TEE PROPOSED SUBSTITUTES FOR RELIGION. 



431 



guage as this ! Our being is consciousness ; with 

 consciousness our being ends, though our physi- 

 cal forces may be conserved, and traces of our 

 conduct — traces utterly undistinguishable — may 

 remain. That with which we are not concerned 

 cannot aifeet us either presently or by anticipa- 

 tion ; and, with that of which we shall never be 

 conscious, we shall never feel that we are con- 

 cerned. Perhaps, if the authors of this new im- 

 mortality would tell us what they understand by 

 non-existence, we might be led to value more 

 highly by contrast the existence which they pro- 

 pose for a soul when it has ceased to think or 

 feel, and for an organism when it has been scat- 

 tered to the winds. 



They would persuade us that their impersonal 

 and unconscious immortality is a brighter hope 

 than an eternity of personal and conscious exist- 

 ence, the very thought of which they say is tort- 

 ure. This assumes, what there seems to be no 

 ground for assuming, that eternity is a boundless 

 extension of time ; and, in the same way, that in- 

 finity is an endless space. It is more natural to 

 conceive of them as emancipation respectively 

 from time and space, and from the conditions 

 which time and space involve; and among the 

 conditions of time may apparently be reckoned 

 the palling of pleasure or of existence by mere 

 temporal protraction. Even as we are — sensual 

 pleasure palls ; so does the merely intellectual : 

 but can the same be said of the happiness of vir- 

 tue and affection ? It is urged too that by ex- 

 changing the theological immortality for one of 

 physical and social consequences, we get rid of 

 the burden of self, which otherwise we should 

 drag forever. But surely in this there is a con- 

 fusion of self with selfishness. Selfishness is an- 

 other name for vice. Self is merely conscious- 

 ness. Without a self, how can there be self- 

 sacrifice ? How can the most unselfish emotion 

 exist if there is nothing to be moved ? " He that 

 findeth his life, shall lose it ; and he that loseth 

 his life, shall find it," is not a doctrine of selfish- 

 ness, but it implies a self. We have been rebuked 

 in the words of Frederick to his grenadiers, " Do 

 you want to live forever ? " The grenadiers might 

 have answered : " Yes ; and therefore we are ready 

 to die." 



It is not when we think of the loss of anything 

 to which a taint of selfishness can adhere — it is 

 not even when we think of intellectual effort cut 

 short forever by death just as the intellect has 

 ripened and equipped itself with the necessary 

 knowledge — that the nothingness of this immor- 

 tality of conservated forces is most keenly felt : 



it is when we think of the miserable end of affec- 

 tion. How much comfort would it afford anyone 

 bending over the death-bed of his wife to know 

 that forces set free by her dissolution will con- 

 tinue to mingle impersonally and indistinguish- 

 ably with forces set free by the general mortality ? 

 Affection at all events requires personality. One 

 cannot love a group of consequences, even sup- 

 posing that the filiation could be distinctly pre- 

 sented to the mind. Pressed by the hand of 

 sorrow craving for comfort, this Dead Sea fruit 

 crumbles into ashes, paint it with eloquence as 

 you will. 



Humanity, it seems to us, is a fundamentally 

 Christian idea, connected with the Christian view 

 of the relations of men to their common Father 

 and of their spiritual union in the Church. In 

 the same way the idea of the progress of Human- 

 ity seems to us to have been derived from the 

 Christian belief in the coming of the kingdom of 

 God through the extension of the Church, and to 

 that final triumph of good over evil foretold in 

 the imagery of the Apocalypse. At least the 

 founders of the Religion of Humanity will admit 

 that the Christian Church is the matrix of theirs : 

 so much their very nomenclature proves ; and we 

 would fain ask them to review the process of dis- 

 engagement, and see whether the essence has not 

 been left behind. 



No doubt there are influences at work in mod- 

 ern civilization which tend to the strengthening 

 of the sentiment of humanity by making men 

 more distinctly conscious of their position as 

 members of a race. On the other hand, the un- 

 reflecting devotion of the tribesman, which held 

 together primitive societies, dies. Man learns to 

 reason and calculate ; and when he is called upon 

 to immolate himself to the common interest of 

 the race he will consider what the common in- 

 terest of the race, when he is dead and gone, will 

 be to him, and whether he will ever be repaid for 

 his sacrifice. 



Of Cosmic Emotion it will perhaps be more 

 fair to say that it is proposed as a substitute for 

 religious emotion rather than as a substitute for 

 religion, since nothing has been said about em- 

 bodying it in a cult. It comes to us commended 

 by glowing quotations from Mr. Swinburne and 

 Walt Whitman, and we cannot help saying that, 

 for common hearts, it stands in need of the com- 

 mendation. The transfer of affection from an all- 

 loving Father to an adamantine universe is a 

 process for which we may well seek all the aid 

 that the witchery of poetry can supply. Unluck- 

 ily, we are haunted by the consciousness that 



