III

"ULTIMATE QUESTIONS"

I am walking upon a

A MEMORY of long ago. granite pavement that rings like iron, between buildings of granite bathed in the light of a cloudless noon. Shadows are short and sharp: there is no stir in the hot bright air; and the sound of my footsteps, strangely loud, is the only sound in the street. . . . Suddenly an odd feeling comes to me, with a sort of tingling shock - a feeling, or suspicion, of universal illusion. The pavement, the bulks of hewn stone, the iron rails, and all things visible, are dreams! Light, color, form, weight, solidity — all sensed existences

are but phantoms of being, manifestations only of one infinite ghostliness for which the language of man has not any word. . . .

This experience had been produced by study of the first volume of the "Synthetic Philosophy," which an American friend had taught me how to read. I did not find it easy reading; partly because I am a slow thinker, but chiefly because my mind had never been trained to sustained effort in such directions. To learn the "First Principles" occupied me many months: no other volume of the series gave me equal trouble. I would read one section at a time rarely two- never venturing upon a fresh section until I thought that I had made sure of the

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preceding. Very cautious and slow my progress was, like that of a man mounting, for the first time, a long series of ladders in darkness. Reaching the light at last, I caught a sudden new vision of things momentary perception of the illusion of surfaces and from that time the world never again appeared to me quite the same as it had appeared before.

This memory of more than twenty years ago, and the extraordinary thrill of the moment, were recently revived for me by the reading of the essay "Ultimate Questions," in the last and not least precious volume bequeathed us by the world's greatest thinker. The essay contains his final utterance about the riddle of life and death, as that riddle presented itself to his vast mind in the dusk of a lifetime of intellectual toil. Certainly the substance of what he had to tell us might have been inferred from the "Synthetic Philosophy"; but the particular interest of this last essay is made by the writer's expression of personal sentiment regarding the problem that troubles all deep thinkers. Perhaps few of us could have remained satisfied with his purely scientific position. Even while fully accepting his declaration of the identity of the power that "wells up in us under the form of consciousness" with that Power Unknowable which shapes all things, most disciples of the master must have longed for some chance to ask him directly, "But how do you feel in regard to the prospect of personal dissolution?"

And this merely emotional question he has answered as frankly and as fully as any of us could have desired - perhaps even more frankly. "Old people," he remarks apologetically, "must have many reflections in common. Doubtless one which I have now in mind is very familiar. For years past, when watching the unfolding buds in the spring, there has arisen the thought, 'Shall I ever again see the buds unfold? Shall I ever again be awakened at dawn by the song of the thrush?' Now that the end is not likely to be long postponed, there results an increasing tendency to meditate upon ultimate questions."... Then he tells us that these ultimate questions -"of the How and the Why, of the Whence and the Whither"-occupy much more space in the minds of those who cannot accept the creed of Christendom, than the current conception fills in the minds of the majority of men. The enormity of the problem of existence becomes manifest only to those who have permitted themselves to think freely and widely and deeply, with all such aids to thought as exact science can furnish; and the larger the knowledge of the thinker, the more pressing and tremendous the problem appears and the more hopelessly unanswerable. To Herbert Spencer himself it must have assumed a vastness beyond the apprehension of the average mind; and it weighed upon him more and more inexorably the nearer he approached to death. He could not avoid the conviction - plainly suggested in his magnificent

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Psychology and in other volumes of his great work that there exists no rational evidence for any belief in the continuance of conscious personality after death:

After studying primitive beliefs, and finding that there is no origin for the idea of an after-life, save the conclusion which the savage draws, from the notion suggested by dreams, of a wandering double which comes back on awaking, and which goes away for an indefinite time at death; — and after contemplating the inscrutable relation between brain and consciousness, and finding that we can get no evidence of the existence of the last without the activity of the first, - we seem obliged to relinquish the thought that consciousness continues after physical organization has become inactive.

In this measured utterance there is no word of hope; but there is at least a carefully stated doubt, which those who will may try to develop into the germ of a hope. The guarded phrase, "we seem obliged to relinquish," certainly suggests that, although in the present state of human knowledge we have no reason to believe in the perpetuity of consciousness, some larger future knowledge might help us to a less forlorn prospect. From the prospect as it now appears even this mightiest of thinkers recoiled:

... But it seems a strange and repugnant conclusion that with the cessation of consciousness at death there ceases to be any knowledge of having existed. With his last breath it becomes to each the same thing as though he had never lived.

And then the consciousness itself— what is it during

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the time that it continues? And what becomes of it when it ends? We can only infer that it is a specialized and individualized form of that Infinite and Eternal Energy which transcends both our knowledge and our imagination; and that at death its elements lapse into that Infinite and Eternal Energy whence they were derived.

With his last breath it becomes to each the same thing as though he had never lived? To the individual, perhaps surely not to the humanity made wiser and better by his labors.... But the world must pass away: will it thereafter be the same for the universe as if humanity had never existed? That might depend upon the possibilities of future interplanetary communication. . . . But the whole universe of suns and planets must also perish: thereafter will it be the same as if no intelligent life had ever toiled and suffered upon those countless worlds? We have at least the certainty that the energies of life cannot be destroyed, and the strong probability that they will help to form another life and thought in universes yet to be evolved.... Nevertheless, allowing for all imagined possibilities, - granting even the likelihood of some inapprehensible relation between all past and all future conditioned-being the tremendous question remains: What signifies the whole of apparitional existence to the Unconditioned? As flickers of sheet-lightning leave no record in the night, so in that Darkness a million billion trillion universes might come and go, and leave no trace of their having been.