," and that this is the whole meaning of the desire to be one spirit, is to appeal to a coarsely physical method of explanation, which is as good as explanations of the higher by the lower usually are (cp. ch. vi. § 3); but it should at this point be unnecessary to show in detail why it is misleading.

The essential points for which we must now contend are that such a metaphysic of love will not in any wise affect either the practical value of our doctrine of immortality or the metaphysical principles on which it rests. It does not affect its emotional value, because ex hypothesi the basis of the evidence for the explanation suggested is emotional, and it is our desire for the coalescence of imperfect personalities which makes us think it possible. Hence there is no loss, but gain: whatever we may lose of individual immortality is lost because it is our soul's desire, is lost because we gain in return a higher good which we desire more intensely than what we sacrifice. And, moreover, it is not even true that the self is lost by being absorbed and growing one with what it loves: it is lost as little as our earth-life is lost by passing into a higher phase of being (§ 15).

And similarly this theory contains nothing that need modify our metaphysics and our view of the world-process, but rather confirms them. We cannot argue from a possible fusion of imperfect into perfect persons to an impossible confusion of all things in the absolute One. We need not therefore abandon our view of the personality or individuality of ultimate existence; indeed, the very fact that human personality is still imperfect is the best testimonial to the value of personality as the ideal (cp. ch. viii. § 19). It is only at first sight that the metaphysic of love can be regarded as conflicting with the universal principle of the development of individuality; for it also aims at completing a personality.

But though such an apparent exception ultimately proves the rule, it must yet be admitted to do so by exceptional means, forming a certain antithesis to the other aspects of the evolution of perfect individuals in a perfect society. For it is undeniable that love in its higher developments is an anti-social force, and that its exclusive attraction contradicts the ideal of a universal harmony of all spirits. Whatever services this passion may have originally rendered in bringing men together, and forming the basis of the social life, it is now antagonistic to the social ideal. A society of lovers would be a ludicrous impossibility; for it is the chief symptom of their condition that they are entirely wrapped up in each other, and that the rest of the world does not exist for them. From the social point of view there is something awe-inspiring and terrible in the madness of a passion which teaches men to forget all other ties, the claims of country, friendship, duty, reason.

And this exclusiveness of the attraction which holds together the human atoms of the sexual dyad becomes particularly clear when we compare love with friendship; i.e., with the feeling which forms the bond of the social union. The charm of friendship lies in the play of difference, in the free intercourse of spirits who preserve their own centres of activity, in agreement amid diversity, in the sympathy of kindred souls which is desired just because it is the sympathy of others; it aims not at union in the sense of effacement of individuals, but in the sense of harmony; it respects the individuality of the friend, and values it because of its very distinctness. In love, on the other hand, if we have interpreted aright the indications of feelings which dimly prognosticate its inner essence, there is none of this: the union it desires is absolute, and requires a complete sacrifice of self.

And again, to consider them with respect to their attitude towards extraneous influences: the harmony of friendship resents the intrusion of uncongenial elements, but is not in itself hostile to any widening of its sphere; on the contrary, the natural impulse of a sociable nature is "to be friends with all men," the ideal of social harmony is all-embracing. And it is not as such prone to jealousy: we wish that our friends should also be friends of one another, and labour to effect this. Love, on the other hand, is distinguished from all the other forms of affection by its exclusiveness; jealousy is part of its essence, and is the repulsion which will not brook the intrusion of any foreign force upon the intimate attraction of the human molecule. A pair of lovers are sufficient for each other; they require no one else, and will not admit others into the intensity of their mutual feelings. Would it not be the height of absurdity to suggest to lovers what is the desire of friends, viz., that they should love the largest possible number and be loved by them? For does not love desire wholly and solely to possess that which it loves, and resent the intrusion of the most solemn social obligations as a desecration of its sacred rights?

§ 25. The above discussion of the metaphysic of love may be taken as in some sort the supplement of the physical treatment which was so conducive to Pessimism (ch. iv. § 17); but whether we regard the subject in its highest or in its lowest aspects, the result is the same. From either point of view it is a momentous fact; from neither point of view is it the road to happiness or the ideal of life.

It is not fitted to be the ideal of life because it cannot be made to include all existences, because a pair of lovers as the culmination of the world-process would be a conclusion equally bizarre and impossible. We cannot abandon for such amorous fancies the ideal which has been our lode-star in the pursuit of truth, the ideal which first revealed itself to us in the search for an adequate formulation of the world's process, the ideal of a harmonious interaction of individual existences
; for it is an ideal which all our subsequent progress has only confirmed and deepened. The conception of a community of perfect persons was the efficient cause of the wondrous evolution of individual existence (ch. viii. §§ 6-19), the final cause of the material universe (ch. ix. §§ 26-31), and the formal ground of our pluralistic answer to the ultimate questions of ontology (ch. x. § 23). And now it has successfully stood the severest of its tests: in spite of the most powerful objections, it has been shown that there is nothing impossible in the continuance of personality; in spite of our strongest feeling, it has been shown that friendship is a more universal principle than love, that the concord of harmony is a higher ideal than the ecstasy of love.

Thus we have at length reached an eminence whence the eye of faith can clearly discern the features of the Promised Land which this ideal holds out to us; and though we may not enter until the far-distant end of the world's process, we can already grasp its nature and describe its character, and it is to this completion of our task that the following chapter must be devoted.

________________

Notes:

1 It is gratifying to find this view as to the comparative rarity of real interest in this question, supported by the high authority of Mr. F. W. H. Myers, whose unrivalled experience has caused him to come to substantially the same conclusions about the real feelings of men. (Cp. Proceedings of the Psychical Soc, pt. xvi.  P. 339.)
 
2 Hence it has been suggested by several authors that ghosts are a sort of semi-material "shells," containing a few relics of the intelligence of the living, which gradually decay and fade away. And there is something in their recorded conduct which justifies such theories. But of course we have no business as yet to dogmatize in any way upon the subject, and the futility of ghosts, which is certainly sometimes very marked, is explicable in many ways, e.g., if we suppose that their appearance in our world involves what to them also are abnormal conditions, or that they are "dead men's dreams," i.e., effects on our minds produced in states analogous to dreaming in our world.
 
3 With and without the leave of their authors. Thus Averroes developed his impersonal immortality of the Active Reason ([x]) out of Aristotle's dualism, with, it must be confessed, considerable support from the vagueness and obscurity of Aristotle's language, who in this matter was unsuccessfully trying to reconcile conflicting views. Similarly Spinoza's doctrine does but draw conclusions implied in the dualism of Descartes. And as for Plato, the founder of the philosophic doctrine of immortality, there has been no lack of commentators ready to show that if he had understood his principles as well as they did, he could never have asserted a doctrine so contrary to them as that of a personal immortality, and that his very explicit assertions must be interpreted as figurative expressions designed to mislead the vulgar. And though we may doubt whether deliberately ambiguous language upon so vital an issue is not rather a modern refinement of professional philosophy, alien to the frankness and freedom of the ancients, it must yet be confessed that, owing to his dualism, Plato's theory of the soul, with its mortal and immortal parts, does not admit of being combined into a consistent and tenable whole.

4 Cp. Mr. F. H. Bradley's Logic, p. 466, for a forcible and frank discussion of this difficulty.
 
5 For, as Goethe well says (Faust, Pt. 2, Act 3 s.f.): —
 
"Wer keinen Namen sich erwarb noch Edles will
Gehort den Elementen an: so fahret hin —
Mit meiner Konigin zu sein verlangt mich heiss;
Nicht nur Verdienst, auch Treue wahrt uns die Person."
[They that have won no name, nor willed the right,
Dissolve into the elements — so pass away!
But I to follow on my queen do ardently desire;
Not merit only, but attachment, keeps our personality.]


