CHAPTER X
THE LAST OUTLOOK ON LIFE
The view of life that man has on leaving it is the final test of his philosophy of life. These are my thoughts: It is time to detach thyself from this earth. The shadows are lengthening. Look around you and note the strange changes that have taken place in the men and women of your acquaintance. Those that you once knew in their prime are now old and wrinkled,—and how many already dead! As you survey the procession of life, how many vacant places are there in it! How many true and loyal comrades have been swept away! Or go into the busy streets of the city, and look at the multitude passing through them. You are still one of this multitude. Presently you will drop out. There will perhaps be a little ripple on the surface, and then the stream will flow on as before. How curious is it to think that this frame of life which sustains such high faculties should crumble into a little heap of dust at the touch of the wand of death! Detach thyself, therefore, relax thy hold by anticipation as thou shalt soon relax it actually. But detachment does not mean cold inattention or unnatural shrinking from the earthly scene, like that of the monk in his cell. Relax thy hold on what is earthly in the earthly scene, and fix thy loving attention all the more on what is spiritually significant in it. Regard with a friendly eye the beauty of the natural landscape around thee—yonder lake and yonder noble mountain summit. They are earthly, yet are they also hieroglyphs and symbols.
Still more is this true of thy social relations. Detach thyself means relax thy hold on what is transient in those relations. Cling all the more firmly to what is spiritual in them. The earth is thy foundation, thou art Antæus as long as thou remainest in contact with the earth. Until the very last thou must lean for strength upon the earthly bases and substrata.
Consider the drive of the human race through the time and space world, and its net result. Thou standest now on a high tower. Lean over the parapet and peer as far out into the future as thou canst. Thou standest as did Moses on Mount Pisgah. Strain thy eyes to catch sight of the Promised Land. But remember that the Promised Land turned out to be a land still of promise, not of fulfilment,—a land in which the prophetic soul of Israel matured its visions of a fulfilment never on earth to be attained.
Remember that as thou art linked to thy ancestry, so art thou linked to posterity. The future centuries of the human race are like the future years of an individual. Thou art keenly interested in what may happen hereafter to the race with which thou art interlinked. But the race, like the individual, will be cut off and become extinct before ever the ideal is reached. Remember, therefore, that the purpose for which humanity exists is achieved at every moment in everyone who appropriates the fruits of partial success and frustration. Whosoever standing on the earth as a foundation builds up for himself the spiritual universe attains the purpose of human existence. There is indeed progress in the explicitness with which the spiritual ideal is conceived, and we are immeasurably interested in the greater light to be attained by our posterity. But the essential fruition of the contact of the infinite that is in us with the finite world is achievable at every moment in every human being. And this gives an entirely new meaning to the spiritual gains achieved in solitude, which seem vain because there are no witnesses. But neither will there be witnesses when the last human beings perish on earth. The spiritual bravery of the shipwrecked man who sinks on the lonely ocean springs from the conviction that though the sea can overwhelm him there is that in him greater than ocean’s immensity; a conviction achieved through the experience of living in the life of others. The same is the gain achieved by the sick man who lies in solitude like a helpless log in the darkened room. The altruistic philosophy fails in accounting for the moral grandeur that attaches to the spiritual victories gained in silence and solitude.
Face the terrors of life before you leave life. Be resolute to the last not to cherish illusions. Face the terrors of life, the absence of observable design, the cruelties, the ferocities. Think of William Blake’s poem “The Tiger”: “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” In your philosophy there is no question any longer of a Creator. Creation is an attempt to explain the coexistence of the imperfect with the perfect, to account for a lower stage in terms of a higher. The ultimate inability of man to understand, to explain, is one of the principal frustrations he meets with, is the crucifixion of man at the point of his intellect.
The radical incompetence of man to grasp with his intellect the world as a “universe,” is to be faced by him and accepted without qualification. It marks off this philosophy of life from those philosophies and theologies which have attempted to explain the universe, and which, while affecting humility, are the dupes of an unwarranted self-confidence. Unqualified admission of the incompetence of the human intellect to resolve the world riddle is the determining factor in the more profound humility which characterizes the religion of ethical experience. Agnosticism on the intellectual side is the very condition of the transcending ethical conviction subsequently attained. Without intellectual agnosticism there is no ethical certainty.
Consider now frustration and its supreme outcome, or the various points at which man is crucified. I have mentioned the intellectual crucifixion, due to the incompetence of the mind to understand. I must now speak of still more poignant experiences due to the incompetence of man adequately to fulfill the moral law, or to carry out the spiritual relation in finite terms.
