A MODERN- "SYMPOSIUM." 



501 



ticipate, and much of which I anticipate with 

 absolute indifference. Even our best actions 

 have bad effects as well as good. Macaulay and 

 most other historians held that the Puritan ear- 

 nestness expended a good deal of posthumous ac- 

 tivity in producing the license of the world of the 

 Restoration. Our activity, indeed, is strictly post- 

 humous in kind, even before our death, from the 

 very moment in which it leaves our living mind and 

 has begun to work beyond ourselves. What I did 

 as a child is, in this sense, as much producing post- 

 humous effects, i. e., effects over which I can no 

 longer exert any control, now, as what I do before 

 death will be producing posthumous effects after 

 my death. Now, a considerable proportion of these 

 posthumous activities of ours, even when we can 

 justify the original activity as all that it ought to 

 have been, are unfortunate. Mr. Harrison's pa- 

 pers, for instance, have already exerted a very 

 vivid and very repulsive effect on my mind-!— an 

 activity which I am sure he will not look upon 

 with gratification, and I do not doubt that what 

 I am now writing will produce the same effect 

 on him, and in that effect I shall take no delight 

 at all. A certain proportion, therefore, of my 

 posthumous activity is activity for evil, even 

 when the activity itself is on the whole good. 

 But when we come to throw in the posthumous 

 activity for evil exerted by our evil actions and 

 the occasional posthumous activity for good 

 which evil also fortunately exerts, but for the 

 good results of which we can take no credit to 

 ourselves, the whole constitutes a melange to 

 which, as far as I am concerned, I look with ex- 

 ceedingly mixed feelings, the chief element being 

 humiliation, though there are faint lights mingled 

 with it here and there. But as for any rapture of 

 satisfaction in contemplating my " coming incorpo- 

 ration with the glorious future of our race," I must 

 wholly and entirely disclaim it. What I see in 

 that incorporation of mine with the future of our 

 race — glorious or the reverse, and I do not quite 

 see why the positivist thinks it so glorious, since 

 he probably holds that an absolute term must be 

 put to it, if by no other cause, by the gradual 

 cooling of the sun — is a very patchwork sort of 

 affair indeed, a mere miscellany of bad, good, and 

 indifferent, without organization and without uni- 

 ty. What I shall be, for instance, when incor- 

 porated, in Mr. Harrison's phrase, with the future 

 of our race, I have very little satisfaction in con- 

 templating, except so far, perhaps, as my " post- 

 humous activity " may retard the acceptance of 

 Mr. Harrison's glorious anticipations for the hu- 

 man race. One great reason for my personal 



wish for a perpetuity of volition and personal en- 

 ergy is, that I may have a better opportunity, as 

 far as may lie in me, to undo the mischief I shall 

 have done before death comes to my aid. The 

 vision of " posthumous activity " ought iudeed, I 

 fancy, to give even the best of us very little sat- 

 isfaction. It may not be, and perhaps is not, so 

 mischievous as the vision of " posthumous fame," 

 but yet it is not the kind of vision which, to my 

 mind, can properly occupy very much of our at- 

 tention in this life. Surely the right thing for us 

 to do is to concentrate attention on the life of 

 the living moment — to make that the best we can 

 — and then to leave its posthumous effects, after 

 the life of the present has gone out of it, to that 

 power which, far more than anything in it, trans- 

 mutes at times even our evil into good, though 

 sometimes, too, to superficial appearance at all 

 events, even our good into evil. The desire for 

 an immortal life — that is, for a perpetuation of 

 the personal affections and of the will— seems to 

 me a far nobler thing than any sort of anticipa- 

 tion as to our posthumous activity ; for high af- 

 fections and a right will are good in themselves, 

 and constitute, indeed, the only elements in Mr. 

 Harrison's "glorious future of our race " to which 

 I can attach much value — while posthumous ac- 

 tivity may be either good or evil, and depends on 

 conditions over which he who first puts the ac- 

 tivity in motion often has no adequate control. 



And this reminds me of a phrase in Mr. Har- 

 rison's paper which I have studied over and over 

 again without making out his meaning. I mean 

 his statement that on his own hypothesis " there 

 is ample scope for the spiritual life, for moral re- 

 sponsibility, for the world beyond the grave, its 

 hopes and its duties, which remain to us perfect- 

 ly real without the unintelligible hypothesis." J 

 Now, I suppose, by " the hopes " of " the world 

 beyond the grave," Mr. Harrison means the hopes 

 we form for the " future of our race," and that I 

 understand. But what does he mean by its "du- 

 ties ? " Not, surely, our duties beyond the grave, 

 but the duties of those who survive us ; for he 

 expressly tells us that our mental and moral 

 powers do not increase and grow, develop or 

 vary within themselves — do not, in fact, survive 

 at all except in their effects — and hence duties 

 for us in the world beyond .the grave are, I sup- 

 pose, in his creed impossible. But if he only 

 means that there will be duties for those who 

 survive us after we are gone, I cannot see how 

 that is in any respect a theme on which it is 

 either profitable or consolatory for us to dwell by 

 1 No. III., p. 242. 