6 Ar. Eth. Nich. X. vii. 8.

7 The evidence for this is not very abundant, but sufficient. But then experiments have hitherto aimed chiefly at establishing the fact of suggestion, and hence the actions suggested have been intentionally made repugnant to the subject, and such as he clearly would not perform of his own accord. But even though the experiments were specially calculated to arouse suspicion as to their source in the subject's mind, the absurdity of the suggested action may reach an alarming height without arousing any suspicion of an extraneous origin. Cp. Proc. Psychical Soc, vol. III. p. 1.
 
8 Cp. Mr. F. H. Bradley's Logic, Bk III., pt. 2, ch. 2.

9 Fitzgerald's translation of Jami's Salaman and Absal. We  have quoted from an Oriental, because he is perhaps the least likely to be suspected of taking too idealist a view.
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Re: Riddles of the Sphinx, by Ferdinand Canning Scott Schill

Postby admin » Wed Apr 29, 2020 6:00 am

CHAPTER XII. CONCLUSION.

§ 1. We have arrived at the end of our inquiry, and at a point where it seems merely necessary to gather together the converging clues that resulted from our discussion of the problems of man's past, present, and future environment, into a single and connected solution of the Riddle of the Sphinx. And though the principle which guided our steps throughout was one and the same, viz., faith in the world-process and the metaphysics of Evolution, we have yet to answer explicitly the question, which so far we have answered only by implication, as to what is the final meaning and end of the world-process, the nature of that "far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves." and in what sense the world can be said to have a beginning and an end. And this is in some ways the most crucial and difficult of all questions; for our speculations will have availed us nothing if we ultimately fail to prove how the conception of a world-process can be attributed to ultimate reality. We must consider then, (a) what is the ultimate meaning of the world-process, (b) what were its beginning and previous or pre-cosmic conditions, (c) what is its end or post-cosmic state, (d) whether such an end is possible, i.e., capable of actual realization.

§ 2. The answer to the first question follows almost at once from the formula of the world's evolution. In chapter viii. Evolution was found to be the development of the individual in society, and it is easy to interpret by this formula of what Evolution actually is, what it must be intended to be. If Evolution is the process of the gradual perfectioning of the individual in society, its purpose and its meaning must be the adaptation of the individual to the social environment. And in the light of chapters ix. and x. the individuals to be adapted or perfected by social harmony are the ultimate spiritual existences or Egos which underlie our phenomenal selves. The ultimate aim, therefore, of the world-process is a harmonious society of perfect individuals, a kingdom of Heaven of perfected spirits, in which all friction will have disappeared from their interaction with God and with one another.

§ 3. But if this be the ultimate end or aim of the world-process, light is at once thrown on its starting-point. If the individuals are as yet imperfectly harmonized, but tending towards harmony, the process must have begun with a minimum of harmony. That is to say, at the beginning of the world-process lies a state in which the individual spirits formed no world or society, and did not interact with one another. Their interaction was as yet a mere possibility (cp. ch. x. § 23), and each existed for and by himself in a timeless solitude. But this spiritual chaos forms a complete antithesis to the world or cosmos, and so may be called a pre-cosmic condition of the world-process. It is precosmic because a world or cosmos could not come into existence until some sort of connection and interaction had been established among the ultimate existences, even though of the most imperfect and rudimentary kind. Thus the pre-cosmic conditions of the world-process He beyond and outside the process, and form a limit to the world and our thought about it, a parte ante. For when our thought travels back to this point, the subject and the means of our inquiries alike disappear. We cannot ask what the world was before the world was, what was before Time was. For without an interaction of the Many there is no world to explain, and as neither Time nor Causation apply to the changeless (cp. § 4), there are no means of explaining it. We cannot answer questions as to what the pre-cosmic is in itself, because they cannot be validly asked, i.e., formulated without a reference to cosmic conditions which are ex hypothesi inapplicable to the pre-cosmic. Our thought is silenced because all its questions hold good only for the world- process, and become unmeaning in face of the pre-cosmic. Yet the precosmic is the presupposition of the world-process (ch. xi. § 16), hence we have already had occasion to anticipate it in several ways. Thus it represents the hypothetical state of the absolute independence of the individual atoms, which was implied as the logical ideal in the theory of the development of matter (ch. vili. § 1 7). And again it forms the conditions which limited the Deity (ch. x. § 2), the ultimate nature of things which was not identical with God (ch. X. § 24), the resisting Egos whose consciousness could not be destroyed but only depressed (ch. ix. § 27-28), the immortal spirits of the development of which all living beings are phases (ch. xi. § 14).

But though the conception of a pre-cosmic state is a logical inference from that of a real world-process, it must be admitted that our imagination has no little difficulty in picturing it, and that it can claim little support from previous philosophy. But then we recognized that for various reasons the conception of a time-process and of a real history of things was alien to philosophy,1 until the scientific doctrine of Evolution boldly affirmed the reality of history (ch. vii. § 2). On the other hand, it is interesting to find that our account of the pre-cosmic receives substantial confirmation from religious tradition, which in preserving its memory has shown no less superiority over profane thought than when it was the first to assert the reality of the world's beginning.

For only the preconceptions of a mistaken exegesis can blind us to the fact that through the first chapter of the Book of Genesis professes to give an account of the creation of the world, it does not assert its creation out of nothing. It does not profess to give the origin of all existence, but only of our material and phenomenal world. It clearly recognizes the pre-existence of good and evil and of spiritual beings, which were presumably uncreated, and certainly pre-cosmic, like our ultimate spirits. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil demonstrates that even before the Fall evil was potentially existent in the world, and the obvious inference is that the world was created in order to remedy this pre-existent and pre-cosmic defect. And the nature of this defect is further elucidated by the religious tradition of the fall of Satan and his angels. Their fall, we are told, was due to pride, a term which would describe not unaptly the defiant resistance of ultimate spirits to the attempt to induce them to submit their selfish and intractable wills to the harmony of cosmic order. All this agrees excellently well with the conclusions we have independently reached; we also were led to ascribe Evil to the agency of superhuman forces, viz. the Egos (ch. x. § 25), and to find the source of its all-pervading taint in the region of the pre-cosmic; in short, to regard the nature of the world as conditioned by what existed before its production and before the beginning of its process. On the other hand, the fall of the angels must not be interpreted as a lapse from an initial harmony, in view of the fact that harmony, once attained, would necessarily be eternal and unchangeable (§ 10), and it seems preferable to regard ourselves as angels in course of development out of isolated and unsociable spirits.

Thus the beginning of the world-process, i.e., of what we call the world, may be conceived as taking place in consequence of the union of the individual spirits into some sort of whole, under the influence of the Divine Spirit, and the object of the process will be attained when that spiritual whole or commonwealth can be rendered completely harmonious.

§ 4. But though the pre-cosmic conditions of the world-process enable us to understand much that would otherwise remain mysterious, they are not of such direct interest as the question of the post-cosmic condition and end of the world-process.

If our speculations have not entirely missed their mark, the world-process will come to an end when all the spirits whom it is designed to harmonize have been united in a perfect society. Or, to put it in the language of chapter viii., when the individual has become a perfect individual, and has been developed to the utmost of his powers, and is in perfect harmony with and completely adapted to the whole of his environment.

This attainment of the end of the world-process may be described by the most various formulas, for it would represent the perfection of all the varied activities of the process. We may call it in the language of physics a state of perfect equilibrium, or in that of biology, a perfect life or adaptation to environment, or in that of sociology, the perfection of the individual in the perfection of society; or again, we may describe it psychologically as perfect happiness, goodness, knowledge and beauty.

