03.03. The Assurance of Immortality

CHAPTER III THE ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY THE bare possibility that after death we may continue to exist falls far short of satisfying the interest of men in immor tality. There may be some, indeed, whose desires for life eternal are so strong that when the arguments against it are proved inconclusive, their hearts, like coiled springs released, leap out in confident affirmation that the possible is true. Such an attitude is not altogether unreasonable, for when a great life, pulsating with energy and hope, bur dened with powers but half-expressed, aspir ing with a reach that is larger than its grasp, suddenly passes from our sight, the respon sibility of proof seems to rest with those, who, in the face of mankind s universal hope, assert that the life has been anni hilated. If, therefore, such proof is quite impossible, if all the nooks and crannies of the mental universe hide not a single fact that demonstrates the dissolution of the personality, a man may well feel the strong presumption of probability that the life goes on. More cautious minds, however, will not be greatly influenced by this consideration. If the bare possibility of life eternal is all that they can affirm, their resultant attitude will be not positive confi dence but agnosticism. However much they may desire to be convinced of immortality, they will feel themselves in honor bound not to go beyond the evidence.

Moreover, the bare possibility that man may live through death is insufficient, because the profoundest meanings which faith in immortality possesses for the lives of men cannot belong to one who, perceiv ing that existence beyond the grave is pos sible or even probable, is yet not positively convinced that it is true. If belief in per sonal permanence concerned only a myste rious future, uncertainty about it would be of no great moment, and the possibility of its truth might serve most of the needs which could be met by confident assurance. Life beyond the grave, however, is not an artificial addition to this present existence, but a natural continuation of it ; if a man is immortal at all, he is immortal now. Eternal life, to those who are destined to live forever, is not a possession conferred at death, but a present endowment, the full appreciation of which incalculably deepens, beautifies and solemnizes the meaning of our most common days. For if a man is immortal, he now has entered on an endless course of spiritual growth with limitless possibilities latent in it ; he has now begun a journey in which death is an incident, a life story which the grave will simply punctuate to more exalted mean ing. If this faith in life eternal as a present possession is to be so apprehended that it will make a vital difference to character, if a man to-day is to take advantage of the comforts, sanctions, motives and hopes which properly belong to an immortal per sonality, until, aware that he is deathless, he begins now to live the kind of life that it will be worth his while to live forever, immortality must be to him not a proba bility but an assured conviction. Confident belief in immortality is important for this fundamental reason, that upon it depends the practice of immortality now. No man will really live as though he were an eternal person until he is assured that such an interpretation of his life is true.

Now, when a man seeks positive and assuring reasons for faith in personal per manence, he may well be discouraged at the beginning by the unanimity with which men agree, sometimes triumphantly and some times reluctantly, that immortality cannot be proved. To be sure, some psychic in vestigators, with more or less confidence, assert that they have held communion with the dead. Facts which suggest spiritual intercourse between the other world and this, and which have been impressive enough tentatively to convince Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and men of like scientific temperament and training, may not cavalierly be laughed out of court, but such evidence is too difficult of access, too dubious at present in its impli cations, to assure any considerable number of people that the world to come is true. It may be that great light will break upon us from this quarter, and that, as Frederick Myers prophesied, a few generations hence it will be impossible for any man to doubt the appearances of Jesus to his disciples after Calvary, but at present, the evidence, whether of our own immortality or of the Master s, must move for most men in a realm quite other than that of psychic phenomena. There are, to be sure, multi tudes, who take their faith in immortality, without evidence, on the dictum of an ex ternal authority, but such a credulous atti tude is increasingly impossible. If the as sertion of immortality in book and church cannot find positive support in discoverable facts, mankind s conviction of its truth will surely wane. Men to-day demand proof. Because, therefore, belief in immortality seems to be amenable to no scientific processes of thought, and to allow no veri fiable confirmation, man s faith in it natu rally tends to grow unsure, to become a tentative and uncertain hope, until at last the future world for him pales into a dim possibility.

