THE ETERNAL LIFE m mm '- 1 mm HUGO MUNSTERBERG LIBRARY JlrfvEftSlTVOF 4 EDWARD M. NEALUBY I -^i SANTA ANA,I AM^ /v<*-W~ In reality we are free, and in our freedom we have an interest in thinking of ourselves as mechanisms. In reality we are that which we know ourselves to be in our practical life, subjects which take free attitudes, and not simply objects. I see a bright response in your eyes, my friend, am I right in supposing that your quick intelligence sees how everything else must follow from this central point ? Do you grasp already the vital truth tnliFourlife is lived'm time only so far as we see ourselves as such causal objects, but that it is rjeyo'ndnGrneTn the reality of our im- mediate life ? The personality which shapes the objects in its thought ere- 16 THE ETERNAL LIFE ates not only the conception of cau- sality, but in that same act the form of time which is to embrace all causal processes of the world. Fast, present, and future mean simply attitudes of the personality toward its objects. We call present the objects which we attend to, and future the objects which we are expecting as effects of the pre- sent ones, and past the objects which we conceive as causes of the present ones. But the personality which thus creates by its attitudes the idea of time as form of its objects is not itself ban- ished into the prison of time. To ask what time the real personality itself fills is not more reasonable than to ask whether the will is round or square, how many pounds it weighs, and what its color may be. The real personality, THE ETERNAL LIFE 17 the subject of will and thought, is not an object in time, as it is itself the con- dition of time. Its whole reality lies in its attitudes and in its acts ; it can- not be perceived like a thing, but must be understood in its meaning and aims ; it cannot be explained by causality, but must be interpreted and appreciated ; it cannot be measured, but must be valued ; it is not in the world of things which we find, but in a world of actions and judgments which are performed. The meaning of our real personality is thus not to be a phenomenon for ourselves or others, but to be a will whose acts are valid for ourselves and demand the acknowledgment of others. Our per- sonality reaches another directly But no, I fear your approving 18 THE ETERNAL LIFE countenance means that you think I want to defend a mystical belief in telepathy or spiritualism. This time you misunderstand me utterly. Do you not see, my friend, that the mystic who craves for telepathic and similar wonders seeks the essence of our life still in the world of things in space and time ? He hopes to overcome the limitations of that world of things by breaking the chain of causality, by making exceptions here and there, by linking together in a mysterious way objects which are far from one another in time and space. He does not see that we have projected our experiences into time and space just because we sought to bring order and law and cau- sality into the chaos, and that we undo our own work if we destroy the order THE ETERNAL LIFE 19 which we created and allow mystery in place of strict causality. In the world o space jindjtime there cannot be any exceptions to the laws of cause and effect, and a mystic event is simply an event which has not yet found its proper explanation. When I said that we as personali- ties reach each other immediately, I did not mean that my thought as function of my brain that is, as a process in the world of phenomena jumps mysteriously over to your brain. I meant rather that if you and I are talking here absorbed in serious thought, we do not come in question for each other as scientifically con- structed bodies in which some mental states succeed one another in time, but merely as real personalities which 20 THE ETERNAL LIFE f try to understand one another. Our mutual interest forms a direct will- connection, and that has nothing to do with the causal connection which certainly exists between us if we care to consider ourselves as objects in the sphere of space and time. In that case, of course, our thoughts and our feelings are just passing phenomena which come in time one after the other ; but in reality they are judg- ments, attitudes, volitions, which bind one another by their meaning, with- out relation to time and succession. Whether I think of myself and of my aim to awake your interest for the creed of philosophy, or whether I think of you and your aim to follow the paths of religious emotions, or whether I think of our common grief THE ETERNAL LIFE 21 and our common memory of our friend, in every case, my expe- rience is made up of acts which are bound together by the unity of pur- pose. The one act refers to the other, the one means the other, the one in- volves the other. If we are here in serious discussion, we do not play the explaining psychologist who asks what thought came by causal laws after what other thought, how many seconds the emotion lasted, how many minutes the development of the ideas, no, you and I ask ourselves what your atti- tude toward life, what my view means, and how we agree and disagree ; how those intentions hang together in their ends, and how far one act binds us to accept the other. They follow from each other as the equations of the 22 THE ETERNAL LIFE mathematician follow from each other : how needless to ask in what time- order they are related ! Has our talk here, has our whole life, any meaning if we seek its reality in such time- succession ? Do we not mean by time an order in which the reality of one member excludes the reality of all the other members ? Only one time-instant is real, and the reality of the present ex- cludes the reality of everything which precedes ; the past must have become unreal when the present is real, and the existence of the present must have become unreal when the future will be real. Of course, the scientist needs this self-devouring time, for, as I said, time is to him the form of causality, and causality indeed demands that the THE ETERNAL LIFE 23 effect shall become real through the disappearance of the causes. As we scientists must think of the world of objects as a causal chain, we must