I have reached the bourne, or am very near it. The shadows lengthen, the twilight deepens. I look back on my life and its net results. I have seen spiritual ideals, and the more clearly I saw them, the wider appeared the distance between them and the empirical conditions, and the changes I could effect in those conditions. I have worked in social reform, and the impression I have been able to make now seems to me so utterly insignificant as to make my early sanguine aspirations appear pathetic. I have seen the vision of democracy in the air, and on the ground around me I have seen the sordid travesty of democracy—not only in practice but in idea. I have caught the far outlook upon the organization of mankind, the extension of the spiritual empire over the earth by the addition to it of new provinces, and I do not find even the faintest beginnings, or recognition of the task which the advanced nations should set themselves. I scrutinize closely my relations to those who have been closest to me,—and I find that I have been groping in the dark with respect to their most real needs, and that my faculty of divination has been feeble. I look lastly into my heart, my own character, and the effort I have made to fuse the discordant elements there, to achieve a genuine integrity there, and I find the disappointment in that respect the deepest of all.
These are the various points of my life at which I have undergone the crucifixion. I am like Arnold Winkelried, who gathered the sheaf of spears into his breast, and even pressed them inward, to make a way for liberty. So do I press the sharp-pointed spears of frustration into my breast to make way for spiritual liberty. For these cruel spears turn into shafts of light, radiating outward along which my spirit travels, building its final nest—the spiritual universe.
Consider the new and profounder humility. In ethical experience is revealed the plan of the spiritual relations, but the entities or substances which are thus related are incognizable, unknowable. Did I know them I should be able to solve the riddle of the universe. I should know how it is that the finite exists side by side with the infinite. But I cannot know. I cannot enter into the counsels of the multiform godhead. There are the mighty powers that weave and interweave behind the veil, but the veil between them and myself is down, not to be lifted. Within the palace of light is the solemn and serene assembly of the gods: I, man, stand at the gate.
The world as we know it is itself the veil, the screen, that shuts out the interplay, the weavings and the interweavings of the spiritual universe. But at least at one point, in the ethical experience of man, is the screen translucent. The plan of the spiritual relation is there traced in outline. It is this plan that conveys the certainty as to what verily exists beyond, within, beneath.
As to my empirical self, I let go my hold on it. I see it perish with the same indifference which the materialist asserts, for whom man is but a compound of physical matter and physical force. It is the real self, of which the empirical was the substratum, upon which I tighten my hold. I do not assert immortality, since immortality, like creation, is a bridge between the phenomenal and the spiritual levels. Creation is the bridge at the beginning; immortality the bridge at the end. Were I able to build the bridge, I should know. I do not affirm immortality. I affirm the real and irreducible existence of the essential self. Or rather, as my last act, I affirm that the ideal of perfection which my mind inevitably conceives has its counterpart in the ultimate reality of things, is the truest reading of that reality whereof man is capable. I turn away from the thought of the self, even the essential self, as if that could be my chief concern, toward the vaster infinite whole in which the self is integrally preserved. I affirm that there verily is an eternal divine life, a best beyond the best I can think or imagine, in which all that is best in me, and best in those who are dear to me, is contained and continued. In this sense I bless the universe. And to be able to bless the universe in one’s last moments is the supreme prize which man can wrest from life’s struggles, life’s experience.
I look back upon my life once more, and am grateful for the eternal worth which it was permitted me in this frail vessel of my mortal existence to hold, for the shimmer of the spiritual reality of things which I was permitted to see; grateful especially to those who loved me, and whom I was permitted to love, and who were to me in some measure revealers of the eternal life.
Consider lastly the peace that passeth understanding. Now, if ever, this peace should descend upon me. There is a kind of peace that is accessible to the understanding, and there is the peace that passeth understanding. The peace that can be understood is that which consists in the relief of pain. It arises in various ways. After an acute attack of physical pain how like balm is felt the succeeding absence of pain. After a prolonged sickness, when the convalescent takes his first walk, what a sweet tranquillity fills his mind! There is also the mental relief that comes when some danger has been safely passed; the peace of the sheltered fireside to one who has passed through a storm. Again, there is the peace that follows pecuniary anxiety, or the removal of some carking care, as when an erring son is reclaimed, or an estranged wife or husband is found anew.
But the peace that passeth understanding is that which comes when the pain is not relieved, which subsists in the midst of the painful situation, suffusing it, which springs out of the pain itself, which shimmers on the crest of the wave of pain, which is the spear of frustration transfigured into the shaft of light.
It is upon those we love that we must anchor ourselves spiritually in the last moments. The sense of interconnectedness with them stands out vividly by way of contrast at the very moment when our mortal connection with them is about to be dissolved. And the intertwining of our life with theirs, the living in the life that is in them, is but a part of our living in the infinite manifold of the spiritual life. The thought of this, as apprehended, not in terms of knowledge, but in immediate experience, begets the peace that passeth understanding. And it is upon the bosom of that peace that we can pass safely out of the realm of time and space.