POSITIVISM AND AN AFTER LIFE.

THE DRIFT OF MODERN THOUGHT.

" If truth be with thy friend, be with them both." GEORGE HERBERT.


The most practical difficulty, probably, attending positivism as a propaganda is to reconcile mankind to surrender the hopes and expectations of a future life. We purpose devoting some space to show how this difficulty has been met by some of the most prominent exponents of the belief of positivism in our time. And it is right to say that in attaching this designation to those writers whose thoughts we shall quote, we by no means desire to attribute to them any particular position in reference to the general doctrines grouped under the head of positivism, but merely to imply that with regard to this belief of a future life, they dealt with it on purely natural and scientific grounds, held that it was unproved, and laboured to show that humanity could get on unimpaired in either its happiness or its morals without it. There is no more eloquent expositor of the faith of positivism than Mr Frederic Harrison, and it is to two articles by him on "The Soul and Future Life," in the June and July numbers of tho Nineteenth Century that we would first direct attention.

Mr Harrison refers to those who " flout sober thought,' or 'rebuke it with some household word from the Bible or the poets—'Eat, drink, for to-morrow ye die.' Were it not better not to be?' And they assume the question closed, when they have murmured triumphantly, 'Behind the veil behind the veil." He proceeds:—

"They are right, and they are wrong; right to cling to a hope of something that shall endure beyond the grave, wrong in their rebukes to men who in a different spirit cling to this hope as earnestly as they. We, too, turn our thoughts to that which is behind the veil. We strive to pierce its secret with eyes, we trust, as eager and as fearless , and even it may be more patient in searching for the realities beyond the gloom. That which shall come after is no leas solemn to us than to you. We ask you, therefore, What do you know of it ? Tell us , we will tell you what we hope. Let us reason together in sober and precise prose. Why should this great end, staring at all of as along the vista of each human life, be for ever a matter for dithyrambic hypotheses and evasive tropos ? What in the language of clear sense does any one of us hope for after death; what precise kind of life, and on what grounds ? It is too great a thing to be trusted to poetic ejaculations, to be made a field for Pharisaic scorn. At least, be it acknowledged that a man may think of the soul, and of death, and of future life in ways strictly positive (that is, without ever quitting the region of evidence), and yet may make the world beyond the grave the centre to himself of moral life. He will give the spiritual life a place as high, and will dwell upon the promises of that which is after death as confidently as the believers in a celestial resurrection. And he can do this without trusting his all to a perhaps so vague that a spasm of doubt can wreck it, but trusting rather to a mass of solid knowledge, which no man of any school denies to be true so far as it goes."

Further on he writes:—

"We do not pretend there are no mysteries, we do not frown on the poetic splendours of the fancy. There is a world of beauty and of pathos in the vast tether of the Unknown in which this solid ball hangs like a speck. Let all who list, who have true imagination and not mere paltering with a loose fancy, let them indulge their gift, and tell us what their soaring has unfolded. Only let as not waste life in crude dreaming, or loosen the knees of action. For life and conduct, and the great emotions which react on life and conduct, we can place nowhere but in the same sphere of knowledge, under the same canons of proof, to which we entrust all parts of our life. We will ask the same philosophy which teaches us the lessons of civilisation to guide our lives as responsible men ; and we go again to the same philosophy which orders our lives to explain to us the lessons of death. We crave to have the supreme hours of our existence lighted up by thoughts and motives such as we can measure beside the common acts of our daily existence, so that each hour of our life up to the grave may be linked to the life beyond the grave as one continuous whole, 'bound each to each by natural piety.' And so, wasting no sighs over the incommensurable possibilities of the fancy, we will march on with a firm step till we knock at the Gates of Death; bearing always the same human temper, in the same reasonable beliefs, and with the same earthly hopes of prolonged activity amongst our fellows, with which we set out gaily in the morning of life."

