Tragic Sense Of Life

f reason to prove the immortality of the soul. The arguments in favour of it are commonly derived from metaphysical, moral, or physical considerations. But it is really the Gosp

is is the real origin, the inward origin, of his Critique of Practical Reason, and of his categorical imperative and of his God. But in spite of all this, the sceptical

w degrees according as the brain receives impressions from the outside world, how it is temporarily suspended during sleep, swoons, and other accidents, and how everything leads us to the rational conjecture

hange, that in like manner as it is integrated so it is disintegrated, is a thing very evident. For Aristotle it was the substantial form of the bo

bides solely by reason, by objective truth-is necessarily

all materialism means for us nothing else but the doctrine which denies the immorta

tem will always seem to us materialist. The immortality of the soul is saved only by the dualist systems-those which teach that human consciousness is something substantially distinct and different from the other manifestations of phenomena. And reason is naturally monist. For it is the function of reason to understand and explain the universe, and in order to understand and explain it, it is in no way

nexpugnable longing for immortality and the subsequent belief in it. All the sophistries which aim at proving that the soul is substance, simple and incorruptible, proceed from this source. And further, the

has proved the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents of the wafer do not change in the Lord's Supper, and yet it has become the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance solely. The bread-substance must have been withdrawn and the Divine substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate sensible properties. But though th

ncept of substance to the doctrine of the Eucharistic transubstantiation is merely a consequence of its anterior application to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. As I explained in the preceding chapter, the Sacrament of the Eucharist is simply the reflection of the belief in immortality; it is, for the believer, the proof, by a mystical experience, that the soul is immortal and will enjoy God eternally. And the concept of substance was born, above all and before all, of the concept of the substantiality of the soul, and the latter was affir

he soul is the man, whether the soul is composed of matter and form, and whether it is incorruptible, and then say if all this is not subtly intended to support the belief that this incorruptible substantiality of the soul renders it capable of receiving from God immor

piece of timber, which was replaced by another of the same shape and dimensions, then lost another, and so on with all her timbers, and finally returned to port the same ship, with the same build, the same sea-going qualities, recognizable by everybody as the same-we might as well say of such a ship

n me a principle which thinks, wills, and feels.... Now this implies a begging of the question. For it is far from being an immediate truth that there is in me such a principle; the immediate truth is that I think

sequently the simple subject A will be the soul. If thought resides in A, B, and C, it follows that thought is divided into parts, which is absurd. What sort of a thing is a perception, a comparison, a judgement, a ratiocination, distributed among three subjects?" A more obvious begging of the question cannot be conceived. Balmes begins by taking it for granted that the whole, as a whole, is incapable of making a judgement. He continues: "The unity of consciousness is opposed to the division of the soul. When we think, there is a subject which knows everything that it thinks, and this is impossible if parts be attributed to it. Of the thought that is in A, B and C will know nothing, and so in the other cases respectiv

hat apperception and judgement are a resultant, that perceptions or ideas themselves are components which agree. They begin by supposing something external

which I think of my previous state of consciousness B, is not the same as its predecessor. Or if I think of my soul, I t

ent move? And only that which moves has external reality. Does the principle of life live? Hume was right when he said that he never encountered this idea of himself-that he only observed himself desiring or performing or feeling somethi

ties intended to establish the rationality of faith in the immortality of the soul. It is sought to give the value of objective reality to that which does not po

he notion of substance is a non-phenomenal category. It is a noumenon and belongs properly to the unknowable-that is to say, according to the sense in which it is understood. But in its transcendental sense it is som

g is idea or that everything is spirit, is the same as saying that everything is matter or that everything is energy, for if everything is idea or everything spirit, and if, therefore, th

ism, or want a demonstration of the existence and immateriality of God, or the natural immortality of the soul." In paragraph cxl. he lays it down that we have an idea, or rather a notion, of spirit, and that we know other spirits by means of our own, from which follows-so in the next paragraph he roundly affirms-the natural immortality of the soul. And here he enters upon a series of c

, the originator of all the organic functions of the body. The soul not only thinks, feels, and wills, but moves the body and prompts its vital functions; in the human

or the reason is a veritabl

by the newly published writings of the second-century philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias and by Pietro Pomponazzi and others. And in point of fact, little or