con- ceive it as a world in time in which new and ever new existing objects fol- low one another just to disappear in the next instant into the past ; that is, into irrevocable unreality. If we take ourselves and our friends as causal ob- jects, then indeed nothing but the pre- sent instant of our existence has real- ity, while all our living and striving up to the present moment has been completely destroyed by having be- come a thing of the past. Our whole life has then become unreal at the mo- ment of death, and then, of course, we must put all our desires into the hope for a future, near or far, in which some- 24 THE ETERNAL LIFE thing worth while shall become real again. Time has taken away and made unreal everything which gave value to our lives ; no wonder that we look out to see whether time cannot bring us again a piece of reality after death or in a billion of years. And yet, my friend, is there really any value whatever in such a life, short 6r long or endless, if we conceive it as jsuch a mere series of phenomena in /time? Is life worth living for two heart- / beats long, if all that we experience in / tn~e : fiFsTTias become non-existent, and / thus unreal, in the second ? Is life still / life if its contents follow as passive events, each one destroyed by the next, each one just passing by in a momentary existence ? What can be gained if this meaningless procession of shadows is THE ETERNAL LIFE 25 to go on in us for a thousand times a thousand centuries ? The mere exten- sion in time cannot add any new value or dignity. It is not different from extension in space. If you were get- ting taller and taller, growing up to the highest mountain, stretching up to the moon, on to the farthest star, reaching with your arms around the whole phy- sical universe, would that give you any new value ? Would you not yearn for the narrow room where you might sit again, man with man, to fulfill your daily duties, as they alone give mean- ing to your life ? A mere expansion, a more and more of phenomena in space and time, is a valueless amass- ing of indifferent and purposeless material. How far otherwise if we emancipate 26 THE ETERNAL LIFE ourselves from this unnatural view and apperceive our life as act and not as object, as creator of time and not as a chance occurrence in time ! As to this, my real personality, it is mean- ingless to ask myself what came be- fore or what will come after it. The objects of my personality have the cause-relation and time-length, but my real personality itself has no causes and has no place in time. It does not fill more or less time, just as it is not more or less in weight ; and nothing can come after it, just as there is no- jthing to its right or to its left. My life as a causal system of physical and psychical processes, which lies spread out in time between the dates of my birth and of my death, will come to an end with my last breath ; to con- THE ETERNAL LIFE 27 tinue it, to make it go on till the earth falls into the sun, or a billion times longer, would be without any value, as that kind of life which is nothing but the mechanical occurrence of physio- logical and psychological phenomena had as such no ultimate value for me or for you or for any one at any time. But my real life as a system of inter- related will-attitudes has nothing be- fore or after, because it is beyond time. It is independent of birth and death, because it cannot be related to the biological events ; it is not born and will not die ; it is immortal ; all pos- sible thinkable time is inclosed in it : it is eternal. Again, I beg you not to think, here, of any mystical revelation. I do not speak of a visionary existence to which 28 THE ETERNAL LIFE we may lift ourselves in the inspira- tion of a holiday hour, and which is far removed from our daily humble life with its hardships and its pleasures. Metaphysical dreams and doubtful speculations cannot help us when we seek convictions on which we are to base all that is valuable in our life. The more we separate our life of ideal- istic belief from the practical reality between morning and evening, the more we deprive our daily life of its inner dignity and force it to the super- ficial hopes of an external hereafter. I certainly do not think, when I speak of our timeless will-life, of anything which is different from our practical doing in our quiet home or on the noisy market, in the circle of friends, or in the turmoil of the world. It is THE ETERNAL LIFE 29 the life which you and I live every day, and the only life of which the his- torians tell us. The question is thus not whether you are gifted with a won- derful intuition to grasp in yourself the hidden germ of a higher reality. No, you cannot live through any act of your life without knowing yourself as such a free and timeless agent. All our social and political life, our scien- tific and artistic endeavor, our law and religion, involves such freedom ; and where acts are in question in their free- dom, they are not looked at under the naturalistic aspect of causality. It was only this category of causality that forced them into the Procrustean bed of time. Just this our good friend felt in his inmost heart, as he had the fullest and 30 THE ETERNAL LIFE finest understanding for the spirit of true history. I remember still every word of a fine talk which he and I had last June on a beautiful summer even- ing at the seashore. He had just been reading much of Buckle and Spencer and Comte and of the more modern positivists and sociologists. He had needed the material for an address he wanted to deliver on the task of the historian, and he came to me to talk it all over. Oh, he felt so wearied, he said, as if he had walked through a desert into which the flourishing land- scape of history had been transformed. No doubt, he exclaimed, we can treat the whole world's history and the struggles of the nation and the devel- opment of individual great men as if it were all nothing but a big causal THE ETERNAL LIFE 31 mechanism, wherein everything is un- derstood when it is explained, and wherein the natural factors of race disposition and climate, of market and food, determine fate. Of course, for certain purposes