Mr. Harrison is strenuous in denouncing "materialism" as he understands it and in asserting the existence and power of a religion without theology. He says:—

"We certainly do reject as earnestly as any school can, that which is most fairly called Materialism, and we will second every word of those who cry out that civilisation is in danger if the workings of the human spirit are to become questions of physiology, and if death is the end of man, as it is the end of a sparrow. We not only assent to such protests, but we see very pressing need for making them. It is a corrupting doctrine to open a brain, and to tell us that devotion is a definite molecular change in this and that convolution of grey pulp and that if man is the first of living animals, he passes away after a short space like the beasts that perish. And all doctrines, more or less, do tend to this, which offer physical theories as explaining moral phenomena, which deny man a spiritual in addition to a moral nature, which limit his moral life to the span of his bodily organism, and which have no place for 'religion' in the proper sense of the word."

"The spiritual traditions of mankind, a supreme philosophy of life and thought, religion in the proper sense of the word, all these have to play a larger and ever larger part in human knowledge, not as we are so often told, and so commonly is assumed, a waning and vanishing part. And it is in this field, the field which has so long been abandoned to theology, that positivism is prepared to meet the theologians. We at any rate do not ask them to submit religion to the test of the scalpel or the electric battery. It is true that we base our theory of society, and our theory of morals and hence our religion itself, on a curriculum of physical, and especially of biological science. It is true that our moral and social science is but a prolongation of these other sciences. But then we insist that it is not science in the narrow sense which can order our beliefs but philosophy; not science which can solve our problems of life, but religion. And religion demands for its understanding the religious mind and the spiritual experience."

But of course it is understood that this is to be a different religion from that which calls itself by this name. As to the present position of theologians who are "fighting a forlorn hope before the advancing line of positive thought," he says:—

"In a religious discussion years ago we once asked one of the Broad Church, a disciple of one of its eminent founders, what he understood by the third Person of the Trinity ; and he said doubtfully 'that he fancied there was a sort of a something.' Since those days the process of disintegration and vaporisation of belief has gone on rapidly, and now very religious minds, and men who think themselves to be religious are ready to apply this 'sort of a something' to all the verities in turn. They half hope that there is 'a sort of a something' fluttering about, or inside, their human frames that there may turn out to be a 'something' somewhere after death, and that there must be a sort of a somebody or (as the theology of culture will have it) a sort of a something controlling and comprehending human life. But the more thoughtful spirits, not being professionally engaged in a doctrine, mostly limit themselves to a pious hope that there may be something in it, and that we shall know some day what it is."

So that we have to see what is the future life which science can afford to allow us. This is stated in the following paragraph:—

"And now to turn to the great phenomenon of material organisms which we call Death. The human organism, like every other organism, ultimately loses that unstable equilibrium of its correlated forces which we name Life, and ceases to be an organism or system of organs, adjusting its internal relations to its external conditions. Thereupon the existence of the complex in dependent entity to which we attribute consciousness, undoubtedly—i.e. for aught we know to the contrary—comes to an end. But the activities of this organism do not come to an end, except so far as these activities need fresh sensations and material organs. And a great part of these activities, and far the noblest part only need fresh sensations and material organs in other similar organisms. Whilst there is an abundance of these in due relation the activities go on ad infinitum with increasing energy. We have not the slightest reason to suppose that the consciousness of the organism continues, for we mean by consciousness the sum of sensations of a particular organism, and the particular organism being dissolved, we have nothing left whereto to attribute consciousness, and the proposal strikes us like a proposal to regard infinity as conscious. So of course with the sensations separately, and with them the power of accumulating knowledge, of feeling thinking or of modifying the existence in correspondence with the outward environment. Life in the technical sense of the word, is at an end, but the activities of which that life is the source were never so potent. Our age is familiar enough with the truth of the persistence of energy and no one sup poses that with the dissolution of the body the forces of its material elements are lost. They only pass into new combinations and continue to work elsewhere. Far less is the energy of the activities lost. The earth and every country, every farmstead and every city on it are standing witnesses that the physical activities are not lost. As century rolls after century, we see every age more potent fruits of the labour which raised the Pyramids, or won Holland from the sea, or carved the Theseus out of marble. The bodily organisms which wrought them have passed into gases and earths, but the activity they displaced is producing the precise results designed on a far grander scale in each generation. Much more do the intellectual and moral energies work unceasingly. Not a single manifestation of thought or feeling is without some result so soon as it is communicated to a similar organism. It passes into the sum of his mental and moral being."