Psychical Research resumed that formidable mass of data relating to presentiments, apparitions of the dead, the phenomena of dreams, telepathy, hypnotism, sensorial automatism, ecstasy, and all the rest that goes to furnish the spiritualist arsenal. I entered upon the reading of it not only without that temper of cautious suspicion which men of science mainta

f this indeed be so, then we were in God before we were born, and if when we die we return to where we were before being born, then the human soul, the individual consciousness, is perishable. And since we know very well that God, the personal and conscious God of Christian monotheism, is

ypocrisy. The whole of the first part of Spencer's First Principles, and especially the fifth chapter entitled "Reconciliation"-that between reason and faith or science and religion being understood-is a model at the same time of philosophical superficial

ious affirmations, is a science which, in explaining the origin of the belief that the soul is something that can live disjoined from the body, has destroyed the rationality of

son confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts it.

ent each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it, to lay it out rigid in the mind. Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them. Worms also

not, and both itself and others, in relation to themselves and one another, are and are not, and appear to be and appear

is the only perfect science, inasmuch as it adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides numbers, but not real and s

we think with words, we perceive with forms. To think is to converse with oneself; and speech is social, and social are thought and logic. But

. He has always sought to hold fast to logic, and especially in the Middle Ages, in the interests of theology and jurisprudence, both of which based themselves on what was establ

aw. The Eastern theology is rhetorical in form and based on philosophy. The Latin divine s

nger of immortality, which pretend to be grounded o

facts, the data, presented to us by reality, in order that it may arrive, or not arrive, as the case may be, at a certain conclusion. What is important is to define the problem clearly, whence it follows that

llows that the theological or advocatory spirit is in its principle dogmatical, while the strictly scientific and purely rational spirit is sceptical, σκεπτικο?-that is, investigative. It is so at least in its principle, for there is the other sense of the term scepticism, that which is most usual to-day, that of a system of doubt, suspicion, and uncertainty, and this has arisen from the theological or advocatory use of reason, from the abuse of dogmatism. The endeav

these objections-sed contra est ... or respondeo dicendum.... Pure advocacy! And underlying many, perhaps most, of its arguments you will find a logical fallacy which may be expressed more scholastico by this syllogism: I do not understand this fact save by giving it this explanation; it is t

ut not that it is false, for there is no proof that the true is necessarily that which suits us best. The identification of the true and the good is but a pious wish. In his études sur Blaise Pascal, A. Vinet says: "Of the two needs that unceasingly belabour human nature, that of happiness is not only the more universally felt and the more constantly experienced, but it is also the more imperious. And this need is not only of the senses; it is intellectual.

the power to contemplate all things with a serene soul-pacata posse mente omnia tueri. And it was the same Lucretius who wrote that religion can persuade us into so great evils-tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. And it is true that religion-above all the Christian religion-has been, as the Apos

his sadness. The melancholy of the ancients seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, who all more or less presuppose an immortality on the yonder side of the black hole. But for the ancients this black hole was the infinite itself; the procession of their dreams is imaged against a background of immutable ebony. The gods being no mo

what is worse, he wished to find consolation in reason. For there

majority of those who call themselv

o the vindictiveness of the odium anti-theologicum, and exclaims with the Pharisees: "This people who knoweth not the law are cursed." There is much truth in these words of Soloviev: "I have a foreboding of the near approach of a time when Christi

e indecencies of Haeckel, that supreme incomprehender, there is no need to speak, nor yet of those of Büchner; even Virchow is not free from them. And others work with more subtilty. There are people who seem not to be content with not believing that there is another life, or rather, with believing that there is none, but who are vexed and hurt that others should believe in it o

of some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all human consciousness shall have ceased to exist. And these motives for living and working, this thing which some call humanism, are the amazing products of th

serving I know not what destiny, and all this without our taking thought for the ultimate end of each one of us? Must I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of science, of art, of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice ... of all

cs it has been sought to discover rational consolation in truth and to convince men, although those who sought so to do remained themselves

ay be rendered by "Live for the day," does not differ in its essence from the Stoic attitude with its "Accomplish what the moral conscience dictates to t