II The common statement, therefore, that immortality cannot be proved, must be subjected to searching analysis. As a matter of fact, it is untrue that the assertion of immortality and the assertion of a scientific law involve radically different intellectual processes, and the popular idea that they do is based upon an utter misunderstanding of the methods which scientists continually employ. The fundamental assumption of all science is that the universe is truly a universe, consistent in its regularity of pro cedure, not erratic and whimsical, but uni form, dependable and law-abiding. With out this faith, which never has been and never can be fully demonstrated, science would be impossible. Huxley calls him self an agnostic with reference to God s being and character, but in regard to the consistency and regularity of the universe he could not be agnostic and still be a scien tist. He must make that leap of faith, and he makes it with gladness and confidence. "As for the strong conviction," he says, "that the cosmic order is rational, and the faith that, throughout all duration, unbroken order has reigned in the universe, I not only accept it, but I am disposed to think it the most important of all truths." Exactly ! Than this there are few more amazing ventures of faith for a man to make, and yet this lies at the basis of all science. For this assumption that the universe always has been and always will be a reason able and law-abiding whole, is, in the nature of the case, not amenable to complete verification. So many confirming facts, however, indicate, and within limited spheres strictly demonstrate, the depend- ableness of nature, that the assertion of a universal cosmic order is a reasonable con viction, as certain as it is supremely im portant. Men discovered the laws of the ellipse and found afterwards that the plan ets in their courses observe them per fectly. The chemical conditions and qual ities of fire, whether on earth or in the stars, are found to be identical. In special sci ences the dependableness of nature is so completely verified that the exultant asser tion of a professor in chemistry is readily transferred to the whole cosmic order : "Ask nature the same question in the same way, and she will always give you the same answer." The universe is everywhere amenable to thought ; it can be understood ; it is trustworthy, not capricious, this is the conviction which, proved in segments, is confidently affirmed as the faith of science concerning the entire cosmic process. A notable consequence is involved in this affirmation that the universe is rational. What does this assertion mean, if not that the world acts as it might be expected to act, had it been thought through by Mind. When Charles Darwin exclaims, "If we consider the whole universe, the mind refuses to look at it as the outcome of chance," he is saying that the cosmic pro cess is rational and that nothing rational ever comes by accident. Reasonableness is the work of mind. Can a man read sense into a printed page that bears the impress of type which, haphazard, has pied itself ? Type must express previous thought before any man can discover thought there. When, therefore, as Dar win says, the mind refuses to believe that the planets accidentally arranged them selves, and that the story of evolving human life comes from the pied type of a fortuitous creation, we are compelled to the alternative, that the cosmic order has reasonableness inherent in it, discovered, not created by the thought of man. The only way we have of asserting the reason ableness of the world involves the assertion that the world has been thought through, that there is mind behind it and in it, that it did not come by chance, and that the human mind studying it, discovers thought already there. When Kepler, sweeping the heavens with his telescope, cried : "O God, I think Thy thoughts after Thee," he was affirming the logical result of believing that the universe is rational.

Because science starts with this funda mental assumption of the cosmic order s rationality, it goes on to affirm as true all propositions, whether they can be com pletely verified or not, that are necessary to make intelligible and reasonable the facts of experience. The scientist notes the facts first, and then makes a venture of faith, which in ordinary parlance is con cealed under various names, doctrine, as in the " doctrine of evolution," law, as in the "law of gravitation," theory, as in the "theory of electrons,"- -but all of which have this in common, that they are sciences attempts to frame a proposition that will make intelligible and reasonable the facts of experience. Every statement of scien tific law is a venture of faith in disguise as a hypothesis. The Copernican astron omy was at first a sublime guess, and the conservation of energy, still incapable of universal proof, was an enormous assump tion, but since without them the data of the physical world are not understandable, they are confidently affirmed as true. He who does not go beyond the facts," says Huxley, "will seldom get as far as the facts" ; and even Haeckel adds, " Scientific faith fills the gaps in our knowledge of natural laws with temporary hypotheses." Take away this privilege of faith, and from the foundation to the topmost pinnacle the elaborate structure of science falls apart into unrelated, inchoate elements. As the president of the Massachusetts Insti tute of Technology expresses it, " Science is grounded in faith just as is religion, and scientific truth, like religious truth, consists of hypotheses, never wholly veri fied, that fit the facts more or less closely." Without the exercise of faith, therefore, the world of knowledge would be reduced to factual elements, disparate and unorgan ized by law, a topsy-turvy jumble of units without sequence or relation. But even this sort of world is too rich and copious to be obtained without faith. Indeed, let a man once begin to be a thoroughgoing agnostic, to refuse utterly to go beyond the facts, and he speedily reduces the universe to absurdity. To believe at all in the existence of an outer world or in the reality of other persons is a gigantic venture of con fidence. To trust as veracious one s sen sations of things and people is prerequisite to thinking that things and people exist at all, so that if by proof is meant the achieve ment of undoubtable certainty, Tennyson s sage is strictly correct :

"Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son, Thou canst not prove the world thou movest in, Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone, Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one: Thou canst not prove that thou art immortal, no, Nor yet that thou art mortal nay, my son, Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee, Am not thyself in converse with thyself, For nothing worthy proving can be proven, Nor yet disproven."

