In my quarter of a century in London there were at least two men of conspicuous ability who came to the front by proclaiming the certainty of life after death. The one was a Mr. Sinnett who preached in a new magazine entitled Broad Views. “I know people,” he said boldly, “who not only remember their past lives, but are in a position, if it were worthwhile, to write a complete diary of every day of those antenatal lives. For all persons the faculty in due course of time will come.”
Every soul now being born into the world, Mr. Sinnett insisted, went out of the world from 1,500 to 2,000 years ago. We are therefore all contemporaries of the Apostles and the Caesars, and the antenatal autobiographies of some of us ought to be worth reading. Dr. Anna Kingsford believed she was a reincarnation of Plato, and Mrs. Besant is said to be Hypatia come to life again, but these are mere assertions.
Mr. Sinnett sets forth “what happens to the soul after the death of the body. The experiences that come on first when a human soul is emancipated from the prison of the flesh are not of a very exalted order. As consciousness fades from the physical vehicle, it carries with it the finer sheath of astral matter which has interpenetrated the coarser physical vehicle during life, and in this ethereal but still quite material envelope, it exists for a time in the region commonly called the astral plane.
“On the astral plane the soul, in a vehicle of consciousness which is insusceptible to heat or cold, incapable of fatigue, subject to no waste, and therefore superior to the necessity of taking food, continues an existence for a variable period which in many of its aspects is so like the life just abandoned that uninstructed people who pass over find it impossible to believe that they are what is called dead. But that state of things, though, as it grows familiar, and as the field of view is enlarged, may be agreeable enough, and may be associated with the renewal of friendships and affections interrupted for a time by death, is not the stage of things that corresponds to the Heaven of religious teaching.
“Nothing that has ever been said from the religious point of view concerning the blissful condition of the soul in Heaven involves any exaggeration. On the contrary, the basic fact connected with existence on the plane of nature corresponding to the Heaven of theology is bliss, absolute, complete and unalloyed.”
But surely the methods of nature provide for all cases, and not merely for those of the spiritual aristocracy. What are we to think of the condition in Heaven of, let us say, a drunken coal heaver, whose earthly life has been anything but meritorious. Mr. Sinnett might reply that even in such a man's life there may have been some little gleam of spiritual feeling, something resembling love for a woman or a child.
Mr. Sinnett concludes by declaring that this theory of his “is not theory at all, but a living fact of consciousness" still to most of us as yet it is only a theory and hardly even plausible.
Plainly the whole hypothesis depends on the antenatal biographers and they are conspicuous by their absence.
The second person to preach Eternal Life was a Frederic Myers who was much more scientific than Sinnett, if I may be forgiven for using such a word to describe either of these dreamers. His book, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, is, he tells us, the result of thirty years' close study and serious thought.
Myers declares that “messages of the departing and departed have actually proved: a) Survival pure and simple; the persistence of the spirit's life as a structural law of the universe; the inalienable heritage of each several soul. b) In the second place, these messages prove that between the spiritual and the material worlds an avenue of communication does in fact exist, that which we call the dispatch and the receipt of telepathic messages, or the utterance and the answer of prayer and supplication. c) In the third place, they prove that the surviving spirit retains, at least in some measure, the memories and the loves of earth. Without this persistence of love and memory should we be in truth the same?” Finally he declares that “every element of individual wisdom, virtue, love, develops in infinite evolution toward an ever-highering hope, toward Him who is at once thine innermost Self and thine ever unattainable Desire.”
But all this is founded on the slightest basisis indeed mere assertion. The whole theory is as fantastic and absurd as that of Sinnett. It only shows the intense human desire to live again after this life, but after thousand of years of study we have not the slightest proof of any such existence.
A little later there was much stronger testimony: Sir Oliver Lodge who succeeded Frederic Myers as President of the Society for Psychical Research and a few years later as Head of the British Association, made some startling statements which his position rendered extremely important. He stated boldly that “personality persists beyond bodily death.” Bergson made as positive an assertion to the same effect only a short time before in an address to the Society for Psychical Research. But Lodge went further and his words carried weight. He said: “The evidence to my mind goes to prove that discarnate intelligence, under certain conditions, may interact with us on the material side, thus indirectly coming within our scientific ken, and that gradually we may hope to attain some understanding of the nature of a larger, perhaps ethereal, existence and of the conditions regulating intercourse across the chasm. A body of responsible investigators has even now landed on the treacherous but promising shores of a new continent. Yes, there is more to say than that. The methods of science are not the only way, though they are our way, of being piloted to truth.”
He was asked if he could tell of his investigations. “Not yet,” he answered, “one must wait a little longer; but I am convinced that those on the other side are trying to speak to us, and that they are doing all in their power to help us.”
And he went on: “When the time comes in which men not only think or hope that they survive death, but when they know it, know it is a fact of life, then many of our problems will solve themselves. For it is inconceivable that men thus convinced of Immortality should lack the spirit of fellowship; inconceivable, surely, that they should depress each other, struggling for material enjoyments which entail suffering on their fellow creatures. One believes, as Christ believed, that Brotherhood among men absolutely depends upon faith in a divine Fatherhood; the whole labor of Christ's teaching was to persuade men to believe in the existence of a God in order that they might live on the earth as the sons of one Father. Because we have grown to be incurious about life after death, life here and now has assumed the dangerous characteristics which are at present troubling the politicians. Social existence is organized almost entirely on an animal basis; struggle for existence is still one of our main conditions; the dignity of life tends to disappear more and more with the stability of the social order; men are not now so concerned about character, about real values, as about money and enjoyment. This is why I regard the labor of psychical research as so well worthwhile; it is a labor which ought to result in restoring to mankind a sense of Infinitythat sense of greatness, the grandeur, and the dignity of existence without which poetry must perish, the imagination wither, and the human species sink into a miserable condition of animal degradation.”