tality of the soul, since a soul which, disjoined from the body in which it lived, does not remember its past, is neither immortal nor is it a soul-he goes on to affirm in proposition xxiii. that "the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but there remains of it something which is eternal," and this eternity of the mind is a certain mode of thinking. But do not let yourselves be deceived; there is no such eternity of the individual mind. Everything is sub ?ternitatis specie-that is to say, pure illusion. Nothing could be more dreary, nothing more desolating, nothing more anti-vital than this happiness, this beatitudo, of Spinoza, that consists in the intellectual love of the mind towards G

terrible liberty. And against Spinoza and his doctrine of happiness there is only one irresistible argument, the argument ad

ne that leads them; the fear of frightful punishments with which they are menaced after death also influences them to live-in so far as their impotence and poverty of spirit permits-in conformity with the prescription of the Divine law. And were not this hope and this fear infused into the minds of men-but, on the contrary, did they believe that the soul perished with the body, and that, beyond the grave, there was no other life prepared for the wretched who had borne the burden of piety in this-they would return to their natural inclinations, preferring to a

hing, absolutely nothing, absurd in it. Was he happy, the poor Jewish intellectualist definer of intellectual love and of happiness? For that and no other is the problem. "What does it profit thee to know the definition of compunction if thou dost not feel it?" says à Kempis. And what profits it to discuss or to define happiness if you cannot thereby achieve happiness? Not inapposite in this connection is that terrible story that Diderot tells of a eunuch who desired to take lessons in esthetics from a native of Marseilles in order that he might be bet

mber of times. This is evident, and just as I shall live again the life that I am now living, so I have already lived it before an infinite number of times, for there is an eternity that stretches into the past-a parte ante-just as there will be one stretching into the future-a parte post. But, unfortunately, it happens that I remember none of my previous existences, and perhaps it is impossible that I should remember them, for two things absolutely and completely identical are but one. Instead of supposing that we live in a finite universe, composed of a finite number of irreducible primary elements, suppose that we live in an infinite universe, wit

ad heart, feeling, and, above all, hunger, a mad hunger for eternity, for immortality. The physical eunuch does not feel the n

assure us that he feels no great longing to enjoy the world of sight nor suffers any great anguish from not having enjoyed it, and we must needs believe him, for what is wholly unknown cannot be the object of desire-nihil volitum quin pr?cognitum, there can be no volition save of things already known. But I cannot be persuaded that he who has once in his life,

ome what may." But this sincerity hides a yet deeper insincerity. May it perhaps be that by saying "We must not talk about it," they succeed in not thinking about it? Our will is weakened? An

o obliar, sen

me mister d

how the earth, the mother of the fugitive soul, must roll its burden of glory and sorrow round the sun "until, worn out beneath the equator, mocked by the last flames of dying heat, the exhausted hum

ning all attempt to understand it? Is it possible to contemplate the vast All with a serene soul, in the spirit of the Lucretian pi

ou?" And further on, this same Lucifer says to Adah, the sister and wife of Cain: "Choose betwixt love and knowledge-since there is no other choice." And in the same stupendous poem, when Cain says that the tree of the kn

ns, the Spanish ciencia, the French science, the German Wissenscha

Wisdom lingers, and h

e, moving toward the

e? It is well enough to say with Matthew Arnold in his Introduction to Wordsworth's poems, that poetry is reality and philosophy illusion; but reas

ys fallen to pieces. Science will be able to satisfy, and in fact does satisfy in an increasing measure, our increasing logical or intellectual needs, our desire to know and understand the truth; but science does not satisfy the n

I repeat-that the individual consciousness cannot persist after the death of the physical organism upon which it depends. And these limits, within which I say that human reason proves this, are the limits of rationality, of what is known by demonstration. Beyond these limits is the irrational,

idity of the concept of truth and of the concept of necessity. Both concepts are relative; there is no absolute truth, no absolute necessity. We call a concept true which agrees with the general system of all our concepts; and we call a perception true which does not contradict the system of our perceptions. Truth is coherence. But as regards the whole system, the aggregate, as there is nothing outside of it of which we have knowledge, we cannot say whether it is true or not. It is conceivable

than scepticism, in the most modern sense of the t

d truth itself, beyond the concept of reality itself, succeeds in plunging itself into the depths of scepticism. And in this abyss the scepticism o

exami

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