2.12. OF PERSONAL IMMORTALITY.
These are my beliefs. They begin with arbitrary assumptions; they end in
a mystery.
So do all beliefs that are not grossly utilitarian and material,
promising houris and deathless appetite or endless hunting or a cosmic
mortgage. The Peace of God passeth understanding, the Kingdom of Heaven
within us and without can be presented only by parables. But the
unapproachable distance and vagueness of these things makes them none
the less necessary, just as a cloud upon a mountain or sunlight remotely
seen upon the sea are as real as, and to many people far more necessary
than, pork chops. The driven swine may root and take no heed, but man
the dreamer drives. And because these things are vague and impalpable
and wilfully attained, it is none the less important that they should be
rendered with all the truth of one's being. To be atmospherically vague
is one thing; to be haphazard, wanton and untruthful, quite another.
But here I may give a specific answer to a question that many find
profoundly important, though indeed it is already implicitly answered in
what has gone before.
I do not believe I have any personal immortality. I am part of an
immortality perhaps; but that is different. I am not the continuing
thing. I personally am experimental, incidental. I feel I have to do
something, a number of things no one else could do, and then I am
finished and finished altogether. Then my substance returns to the
common lot. I am a temporary enclosure for a temporary purpose; that
served, and my skull and teeth, my idiosyncracy and desire, will
disperse, I believe, like the timbers of a booth after a fair.
Let me shift my ground a little and ask you to consider what is involved
in the opposite belief.
My idea of the unknown scheme is of something so wide and deep that I
cannot conceive it encumbered by my egotism perpetually. I shall serve
my purpose and pass under the wheel and end. That distresses me not at
all. Immortality would distress and perplex me. If I may put this in a
mixture of theological and social language, I cannot respect, I cannot
believe in a God who is always going about with me.
But this is after all what I feel is true and what I choose to believe.
It is not a matter of fact. So far as that goes there is no evidence
that I am immortal and none that I am not.
I may be altogether wrong in my beliefs; I may be misled by the
appearances of things. I believe in the great and growing Being of the
Species from which I rise, to which I return, and which, it may be, will
ultimately even transcend the limitation of the Species and grow into
the Conscious Being, the eternally conscious Being of all things.
Believing that, I cannot also believe that my peculiar little thread
will not undergo synthesis and vanish as a separate thing.
And what after all is my distinctive something, a few capacities, a few
incapacities, an uncertain memory, a hesitating presence? It matters no
doubt in its place and time, as all things matter in their place and
time, but where in it all is the eternally indispensable? The great
things of my life, love, faith, the intimation of beauty, the things
most savouring of immortality, are the things most general, the things
most shared and least distinctively me.