Indeed, such unmitigated scepticism, not to be evaded except by faith in those per ceptions which assure us of an outer world of things and persons, forces us even to dis believe our own identity. That I myself am the same person whose experiences are transmitted in the flow of my memory is an unprovable conviction. My recollection is assumed for true on faith, and my sense of personal identity is the result of trust in the veracity of my remembrance. If a man decides to have done with faith, from its largest and most comprehensive exercise to its most simple functioning, this vast and complicated world will be reduced for him to the luminous pin-point of his immediate sensation. This is the only strictly demon strable experience which we can know, and even while we are knowing it, it is gone. Everything in the universe beyond that momentary flash of consciousness, our per sonal identity, the existence of an objective world, the reality of other persons, and our scientific laws, are creations saturated thor oughly with faith. That this is a reduc- tio ad absurdum is obvious, but it is agnos ticism readily reduced to absurdity because, in its essential nature, agnosticism is absurd. No one has ever really practised it, save as a tentative confession of embarrassment, in the attempt to push to its limit the construc tion of a world out of chaos. The plain fact, therefore, is that every man must and does build up by faith the conception of the world in which he lives, and the regulating principle of this scien tific process, by which a man "sees life steadily and sees it whole," is the assump tion that those propositions are true which are necessary to make the facts of life intel ligible and reasonable. On this principle man believes in his personal identity, the existence of an objective world and the reality of other persons ; on this principle he constructs theories in astronomy to explain the stars, in geology to explain the rocks and in psychology to explain the mental processes ; and on this same principle he affirms the truth of God and immortality. To be sure, the facts involved in this last affirmation are spiritual, not material, are more subtile, less tangible, and lend them selves with greater difficulty to confident verification, than the facts of the physical world, but so far as the fundamental intel lectual processes are concerned, the reli gious interpretation of life, affirming God and immortality, is a venture of faith, like the law of gravitation, to explain the facts. The desires of men, the necessities of their intellectual and moral life, their loves, faiths, hopes and spiritual possibilities, are not only facts, but are facts incomparably more significant than subhuman things, rocks, flowers, fossils, stars, on which the natural sciences are founded. Must not hypotheses be advanced to make these greater facts intelligible? When one re members that all science is based upon the fundamental assumption that the universe is reasonable, when one considers that all propositions are affirmed as true which are necessary to rationalize the facts of experi ence, it is clear that if personal permanence is necessary to the reasonableness of human life, which is the most important part of the universe, we have proof of immortality, in which essentially the same intellectual pro cess used by science in asserting the con servation of energy, is applied to the loftier ranges of the spiritual life of man.

III The necessity of personal permanence to the reasonableness of human life may be, perhaps, most clearly seen when we consider the essentially limitless possibilities which inhere in knowledge and in character. If death ends all, these possibilities are involved in man s very nature only that without excuse they may be brusquely and abruptly snatched away. The body has its cycle of existence, like a tree ; it is born, reaches its climacteric, withers and dies, but the mind consciously walks an ascending avenue, widens its horizons, deepens its insight, and is ever aware that there are no limits to the possibilities of growing knowledge. The world of mind is an illimitable realm ; thought amid all its achievements is ever a pioneer that hears the call of undiscovered countries over the next range of hills ; and the intellect of man, conscious of these exhaustless potentialities, dies, as Goethe did, crying in his last moments, "More light!" To feel the endless lure of truth yet unattained is the essential nature of the intellectual life. If Huxley prefers Hell to the stoppage of his growing power to know, he is but feeling that elemental passion whose most notable expression Milton puts into the mouth of his mag nificent Satan, writhing in the agonies of the pit:

"For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish rather, swallowed up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated night, Devoid of sense and motion? " Not the small men, but the men of largest mental life most have felt the unforgiv able cheat which the universe practises on us, if it opens to us the endless possibility of knowing, only to refuse us its fruition. What is thus true of mind, is true of character, for there is no conceivable limit to the potentiality of spiritual life. A traveller in Switzerland tells us that, uncer tain of his way, he asked a small lad by the roadside where Kandersteg was, and received, so he remarks, the most signifi cant answer that was ever given him. do not know, sir," said the boy, "where Kandersteg is, but there is the road to it." That is an epitome of the spiritual experi ence of mail. The ideal is beyond our ken, it is a goal that never can be located, but always in the progressive achievement of character, we are conscious that we are on an endless road that leads toward unknown perfection. While death, there fore, seems logically the portion of the body, it comes as an impertinent intruder, a meddling interloper into the progress of a spiritual life. Death resides in the body from the beginning ; but death is a thief who breaks into the character and steals from it its essential nature of endless aspiration. Not small souls, but the great men of spirit have most been conscious of the illimitable realm into which they are introduced by even the faint beginnings of moral character, and are most aware of the fraud which life practises on them, if it creates, only to disappoint, what Words worth calls, "That most noble attribute of man, Though yet untutored and inordinate, That wish for something loftier, more adorned, That is the common aspect, daily garb Of human life."