But though it is the perfection and aim of all the activities of life, it is yet contrasted with them by its metaphysical character. For it would be opposed to the changing Becoming of our world of Time as a changeless and eternal state of Being. In it Becoming would be no longer possible, for all would be all they could be; the actual and the potential would be co-extensive, for all would have realized their highest ideals. And as all would be in perfect equilibrium, perfectly adapted to their environment, and in perfect correspondence with it, there could be no more change: neither within nor without the universe would there be left a cause of disturbance or change.

Nor would there be any more Time, for Time, as we saw (ch. ix. §11), was but the measure of the impermanence of the imperfectly-adjusted, and so it would pass away together with the changes by which alone it could be estimated. For without consciousness of change there can be no consciousness of Time, and the sceptical objections to a Time independent of our measurements of Time (ch. iii. § 6) should have cured us of the fancy that absolute Time could exist, which was not relative to change of some sort. And so the case we anticipated in an earlier chapter (ix. § 1 1) would have been realized, and Time would have passed into Eternity.

And in that state all difficulties would be solved, and all discords harmonized. There would be in it no change, Becoming, or death, but life eternal. The problems of our imperfect life would have been either answered or seen to be unmeaning. Pain and Evil would have ceased to be actual, and their past actuality would be approved of as the necessary means to perfect harmony. The infinity of Time and the infinity of Becoming would have ceased to perplex beings who would see how the absence of the perfect equipoise of Being dissevered the union of Eternity into the discordant trinity of Time. The discrepancy between thought and feeling (ch. iii. §§ 13-17) would have disappeared; our interpretation of Becoming by means of Being would have been justified when all beings had become perfect. For all would appear as they really were, we should think them such as they were, think them as we perceived them, and perceive them as we thought them; reality would have realized the ideals of our thought, and so our ideals would no longer be unreal, and our thought would no longer need to idealize realities with which it was in perfect correspondence (ch. V. § 2). And whereas the pre-cosmic put an end to further inquiry by destroying the meaning of the questions asked, the post-cosmic would put an end to inquiry by making it impossible to ask them. For how could the endless regress of causation perturb a spirit conscious of the self-evident and self-sufficing order of the All in the fruition of a self-supported harmony that suggested no question and admitted of no doubt, of a life of light that could not be borne until the last dark shadow had vanished from the soul?

§ 5. But from the ecstatic contemplation of such a state of Being we should be apt to be rudely recalled by the objection that it was inconceivable and impossible, and incompatible with conscious existence. There would be quoted against us a psychological "law" of Hobbes', that sentire semper idem et nil sentire ad idem recidunt, that a consciousness in which there was no change was no consciousness at all. And doubtless there would be truth in this objection if by being "always conscious" of a feeling consciousness in Time were indicated. Our present nature cannot react indefinitely upon the same stimuli. Or rather, the stimuli being the resultant of constantly-changing factors, cannot remain the same. The nature and the stimulus are both changing from moment to moment, and can generate only an imperfect and impermanent consciousness. But it is only on account of the imperfection of our nature that our activity cannot endure. God, as Aristotle says,2 eternally rejoices in a single and simple pleasure, and our case would be very different if we also had attained to perfect harmony and eternal Being. For, as all Time and change would have been transcended, whatever ecstasy of bliss accompanied the first consciousness of the attainment of perfect adaptation, would persist unimpaired, timelessly and without change.

It is true, however, that though perfect Being would be conscious, it would not be self-conscious, if by self-consciousness is meant the power of consciously distinguishing oneself from one's state, of contrasting what one was with what one is, of proving one's happiness to the satisfaction of others or of oneself, in short, of arguing about it. For all such operations and states of consciousness are indelibly stamped with the mark of change and imperfection.

But why should any one wish to be self-conscious in this way? For though argument and philosophic self-consciousness maybe a salutary and even a necessary discipline for imperfect spirits, Milton is surely right in regarding them as permanent occupation'? appropriate only to devils.3 For while they might assuage the lot of lost spirits, whose anguish they might charm for a while with a pleasing sorcery, they would only fruitlessly disturb the blessed denizens of Heaven. Even now self-consciousness is a necessary evil rather than a positive good and a fatal alloy to unreflecting enjoyment. It is possible to feel without consciousness of a contrast, and it is only to self-conscious thought that everything suggests its logical contrary. But pure feeling, too entirely absorbed in its present reality to point to anything beyond itself, is far from being less real and vivid than feeling which is accompanied by the uneasy reflections of self-consciousness. On the contrary, we can see even now that the happiness that reflects is lost, that comparisons are odious, and creep into the soul upon the wings of the Harpy Doubt when it has sullied the unsuspecting transparency of its virgin feelings.

What need then of self-consciousness in Heaven, and what could cause it in a state of perfection? What could there be doubtful to dispute? Who would raise a question about the reality of bliss such that it could arouse self- consciousness to refute its absurdity? Would happiness be any the more real for being reasserted against denial, or would not such assertion ipso facto destroy its perfection? And if all were blessed, there would be no tempter to raise the question.

The idea that consciousness is impossible without self-consciousness is merely a pernicious example of the fallacious tendency to suppose that all reality must be capable of being expressed in terms of discursive thought, and this idea it was found necessary to reject long ago (ch. ii. § 21, and iii. § 14-19).

§ 6. There is, however, a kindred error more deep-rooted even than that of regarding consciousness as dependent on change, and even more fatal to a proper appreciation of the nature of perfection; the idea, to wit, that a state of Being is a state of Rest,

Our ideas of activity are so moulded upon activities involving motion and change that Rest is regarded as the natural antithesis to change, and so we are wont to speak of Heaven as a changeless state of Rest. Or if the ethical inadequacy of this treatment strikes us, we sometimes rush into the opposite extreme, and still more absurdly regard perfection as a state of work, i.e., of imperfect activity, which is not its own end. In either case the effects upon the conception of Perfection are disastrous, and the failure to grasp the true alternative to work has gone far to banish it from philosophy and to render it ridiculous in religion. And yet nothing could be more erroneous or more fatal to all true philosophy than the idea that Rest is the only possible alternative to Work.

The conception of Rest stands, it is true, in antithesis to Becoming, as much as the conception of Being. But its analogue is Not- Being rather than Being; it is beneath, rather than above. Becoming.

And this becomes evident if we suppose that, one by one, a being rests or ceases from all its activities. As it ceased to affect the rays of light, it would become invisible; as it ceased to resist penetration, it would become intangible; as it ceased to produce vibrations in the air, it would become inaudible; as it ceased to attract other bodies, it would cease to be material, etc., until, with the cessation of its last activity, the last quality that distinguished it from nothing, would pass away, and it would vanish utterly. And thus we see that qualities are activities, and that existence without qualities is impossible, and so that existence depends on activity, and that non-activity is tantamount to non-existence.

Rest, therefore, is non-existence, it is the negation of motion or activity, it is not: Being is the perfection of motion, it is more than motion. And, whereas Rest in our world is an illusion, that which seems to exist but does not. Being is the ideal, that which ought to exist, but does not yet. Being, as perfect activity. Is at the opposite pole to Rest or Not-Being, and they are separated by the whole extent of Becoming, i.e., of the world with its imperfect activities. The question therefore arises at which of these the world is aiming, whether at an absorption into Nothingness, or at the constitution of an eternally active and adjusted whole. Which of these diametrically opposed ideals is being realized by our world of Becoming? is it tending towards Being or Not- Being, towards Rest or Perfect Activity? And, according as we decide for the one or the other of these, we shall arrive at radically different theories about the world-process, resulting in totally different views of life.

