A MODERN "SYMPOSIUM." 



37 



being protected, a pity for suffering, an adniira- ' 

 tion of power, goodness, and truth. All of these 

 imply an external world to act in, human beings 

 as objects, and human life under human condi- 

 tions. 



Now, all these conditions are eliminated from 

 the orthodox ideal of a future state. There are 

 to be no physical impressions, no material diffi- 

 culties, no evil, no toil, no struggle, no human 

 beings, and no human objects. The only condi- 

 tion is a complete absence of all conditions, or 

 all conditions of which we have any experience. 

 And we say, we cannot imagine what you mean 

 by your intensified sympathy, your broader 

 thought, your infinitely varied activity, when you 

 begin by postulating the absence of all that 

 makes sympathy, thought, and activity possible, 

 all that makes life really noble. 



A mystical and inane ecstasy is an appropri- 

 ate ideal for this paradise of negations, and this 

 is the orthodox view ; but it is not a high view. 

 A glorified existence of greater activity and de- 

 velopment may be a high view, but it is a con- 

 tradiction in terms ; exactly, I say, as if you 

 were to talk of a higher civilization without any 

 human beings. But this is simply a metaphysi- 

 cal after-thought to escape from a moral dilemma. 

 Mr. Hutton is surely mistaken in saying that 

 Positivists have forgotten that Christians ever 

 had any meaning in their hopes of a " beatific 

 vision." He must know that Dante and Thomas 

 a Kempis form the religious books of Positivists, 

 and they are, with some other manuals of Catho- 

 lic theology, among the small number of volumes 

 which Comte recommended for constant use. 

 We can see in the celestial " visions " of a mys- 

 tical and unscientific age much that was beauti- 

 ful in its time, though not the highest product 

 even of theology. But in our day these visions 

 of paradise have lost what moral value they had, 

 while the progress of philosophy has made them 

 incompatible with our modern canons of thought. 



Kr. Hutton supposes me to object to any con- 

 tinuance of sensation as an evil in itself. My 

 objection was not that consciousness should be 

 prolonged in immortality, but that nothing else 

 but consciousness should be prolonged. All 

 real human life, energy, thought, and active af- 

 fection, are to be made impossible in your celes- 

 tial paradise, but you insist on retaining con- 

 sciousness. To retain the power of feeling, 

 while all means and objects are taken away from 

 thinking, all power of acting, all opportunity of 

 cultivating the faculties of sympathy are stifled : 

 this seems to me something else than a good. 



It would seem to me that simply to be conscious, 

 and yet to lie thoughtless, inactive, irresponsive, 

 with every faculty of a man paralyzed within 

 you, as if by that villainous drug which produces 

 torpor while it intensifies sensation — such a con- 

 sciousness as this must be a very place of tor- 

 ment. 



I think some contradictions, which Mr. Hut- 

 ton supposes he detects in my paper, are not very 

 hard to reconcile. I admitted that death is an 

 evil, it seems ; but I spoke of our posthumous 

 activity as a higher kind of influence. We might 

 imagine, of course, a Utopia, with neither suffer- 

 ing, waste, nor loss ; and compared with such a 

 world, the world, as we know it, is full of evils, 

 of which death is obviously one. But relatively, 

 in such a world as alone we know, death be- 

 comes simply a law of organized Nature, from 

 which we draw some of our guiding motives of 

 conduct. In precisely the same way the neces- 

 sity of toil is an evil in itself; but, with man and 

 his life as we know them, we draw from it some 

 of our highest moral energies. The grandest 

 qualities of human nature, such as we know it at 

 least, would become forever impossible if Labor 

 and Death were not the law of life. 



Mr. Hutton again takes but a pessimist view 

 of -life when he insists how much of our activity 

 is evil, and how questionable is the future of the 

 race. I am no pessimist, and I believe in a prov- 

 idential control over all human actions by the 

 great Power of Humanity, which indeed brings 

 good out of evil, and assures, at least for some 

 thousands of centuries, a certain progress toward 

 the higher state. Pessimism, as to the essential 

 dignity of man and the steady development of his 

 race, is one of the surest marks of the enervating 

 influence of this dream of a celestial glory. If I 

 called it as wild a desire as to go roving through 

 space in a comet, it is because I can attach no 

 meaning to a human life to be prolonged without 

 a human frame and a human world ; and it seems 

 to me as rational to talk of becoming an angel as 

 to talk of becoming an ellipse. 



By " duties " of the world beyond the grave, I 

 meant the duties which are imposed on us in life, 

 by the certainty that our action must continue to 

 have an indefinite effect. The phrase may be in- 

 elegant, but I do not think the meaning is ob- 

 scure. 



II. I cannot agree with Lord Blachford that 

 I have fallen into any confusion between a sub- 

 stance and an attribute. I am quite aware that 

 the word " soul " has been hitherto used for 

 some centuries as an entity. And I proposed to 