Now the argument for immortality has always included the fact which we have just been stating, that human life on the plane of earth alone promises more than it attains, aspires beyond its grasp, and is left at death an unfinished and disappointing frag ment, truncated, partial, incomplete, expir ing like Moses on Nebo s top, vainly look ing towards the lands that he dreamed of conquering but that he never reached. This argument, however, is often stated so that it seems to say in language more or less learned and grandiloquent, that men want to live after death and that, therefore, immortality must be considered true. But this is an utter perversion and caricature of the bearing which the incompleteness of human life at death has upon the problem of life everlasting. The persuasive con sideration is not that men want to live after death, but that now after countless ages of painful evolution, the creative process has brought into existence beings who have set their feet upon endless avenues of knowledge and of character. They are the crown of creation ; no mother could insist that her babe is worth more than all the Alps with greater assurance than reason insists on evaluing personalities above un conscious and unmoral rocks and stars. And now when the universe has so achieved a creature in whom evolution has ceased being physical and has become psychical, in whom exhaustless possibilities are at last begotten, does the universe in utter unconsciousness of her achievement toss the potentialities of mind and spirit into Sheol with the refuse of the flesh, and caring no more for one than for the other, bring all alike to a dismal and inconsequential end ? Then human life, as we know it, is utterly unreasonable. The most hopeful attitude which we can take towards it is that of the King of Hearts in " Alice in Wonderland," when he examines the cryptic document introduced at the historic trial. "If there is no meaning in it," he says, "that saves a world of trouble, as we needn t try to find it." One generation of incom plete, aspiring persons is wiped off the earth, as a child erases unfinished problems from his slate, that another generation of incomplete, aspiring persons may be created created and then annihilated. Nothing ever is finished anywhere. God, like a half-witted artist, amusing himself with tasks that have no meaning, paints pictures in which he barely outlines forms of beauty, full of promise, only to erase them and begin again. Aspiring characters, as an agnostic said, are "trying to get music out of sackbuts and psalteries, that never were in tune and seemingly never will be," and our social labors simply build tran sient oases in a desert world, empty of spiritual meaning oases that in the end the desert will consume in burning sand. To say that the loftiest aspects of our human life in such a universe are unintelligible and unreasonable is surely far within the boundaries of the obvious.

When, therefore, we assume, as science always does in the physical realm, that this is a reasonable world, we have a positive and assuring argument for immortality. Of course, this may be an utterly erratic universe, not in the least to be depended on to furnish reliable clews to truth, but such a conception makes science as impossible as it makes immortality unlikely. When ir regularities in the orbit of Uranus were discovered, for which there was no visible explanation, science did not throw up her hands in hopelessness, consenting that the heavens were capricious and whimsical. Rather, Leverrier computed the size, po sition and orbit of a planet which, if the per turbations of Uranus were to be made intelligible, must be in the heavens. Be cause of her fundamental faith that the uni verse is not irrational, science knew that the planet must be there, although unseen, and when sight consummated insight, and Nep tune was discovered, less than one degree from the spot indicated in the prophetic affirmations of Leverrier, the faith of sci ence in the dependableness of the world was justified. Not otherwise is personal permanence essential to the reasonableness of human life ; the orbits of aspiring mind and character demand it to make them intelligible ; and the faith that insight, so based upon the reasonableness of creation, shall some day be turned to sight, when we have eyes to see the unseen world, is a faith built on foundations firm and deep.

IV

If the basal assumption of science that the universe is reasonable supplies so strong a foundation for faith in immortality, how much more does the basal assumption of religion that the universe is beneficent argue, of necessity, the permanence of personality ! If God is good in any sense imaginable to man, then he cares for his creatures, has a purposeful meaning in them, and regards them with solicitous concern. A just and fatherly God cannot have brought into being children, capable of endless growth, aspiring after perfect knowledge and character, only to toss them one by one into oblivion, until at last, tired even of the house he built for them, he burns it up. As the seers have always felt, the goodness and honor of God are at stake in the question of immortality,

"Thou wilt not leave us in the dust : Thou madest man, he knows not why, He thinks he was not made to die ; And thou hast made him: thou art just." Of course the confident affirmation that God is good has always met the amazed and jeering accusation of anthropomor phism. Your God is your lengthened shadow, men say ; you have taken the coin of the realm universal and stamped your own visage on it. What the accuser obviously means is that a man has com mitted an astonishing blunder when he goes down into his own experience, and there takes the best and highest that he knows for his interpretation of God. The suggestion is that when a materialist takes rocks and stars, or a monist takes abstract notions like energy and law, for his idea of Deity, he has performed the sublimely ingenious feat of overleaping the boundaries of human experience and finding a symbol of God that is not anthropomorphic. Of course he has done no such thing. Can a man leap outside himself and look at the world through other than human eyes or con ceive it in other than human terms ? All the rocks and stars I know and can use in thought, are rocks and stars which, in the form I know them, have been made inside my experience ; all the abstract ideas of energy and law I have are those of my own mind s construction ; the entire world in which I live and from which I can pick symbols by which to interpret God is the world of my own consciousness an an thropomorphic world, because conformed to the laws of my own thinking. I have no pool other than my own consciousness in which to fish for my ideas of anything. The question is never whether or not a man will interpret God by some element in his experience, he cannot help that ; the question is only whether he will interpret God at all, and if so, what elements of his experience he will use, the low or the high. Physical energy is just as much our expe rience of body read out into the world as personality is our experience of self-con sciousness. Materialist though a man be, down into his own experience he must plunge like the veriest Christian, however he tries to escape it ; only if he chooses, he may bring up body instead of soul, the lowest instead of the highest, for his inter pretation of Deity. It is faith in either case, however, and it is anthropomorphism too. Christianity s method, therefore, is not one whit different from the materialist s or the monist s save in this, that instead of choosing a lower part of experience, or a by-product of experience, Christianity, ranging over the hierarchy of elements there, from the vassal serf of physical energy to the spiritual king, self-conscious per sonality, hungering for righteousness and ablaze with love, takes this last, this highest form of life it knows, and that too with lofty and undiscourageable optimism ex tended to the farthest boundaries of imag ination, as the only adequate highway to travel toward the truth about God. The Christian is anthropomorphic, as every one has to be, but being under such necessity, he thinks that the whole of man is not too big nor too good to be the symbol of God. "But," says some one, now no longer able to contain impatience with such an exultant idea of God, "do you mean that by interpreting God in terms of the hu manly best you can imagine, you have comprehended absolute Deity, the omnip otent, omnipresent, omniscient God, the philosophic world-ground, the ontological essence of the universe?" To which the Christian, likewise impatient, answers, "Do you think that I go hunting for the sun at noon with a butterfly net, that I seek to imprison the Most High in a hu man symbol ? Who am I that I should talk about absolute Deity or seek to grasp the Infinite with a finite mind ? Only this is my faith, that through all eternity, with all new disclosures of God, never will a man who starts with the best he knows have to stop, turn around, come back, and begin again on a road toward God that is less than that best. Never will he have to take a path that is lower than personal, or that negatives holiness and love. The road leads what distance beyond my gaze I cannot guess, but it is the same road and not another." Sir Oliver Lodge has given in one sentence a complete summary of the Christian s method of approach to the idea of God: "I will not believe that it is given to man to have thoughts, nobler or loftier than the real truth of things."