The one, which is the view which Pantheism can escape only by a sacrifice of consistency, regards the world-process as ultimately and essentially illusory: the fitful struggles of the individual and of the race alike are in the end absorbed again into the restful quietude of non-existence: the Absolute that was before the world began, and will be after it has ceased, is All and Nought, unchangeable and untouched by the phantom worlds which an inexplicable fate produces, and inexorably sweeps away. So Quietism becomes the ideal of life, and Nirvana its end: the highest and the only good is reabsorption into the Absolute, in which life and suffering cease together. Such is the ideal of Rest, the ideal which from time immemorial has lurked beneath the whole life of the East, for all its creeds and all its mysticism; and a strange and doleful ideal it seems to put before us as the end of all the activities of life!

The other ideal is an ideal of Activity, enhanced and intensified until it becomes perfect and constant and eternal, and transcends the motion and change of imperfect effort. It asserts that life is essentially activity; that perfect life and perfect bliss are but the consciousness of the harmonious exercise of an activity that meets no check, and is broken by no obstacle. And so it is an ideal not of Nirvana but of Heaven, not of non-existence but of harmonious existence, of individuals who are not annihilated but united. And if the one ideal has the support of common prejudice, of the more or less avowed consequences of the majority of philosophic systems, and of the dreamy despair of the East, the other may appeal to the religious tradition of Heaven, and confidently rely on all the healthier instincts, on whatever hope and strength remains in man.

And it is not without support even in past philosophy; indeed, its clearest description is found in the writings of the greatest of thinkers. Aristotle, in a passage all too brief for the correct guidance of his successors, speaks of the divine activity as being one and changeless and invariable, because it is an activity that involves no motion.4 And it is as such an [x] that we must conceive the perfect activity of Being, i.e., as an activity which has become so perfectly adjusted that no anomalies or variations exist in it which could produce the consciousness of change, and serve to measure Time. And if the activities of life are ever tending towards more perfect adaptation and adjustment, such must be the ideal to which they point, and to which they will approximate until the goal is reached, and Becoming is merged in the equable and harmonious but changeless activity of Being.

§ 7. And perhaps we may illustrate the case of perfect activity by that of perfect motion. Perfect, i.e., unimpeded motion is, according to Newton's second law of motion, unchanging, undeviating, and eternal motion in a straight line. But is such motion ever realized? And what are the conditions of its realization? It is never realized because the mutual attractions of bodies produce deviations from the rectilinear motion. It could be realized, therefore, only by the union of all the bodies in the universe. Supposing this to have been accomplished, the motion would go on with equable velocity to all eternity. But though the body thus formed would be in motion to the highest and most perfect degree, it would yet be impossible for us to detect this fact unless we knew it beforehand. It would be an impossibility for one not in the secret to discover any trace of this motion. For there would be no inequality or distinction in Space, by which it would be possible to determine its motion, and hence to an outsider it would appear to be at rest. And yet it would be in motion, regarded from inside. Now supposing it were conscious; it would be conscious of being in motion, and conscious also that its motion was perfectly equable and rectilinear.

And the case of the perfect activity of a state of Being would be precisely analogous. It would be an activity so perfect that the ordinary modes of measuring activities would be no longer applicable to it. And yet there would be an internal consciousness and fruition of activity. But, again, as in the case of physical motion, that consciousness could not be transferred to an outsider. We saw above (§ 5) that the consciousness of perfection did not involve self-consciousness, that it was neither capable nor in need of reasserting itself against outside criticism: this would be as impossible in the case of perfect activity as it would be to prove that the body was in motion.

We may look forward, then, to a future in which activity, i.e., life, becomes ever more intense, more sustained, and more harmonious, and finally culminates in a perfect activity, which sums up and includes all the activities of life, and realizes in actuality all the powers of which we are capable.

§ 8. The claims of the Being, which is the end of the world-process, to be regarded as perfect activity having been vindicated, the question naturally arises, of what this activity consists, whether, e.g., it takes the form of a perpetual oratorio, or of eternal buffalo hunting; whether eternity is spent in the society of Houris, or in the fighting and feasting of Walhalla. The question is a natural one, but the mistaken mode of answering it has perhaps done more to discredit the conception it was intended to elucidate than all the attacks of its adversaries. For nothing is in the long run more fatal to the interests of an ideal than the attempt to identify it with the sensuous imagery of an inadequate presentation. Such a procedure confuses the presentation with the conception,5 and leads to the rejection of the latter as soon as men become conscious of the absurdity of the former. Now it follows from the very nature of the conception of perfect activity that we can imagine no adequate content for it in terms of imperfect activities. For that activity is immeasurably exalted above our present state of existence, and, as we saw (ch. vi. §12), the lower can never anticipate the actual content of the higher life; it can at the most determine it as the perfection of the forms in which the lower is cast.

And, moreover, the demand that we should determine the content of the ideal of perfect activity involves a forgetfulness of the method whereby we found that ideal. If it is an ideal of our thought, it cannot for that very reason as yet be realized in the sensible world, and the attempts to imagine it in terms of the sensible are not only fruitless, but wrong in principle.

We must avoid, therefore, with equal care the contrary errors of regarding the conception of perfect activity either as unthinkable or as imaginable. It is not imaginable, because the real world presents us only with activities which are essentially imperfect. It is pre-eminently thinkable, because it is the ideal towards which the Real tends, and the standard to which it is referred, the conception by which it becomes intelligible.

And this conceivability of Perfection, in spite of the inadequacy of the sensuous content our imagination essays to give it, is a point of such importance as to warrant a brief digression in order to realize precisely the cardinal affirmation on which the possibility of Being rests. It affirms that if we are right in interpreting Reality by our thought, i.e., if knowledge is a reality and not an elaborate illusion, then reality must realize the ideals of that thought. Now in all knowledge we use the category of Being, we describe all things as being or not being, and assert that everything must either be or not be. Without the standard of Being to refer to, the Becoming of the world would be utterly indescribable and unknowable (ch. iii. jj 13; iv. § 22). But if we mean to assert that our standard is a true one, that the real world is really subject to the laws of our thinking faculty, we must assert also all that is implied in the meaning of that standard. If we know that the real world aspires, and as yet aspires unsuccessfully, to be in the strictest sense of the word, if as yet reality only becomes and contains an element of Not-Being, we must assert that eventually it will really be, and really realize the ideal whereby we know it. We must assert, in other words, the reality of perfect Being in order to justify the assertion of the reality of knowledge. And so the conditions and nature of such Being which may be determined by our thought (for Being is a category of our thought) must be binding on all reality.

Being, then, is an ideal which the world-process must realize, and as one of our ideals and like all our ideals, it must as yet be a mere form, the real content of which can be filled in only by the consummation of the process of Evolution. It must be experienced to be understood, and we can determine only the formal aspects to which it must conform. Perfect activity can be described only as the perfection of the activities of life, and most of these are so imperfect that their attainment of their ideal and their realization of perfection would absorb them in something more divine but different.

§ 9. Thus, though we may describe the perfect activity of complete adjustment as the supreme End of the process of Evolution, as the all-embracing culmination of all the activities and ideals of life, we must yet not overlook the fact that, strictly speaking, it would transcend them. If we regard Knowledge, Goodness, Beauty and Happiness as the supreme ideals of life, as the ideals respectively of the intellectual, the moral, the aesthetic, and the sensitive consciousness, we must say that the perfect activity of Being includes all these, and yet is something more. It is perfect knowledge, perfect goodness, perfect beauty and perfect happiness, because it is that into which they all pass and are united. And in it they are so absorbed that they no longer exist in isolation and in opposition to one another. They arc fused in a whole which reconciles, unites and transcends them. And so it would inadequately represent the reality to say that perfect activity was either knowledge, or goodness, or beauty, or happiness.

