4

PHYSICAL LIMITATIONS

[CHAP.

will even be faced in the comprehensive and thorough-going manner which alone could avail, in the lifetime of the present generation, in all probability of others to come. And if in the end the Utopia of philanthropists is realised, and peace, sufficiency, and the means of full self-development are placed within the reach of all, there yet remains the tale of ruined lives and uncompensated suffering through which its attainment will have been achieved.

For were full social regeneration capable of immediate accomplishment, individual life would not be rendered satisfactory. Under present conditions, even when, as human experience goes, they are altogether favourable, man never appears to himself to attain the true zenith of his powers. There is always a beyond which could quite conceivably be reached were this or that limitation, perhaps the universal one of the shortness of life, removed. The old man may indeed, owing to the very decay of vitality which causes it, acquiesce calmly in the arrest of his powers, but would he do so before decay has touched him, when body and mind are still in full vigour and activity?

1.]

SHORTNESS OF LIFE

5

Let each man in possession of the mens sana in corpore sano ask this question of himself. And indeed if the first half of the condition alone be fulfilled, it is hard for a man to give up the hope of achievements for which he feels full mental capacity on account of physical infirmity, whether the latter be due to age or to illness. Those who have read the Letters of J. R. Green will remember the pathetic exclamation uttered when it was supposed he had but six weeks to live: "I have so much work to do." As a matter of fact his frail life had yet two years to run, and he accomplished — kept alive, his physician said, more by sheer force of will than anything else, the chief part of the task which lay so near his heart. But can it be doubted that even then his intellectual power was unexhausted, and that had it not been for physical limitations and premature death, far more would have been successfully attempted? The same remark applies with even more force to one whose death came with a shock of surprise to friend and foe alike: "So much to do, so little done," are reported to have been the last words of Cecil Rhodes, who in his

6

INDIVIDUALS SUFFER

[CHAP.

fiftieth year had to leave unfinished at a peculiarly critical period a gigantic task to which perhaps no other living man is equal. Nor are such cases exceptional, save in the particulars of unusual talent and energy. We have but to run over in our minds the list of our personal friends and acquaintance, and we shall find that in the case of successful and unsuccessful alike a falling short of possibilities is the rule. So and so has done well, but he might have done so much better if and then follows the inevitable qualification; or such another would have succeeded, but he was overweighted by poverty, or family cares, by ill-health, or by some other of the ordinary hindrances of ordinary life.

Again there is the injurious effect on others than the individual immediately concerned, which this individual limitation occasions. The statesman who is lost to his country's councils just when she is most in need of him, the mother who is snatched from her children at the age when they chiefly require her care, and the loss of whose tender watchfulness in early years is felt to the end of life, the father whose counsel and ripe experience

I.] DESPITE SOCIAL REGENERATION

7

would have been invaluable to the son just setting forth on his career, but whose voice is silenced by death at the moment when it seemed indispensable, these and countless other instances are so familiar that even to mention them savours of the trite. Each time, however, that they enter into a living experience they are felt with the same keen and bitter strength as though they were the first sorrow of the first man.

Social regeneration is no panacea for these things. It cannot secure to the individual the certainty that his powers shall ripen to their full development, that work which he has undertaken shall be accomplished, that his life shall last long enough to shelter, till shelter is no longer necessary, the lives dependent on him; that the desires either of affection or intellect shall come even near to satisfaction.

And if it is thus with the successfulfor so far it is chiefly those whom the world would deem successful that we have been bearing in mind, in whose case there has been at any rate a partial fulfilment of their best potentialities,-what shall be said of the unsuccessful, of the world's failures, of the

HUMAN IMMORTALITY MEANS [CHAP.

incurably diseased, vicious, miserable, who might have been so different had their environment been different, who, had the halcyon days of social regeneration fallen to them, would at any rate have attained an ordinary level of virtue, decency, satisfaction? Does it content us to regard them as the necessary sacrifice to the well-being of future generations? Are the victims

to war, pestilence, inefficient legislation; to their own and others' ignorance, neglect or despair, mere age-long object-lessons of how not to live? Our intellectual and moral nature alike shrinks from thus regarding them. And it is this fact, quite as much as our private needs, aspirations and affections, which makes of immortality primarily an individual question. We ask indeed, at moments when the brevity and uncertainty of life are personally brought home to us by bereavement or the first warnings that our physical powers have passed their zenith: "Shall I survive? Will those I love survive? Will the desires, the capacities that have never found fruition here 'bloom to profit other where?"" But it is at times of wider sympathy, when not our own lot