When, therefore, to the Christian the old taunt is flung, The lions, if they could have pictured God, would have pictured him in fashion like a lion," the answer is ready at once : Good for the lions ! For if they had been gifted with a faith superb enough to do so worthy and exalted a thing as to take the best they had and think out toward God along the pathway of it, they would have been in so far Christian in their philosophy of life. It were certainly nobler and truer to be a lion interpreting God in terms of the best lion he could imagine, than to be a man interpreting God in terms of dirt. But if God is good in any such way as this, then death does not end all. Not only in general is an unreasonable world utterly incompatible with a just and benef icent God, but in particular, a God of good will must care for his creation. What, then, in all the universe can be the object of the divine solicitude ? Is God vain about his sun and stars ? Is he twirling them about his thumb and finger, like a child, proud of their scintillating revolutions, until transposing them and caring nothing that the transposition incidentally anni hilates the transient race of beings on the earth, he will twirl them in some other way ? Such a conception of God is impossible. If God exists at all, he must care for his creation, and if he cares at all, he must care for the crown of creation, personality. Charles Darwin tells us that at times he had a warm sense of a friendly God, but that at other times this feeling vanished. Yet even with so fugitive a faith in a uni verse that cared for its creatures, he wrote, It is an intolerable thought that man and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation, after such long-con tinued slow progress." To one who is deeply convinced that Darwin s occasional and evanescent sense of a friendly God may be a man s reasonable and constant faith, such a conception of the world is not only intolerable ; it is impossible. To talk about the fatherhood of a God, who begets chil dren, only to annihilate them, is absurd. The goodness of God is plainly at stake when one discusses immortality, for if death ends all, the Creator is building men like sand houses on the shore, caring not a whit that the fateful waves will quite obliterate them all. If death ends all, the struggle and aspiration of humanity have meant no more to him than the mist that rests in the morning on the Alps and at noon is gone. If death ends all, there is no God of whom goodness, in any conno tation imaginable to man, can be predi cated.

How indissolubly faith in immortality is interwoven with faith in a beneficent Deity is plain when one considers the venerable objection to belief that God is good, which has always made acceptance of Christian optimism difficult. The pres ent evils of human life, its miseries, dis eases and sins, its Lisbon earthquake that caused Goethe even when six years old to doubt the justice of the universe, and its San Francisco fire that made more atheists than preachers will convert in many a year, - - these are the standard and colossal arguments against the honor and benefi cence of God. To this objection only one answer ever has been possible. Those who in spite of the injustice and evil of our present life have still believed that God is good have insisted that there is no more reason to interpret human existence evilly in terms of its woes, than to interpret it happily in terms of its amazing story of spiritual growth, and that while it is impos sible to account for goodness in man if there is no goodness at the heart of the world, it is entirely possible that the inci dental evils of a process, leading toward a worthy consummation, may be explicable when the process is complete. The asser tion of the beneficence of God has always depended for its full support upon this appeal to the arbitrament of the future. Like Gladstone, defeated in the House of Commons, the man of faith has returned undismayed to face his enemies, wearing a boutonnire of defiance on his coat, and saying, "I appeal to time !"

If, therefore, all worthy consummation to human life is denied, if men, seeing their present inexplicable woes, are convinced that no resultant future will ever show the reason for a process that here was mys terious and hard, as a vase might under stand in retrospect the deft and strenuous fingering of the potter and the overwhelm ing heat of the furnace, then the basis is removed on which man can rest his faith in a friendly universe. The universe dis tinctly is not friendly, if it has reared with such pain the moral life of man, only to topple it over like a house of cards.

