AS REGARDS the possibility of personal survival of bodily death, the evidence of
Psychical Research is clearly of scientific importance. All relevant facts
should be considered and investigated with scientific precision. Any scientific
statements should be based upon knowledge and not upon ignorance. Nevertheless,
our belief in survival is but little influenced by the findings of Psychical
Research. Evidence from that source falls far short of convincing proof.
Alternative hypotheses are possible, and in the end the conclusion must remain
within the realm of hypothesis, whereas the arguments in favour of survival
which are really impressive are on a different footing, and have to do with a
different level of our mind - the level that comprises the general scheme of
values. We have already seen on more occasions than one that value-experiences
are only indirectly the subject-matter of psychology, and yet are the most
important parts of our mental life. Hence a theory of values is needed, which is
to be not a merely psychological theory. Considerations of a psychological
nature are relevant, but do not constitute the foundations of such a theory. The
theory of values belongs primarily to metaphysics, not to psychology.
This question is intimately bound up with the theory of values. Is the life we
live on this earth worth while? If we believe that it is, what are our reasons
for such belief? We may find that the answer to this gives an answer to the
further question: Are we likely to survive? We are likely to survive so far as
we can continue a realization of values which we are in process of realizing
here. This is probably the most decisive criterion. We cannot get certainty.
Scientifically we do not get certainty. It has often been remarked that in
psychical research we have frequently seemed to be on the verge of obtaining
some conclusive evidence to settle the question in a positive way, and through
carelessness in the reports of observers or through peculiar circumstances
apparently accidental, this evidence has broken down, producing the impression
that we are possibly not meant to know. Possibly it is good for us not to be
scientifically certain about a future life, for reasons that will at once
suggest themselves. One such reason is that if the future life is happier than
this life there would be a greater temptation to leave this life when faced with
specially difficult circumstances, and so to lose the discipline which this life
has for character, and to miss some of the factors of character-training. If, as
Keats said long ago, this world is "the vale of soul making," it is fairly clear
that many of the difficulties which we would otherwise wish to avoid, and do
attempt to avoid, are of real benefit to us.
Secondly, if we were scientifically sure of a future existence, we should lose
whatever moral advantage attaches to uncertainty. The uncertainty is itself a
testing circumstance for character. Different people re-act to that uncertainty
in different ways. Some say: "Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we
die.' Others says: "We have this life, let us make the best of it and develop
its possibilities to the utmost, help one another while we are here, sink our
merely individual differences as far as possible, pursue the values we dearly
see without enquiring too much about the more ultimate values of existence at
present hidden from us." These are the two extremes. On the one hand we may find
people giving up the pursuit of ideals, adopting an Epicurean attitude towards
life, regarding the senses and direct physical pleasure as the most obvious and
the most important things in this life, and living for them. On the other hand,
we may find people recognizing the value of evolution, approving of the good,
emphasizing it, and fighting for it without thought of anything beyond -
following virtue for its own sake without thought of reward. Perseverance in
that attitude of mind is itself a training of character, and most likely to
develop to the utmost the potentialities of character. A conviction, grounded in
scientific knowledge, that there is a future life, would not necessarily
interfere with such training; but in the previously mentioned type of person it
might encourage a different order of "goodness" - it might encourage such
persons to look at spiritual things as means to an end instead of as ends in
themselves. Probably, if men were certain of another life, the actual
differences between individuals would remain much as they are now.
If we believe in super-personal values, which are, as it were, caught up in, or
participated in by, the individual personality - if we believe that the
individual achieves personality partly through submission, living for values,
striving to purify his power of appreciation of those values, and partly through
affirmation of them, we pass beyond individuality towards a more general outlook
on life, a super-individual outlook, in that way lessening individuality but
gaining rather than losing in personality. As the individual disciplines his
mind to an appreciation of this hierarchy of values, he gains another attitude
which is also a personal attitude, the attitude of religion, in which he faces
reality not in its abstract aspects of truth, goodness, and beauty, but in its
concrete character as the spirit or soul of the universe, which includes these
values in itself, and realizes them in its own life. The individual in losing
his individuality, gains it again as part of this all-conclusive spiritual
unity. And if we take the individual personality as a very faint reflection of
what we may believe the Universal Mind to be, we may feel that its development
and realization is cut short in this life. However long we may live, fulfilment
is denied us in every case, more in some cases than in others, and the adequate
fulfilment from the point of view of the imperfect human mind can only be
achieved by continued existence in later lives. This would appear to be a much
more powerful argument for belief in a future existence.
