Renan’s^[251] ideas may be taken as typical of the compromise between poetry and philosophy. Speaking of immortality, he said “that we shall each live again by the traces we leave on the bosom of the Infinite.”^[252]

The views elaborated by Guyau^[253] are equally poetic. Like so many others he is unable to accept without protest the prospect of the inevitability of death. Brought face to face with this end, he declares that he feels “not sorrow but indignation, as against an injustice of nature.” “It is with justice,” he cries, “that we look on nature as a murderess if she kills what is morally best in ourselves and in others.”^[254]

It is chiefly in the name of love that Guyau protests against death: “The death of others, the annihilation of those we love, is insupportable to men, who are essentially thinking and loving creatures.”^[255]

This problem, so vast and so difficult to solve, is presented by him as follows: “As regards the question of individual immortality, human thought is dragged in opposite directions by two great forces—science, in the name of evolution, prepared to sacrifice the individual completely; love, in the name of an evolution, morally and socially higher, which would preserve the individual at all hazards. There is no more disturbing dilemma proposed to the philosopher.”^[256]

Guyau hopes that in the course of evolution there will come about a merging of individual consciousness in the consciousness of the whole. “One may ask,” he says, “if it may not be that these conscious entities mingling and interpenetrating, may come to live on from one to the other, and so to acquire a new duration?” On such a hypothesis he can foresee “an epoch not, indeed, certain to come, but far from inconceivable, in which individual consciousnesses will have achieved a corporate integrity and a complex intercommunion, without themselves being lost by the union.”^[257]

On this hypothesis, “the problem is to be at the same time loving enough and loved enough to live and endure in another.^[258]... Those who vanish and those who remain must love one another so greatly that the shadows cast by them on the universal consciousness are identical.” “We should then feel ourselves passing and ascending from this life to an immortality of love,” and “the point of contact between life and immortality would be discovered.”^[259]

A solution recently offered by Finot^[260] is much less poetical. According to him, it is only “when death is conceived of as annihilation that it is repugnant. On the other hand, if we regard it merely as a change of life, we shall cease to fear it, and even come to love it.”^[261]

But what is this “change of life” that is to prove so consoling? It is the “immortality of the body,” that is to say, the life of the creatures developed at the expense of the human body. “Flies begin the work of the labourers on the dead,” giving birth to worm-like larvæ that writhe in the decomposing flesh. The same vermin that horrified Tolstoi when he thought of his own death (see chap. vi. p. 123) became Finot’s symbol of consolation. He describes the whole succession of the fauna of corpses, and concludes by saying, “and so goes on the routine of life, from birth to the tomb, of noisy, clamorous life, ceaselessly renewed. Ever loving, giving birth, living and dying. The peace of the tomb is as filled with life as the dust into which we think our bodies will fall.”^[262]

I have given the above quotation as an instance showing to what lengths men have gone in their search for a solution of the problem of death and in their desire for a gleam of hope that the end may not be final. I need not say that this idea of the fauna of the corpse has no place in the philosophy of death. Thinkers, no doubt, would prefer the most vague ambiguities to certainties of such a nature. Most contemporary philosophers regard the problem in a very different fashion.

In my opinion, Meyer-Benfey, a scholar at Göttingen, has summed up the present condition of the problem very clearly and exactly, in essays on Modern Religion.^[263] He realises that it is impossible to accept the immortality of the soul. Personality must utterly and inevitably perish. But, just as no single atom of our bodies can be annihilated, so “no parts of our souls can be lost.” Our actions during life leave traces so much the deeper as the life has been fuller. It is this reuniting “of the actions of individuals with the life of the whole of humanity, that constitutes the true immortality or Nirvâna.” He says, too, “In accustoming our minds to this thought, and in educating ourselves with a view to the accomplishment of this end, lies the only possible means of overcoming the fear of death and the terror of annihilation.”

Meyer-Benfey is of the pessimistic opinion that happiness cannot possibly be regarded as the supreme end of humanity, for he thinks, if that were so, the whole course of evolution would have been a mistake. It would have been much better had evolution been arrested before the creation of the human race, since animals, being unaware of the inevitability of death, are undoubtedly happier than man. As, however, we have passed through the animal stage and reached the human stage, and achieved some measure of civilisation, and this not by our own desire, or as the result of mere chance, but guided by the inner workings of our nature, it is plain that the ultimate goal towards which we are advancing, must be some other than mere happiness. There can be no question but that the goal is the triumph of pure and perfect culture.

This idea, that the goal of humanity is progress in all its manifestations, is no recent theory, and many definitions of this progress have been advanced, but so far none have been generally accepted as satisfactory. The term “culture,” though vague, will have to continue in use until some better word conveying a more precise meaning is found to replace it.

On reviewing all the systems of philosophy which have attempted so strenuously to solve the problem of individual death, it becomes plain that all, or nearly all, of them deny the existence of a future life and the immortality of the soul. The greater part of them, however, admit some general principle incomprehensible but eternal, which will eventually incorporate within itself all individual souls. Feeling that these vague ideas are incapable of conveying consolation to poor humanity in its fear of annihilation through death, philosophers have persistently taught the advantages of resignation. Even Guyau, realising that his philosophy regarding the immortality of love fails to reassure those who look to philosophy for some word of consolation, ends by admitting that “as there is no help to be expected from the inexorable, nor mercy from that which is in conformity with the universe and even with our own judgment, resignation is best.”^[264] As it is the general opinion that to be philosophical is to take things as they are, without undue protest, the watchword of all systems of philosophy is to bow to the inevitable, that is to say, to be resigned to the prospect of annihilation.