Our author proceeds:—

" We make no mystical or fanciful divinity of death we do not deny its terrors or its evils. We are not responsible for it, and should welcome any reasonable prospect of eliminating or postponing this fatality that waits upon all organic nature. But it is no answer to philosophy or science to retort that death is so terrible, therefore man must be designed to escape it. There are savages who persistently deny that men do die at all, either their bodies or their souls, asserting that the visible consequences of death are either an illusion or an artfully contrived piece of acting on the part of their friends, who have really decamped to the happy hunting fields. This seems on the whole a more rational theory than that of immaterial souls flying about space, as the spontaneous fancies of savages are sometimes more rational than the elaborate hypotheses of metaphysics. But though we do not presume to apologise for death, it is easy to see that many of the greatest moral and intellectual results of life are only possible, can only begin, when the claims of the animal life are satisfied, when the stormy complex and chequered career is over, and the higher tops of the intellectual or moral nature alone stand forth in the distance of time. What was the blind old harper of Scio to his contemporaries, or the querulous refugee from Florence, or even the boon companion and retired playwright of Stratford, or the blind and stern old malignant of Bunhill Fields? The true work of Socrates and his life only began with his resplendent death, to say nothing of yet greater religious teachers, whose names I refrain from citing, and as to those whose lives have been cast in conflicts—tho Cæsars, the Alfreds the Hildebrands the Cromwells the Fredericks—it is only after death, oftenest in ages after death, that they cease to be combatants, and be come creators. It is not merely that they are only recognised in after ages, the truth is that their activity only begins when the surging of passion and sense ends, and turmoil dies away. Great intellects and great characters are necessarily in advance of their age, the care of the father and mother begins to tell most truly in the ripe manhood of their children, when the parents are often in the grave, and not in the infancy which they see and are confronted with. The great must always feel with Kelper, 'It is enough as yet if I have a hearer now and then in a century. 'John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the grave, but his soul is marching along."

"It is not merely," writes Mr Harrison, " that this eternity of the tabor is so gross, so sensual, so indolent, so selfish a creed, but its worst evil is that it paralyses practical life, and throws it into discord. A life of vanity in a vale of tears to be followed by an infinity of celestial rapture is necessarily a life which is of infinitesimal importance. The incongruity of the attempts to connect the two, and to make the vale of tears the ante-chamber or the judgment-dock of heaven, grows greater, and not less, as ages roll on. The more we think and learn, and the higher rises our social philosophy and our insight into human destiny, tho more the reality and importance of the social future impresses us, whilst the fancy of the celestial future grows unreal and incongruous. As we get to know what thinking means, and feeling means, and the more truly we understand what life means, the more completely do the promises of the celestial transcendentalism fail to interest us. We have come to see that to continue to live is to carry on a series of correlated sensations, and to set in motion a series of corresponding forces; to think is to marshal a set of observed perceptions with a view to certain observed phenomena, to feel implies something of which we have a real assurance, affecting our own consensus within. The whole set of positive thoughts compels us to believe that it is an infinite apathy to which your heaven would consign us, without objects, without relations, without change without growth with out action—an absolute nothingness—a nervana of impotence. This is not life, it is not consciousness , it is not happiness. So far as we can grasp the hypothesis, it seems equally ludicrous and repulsive. You may call it paradise but we call it conscious annihilation. You may long for it, if you have been so taught; just as if you had been taught to cherish such hopes, you might be now yearning for the moment when you might become the immaterial principle of a comet, or as you might tell me, that you really were the ether, and were about to take your place in space. This is how these sublimities affect us. But we know that to many this future is one of spiritual development, a life of growth and continual up soaring of still higher affection. It may be so, but to our mind these are contradictions in terms. We cannot understand what life and affection can mean, where you postulate the absence of every condition by which life and affection are possible. Can there be development where there is no law, thought or affection where object and subject are confused into one essence? How can that be existence where everything of which we have experience, and everything which we can define, is presumed to be unable to enter? To us these things are all incoherences, and in the midst of practical realities and the solid duties of life, sheer impertinences. The field is full, each human life has a perfectly real and a vast future to look forward to; these hyberbolic enigmas disturb our grave duties and our solid hopes. No wonder, then, whilst they are still so rife that men are dull to the moral responsibility which, in its awfulness, begins only at the grave; that they are so little influenced by the futurity which will judge them, that they are blind to the dignity and beauty of death, and shuffle off the dead life and the dead body with such cruel disrespect. The fumes of the celestial immortality still confuse them. It is only when an earthly future is the fulfilment of a worthy earthly life, that we can see all the majesty as well as the glory of the world beyond the grave, and then only will it fulfil its moral and religious purpose as the great guide of human conduct."

