xix PHILOSOPHY AND A FUTURE LIFE 371 



struction ; what he saw was the death of a body which 

 was merely a phenomenon in his own world of experience. 

 But \t,per impossible, he could have witnessed the destruc 

 tion of the subject of a world of experience, his own destruc 

 tion, as a phenomenon in such a world, would have been 

 included in the catastrophe. Thus both these paradoxes 

 are designed to bring out the essential and incurable 

 philosophic ambiguity of death. * Death is not the 

 same thing for him who experiences and for him who 

 witnesses it. It forms the limiting case which involves 

 the breakdown of the great social convention, whereby we 

 postulate (for practical purposes) a common world which 

 is experienced by us all. (No. 3.) Even during life that 

 convention is maintained only at the cost of excluding 

 from reality all such experiences as are personal, or 

 divergent, or incapable of forming a basis for common 

 action. At death it breaks down altogether, and the long- 

 suppressed divergence between the world of my experi 

 ence and the objective world, which is nobody s experi 

 ence but is supposed to account for everybody s, dominates 

 the situation. 2 



When a man dies his relation to the common world 



1 Cp. also Riddles of the Sphinx, ch. xi. 8. 



2 This is the simplest description of the actual situation and begs the fewest 

 questions. The monistic metaphysicians who arrogate to themselves exclusive 

 rights to an idealism which they cannot use, and which dies away in their hands 

 either into naturalism or into platitude, prefer to distort it by postulating as its 

 explanation a divine consciousness which somehow embraces or contains all the 

 subject-consciousnesses of our fellows, and thereby (sic) guarantees the absolute 

 commonness of the common world which is really the object of the divine 

 consciousness. But the expedient proves utterly futile. For (i) the conception 

 of one consciousness (divine or diabolical) including another has never yet been 

 shown to be capable of anything like intelligible statement (cp. Dr. Rashdall in 

 Personal Idealism, pp. 382-4). The only clue in experience to anything of the 

 sort is to be found in the highly suggestive, but quite inadequately studied, facts of 

 multiplex personality, and it seems extremely doubtful whether even these would 

 lead to the desired conclusion. The metaphysicians in question, moreover, are 

 about the last people in the world to concern themselves with empirical phenomena 

 of this sort. (2) The divine world-image, so far from explaining the plurality of 

 our individual world-images, only adds one to their number. It remains involved 

 in the old Platonic difficulty of the transcendent universal. Or, if it is taken as 

 really immanent, it becomes merely a hypocritical description of the harmony of 

 the individual images, and lapses into atheism. And (3) in many cases the 

 harmony is very imperfect, and there is not, strictly, a common world at all. 

 That is, the communion is neither pre-existent nor absolute. It is an achievement, 

 reached by infinite labours and unending struggles, to a limited degree, for a 

 limited period. We do not, as a matter of fact, experience our common objects 