These are weighty words: No such dignified pronouncement has been made in our time. And though I should like to believe that “personality persists after death,” and though I believe that all manner of good would come from the faith, I cannot believe. I often wish I could.
I find myself in closer agreement with Maeterlinck who wrote a series of articles on “Life after Death” in The Fortnightly Review during 1913. He begins by declaring that he has “no reluctance to admit the survival and the intervention of the dead, but it is for the spirit, or for those who make use of its name, first to prove that the dead really exist.”
He sums up: “The spiritualist follow the tracks of our dead for a few seconds, in a world where seconds no longer count, and then they abandon them in the darkness.
“The fact remains that this inability to go even a few years beyond the life after death detracts greatly from the interest of their experiments and revelations; at best, it is but a short space gained, and it is not by this juggling on the threshold that our fate is decided. I am ready to go through what may befall me in the short interval filled by those revelations, as I am even now going through what befalls me in my life. My destiny does not lie there, nor my home. The facts reported may be genuine and proved; but what is even much more certain is that the dead, if they survive, have not a great deal to teach us, whether because, at the moment when they can speak to us, they have nothing to tell us, or because, at the moment when they might have something to reveal to us, they are no longer able to do so, but withdraw forever and lose sight of us in the immensity which they are exploring.”
Even Maeterlinck here seems to believe more than I can credit.
It is true that Alfred Russel Wallace believed devoutly in a life after death and believed too, as I have told, that there was continual communication between the dead and the living. But I strained ears in vain and remained at long last a confirmed skeptic. Meredith, too, another wise man, believed in a Divine Providence and the gradual disappearance from this life of all that was maimed or wrong. I could hardly rise to that height of faith. Wise men, I saw, were instruments of good in life and might yet lift this earthly life to a high plane of enjoyment and spiritual growth; but even this appeared to me doubtful and I could find no trace of a God in nature, no hope of a life after death for man. Skepticism was rooted in my nature.
Small wonder that Professor Metchnikoff, one of the greatest modern scientists, declares that “since the awakening of the scientific spirit in Europe, it has been recognized that the promise of a future life has no basis of fact to support it. The modern study of the functions of the mind has shown beyond all question that these are dependent on the functions of the body, in particular of those of the central nervous system.”
I cannot understand why we hesitate to explain life according to our present knowledge. There is no trace of an omnipotent or all-good God to be found anywhere in life; but there is everywhere in animals, as in insects, abounding evidence of a creative impulse, and impulse that is the chief source of our bodily pleasures and is at the same time the soul, so to speak, of all our highest spiritual joys. To deny this universal creative impulse would be as ridiculous, it seems to me, as to talk of goodness in creation.
There are two other facts that appear to consort better with our wishes; we seem to be able to trace hierarchy in living creatures and it is fairly plain that the tenure of life corresponds roughly to this hierarchy. That is, the highest or most complicated creatures live the longest. Furthermore the highest in the hierarchy, men and women, are also the kindliest, the most unselfish, in short the most moral, or rather the only ones in whom morality can be said to exist.
We have then in life a universal creative impulse and this impulse satisfies itself in producing higher and higher creatures; or, if you will, more and more complex creatures, and these creatures in proportion to their complexity live longer than the others and finally develop a morality of kindness and unselfishness which the other creatures know little or nothing about.
There is a certain order in the universe, a rude imperfect order, if you will, but order neverthelessorder and law.
And strange to say, in this cosmos ruled by law, there are continued revelations of pure beauty; now a sunset or sunrise; again a coastline framing a dark blue ocean transfigured by silvery moonlight; or a mountain gorge with pine-clad heights and shadowy depths holding a little rivulet; or simply a superb man's figure or the soul-glow in a girl's eyes. Beauty everywhere, without order of any kind or law that we can detect.
Now is the creative impulse to stop and be satisfied with men and women? That is a question we cannot answer from experience. Some say the creative impulse is committed by its very nature to an endless succession of cycles. I see no reason to believe this; rather I believe that the best men will sooner or later get together and transform this world of ours into an Earthly Paradise by making men and women better and wiser than we can easily imagine them today. It seems so simple to begin by abolishing war and doing away with armies and navies while spending the money thus saved on the education and development of the many. We could thus put an end to poverty and know nothing more of the millionaire or the starving child, and every foot of progress upward would make the next step easier, the good result more certain. The heaven dreamed of can be realized here on this earth and in man's lifetime if we set ourselves to the work.
One cannot resist the question: Are we tending to this goal or are we merely taking our wishes for the spirit and purpose of the Universe? Even so, it may be that our unselfish desires are themselves prophetic of the future.
It looks as if the creative impulse we have found everywhere in life is working out its own fulfillment. How else can we explain the fact that the best men, centuries after their death, are selected out and adored as Gods, their teaching even becoming our example and inspiration?
In truth, we men are called and chosen to a purpose higher than our consciousness. The creative impulse, if not God, is at least a conscious striving to reach the highest. We must cooperate with this impulse and do our best to make this life worth living for all and so turn men and women into ideals and this earthly pilgrimage of ours into a sacred achievement.