For the purpose of illustrating these views of Mr. Harrison we quote some passages from the recently published Autobiography of Harriet Martineau. In an article on this work in the August number of the Nineteenth Century, by Mr. W. R. Greg, that writer comments on one passage in the latter part of the book as "describing the more genuine confidence and peace with which she prepared to die when convinced that death was the final close of individual or conscious existence, and of the greater comfort, as well as certainty to her mind, of the later faith. For, surprising and startling as it will be to most of her readers, let no man question that these convictions (to most so desolate) were to her positive beliefs, and not mere negations, a creed not an atheism, as firmly held as doctrines which take martyrs to the stake, and, moreover, seemingly as joyous as any which ever brightened the last hours of an intelligent and beautiful career. Nothing seems more curiously clear than that her course of thought and sentiment became, step by step, more enthusiastically cheerful, and even glad, as, to use her own expression, she exchanged the delusions of theology for the certainties of science, or, as others would describe the same march, as she shook herself gradually free from Christianity, revelation, and dogmatic theism, and, took refuge in what some call Agnosticism and others Knowledge. These views may not be ours, they may be far, indeed, to us from either giving confidence or inspiring joy, but it is simply idle and foolish to deny that they are compatible, at least, with the truest peace and cheerfulness to hundreds with whose intellects we can claim no equality. No one, perhaps, has explained what comfort they are capable of yielding with such bold and simple nakedness as Harriet Martineau; and it is to lose one of the richest lessons of her book to disbelieve the truthfulness of these pages of self development."
Of the extracts quoted by Mr. Greg we select the following:—

"When in the evenings of that spring I experienced the new joy of feeling myself to be a portion of the universe, resting on the security of its universal laws certain that its cause was wholly out of the sphere of human attributes, and that the special destination of my race is infinitely nobler than the highest proposed under a scheme of Divine 'moral government,' how could it matter to me that the adherents of a decaying mythology (the Christian following the heathen, as the heathen followed the barbaric fetish) were fiercely clinging to their man god, their scheme of salvation, their reward and punishment their arrogance, their selfishness, their essential pay system, as ordered by their mythology? As the astronomer rejoices in new knowledge which compels him to give up the dignity of our globe as the centre of the universe, so do those who have escaped from the Christian mythology enjoy their release from the superstition which fails to make happy, fails to make good, fails to make wise, and has become as great an obstacle in the way of progress as the prior mythologies which it took the place of nearly 2,000 years ago. For three centuries it has been undermined, and its overthrow completely decided, as all true interpreters of the Reformation very well know."

" Now whatever estimate, " proceeds Mr. Greg "we may form as to the distinctness of the ideas here conveyed, the correctness of the predictions, or the taste and judgment of some of the phraseology employed, no one can doubt the sincerity of the relief expressed, nor can any one who knew Miss Martineau question for a moment that the last 25 years of her life, the unbelieving portion, as it would be termed, were incomparably the happiest and most buoyant. Yet the last 20 of these were passed, in her own conviction at least, under sentence of imminent and probably sudden death. And the following is her deliberate account of her feelings and reflections under the solemn prospect:—