While a man, therefore, may believe in immortality without believing in the good ness of God, he cannot reasonably believe in the goodness of God without believing in immortality. Indeed, the Buddhist pas sion to escape continued existence bears impressive witness that without a benefi cent Deity, life everlasting, while believ able, is positively undesirable. The noble, eightfold path" of Buddha, by which a man shall reach Nirvana, and become "like a flame that has been blown out," has been preached to men with a mis sionary enthusiasm that can find its equal, if at all, only in Christianity, not because Buddhists do not believe in immortality, but because they do believe in it, and because, conceiving God not as beneficent, but as unconscious, unmoral Being, devoid of character and purpose, immortality to them is so undesirable that to escape it is their supreme ambition. The wheel of continuous existence is their terror. They proclaim as a gospel that to become here a passionless sepulchre in which all desires are dead is the way to that reabsorp- tion into unconscious Being which is the great salvation of the race, the passionately desired escape from the neces sity of living. "Let, therefore, no man love anything!" says Buddha. "Loss of the beloved is evil. Those who love nothing and hate nothing have no fetters. * Continuous life in a universe that is not friendly is a bane to be abhorred. When, however, a man positively believes in a God of good will and purpose, eternal life to him is not only inevitable ; it is desirable. The difference between Buddha s attitude towards immortality and the New Testament s is not that one believes in existence after death, while the other is unsure or disbelieving ; both alike are positively convinced of the soul s continuance. But one, conceiving ever lasting life in terms of a Fatherless world, dreads it as a mediaeval Christian dreaded Hell ; while the other, crying that death cannot separate us from the love of God, claims it as an inspiration and a glorious hope. One strength of Buddhism lies in the fact that the idea of a perpetual, self- conscious existence, which through everlast ing ages trails after it the full memory of all previous experience and from itself never can escape, causes to the man who endeavors to imagine it what Professor Goldwin Smith calls "mental vertigo." The human mind finds it as impossible to handle this concep tion as in mathematics it finds it impossible to make infinity a member of an equation without invalidating the result. Absolute infinity in any realm cannot be dealt with by the human mind. What God may mean by personal permanence beyond our present power to picture or to compre hend, the thought of man may not usefully inquire, but with the faith that the uni verse is friendly comes the faith that it purposes endless progress for us, and this is sufficient, without knowing more, for the deepest human needs.

Whether one starts, therefore, from the scientific affirmation that the universe is reasonable or from the religious faith that the universe is friendly, he comes inevi tably to the conviction that death does not end all. The assurance of immortality is grounded on great foundations. The rea sonableness and beneficence of creation are pledged against the annihilation of man.

V No other reasons for faith in immortality compare in fundamental importance with those which have been mentioned, but there are at least two further considerations which tend greatly to confirm belief in everlast ing life. That the universe is reasonable and beneficent and so will certainly pre serve its moral gains, is a judgment of value, in making which the single individual, un supported by his fellows, might well feel insecure. The main facts of Beethoven s life may be so clearly ascertained by one investigator that, whether any one agrees with him or not, he is convinced ; but that Beethoven s music is beautiful would be exceedingly difficult for a single critic to maintain, if all those most competent to judge in the aesthetic realm insisted that the sonatas were miserable music. If one inquires the nature of the proof demanded when men seek to demonstrate that the Sistine Madonna is glorious, or that the Prize Song in " Die Meistersinger " is superb, he sees that it depends in no small degree upon the consensus of opinion among those most competent to judge. If, therefore, a man, feeling that the reasonableness and friendliness of the cosmic order are worthy foundations for his faith in a future life, should find himself alone in such an esti mate, while ranged against him the seers of the race marshalled their contrary judg ments, it would require an almost unattain- ably heroic obstinacy of opinion to insist that he is right. Who, upon the other hand, can calculate the confirming influence on our faith, if the judgment which we have reached is not withstood, but with aston ishing unanimity is supported by the author ity of those spiritual seers who have seen most deeply the significance of life ? This use of authority is not by any means irrational. Even science, from whose realm authority in the old sense of dictatorial dogmatism has been banished, welcomes authority in the opinions of able and disinterested experts. Few men of all the millions who believe the facts have ever measured the 92,000,000 miles to the sun, or for themselves have fathomed the secrets of the scientific theories which, taken for granted on expert authority, are used in daily business. If a man refused to make use of any knowledge save that which he personally had proved, he would live in a universe painfully meagre and desiccated. When a man believes Mr. Edison s assertions in the realm of elec tricity, it is generally not because he him self has demonstrated them, but because he trusts Mr. Edison s ability and honesty, finds what he himself knows of electricity not negatived, but illustrated and com pleted by the opinions of the specialist, and is confirmed in his faith by the prac tical results which Mr. Edison manifestly attains on the basis of his truths. Even in science one cannot easily exaggerate the practical importance of the expert s authority. This use of authority in science, however, is insignificant in comparison with its use in those higher ranges of man s life where judg ments of worth are necessary. There, as Browning says, " One wise man s verdict outweighs all the fools ! "