Another argument for survival is that from the absolute value of love and
affection. Many people who would claim to have no particular wish or desire for
personal immortality, yet have a feeling that the ending of all friendships in
this life would be so pronounced a violation of any principle of conservation of
value as to be profoundly irrational. Most men think more of the immortality of
those dear to them than of their own immortality. What appears much more of a
waste than that of merely individual excellences and achievements, is that of
the bonds of affection that spring up between individuals and raise them to a
higher unity. It is, indeed, in such a higher unity in this life between
individuals who are unselfishly fond of one another that we may see an analogy
of what may be eventually the communion of saints or the system of souls towards
which the whole universe may be working. We may regard the whole process of
evolution as a process of soul-making. And without love, no soul.(1)
(1) Those who think that a disbelief
in immortality is justified by science and philosophy are the dupes of their own
cleverness or erudition. The advance of science has freed us from crude
superstition and its savage terrors, but leaves us with the larger hope - the
spacious hope, glorious is the adventure.
The process of evolution, occurring not only on this planet but within the whole
of the stellar systems of the universe, may be a process of indefinite
multiplication of psychical and spiritual reality, and an indefinite union and
systematization of that reality. It may be that the whole process of existence
is a process in which God or the Absolute goes out of Himself to produce
individual agents, to a certain extent separated from one another, with a very
small initial amount of freedom which they can make use of and develop, and so
work out their own salvation by gradually adding to that freedom - realizing the
conditions under which that freedom is diminished or increased, learning by
experience that they cannot be sufficient unto themselves, that they must live
as parts of one another, realizing that salvation can only come to all
simultaneously, that we shall all be saved together if we are saved at all.
Possibly the conditions of reality itself may be such that only in this way can
souls be produced. We may imagine conditions in which souls might spring
fully developed from the Godhead, and yet that may be impossible. It is a
question of what we mean by the omnipotence of God. God is omnipotent in that He
can do everything in harmony with His own nature. Some things are not in harmony
with His nature. It may be that the production of individual souls in initial
perfection and completely adapted to one another is not in harmony with His
nature.
Such a view as this seems to be assuming the time process as something real. If
we regard time as ultimately real, and God as in time rather than time in God,
we come up against all the contradictions that Kant has set out so fully, and a
general philosophy of existence is impossible to us. So far as we regard time as
ultimately real we are certainly limited to a merely scientific knowledge of the
world. That is what science is - organized knowledge in terms of space and/or
time. But philosophy attempts to pass beyond this position. We may, if we like,
protest that it is impossible to pass beyond; that we are in time, and cannot
get out of time. I have already tried to explain how according to the doctrine
of values we are on occasions lifted more or less out of time even in this
temporal life. Nevertheless, the sketch which I have given of the production of
souls out of the divine nature or essence, and their gradual return, is in terms
of time. That is the way in which it appears to us, the only way in which we can
think of it. We find that all our scientific thinking, all our scientific
knowledge, while giving us an increasingly clear view of the world around us,
ties us down to the self-contradictory framework of space and time. The
limitation is especially apparent in the case of time.
Nevertheless, by timelessness one does not mean a totum simul, a mere
simultaneity. Timelessness, or eternity, is not a negation of time, it is rather
a fulfilment of time. Time for us, as we experience it, is more than spatialized
time, more than a sequence of one thing after another. Bergson has drawn from
this consideration a conclusion precisely opposite to that which I am drawing.
Bergson makes time, durée réelle, the very stuff of reality. The time
with which we deal in physics and in the other physical sciences is spatialized
time. Bergson would consider that reality as such is duration, and so one finds
at the centre of his system of philosophy the conception of an élan vital
pressing forwards towards greater and greater vital complexity. This is the
fundamental principle which he uses in explaining evolution, upon which may be
grafted the Darwinian theory of struggle for existence and natural selection and
other evolutionary factors of modern biology. The world is in process of
creation, gild to the question about the beginning of it all, Bergson gives a
most unsatisfactory reply. He speaks about an "interruption" occurring at an
unspecified date in the past in the forward progress of the spiritual principle
a falling away in the opposite direction, which is matter. In the organic world
one finds this vital impulse making use of matter (its own "waste product," as
it were). The vital impulse continues to mould it for its own purposes.
