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Page 30
"After studying primitive beliefs, and finding that there is
no origin for the idea of an after-life, save the conclusion
which the savage draws, from the notion suggested by dreams,
of a wandering double which comes back on awaking, and
which goes away for an indefinite time at death;--and after
contemplating the inscrutable relation between brain and
consciousness, and finding that we can get no evidence of the
existence of the last without the activity of the first,--we
seem obliged to relinquish the thought that consciousness
continues after physical organization has become inactive."
In this measured utterance there is no word of hope; but there is
at least a carefully stated doubt, which those who will may try
to develop into the germ of a hope. The guarded phrase, "we _seem_
obliged to relinquish," certainly suggests that, although in the
present state of human knowledge we have no reason to believe in the
perpetuity of consciousness, some larger future knowledge might help
us to a less forlorn prospect. From the prospect as it now appears
even this mightiest of thinkers recoiled:--
... "But it seems a strange and repugnant conclusion that with
the cessation of consciousness at death there ceases to be any
knowledge of having existed. With his last breath it becomes
to each the same thing as though he had never lived.
"And then the consciousness itself--what is it during the time
that it continues? And what becomes of it when it ends? We can
only infer that it is a specialized and individualized form
of that Infinite and Eternal Energy which transcends both our
knowledge and our imagination; and that at death its elements
lapse into that Infinite and Eternal Energy whence they were
derived."
* * * * *
--_With his last breath it becomes to each the same thing as though
he had never lived?_ To the individual, perhaps--surely not to the
humanity made wiser and better by his labors.... But the world must
pass away: will it thereafter be the same for the universe as if
humanity had never existed? That might depend upon the possibilities
of future inter-planetary communication.... But the whole universe
of suns and planets must also perish: thereafter will it be the same
as if no intelligent life had ever toiled and suffered upon those
countless worlds? We have at least the certainty that the energies
of life cannot be destroyed, and the strong probability that
they will help to form another life and thought in universes
yet to be evolved.... Nevertheless, allowing for all imagined
possibilities,--granting even the likelihood of some inapprehensible
relation between all past and all future conditioned-being,--the
tremendous question remains: What signifies the whole of apparitional
existence to the Unconditioned? As flickers of sheet-lightning leave
no record in the night, so in that Darkness a million billion trillion
universes might come and go, and leave no trace of their having been.
* * * * *
To every aspect of the problem Herbert Spencer must have given
thought; but he has plainly declared that the human intellect, as at
present constituted, can offer no solution. The greatest mind that
this world has yet produced--the mind that systematized all human
knowledge, that revolutionized modern science, that dissipated
materialism forever, that revealed to us the ghostly unity of all
existence, that reestablished all ethics upon an immutable and eternal
foundation,--the mind that could expound with equal lucidity, and by
the same universal formula, the history of a gnat or the history of a
sun--confessed itself, before the Riddle of Existence, scarcely less
helpless than the mind of a child.
But for me the supreme value of this last essay is made by the fact
that in its pathetic statement of uncertainties and probabilities one
can discern something very much resembling a declaration of faith.
Though assured that we have yet no foundation for any belief in the
persistence of consciousness after the death of the brain, we are
bidden to remember that the ultimate nature of consciousness remains
inscrutable. Though we cannot surmise the relation of consciousness
to the unseen, we are reminded that it must be considered as a
manifestation of the Infinite Energy, and that its elements, if
dissociated by death, will return to the timeless and measureless
Source of Life.... Science to-day also assures us that whatever
existence has been--all individual life that ever moved in animal
or plant,--all feeling and thought that ever stirred in human
consciousness--must have flashed self-record beyond the sphere of
sentiency; and though we cannot know, we cannot help imagining that
the best of such registration may be destined to perpetuity. On this
latter subject, for obvious reasons, Herbert Spencer has remained
silent; but the reader may ponder a remarkable paragraph in the final
sixth edition of the "First Principles,"--a paragraph dealing with
the hypothesis that consciousness may belong to the cosmic ether.
This hypothesis has not been lightly dismissed by him; and even while
proving its inadequacy, he seems to intimate that it may represent
imperfectly some truth yet inapprehensible by the human mind:--
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