III.]

INDIVIDUAL IMMORTALITY

69

from that consciousness without some part of the Eternal Meaning lapsing with him. The loss of his conscious individuality would be a loss to the Divine completeness of experience, for in virtue of it he holds towards God a unique ethical place, his own place, which he only can fill. Whatever, therefore, death may involve, it cannot involve such a loss as this. From the philosophic standpoint, indeed, death is of peculiarly small significance, a mere accident of the temporal order, with which alone it has any concern. It cannot frustrate or interrupt the eternal meaning; and in man that meaning is bound up with his consciousness of himself and of God, with his individual personality, in fact.

The question regarding individual immortality is thus, from the philosophic standpoint, affirmatively answered. It is involved in and subsidiary to the larger question of the worth of individuality itself, when manifested in human form, and, as we have seen, that worth is beyond human calculation, because much as each man's individuality means to himself it means yet more to God. It is derived from Him, it is sustained in Him, it is the reflex of His own Infinitude

70 DEATH NOT ETHICAL FAILURE [CHAP.

and partakes of His Eternity. Each finite personal being is to God a unique ethical individual, the one in all creation who can hold just this relationship to the Father of his spirit. If he fails, there is no other who can be to God just what he is. So much of the ethical meaning of the Universe has failed with him. Regarded in this light, it seems absurd to look on death as even a possible term to individual ethical life. It is not ethical failure. There is a shadow which looms far more darkly, the significance of which it would be idle to pretend to underrate and from which to our limited vision death gains a fictitious importance the shadow of moral evil. Here indeed there seems to lie the dread possibility of a unique Divine Ideal being frustrated, of complete and irretrievable ethical failure.

It is not possible, in a few short sentences, even to touch on so vast and difficult a problem as this. Mention is made of it simply to intimate that it is not left out of sight, and that our next effort must be to discern its true proportions and indicate the place it holds in the universe of being, and especially of human being.

III.]

TEMPORAL AND ETERNAL LIFE 71

With one further observation, the present chapter must be brought to a close. Granting all that has been said of the worth of each human individual as a unique ethical being, and as a corollary his persistence after death, how are we to account for his having had a beginning? That which begins, must, it would seem, also end. It belongs to the temporal order, not to the eternal, in which there is neither beginning nor end.

The answer to this difficulty must be found in a twofold recognition :

(1) That in so far as it is subjected to

actual earthly conditions, the life of man is temporal and belongs to the temporal order. Birth and death are facts of that order. Physically, man has a beginning and an end; but we have seen already that even under actual limitations he can and does to some extent transcend both the temporal and spatial, i.e., physical, limits, and on his capability of so doing depends his human-as distinguished from his animal—individuality.

(2) And if the supreme worth of that human individuality be allowed, if

2

MAN'S ETERNAL EXPERIENCE [CHAP. III.
it bears a unique and consequently
eternal ethical significance to God,
we must also grant that it neither
began with birth nor ends at death.
That man should not, while re-
stricted to earthly conditions, be
conscious of the eternity of his being,
is not difficult to understand. It is
obscured to him by the temporal
limitations characteristic of those
conditions, and which, it may well
be, are to
to some extent projected
beyond death. If, however, the
considerations already advanced be
valid, temporal limitations must
ultimately cease for every human
individual, and when they do so, his
eternal experience will stand out to
him in a clear and
clear and perfect whole,
the manner of perceiving which is
feebly and faintly foreshadowed in
his actual power of regarding the
past, present and future of his
earthly experience as one life.

CHAPTER IV

THE ETHICAL INDIVIDUAL AND IMMORTALITY

IT is a familiar but significant fact that in every region of knowledge one fact involves another, one truth another, one aspect of experience or thought another. An isolated fact or truth does not exist. It is always bound by close and often unsuspected ties to other facts and other truths. Nor is this the case within the scope of any specified region of knowledge alone. Every branch of science trenches at some point or other on the subject-matter of other branches,the fundamental scientific assumptions demand and stimulate philosophic investigation science and philosophy both bear in manifold and important ways on practical life and thought. Thus to the human

intellect, the known universe in all its aspects inevitably comes to bear the marks of a vast and systematic whole, in which

73