Bergson's idea of the relation of structure and function is that function
produces structure, and not structure function. His view is the opposite of the
materialistic theory, according to which one starts with the simplest
configuration of atoms that fall into groups or systems, the more stable systems
surviving, until systems arise sufficiently complicated and stable to be capable
of the function of consciousness. For Bergson the reality is spiritual energy,
which asserts itself in spite of a tendency to "fall away." As there is a
falling away, in a sort of condensation of the world in matter, the spiritual
energy then proceeds to mould that matter and produces the various systems of
function and plan, culminating in the intuitive and intellectual life of man.
The objection to this theory is that it does not carry us far enough. The
assumption which it has to make (viz., that of an "interruption") practically
means a retreat from the philosophic problem. To the question "Why did the
interruption occur," there is no answer. On the other hand, if one holds that
God exists from eternity to eternity - that the existence of God and Spirit is
beyond time, then one may find - or some genius in future ages may be able to
find - a place for time within that eternal system, and one may be able to
explain how the temporal series has arisen.
The individual mind is an abstraction, just as, if we look towards the future,
we can see the various selves or personalities becoming more and more harmonious
with one another and achieving universal values; so, if we think back into our
past, and into the past of the whole organic world and of the stellar systems,
we again find ourselves arising from unity rather than from diversity. We are
parts of one another from the beginning, just as we become parts of one another
in the end. We are parts of one another in the beginning in a different sense,
indeed, from that in which we become parts of one another in the end;
nevertheless, the beginning and the end, though separated for us by a temporal
series, are parts of the same system. If we think at all we have to assume that
reality is intelligible, which means that reality forms a system in which
everything is relevant to everything else - we have to accept the principles of
relevance and of sufficient reason.
Our thinking occurs in time, and we set out our scientific knowledge in a
temporal sequence. Yet in our thinking we see that truth transcends time. The
universe, the totality of things, must be a system, but it must be beyond time,
a system that finds a place for time in itself. What is the meaning of time to
us individually? It has various meanings. Taken at its highest level time has
the meaning of development, of a deeper and deeper penetration into the meaning
of things. Time means for us deepened insight into the significance of the
universe. Some may hold that "the end is progress." These have the zeal of the
reformer, who wishes to leave the world better than he found it. But thought
cannot stop there. Indefinite progress is intellectually almost as bad as
indefinite regress. There is no meaning in a better unless one can believe in a
best. This world is imperfect, and the more we appreciate these imperfections
the more we tend to realize the significance of progress, and of a possible
perfection. When we hear of a terrible case of cruelty, or of cynical
self-seeking, it is then that we become specially conscious of what good means
in contrast with evil, just as it is through our own bad actions, through our
own mistakes, that we become more aware of what we are falling away from, of the
possibilities which we are missing in the way of development of character. And
all this comes to us in sequence of time. It can only come to us in that form in
our individual lives, and the time sequence is an essential condition of this
life. Similarly with the appreciation of beauty, we can only wake our souls in
process of time; we need time for it. Likewise with truth; we can only fully
appreciate truth through the process of manufacturing it, hammering it out. But
some do it much more rapidly and completely than others. A mathematical genius
will reach mathematical truth at a much quicker rate than will a mathematician
of average ability. Mathematics, indeed, is a good illustration of the
significance of temporal experience in revealing what is essentially
self-evident and beyond time. The time taken in reaching truth is relative to
mathematical "sincerity," to the extent to which the mathematician can free
himself from the influence of irrelevant factors. So in morals, we in our finite
lives can only achieve the self-evident through painful experience and frequent
failure. Sincerity is an indispensable condition. We thus gradually remake
ourselves in the light of the moral ideal, and in so doing gain an
ever-increasing insight into the nature and significance of that ideal.
Similarly with art - aesthetic appreciation of music, painting, sculpture, etc.
So, too, in religion, which is an attempt to find out the purpose of the
universe, believing that there is such a purpose, taking it as a hypothesis, and
endeavouring to identify oneself as far as possible with that purpose, and to
play one's part within it. Here there is the great difficulty of optimism and
pessimism. The purpose of the universe may be not beneficent, but maleficent, or
again it may be a huge mistake, it may have no meaning at all, and what we think
is its meaning may be simply illusion due to our own individual and restricted
point of view. The argument against this is a pragmatic one, that the more
sincere we are with ourselves in working out and applying the doctrine of
values, the more do we realize that there is a force greater than ourselves, not
only individually but also collectively, working towards a realization of these
values. We advance inevitably from a religion of humanity to a religion of God.
Note: The above article appeared in "Mind and
Personality" by William Brown (1926, University of London Press, London).
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