" I have now had three months' experience of the fact of constant expectation of death, and the result is as much regret as a rational person can admit at the absurd waste of time, thought, and energy that I have been guilty of in the course of my life in dwelling on the subject of death. It is really melancholy that young people (and, for that matter middle aged and old people) are exhorted and encouraged as they are to such waste of all manner of power. I romanced internally about early death till it was too late to die early, and even in the midst of work, and the busiest engagements of my life, I used always to be thinking about death—partly from taste, and partly as a duty. And now that I am waiting it at any hour, the whole thing seems so easy, simple and natural, that I cannot but wonder how I could keep my thoughts fixed upon it when it was far off. I cannot do it now. Night after night, since I have known that I am mortally ill, I have tried to conceive, with the help of the sensations of my sinking fits, the act of dying, and its attendant feelings, and thus far I have always gone to sleep in the middle of it. And this is after really knowing something about it, for I have been frequently in extreme danger of immediate death within the last five months, and have felt as if I were dying and should never draw another breath. Under this close experience I find death in prospect the simplest thing in the world—a thing not to be feared or regretted, or to get excited about in any way. I attribute this very much, however, to my views of death. The case must be much otherwise with Christians, even independently of the selfish and perturbing emotions connected with an expectation of rewards and punishments in the next world. They can never be quite secure from the danger that their air-built castle shall dissolve at the last moment, and that they may vividly perceive on what imperfect evidence and delusive grounds their expectation of immortality and resurrection reposes."

We pass from the writings of Harriet Martineau to those of another thinker who was strongly imbued with the spirit of Positivism. John Stuart Mill, in his posthumously published essays on religion, forcibly protested against the habit of regarding this life, and all of its activities and possessions but as a stepping-stone to one "beyond the veil" of the future. In reply to the objection that the surrender of the belief in an after life can but lead to the adoption of an Epicurean morality, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," he says:—

" Let it be remembered that if individual life is short, the life of the human species is not short; its indefinite duration is practically equivalent to endlessness, and being combined with indefinite capability of improvement, it offers to the imagination and sympathies a large enough object to satisfy any reasonable demand for grandeur of inspiration. If such an object appears small to a mind accustomed to dream of infinite and eternal beatitudes, it will expand into far other dimensions when those baseless fancies shall have receded into the past."

Farther on Mill writes:—

"It remains, then, to estimate the value of this element—the prospect of a world to come as a constituent of earthly happiness. I cannot but think that as the condition of mankind becomes improved, as they grow happier in their lives, and more capable of deriving happiness from unselfish sources, they will care less and less for this flattering expectation. It is not naturally or generally the happy who are the most anxious either for a prolongation of the present life or for a life hereafter; it is those who have never been happy. They who have had their happiness can bear to part with existence, but it is hard to die without ever having lived. When mankind cease to need a future existence as a consolation for the sufferings of the present it will have lost its chief value to them for themselves. I am now speaking of the unselfish. Those who are so wrapped up in self that they are unable to identify their feelings with anything which will survive them, or to feel their life prolonged in their younger contemporaries, and in all who help to carry on the progressive movement of human affairs, require the notion of another selfish life beyond the grave to enable them to keep up any interest in existence, since the present life, as its termination approaches, dwindles into something too insignificant to be worth caring about. But if the Religion of Humanity were as sedulously cultivated as the supernatural religions are (and there is no difficulty in conceiving that it might be much more so), all who had received the customary amount of moral cultivation would, up to the hour of death, live ideally in the life of those who are to follow them, and though, doubtless, they would often willingly survive as individuals for a much longer period than the present duration of life, it appears to me probable that after a length of time, different in different persons, they would have had enough of existence, and would gladly lie down and take their eternal rest."

In answer to the argument which based the belief in a future life on the "instinct of immortality," Mill wrote:—

"Granting that wherever there is an instinct there exists something such as that instinct demands, can it be affirmed that this something exists in boundless quantity, or sufficient to satisfy the infinite craving of human desires ? What is called the desire of eternal life is simply the desire of life ; and does there not exist that which this instinct calls for ? Is there not life ? And is not the instinct, if it be an instinct, gratified by the possession and preservation of life ? To suppose that the desire of life guarantees to us personally the reality of life through all eternity, is like supposing that the desire of food assures us that we shall always have as much as we can eat through our whole lives, and as much longer as we can conceive our lives to be protracted to. . . . .One thing, however, is quite certain in respect to God's government of the world—that He either could not or would not grant to us everything we wish. We wish for life, and He has granted some life ; that we wish (or some of us wish) for a boundless extent of life, and that it is not granted, is no exception to the ordinary modes of His government."

"The Soul and Future Life." By Frederick Harrison. The Nineteenth Century, June and July, 1877

" Harriet Martineau's Autobiography Smith and Elder London, 1877

"Three Essays on Religion By John Stuart Mill, London. Longmans,Green, Bendor and Dyer. 1874

The Argus 1 December 1877,