FAITH IN NATURE, OR FAITH IN GOD?
TN the charming paper which Sir Edwin Arnold repub- lished a short time ago from the Fortnightly Review, under the title "Death—and Afterwards,"* a second edition of which has just appeared, the general drift of the purpose appears to be to strengthen faith in a life after death, by illustrating the singular wealth of the resources of Nature for effecting transformations of which we should never have dreamed, by means which we should have supposed utterly unsuitable to the end in view. For example, he draws a brilliant picture of the evolution of the medusa from a germ resembling a rice-grain; he recounts the history of the aphides, and the transformation of the wingless aphis, which contains both sexes in one, into broods of winged males and females ; he insists on the extreme smallness of our experience, and shows that we cannot even imagine a future except in terms of the past or present, and that this so limits our concep- tions as practically to cut us off from adequate imagination of new worlds altogether; and he maintains that there is no more sense in being sceptical about angelic forms or the in- habitants of quite other universes than our own, because we cannot, with our existing experience, conceive them, than there would have been in rejecting with disdain the supposition that creatures like the kangaroo or the ornithorhynchus could exist before Captain Cook had discovered them. "Birth gave to each of us much ; death may give very much more, in the way of subtler senses to behold colours we cannot here see, to catch sounds we do not now hear, and to be aware of bodies and objects impalpable at present to us but perfectly real, intelligibly constructed, and constituting an organised society and a governed, multiform State. Where does Nature show signs of breaking off her magic, that she should stop at the five organs and the sixty or seventy elements ? Are we free to spread over the face of this little earth and never freed to spread through the solar system and beyond it P Nay, the heavenly bodies which we can discern, for all their majesty, are to the ether which contains them, as mere spores of sea- * Published by TrUbner and ON
weed floating in the ocean. Are the specks only filled with life, and not the space? What does Nature possess more valuable in all she has laboured to manufacture here, than the wisdom of the sage, the tenderness of the mother, the devotion of the lover, and the opulent imagination of the poet, that she should let these priceless things be utterly lost by a quinsy or a flux? It is a hundred times more reasonable to believe that she commences afresh with such delicately developed treasures, making them groundwork and stuff for splendid farther living, by process of death ; which, even when it seems accidental or premature, is probably as natural and orderly as birth, of which it is the complement ; and wherefrom, it may well be, the new-born dead arises to find a fresh world ready for his pleasant and novel, but sub- limated, body, with gracious and willing kindred ministrations awaiting it, like those which provided for the human babe the guarding arms and nourishing breasts of its mother." In a word, Sir Edwin Arnold's method is to bewilder us with a brilliant picture of the wonders of the world, and then point out that in a world so wonderful there could be no ground for any special surprise if death should turn out to be the door into a universe of new experiences, instead of merely the close of a chapter in the story of the world we know.
But Sir Edwin Arnold's drift seems to us to fail through his apparent dislike to use theological language, and to weld his imaginative pictures together into an argument, by formally stating the assumption that all these wonders are due to a creative power whose drift of purpose we can to some extent penetrate and discover. Without this assumption, it seems to us that all his wealth of illustration of the marvels of Nature fails entirely of its effect. When he speaks of what Nature "values," what "she commences afresh," and so forth, we are disposed to answer that, looked at only as Nature, we do not know what she values, or whether she in any way objects to let anything she has fashioned, perish, however beautiful it may be. Do we not see the loveliest flower shedding its petals on the ground, and the ground using these petals, just as it would use the mere clay and dust from which they were drawn, to enrich the soil for future production? If Nature does not find her love- liest productions lovely enough to preserve or transfigure into still more exquisite beauty, why should she find the human mind so lovely that she must commence afresh with it on the death of the body? The more you multiply the glory and magic of mere " Nature " before my eyes, the more unable I feel to determine what it is she values except the eternal process of life and death itself. " She " is nothing to me but a mighty transforming agency, unless I can find a personal mind and purpose working through her. Dazzle my eyes with the wonders of the medusa and the star-sown heavens, and the only effect is to make me feel the bewildering wealth of the universe, in which every molecule is a marvel, and every world is as insecure of independent existence as a molecule. Why should mind be any exception, unless you can detect a creative purpose in the production of mind and a special drift of the evolutionary agencies towards that production, which we can by no means detect in the production of the medusa, or the lily, or the star? The richer the medley of wonders in the world about me, the more am I inclined to