It could not, strictly speaking, be knowledge. For perfect knowledge, the knowledge of all that is to be known, the highest activity of reason in which reason were fully master of its subject-matter, would be a state radically different from anything we now call thought. To a perfect reason, to which all knowledge is an ever-present actuality, the exercise of anything like thought seems needless and degrading. For all our thinking involves change and transition from thought to thought, and therefore Time; and in this case, moreover, it could discover nothing that was not already known.

And so with perfect goodness. The perfection of the moral consciousness would issue in the supra-moral. Goodness which has become so perfect, so ingrained in nature, that the suggestion of evil can no longer strike a responsive chord, that wrong-doing can no longer offer any temptation, is no longer goodness in any human sense. And moreover, not only does wrong action become "a moral impossibility" in the perfectioning of the moral consciousness, but the occasion for moral action gradually vanishes as the moral environment approaches perfection. As Mr. Spencer so well says, self-sacrifice becomes, an impossibility where each is animated by an equal and altruistic zeal to prevent the other's sacrificing himself to him.6

And so with perfect beauty: what sphere would remain for the exercise of the aesthetic consciousness in a state in which material form has perhaps long been transcended, and where no ugliness remained to set off beauty by its contrast? And if we say, and say rightly, that our sense of the beautiful may rise above the appreciation of the physical points which at present almost engross it, and that beauty would remain as the reflexion in consciousness of the perfect order and harmony of Being, and the perfect adjustment and correspondence of its factors, this would yet be a use of the ideal of Beauty in a superhuman sense.

The ideal of Happiness is perhaps less inadequate to describe the activity of Perfect Being than any other, but the reason lies in its very vagueness. It does not directly suggest to us any mode of being perfectly happy, and rather insinuates that the means of attaining happiness would be indifferent so long as the aim was attained. And this is profoundly true, in the sense that no one can be more than happy, and the perfect attainment of any of the other ideals, e.g., either of goodness or of knowledge, would necessarily draw perfect happiness in its train.

But even the ideal of happiness is liable to objection as suggesting an exclusion of the other activities rather than the culminating crown and final perfection of an all-inclusive adjustment of all the activities of life. It is only if we remember to regard perfect happiness as the resultant harmony of perfect goodness and perfect wisdom that it will serve as an unobjectionable popular statement of the formal nature of Perfection.

§ 10. And as the attainment of Perfection depends on the attainment of a complete harmony of the whole environment, it must include all beings. The happiness of each is bound up with that of all. For if there remained any portion of the environment, however humble and however remote, excluded from the harmonious adjustment of perfection, there would be no security that it might not enter into active interaction with the rest and destroy the harmony and changeless eternity of the perfected elements.

And from this necessity not even God is exempt. To deny this is equally impossible on philosophic and on religious grounds.

Philosophically its denial involves a denial of the category of interaction, for if there is any interaction between the Deity and the world, the former also must be affected. If God acts upon the world, the world must react upon God: if God is conscious of the Time-process, then God also is not eternal while the process lasts; if God realizes His purpose in the world, then its attainment involves a change in God. And God must be conscious of the existence of the world, if the world is to be conscious of his existence, for it is only by his action upon us that we are led to infer the existence of a God. The Aristotelian account of a Deity totally unconscious of the world's existence and unaffected by it, who yet is its prime mover, by a magical attraction he exercises upon it, is utterly impossible, though it implies a perception of the difficulty which is lacking to those who glibly repeat their belief in the eternity and immutability of God. Aristotle clearly saw that any connection with the imperfect must involve a sympathetic imperfection in the Deity, and to avoid what he considered a degradation of the divine nature, he denied that God could be conscious of anything less perfect than himself. And then, lest this denial of the sympathy of the perfect with the imperfect should cut away the ratio cognoscendi of the perfect, he devised his extraordinary doctrine of the Deity as unconsciously the object of the world's desire; i.e., as he could not deny the connection of the perfect with the imperfect, without denying the existence of the former, he denied that the connection was reciprocal; just as though one could build a bridge over which men could not pass in either direction. But the revival of such a denial of the necessary implication of action and reaction, by modern Pantheism, is impossible: an unresponsive Absolute, as we saw in chapter x. (§ 10), which is unaffected by the world-process, is nothing, and certainly not God.

And from the standpoint of religious emotion, it is equally certain that the struggle of the imperfect must be reflected in the consciousness of God. God also cannot be happy while there is misery in the world, God cannot be perfect while evil endures, nor eternal or changeless, while the aim of the world-process is unrealized. If we suffer, He must suffer; if we sin. He must expiate our sins.

The conception of a Deity absorbed in perfect, unchanging and eternal bliss is a blasphemy upon the Divine energy which might be permitted to the heathen ignorance of Aristotle, but which should be abhorred by all who have learnt the lesson of the Crucifixion. A theology which denies that the imperfection of the world must be reflected in the sorrows of the Deity, simply shows itself blind to the deepest and truest meaning of the figure of Him that was "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," and deaf to the gospel of Divine sympathy with the world.

Thus the world-process is the process of the redemption alike of God, of the world, and of our own selves. To promote the attainment of Perfection, therefore, must be the supreme motive and paramount obligation of conduct, the supreme principle of life, in comparison with which all others sink into insignificance. And to have risen to the consciousness of the fact that they can. and ought, and must co-operate with the Divine Purpose in order to accelerate the attainment of Perfection, must surely be equivalent to doing so with all the strength and insight they possess, in all beings worthy of the name of rational.

§ 11. But can the purpose of the world be realized, not merely in theory, but in practice? What if the world-process prove a failure? What if the constitution of things be such as to make a complete harmony of all existences impossible?

To such doubts the most obvious answer is that it is not likely that the divine wisdom should attempt the impossible, and that therefore the fact that the world is in process contains the assurance that the end of its process may be achieved.

But the objection may also take the form that though the end of the world-process is finite, yet the approximations to it are infinite, and hence it will never be reached. Progress may be compared to an asymptote, always approaching the state of Perfect Being and never attaining it.

But here again our fears would be unfounded. In thought, indeed, any process is infinitely divisible into infinite gradations, but in reality this is not the case. It is a natural error to suppose that because the infinitesimal can be thought it can also be felt, but were it true, all sorts of absurdities would follow.

Thus, e.g., Zeno would be right in asserting that Achilles would never catch up the Tortoise, if the Tortoise had a start. The demonstration of this most ancient and ingenious fallacy is quite irresistible, if we admit that the endless divisibility of Space and Time can be applied also to the experience of Space and Time. If Achilles could run first ten yards, then one, then one-tenth, then one-hundredth, and so on indefinitely, and be conscious of each step and each moment he required to traverse it, he really would require an infinite time to catch the Tortoise. For he would be conscious of an infinite series of events before he caught it, subjectively at least he would never complete the infinity of infinitesimal steps required (cp. ch. ii. § 6). Really, of course, real Space and Time are not infinitely divisible (ix. § 9), Achilles would soon come to a minimum step no longer capable of subdivision, and he would require a minimum time to traverse it.

And so in the case proposed; the approximations to perfection could not go on indefinitely: they would sooner or later approach so nearly to perfection, that the discrepancy between the real and the ideal would be too minute to enter into consciousness. A precisely similar instance, moreover, of this impossibility of endless approximation in reality, occurs daily in the case of motion. In theory the gradations between velocity 1 and velocity o, i.e. rest, are infinite, and so bodies ought to pass through them all before arriving at velocity o. And as they are infinite, a body ought to require an infinite Time in arriving at rest. But as a matter of fact, nothing of the sort happens. The motion gradually diminishes, and finally ceases entirely, at least with respect to the body relatively to which it exists.7

Hence we may rest assured that just as real bodies can return to a state of rest in a finite time, so the real world-process can attain in a finite time to the perfect adjustment of Being, the eternity of which delimits Time.