If in the establishment of some scientific theory all Asia and Africa count for noth ing, and the masses of unqualified men protest and disbelieve in vain, because the specialists who really know have seen the truth and spoken it, how much more in the rating of beautiful music, painting and architecture, do men of dull eyes shrug their shoulders to no effect, and insensitive minds seek in vain to turn appreciation into cynicism ! The seers are the demonstrators of the value- judgments of the world. Not in religious truth alone, but in all spiritual concerns of beauty and goodness, we ordi nary men stand upon the slope and cry to those upon the summit, that with their wider vision they must interpret to us the real truth of life.

Men s faith in immortality, therefore, is immeasurably confirmed by the testimony of the spiritual seers. With overwhelming unanimity they bear witness to their faith in a reasonable world that "will not leave us in the dust." If we seek counsel of the most comprehensive spirit outside the range of the Jewish-Christian development, we hear Socrates saying through Plato : Then beyond question the soul is immor tal and imperishable and will truly exist in another world." If we seek counsel of that spiritual Master, who most seems to include in himself the ideals of all centuries, all races, both sexes, all ages, as the pure white light gathers up and blends the split and partial colors of the spectrum, we hear him saying with perfect confidence: "In my Father s house are many mansions." The argument is often urged that the universal belief in immortality, held by all men in all ages, makes strong presumption of im mortality s truth ; that if the analogy of physical life holds good, no universal human functioning exists without an objective fact to call it into being ; so that without the stimulus of the existence of another world, it is inconceivable that all races would have believed in it. But this argument, founded on the faith of the vast, obscure masses of mankind, while it has its place, does not compare in persuasive power with the con sideration of those elevated souls, who, rising far above the common levels of our human life, have from their altitude assured us, not with less confidence, but ever with more positiveness as they stood higher in the spiritual scale, that everlasting life is true. Unless Germany denies that men like Kant are her deep-seeing prophets ; unless England chooses lesser souls than her Wordsworth, Browning, and Tennyson to represent her loftiest spiritual insight ; un less America says to Emerson, to Whittier, and to their like that they are not our seers ; men must confess that with marvellous una nimity the most elevated and far-seeing spirits of the race have most believed in immortality. Not the small souls, but the men of "a lordly great compass within" have felt most keenly the necessity, reason ableness and assured certainty of life eternal. Now this appeal to the seers is not in its deepest significance an appeal to an exter nal authority. What the greatest men ordinarily feel is what ordinary men feel in their greatest moments. The appeal to the seers is an appeal to the plain man s best hours. In a singularly revealing sen tence, Professor Tyndall says: "I have noticed during years of self-observation that it is not in hours of clearness and of vigor that this doctrine (of materialism) commends itself to my mind ; for in the presence of stronger and healthier thought it ever dissolves and disappears, as offering no solution of the mystery in which we dwell and of which we form a part." So every man is aware of his self-evidencing high moments, when the ground rises under his feet and he reaches for a time a spiritual eminence, from which horizons are visible and vistas stand clear that are not within his ken on ordinary days. The arbitra ment of the great spirits of the race gets its authority for us because they but confirm the vision of our own elevated hours. The most significant choice which in the end every man makes, is between his own low and his own high moments, as inter preters of life s true meaning. When then a man appeals from himself at his worst to himself at his best, is there any question what the decision is upon the matter of eternal life and all its implications ? Does a man at his best tend to think that he is flesh with a transient mental aspect, that there are no permanent forces save the physical powers that build the solar systems and destroy them ; that the earth throws away with utter carelessness personality, her most precious treasure, and never resolves to harmony the dissonance of her inequities ? Does a man at his best feel in human life no intrinsic and eternal value to inspire sacrifice for spiritual quality in the individual and to furnish basis for pas sionate and hopeful service to the race ? Above all, does any man in his sanest, wor thiest moments, consent to think that the universe preserves none of the moral gains, which have cost such an incalculable price in blood and tears and toil ? Is he willing to accept as his view of the cosmic mean ing Thompson s portrayal of a world that throws away with heedless hand the spirit ual achievements it has wrought ?

"The world rolls round forever like a mill, It grinds out life and death, and good and ill, It has no purpose, heart, or mind, or will.

While air of space and Time s full river flow, The mill must blindly whirl unresting so, It may be wearing out, but who can know ?

Man might know one thing were his sight less dim, That it whirls, not to suit his petty whim, That it is quite indifferent to him:

Nay, doth it use him harshly, as he saith ?