say,—' Certainly there would be no special wonder in my continuing to live a personal life after death, if that be Nature's drift ; but if not, equally certainly there would be no wonder in my not continuing to live a personal life after death, any more than the blossom which sheds its petals on the ground continues to live a personal life after its death. Change, transformation, and if you like, up to a certain point transfiguration, is apparently the law of Nature; but of the continuous development of individuality after what we call death, there is no more evidence, unless we can partially penetrate the purpose of the whole, than there is of the continuous development of the individuality of the fallen oak, or of the worm with which a bird has fed its young. Nothing " forbids " me to think that life may be continuous after death except the deficiency of anything to "bid" me think it. Produce evidence which bids me think that it is so continuous, and I am satisfied; but the abundance of your illustrations to show how marvellous are the resources of Nature, has no effect except to turn me giddy, apart from the definite evidence I Want that there is something in my mind which entitles it to be treated dif- ferently from the most beautiful of blossoms, from the most brilliant of planets, from the most magnificent of suns.' And especially is this rich display of the wonders of the world, bewildering and dazzling, when attention is called, as Sir Edwin Arnold most impressively calls it, to the use which Nature makes of " illusion " in her manipulation of human life :—" How many exquisite devices of Nature are carried to fulfilment in the dark ! In how many ways she coaxes her children of all the kingdoms to her ends, by softly misleading their instincts ! It is, indeed, almost like high treason against her scheme to try to persuade men that death is nonsense, so urgent is she to have them love their present life, and cling to it, and make the most of it. The philosophers who take so much trouble to teach that 'life is not worth living,' and yet go on existing and discharging their social duties so admirably, make one think that Nature is rather like the hen-wives in Essex. When a pullet will not sit, these good women pluck off the breast-feathers from the recalcitrant fowls and whip the bare space lightly with nettles ; whereupon the hens go straight to the nest to ease their skin against the nice cool eggs ; and habit keeps them there, to the benefit of the farm- yard and the poultry market. Pride, doubt, fear, ignorance, ambition, fashion, bodily needs, are all in turn the nettles of Nature." Nothing could be more happily put ; but if illusion be thus freely used by "Nature," why in the world should not the impression of personality itself, or even of existence, be one of these illusions ? Sir Edwin Arnold insists that Space is an illusion, and that Time is an illusion ; but, as regards the latter at least, we should not hesitate to say that if time is an illusion, so is cause, which is inconceivable without time ; and if • cause,' then will;'
and if then ' conscience ; ' and if conscience,' then 'personality' and moral life altogether. If it be not of the very essence of personality that moral choice came before wrong or right doing, that penitence or remorse followed the wrong-doing, and could not have preceded or been simultaneous with it, and, in short, that character in all its significance involves essentially the idea of a particular time-order which could in no imaginable way be got rid of or inverted, then character or personal life has absolutely no meaning, and there is no more reason why it should be preserved permanently from wreck than why the blossom of a rose should be preserved permanently from wreck. This free use of "illusion "by Nature is surely a fatal difficulty in the way of Sir Edwin Arnold's use of the doctrine that as instinct presupposes the existence of the reality to which instinct leads us, so the universal hope of a future life presupposes the existence of the future life to which it points. Why should it, if " illusion " be one of Nature's most common and most effective instruments? Why should we not be beguiled with the hope of a life of which there is no promise, only in order to make the earthly and temporary life a little more liveable, a little less ignoble ?
It seems to us that Sir Edwin Arnold's eloquent paper is full of instruction only if we substitute " God " for "Nature," only if we can discern in the ethical laws which he has im- posed upon us a trace of eternal purpose far transcending that of all natural beauty or marvel, a purpose in which there is no illusion, nay, of which it is the very secret that it sets us free from the many illusions to which we are otherwise liable. The mere wealth and magic of the world are vast enough, no doubt, to render it easy for us to imagine almost anything for the existence of which a reason can be assigned ; but amongst the things which it is most easy to imagine is the illusiveness of human life itself, that vanity of vanities, as cynics have described it. That which alone awakens us from this easiest of all illusions, to the imperious claims of faith, is the voice of conscience, which forbids us to think ourselves bubbles, which forbids us to think ourselves the sport of illu- sion, which compels us to believe in right and wrong, in spiritual consequences for our actions, and in the significance of volitions that must bear fruit in some real life, even though what we call death should intervene, and that, too, whether our actions have been good or evil.
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