§ 12. And with this defence of Eternal Being, which the Becoming of the cosmos slowly evolves out of the timeless Not-Being of acosmic apathy and isolation, with this vision of a Heaven and a Peace surpassing all imagination, which for ever obliterates the last traces of the pre-cosmic discord of which the struggle of life is but an attenuated survival, we must close. And we may close with the assurance that the truths of which we have caught a glimpse do represent a real and complete answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx, an answer which is rational and capable of realization. We have thus achieved the undertaking we proposed to ourselves (ch. v. § 2), and vindicated life and knowledge by showing that after all it was possible so to manipulate our data as to supply a complete answer to all our problems. And if this answer be thought unsatisfactory because it is too dependent on ideas, and is true only if our ideas are realized, we may reply that according to the terms of our bond, this is all we undertook to prove. We did not undertake absolutely to predict the facts, but only to discover what would happen if our ideas were valid. And yet it may perhaps afford some consolation to such objectors to be assured that the realization of our ideas by reality is by no means a rare or unheard-of fact, inasmuch as every advance of knowledge proves an idea to be a fact.8

§ 13. It is not, therefore, any failure to fulfil his promise, nor any defect human science could avoid, that fills the philosopher's heart with apprehension, as he goes forth to his last dread encounter with the Sphinx. It is the consciousness that he can never transcend the supreme alternative of thought, that though he have grasped the truth, truth always leaves him with an if. What though his reasoning be forged, link by link, an adamantine chain of logical necessity, it will yet be hypothetical (ch. iii. §§ 15, 17, 18); what though he show what truth must be, if truth there be, he cannot show that truth there is. The Terror of the Threshold, the Pessimist's fear of the inherent perversity of things (ch. iv. § i), the dread lest the Veil of Truth should conceal, not the loving countenance of a pitying Saviour, but the fiendish grin of a Mokanna, deriding our miseries with malicious glee, or the fantastic nightmare of an insane Absolute, forms a spectre no reasoning can exorcize. And so a revulsion of feeling seizes upon the philosopher in the very hour of his triumph: the prophet's mantle falls; the fiery chariot, that uplifted his ardent soul to the Empyrean, bears him back to earth; the divine enthusiasm that inspired his answer to the riddle of his being, has left him, and, as a child, he cries aloud to the spirit that has forsaken him, —

"An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light.
And with no language but a cry."


And when he finds the Sphinx, enthroned amid the desert sands far from the pleasant paths of life, he cannot read the ambiguous smile that plays around her face. It may be much that she is not grimly unresponsive to his plea, but he cannot tell whether he have answered her aright, whether her smile betoken the approval and encouragement of a goddess to be won by toil and abstinence, or the mocking irony of a demon whom no thought can fathom and no sacrifice appease. And even though he abide to sit at the feet of the Sphinx, if so be that his steadfast gaze may read the signs of her countenance in the light of long experience; yet anon will the wild storms of fortune tear him away, and the light of life fade out, the rushing pinions of Time sweep him along into darkness, and the bitter waters of Death engulf the questioner. For life is too fragmentary and experience too chequered wholly to dissipate a dread that springs from the heart rather than from the reason, and shrinks too vehemently from the cruelties of the world's ways to be consoled by the subtleties of a metaphysical demonstration.

§ 14. Thus the end of philosophy is to confess its impotence to make the supreme decision between two alternative interpretations, each of which is intellectually warranted by the facts of life. The faith in the rationality of things, in the light of which we must read the ambiguous indications of reality, is to be acquired by no reasoning. Hence the final rejection of Pessimism is the highest and most difficult act of Faith, and to effect it the soul must draw the requisite strength from itself, it may be, gather courage from the very imminence of despair.  

If, therefore, we have at this point emphasized the possibility of Pessimism once more, and pointed out the necessity of Faith, it has been with no intention of depreciating the value of reason or of casting a doubt upon its conclusions. For in appealing to Faith we are not appealing to anything that takes the place of reason, and still less to anything hostile to ii, but to that which perfects it, and perfects it by making it practically efficacious. It is thus that we must emphasize again at the close the conviction with which we started (ch. i. § 4); viz., that philosophy is practical. It is a mistake to suppose that when all has been said all has been done; on the contrary, the difficult task of translating thought into feeling, of giving effect to the conclusions of reason, and of really incorporating them with our being, still remains. And it is this incompleteness of mere thought which philosophy recognizes when it leaves us with an alternative. This guards us against the delusion that intellectual assent is sufficient for life. Because philosophy is practical, mere demonstration does not suffice; to understand a proof is not to believe it. And in order to live rightly, we must not only assent that such and such principles are conclusively proved, but must also believe them. But belief is not solely, nor perhaps even predominantly, a matter of the reason. It is a complicated state of mind, into which there enters a large element of will and a considerable element of time and training. We cannot believe unless we will, and we cannot believe new truth until the mind has long been habituated to it. And it is to effect this transformation into belief that speculative philosophy in the end requires the stimulus of fear and the help of faith. For it is keenly conscious that without faith knowledge edifies not, and that the Temple of Truth is upreared in vain if worshippers cannot be found to enter it.

_______________

Notes:

1 Ancient philosophy lacked the evidences of progress (ch. vii.  § 16); modern philosophy rested on an epistemological basis, and  so was congenitally incapacitated from asserting the reality of the  process (ch. ii. § 17; iii. § 15), although Hegel made a bold effort  to transcend the limitations of his standpoint — by confusing the  logical with the real process and identifying the connexions of  logical categories with the development of real existences.

2 Eth. Nich. vii. 14 (13), s.f.

3 Paradise Lost, II. 566.

4 [xx] (Eth. Nic. VII. xiv. 9).

5 "Conception" in English is very ambiguous, and corresponds both to "Vorstellung" and "Begriff" in German. The  possession of this distinction would have spared us a vast amount  of bad logic, bad psychology, and futile dispute about the "inconceivable."

6 It is to such a metaphysical ideal of a supra-moral state that  Mr. Spencer's "absolute ethics" refer, and they are justly obnoxious only to the criticism that he does not seem to realize what a radical difference from the conditions of our present world  they would involve.

7 The argument, of course, is vitiated by its use of infinity in a  false, mathematical sense (cp. ch. ix. § 4), and supposes that rest is  a reality (cp. ch. iii. § 8). But it does so only to accept the basis of  the objection it controverts; for the whole difficulty arises out of  the mistaken application of the mathematical doctrine of infinity  to reality.

8 I.e., shows that a thought determination holds of reality.  
 
 
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Re: Riddles of the Sphinx, by Ferdinand Canning Scott Schill

Postby admin » Wed Apr 29, 2020 6:18 am

APPENDIX. FREE WILL AND NECESSITY.

§ 1. THE dispute about the freedom of the will is so famous and is considered by many so important, that it seems advisable to discuss the principles which have been assumed concerning it. We have throughout used the ordinary language about human action, and so may seem to have supposed something like free-will. And this is true in the sense that human conduct cannot be stated except in terms implying freedom in some sense. But our ordinary usage does not really touch the metaphysical controversy between Freedom and Necessity Indeterminism and Determinism. These difficulties only arise when we are not content with stating the facts in a practically sufficient form, but begin to argue about them, and desire to see how we are free or determined.

And, as usually stated, the difficulty is an insoluble one; it seems on the one hand impossible to assert that we do things without motives, i.e., irrationally, and on the other, false to the facts of our inner consciousness to say that we can never choose between two courses of action both of which are equally possible, but are necessarily determined by "the strongest motive."

§ 2 And the reason why the question is in its ordinary form insoluble, is that neither party has sufficiently analysed the terms it uses. Free-will may mean a great many things, the power and the feeling of choice, the capacity for determination by rational motives, etc., as well as indeterminism.