It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath, Then grinds him back into eternal death." Is that the truth of the universe, as in a man s best hours, it appeals to him? Rather a wholesome mind must finally protest against a useless creation, that as Professor James put it, could as well, like a reversed cinematograph, run one way as another, because it means nothing and issues nowhere. Platonic dialectics to prove the immateriality of the soul and hence its necessary immortality no longer interest the human mind ; the bare con tinuance of a spiritual substance, deathless because it essentially is uncompounded and therefore indestructible, is not even desired; but desire for the preservation of the race s active, spiritual values no generation can outgrow. The passing of special arguments and of whole philo sophical systems leaves that problem still central and dominant. Here, after all, is the crux of the whole question, that no man in those hours when he is intellectually and spiritually at his best can consent, without violence to his profoundest instincts, to believe in a world that loses all its gains, a world in which nothing that we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist. Without some form of personal permanence that issue to the cosmic pro cess seems inevitable.

VI The underlying reason for the seeming inadequacy of all proofs of the life to come is that their absolute verification is impos sible. Hypotheses in geology can be veri fied beyond a peradventure by putting them to the test of facts visible and tangi ble. But hypotheses about the future life, in the nature of the case, cannot be con firmed by an appeal to experiences beyond the grave. When, in answer to this objec tion, it is said that to require a kind of proof which necessarily is out of the ques tion is an unreasonable demand, this, obviously, does not better the case. The really fruitful consideration in this regard is that verification of the hypothesis of everlasting life is not altogether impos sible. Immortality does not concern the future world alone ; it concerns this present existence, for, as we have said, if a man is immortal at all, he is immortal now. Whenever a man, therefore, begins now to live as though he were immortal, he is putting the truth to the test of life, and seeking verification of its validity in terms of its practical consequences. A world in which poison made men strong and foods destroyed them would be no more unreason able than a world in which falsehood made great characters while truth applied issued in ignoble spirit and unworthy life. Indeed, we call arsenic poison just because it does destroy us, and good bread we call food, because it builds us up. So in practical life we count those things true which, taken for true, prove useful, and those things false which will not verify themselves by the difference that they make to life. The engineer, who, engaged in the construction of a bridge, first plots his plans according to the laws of mathematics, then submits them to experts for corroboration, and then building his structure, looks for the ul timate confirmation of his judgment in the completed work, standing the test of use, indicates by his method of procedure the road to all verification of truth. Let a man so test the affirmation of immortality. Let his best judgment decide that it is true, and this judgment be substantiated by the verdict of the seers, and then let him start to live now as though he were immortal. What confirming consequences are sure to come ! The man who lives as though he were immortal lives in a universe where the highest spiritual values are permanent, outlasting the growth and dissolution of the stars ; where personality, whether in himself or others, is infinitely precious and has everlasting issues ; where character is the supreme concern of life, in behalf of which all else may reasonably be sacrificed ; where no social service ever can be vain, if it reg isters itself in even one man made better, and where, in all public-minded devotion to moral causes on the earth, we are not dig ging artificial lakes to be filled by our own buckets, in hopeless contest with an alien universe, but are rather building channels down which the eternal spiritual purpose of the living God shall flow to its "far-off divine event." The truth of immortality makes great living.

It is just here that Jesus gives his most substantial contribution to faith in life everlasting. His teaching of immortality has the authoritative value of a verdict from a spiritual seer, but his life has a veri fying value, exhibiting to us once for all the sort of character resultant from living as though immortality were true. At least once, in him, we have seen what assurance of eternal life means to character. For Jesus differs even from Socrates in this, that while Socrates argued for immortality and believed it, Jesus never stopped to argue, but taking it for granted, as an immediate and unquestionable intuition, lived as though it undoubtedly were true. Others have analyzed the reasons for believ ing in life everlasting, as one might analyze a score of Mozart and discuss arguments to prove its beauty ; but Jesus lived immor tality, as one might play Mozart perfectly. When one considers, therefore, the character of Jesus, in which faith in God was the warp and certainty of life eternal was the woof, he is seeing the consummate verification of faith in immortality. This is the result in human life when personal permanence passes from theory into the verifying test of char acter. Let a man begin to live as though he were not going to die, and his tone of spiritual quality rises by sure degrees towards Christlikeness ; let a man begin to live as though death were the end of all, and even those who themselves have held this creed confess that the deepest motives for character grow dim, and that social ser vice is blighted by disillusionment. Before a man gives himself to disbelief in personal permanence, let him consider this result, that in such a world falsehood makes the best character and truth destroys it. No man, therefore, need stop with the vague possibility of life to come. Immor tality is a hypothesis, if you will, but so is gravitation, and around them both con siderations weighty and assuring gather in support. The reasonableness of the uni verse is pledged to the immortality of man : the beneficence of God is unthinkable with out it; the verdict of the spiritual seers confirms it ; and when it is put to the veri fying test of life it builds the loftiest charac ter.

Death is a great adventure, but none need go unconvinced that there is an issue to it. The man of faith may face it as Columbus faced his first voyage from the shores of Spain. What lies across the sea, he cannot tell ; his special expectations all may be mistaken ; but his insight into the clear meanings of present facts may per suade him beyond doubt that the sea has another shore. Such confident faith, so founded upon reasonable grounds, shall be turned to sight, when, for all the dismay of the unbelieving, the hope of the seers is rewarded by the vision of a new continent.

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