So also the Determinist confuses, or at least uses, in "necessity" a word with many different meanings. Thus, physical, logical and moral necessity are very different things When a man falls over a precipice and exclaims, "I must be killed," the physical necessity which compels him is quite different from the logical necessity he recognizes when he says, "It must be so, Plato thou reasonest well," and also from the moral necessity he feels when he says, "I must speak the truth." Indeed, if we construed the last of these assertions in terms of physical necessity, it would manifestly be nonsense, for if it w^ere physically necessary to speak the truth, lying would be impossible.

Perhaps, however, we may dismiss logical and moral necessity from the present discussion, as they do not often enter into the determinist argument, like physical necessity. But the latter is itself hopelessly ambiguous.

It signifies not only compulsion but also calculability, and is applied not only to the overpowering of a conscious being by superior force, but to the supposed causal connection between phenomena. And while it is in the former sense that it is fatal to morals and productive of fatalism, it is in the latter that it sustains a successful combat with libertarianism.

§ 3. To say that the will is free, it is urged, is to make it an exception to the universal law of causation. The argument is a crushing one — until it strikes us to examine into the credentials of the "universal law of causation," and its application to the case. As soon as we do, it appears that the difficulty lies not in the nature of the will at all, but in the conception of causation, and that libertarians and determinists, so long as they uncritically accept it, are bound to assert precisely the same thing at the end, viz. indeterminism. And the only difference between them is that while the indeterminist frankly admits this at the outset, the determinist refuses to confess that he succumbs to the same difficulty until he is driven into a corner.

§ 4. Thus the indeterminist asserts that motives do not determine the will, they are not the only factors which enter into an act of will. There is in such an act an element of freedom, which is not subject to the principle of causation, and of which no further account can be given. Whereat the determinist grows indignant and talks of the infraction of universal law's, etc. But if pressed he will be found ultimately to assert the very same thing.

Granted that motives cause acts of the will precisely as any other physical cause causes its effect, it is yet no real explanation of a thing to say that it is caused by something which in its turn is caused by something else, and so on indefinitely. For the necessity which each cause transmits to its successor is a hypothetical one, and depends on the assumption that the initial cause had originally any necessity to transmit. But if none of the supposed causes is a cause in its own right, if they are all effects of anterior causes, then their necessity is wholly hypothetical, dependent on a condition which is never fulfilled. Either, therefore, determinism must admit that the regress of causation is infinite, and that a necessity infinitely remote is no necessity at all, or it must assume a First Cause.

But concerning the First Cause the same question must be raised. Was the First Cause, which determined all else, itself determined by motives or not? If it was not, then determinism ends in indeterminism; if it was, then these motives are the real cause of the world, for they alone explain why the First Cause generated the world at one time and not at another.

And these motives in their turn must have been provoked by something within the First Cause, or without it, or by nothing at all. If by nothing at all, the indeterminism of motives uncaused and unprovoked stands confessed. If the motives were provoked by something without it, this constitutes a First Cause higher than the First Cause, which is absurd; if by something within it, a change must have taken place in the First Cause.

This change again must have been either caused by something or by nothing. If the former, we have a recurrence of the infinite regress; if the latter, of indeterminism. And the result remains the same whether we say that the First Cause was determined by nothing or by itself. If by nothing, the indeterminism is once more avowed; if by itself, we require to know why its nature determined it to be the First Cause at the time it was and not before.

In short, whatever excursions into the realms of unmitigated nonsense determinism may undertake in its retreat, it can find no resting place until it reaches indeterminism. And one may naturally inquire why it was necessary to lead us so far afield. Why is indeterminism a worse account of what happens when it is avowed frankly at once, than when it is confessed to after a tortuous course of prolonged evasion, and what is the advantage of a round-about path in coming to a result which indeterminists saw to be inevitable from the first?

§ 5. This result is a serious one. It is a serious shock to our confidence in the power of reason to discover that the contrary theories of the nature of the will both involve the same absurdity. Shall we then draw the agnostic conclusion that the question is insoluble, and indicates a permanent debility of the human intellect? Or rather, that the question has been wrongly put, and that the absurdity of our conclusions indicates some flaw in our premisses?

Nor is such flaw far to seek.

The whole method of applying the conception of causation to the will is radically invalid.

For let us remember the origin of causation. The category of causation, in its application to the world, is a bold piece of "anthropomorphism" originally, and springs from the animistic theory of physical action (ch. iii. § 11). It is an attempt to construe the Becoming of nature upon the analogy of the working of our own wills, and the will is thus the original and more definite archetype, of which causation is a derivative, vaguer and fainter ectype. To explain the will, therefore, by causation is a simple confusion, literally an explanation of ignotum per ignotius, and the only answer to the assertion that conduct is necessarily caused by motives is the question — what is meant by causation and necessity?

§ 6. And whenever these terms are examined it appears that so far from being an exception to the universal law of causation, the freedom of the will is the only case in which causation denotes a real fact and is more than a theory, an assumption we find it necessary to make, if the world is to be regarded as intelligible.

And similarly with necessity, it turns out that strictly speaking necessity and freedom are correlative, and apply only to the will.

For necessity, in whatever way it is taken, is something subjective, an affection of our minds, and to attribute it to nature is a boldly optimistic and anthropomorphic assumption, which ignores the possibility that the operations of nature may be such that no efforts of our thought can ever understand them.

For (1) if by necessity we mean logical necessity, a necessity such as that with which the conclusions follow from their premisses, then we do not find it in nature. That necessity exists in thought alone and does not extend to perception. We cannot demonstrate that one fact is logically involved in another, and so generate an indefinite series of facts from our initial basis. A fact in the sensible world can never be more than a fact, and qua fact is never necessary, i.e., never dependent on a previous fact. The categorical judgment is that which comes nearest to the sensible fact, and is most successful in concealing the logical necessity which is inherent in all thought, and yet the apodictic judgment ranks higher in the realm of thought. For whenever a mere statement of fact is doubted, we proceed to give reasons why it must necessarily be so (cp. ch. iii. § 15).

(2) If, again, we mean by necessity the power of predicting or calculating events, we imply something so different from the ordinary associations of necessity as to be terribly confusing. There is much conduct representing the highest and freest action which is eminently calculable, much conduct which is as remote as possible from freedom, which is quite incalculable. Is it not a paradoxical result of this use of necessity to assert that the deliberate execution of a well-considered purpose is unfree and necessary action, while the maniac impulses of insanity are free? And yet the former is calculable and the latter are incalculable.

(3) If we are to mean anything definite by the use of necessity in connection with causation, we must imply something analogous to the feeling of compulsion which we experience when we use the word "must." If necessity does not imply a reference to our feeling of compulsion, it either means nothing, or two very different things, and the question of the relations of free-will and necessity cannot be profitably discussed. If, on the other hand, necessity is taken in this sense, it becomes evident that both freedom and necessity apply primarily to the will.

§ 7. Both freedom and necessity are psychological modes of describing certain states of consciousness. Freedom is the consciousness of choice, the feeling that we can do either one thing or another ; necessity is the consciousness of compulsion, the feeling that we cannot help doing something. Thus they are correlative states of our will, neither of which can without more ado be applied either to all states of will or to the behaviour of things.

For the consciousness of either freedom or necessity is an extreme and comparatively rare state of our will, and does not extend over the whole of life. On the contrary, by far the larger and saner portion of our lives is accompanied by no consciousness either of necessity or of freedom.

In any properly constituted and situated human being it is only rarely that he feels he "must" or "ought." Generally he simply acts, and no consciousness obtrudes as to whether he might have acted differently, or could not have helped acting as he did. We live by far the greater part of our lives in accordance with our habits and our principles. But as such conduct is not accompanied by the consciousness either of freedom or of necessity, it cannot properly be called either free or necessary. The category of necessity and freedom does not apply to it, and we must not delude ourselves into fancying that it does, merely because ex post facto we can bring our actions under that category, should occasion arise. And when there is any inducement to interpret the neutral action of ordinary life as either necessary or free, it is noticeable that we can generally interpret our past action indifferently as having been either necessary or free. We can colour our record to suit either view, and represent it either as the free expansion of our nature, or as the compulsorily determined result of previous habits. But both these accounts are equally sophistical, and false in the same way. They both invert the true relation of the extremes to ordinary conduct. They attempt to force the original and undissevered whole of normal conduct into the scheme of abnormal divergences, and instead of regarding "free" conduct and "necessary" conduct as special cases of normal conduct, which is conscious neither of freedom nor of necessity, they try to explain the latter as either free or necessary. This is as though we misunderstood the relation of the limbs to the body, and fancying that the body belonged to the limbs, instead of vice versa, proceeded to dispute whether the body was all leg or all arm.

§ 8. And if we consider concrete cases of a maximum and minimum consciousness of freedom and necessity, it becomes quite clear that they cannot be regarded as normal.

The maximum consciousness of freedom is possessed by the man who is most vividly conscious of his capacity of choosing to do one thing or the other. I.e., he hesitates between several possible courses ; intellectually he is irresolute, while morally he feels all the temptations to do wrong, i.e., he lacks the principles which make conceivable crimes "morally impossible.'' And whether he finally acts well or ill,1 his capacity to feel his freedom is due to the defects of his reason and his will. If he could see more clearly what course was wise, if he were impelled by stronger and more unhesitating habits to act rightly, his consciousness of freedom of choice would disappear. It is the mark of the imperfection of his nature, of the lack of stability and harmony in the interaction of its elements.

Taking next the maximum consciousness of necessity, we arrive at a similar result. The man who always feels that "he can't help doing" a thing, that he is compelled against his better inclinations, is also a man in a high state of internal tension. His nature is so ill adapted to the functions of life that there is much friction between the higher and lower elements, just as in the man who felt at liberty to commit every imaginable crime and folly. Only in this case he is [x], he succumbs to the temptation and is enslaved by it, and so feels unfree.

But though he represents a lower grade of moral development than the man who felt "free," he is yet far from having reached the lowest depth of degradation. If he were thoroughly degraded he would no longer feel his slavery. His action would cease to be ''necessary," because it would have sunk beneath the level at which consciousness of necessity exists. Thorough wickedness ([x]) and thorough ignorance have lost sight of the ideals of goodness and wisdom, and so are no longer troubled by the attraction of what is unseen as well as unattainable. There is therefore no consciousness of necessity or freedom in the infra-moral stage, in which it is impossible to say either "I can," "I ought," or "I must." The capacity to feel the last of these at all events does not indeed seem to vanish wholly until we sink beneath the threshold of conscious existence, but it is the normal condition of inanimate nature.

§ 9. For it is wholly erroneous to ascribe necessity to the action of the inanimate in the sense in which we feel it. It is erroneous not because of its anthropomorphism, for all our explanations are anthropomorphic (ch. v. § 6), but because of its bad anthropomorphism. The falling of a stone over a precipice is not necessary, for we cannot, without personifying it, attribute to it the feeling of "not being able to help falling," which we should experience if launched forth into the air. These feelings we know to be false in the case of the stone: the stone simply falls, and feels nothing. We might as truly (and as falsely) represent what happens as the free expression of the stone's inner nature as as a reluctant submission to the external law of gravitation. It would be as correct to say that the stone fell because it wanted to, as that it fell because it had to. In each case we interpret the fact in terms of our thought; it makes no difference in principle whether we regard the Becoming of unconscious nature as analogous to human freedom or to human necessity.

In inanimate nature events simply happen, A is and then B is; but we, interpreting this anthropopathically, say A is the cause of B. But herein lies a double error; for when we say, "When A is, B must necessarily follow," we go beyond our evidence in several ways. For we not only assume a connection where none need exist, except in our fancy, but imply a feeling of compulsion which we cannot seriously ascribe to B. And then it turns out that after all our conception of causation cannot be applied to the Becoming of nature in the way we insist on applying it, that it leads either to an infinite regress of conditioned causes (§ 4 and ch. iii. § 11), or to a first cause which is unmeaning if it is not a final cause (ch. xi. § 21), and which thus inverts the order of succession in time which we set out to explain.

Should we not from these facts infer rather that the becoming of inanimate nature lies beneath the category of freedom and necessity, that it is as yet in itself merely an undifferentiated happening, without necessity, either logical, moral, or physical, and not yet either necessary or free? Should we not infer that it is only when it has risen to consciousness, and only as a psychical phenomenon, that the sequence A — B appears at one time necessary and at another contingent?2

§ 10. We say appears: for just as there is a stage in the evolution of the world previous to the appearance of freedom and necessity, which are not yet applicable to the Becoming of things, so there is a subsequent stage when they have disappeared, to which they cease to be applicable. And certainly our confidence that this evolution of the infra-conscious, infra-free, and infra-moral into the conscious, moral and free is the correct account of the matter, and contains the true solution of the difficulty, is confirmed by the higher developments of consciousness.

For just as it is possible to sink below the consciousness of freedom and necessity, so it is possible to rise above it. Compared with the lower stages of mental and moral development, the good and wise man (the [x]) sees his course clearly. He does not doubt which is the right alternative to adopt, he is not tempted, and still less overpowered by circumstances to do evil. And so it is only in rare and distressful crises that disturb the harmonious equipoise of his existence, that he feels he might have acted otherwise than he did, or that he was compelled to act otherwise than he wished.

Thus here again, it appears that the intense consciousness of moral freedom and necessity is the characteristic only of the mixed characters, of the intermediate phases of imperfect adaptation, to which the thoroughly good, like the thoroughly bad, are not susceptible. Only, of course, they are less conscious of it for a wholly different reason, not because they sink below it, but because they transcend it.

In a perfectly good and perfectly wise being, therefore, both freedom and necessity would be impossible, and would be seen to be ultimately unmeaning, illusions incidental to imperfect development. For how could there be any alternative of action for an intellect which infallibly perceived the wisest, and for a will which unswervingly pursued the best course? For the best course is one and single, and admits no competition from a pis aller. Or would it not be ludicrous to represent a being whose whole nature was attracted towards the best, as obeying a law of necessity?

There can be no change then or wavering in the action or the purpose of the Deity, in the conduct which is as completely determined by Reason from within, as that of the unconscious is determined by external law from without. But change and doubt, hesitation and inconsistency, struggle, victory and defeat befit the intermediate phases of existence: the consciousness of freedom and necessity marks the lives of beings capable of rational action, and yet not wholly rational. We can perceive, more or less clearly, what conduct is required by the progress of the world, and yet we have continually to struggle against the survivals of lower habits {i.e., adaptations to earlier stages in the process, cp. ch. iv. § 10) within us and around us. And it is this consciousness of ill-adjusted elements which generates the consciousness alike of freedom and of necessity. But as the consciousness of freedom accompanies the victory over the obstacles to progress, over the foully-decaying corpses of the dead selves of the individual and of the race, freedom is a higher ethical principle than necessity, and is rightly brought into intimate connection with morality. The phrase "I can because I ought" may not express the connection of both freedom and morality with the essential character of the world-process in the clearest way, but it at least bears witness to their kinship.

________________

Notes:

1 In ancient Greek phraseology, is [x] or [x].

2 The contingent = that which may either be or not be.
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