we must do so, and must demand of dry, stubborn laws that they express the richness of five thousand years of history. Then it is necessity which turns the crank of the historical machine to produce ever new repetitions. But all this is after all merely natural science : the spark of history is quenched. To the eye of history man is not a th!B& wnich is moved, but a creator in freedom, and the whole world's llistory is, a story of mutual will-in- g ~* ~~ "" ' ' '; ii [in uences. If I study history, I am doing it to understand what the will- 32 THE ETERNAL LIFE demands of living men mean. I stand before an endless manifoldness of po- litical and legal and social and intel- lectual will-demands from the people with whom I come in contact. Each one compels acknowledgment, each one demands agreement or disagree- ment, obedience or combat, and my whole historical life is just the chain of my attitudes towards those will- demands. I have to respect the laws of my country, the political existence of other nations, the customs and con- victions of my time ; I have to choose between political parties and scientific theories and aesthetic schools and re- ligious denominations ; I have to sym- pathize with reforms and to fight crimes. And yet those individuals who repre- sent the claims of the country or the THE ETERNAL LIFE 33 rights of other people or the theories of the schools have not invented the demands with which they approach me. Each one of their demands re- fers again to the demands of their pre- decessors and their ancestors. The whole historical configuration of our politics and law and science and art and religion is thus a system of will- demands which asks for our free de- cision, but which in itself points back- ward at every point to other subjects of will, and these others again refer to others. This whole mighty system of will-reference is what we call human history. Thus we talked it over for hours, and it was a delight to listen to his enthusiasm for the thought of such men as Carlyle and Emerson, and 34 THE ETERNAL LIFE above all of the great Fichte, as he contrasted it with the positivistic su- perficiality which he had found in the sociological books. I remember well how he, late that night, left my piazza with the laughing words, " Believe me, from the pair in the Paradise of old to the eighty millions in our new Paradise, the world's history means the will-connections of free per- sonalities." I know his vivid harangue gave me much to think of, and I saw how his view of history was in full accord with my ideas of natural science. We seek in both cases to understand the reality to which we have to submit ourselves and towards which we take attitudes. Now this reality is twofold : we have objects and we have other THE ETERNAL LIFE 35 subjects in our world. The objects we must know because they are useful or harmful to us ; and the subjects we must know because they approach us with their demands for agreement or disagreement. But if we really want to know what the objects are to us, we must find out what we have to expect from them, and we thus consider them as causes and effects. On the other hand, as to the subjects, if we want to understand them, we must find out what is involved in their demands. This does not mean that we ask for the facts which we have to expect ; if we did so, we should be making things out of personalities. No, we want to find what is contained in a given pro- position, political or legal, scientific or artistic, economic or religious. To 36 THE ETERNAL LIFE ask what is involved means, as our friend so rightly insisted, to ask what will-demands of other fellow-beings are approved or disapproved in this demand. Just as the naturalist passes from the given thing to ever new expected effects, so the student of per- sonalities passes from the given de- mand to other and yet other subjects, whose will-demands were involved and acknowledged or thwarted in the pre- sent attitude. That leads him to ever new subjects, and that whole network of will-relations is history. But it is clear that we then come in question historically only in so far as we are such subjects of attitudes, and that all which we are doing in our economic or social, in our political or legal, in our aesthetic or scientific life is then THE ETERNAL LIFE 37 done in a form of existence which can be expressed only in terms of will. If you say that you are an Ameri- can or a Christian, an economic free- trader or an aesthetic realist, an ad- mirer of Shakespeare or an adherent of Beethoven, a sympathizer with the Japanese or a leader of municipal re- form, a student of Plato or a member of your Thursday Club, it is your daily, it is your hourly, life of which you give account, and yet each func- tion is nothing else than the set of your will-attitudes in agreement or disagreement with will-tendencies of others who approach you with their demands for imitation and approval. Your whole practical existence thus continually resolves itself into new at- titudes towards other centres of voli- 38 THE ETERNAL LIFE tion, and you are related then to ft of jfoato not otherwise than to your friends in the Club. The whole meaning of your existence thus lies merely in will-relations which are to be understood and interpreted, but which have lost their significance when taken as causes and effects and thus treated as successive phenomena. If you agree or disagree with the latest act of the Russian Czar, the only signifi- cant relation which exists between him and you has nothing to do with the naturalistic fact that geographically an ocean lies between you, and if you are really a student of Plato, your only important relation to the Greek phi- losopher has nothing to do with the other naturalistic fact that biologically two thousand years lie between you. THE ETERNAL LIFE 39 Of course, if you want to describe and explain your connection with the Czar or with Plato, you must take account of those miles and of those calendar years which lie between. But for the historical meaning of this phase of your life, that aspect of description has no significance. That which the naturalist accounts for as spatial or temporal distance then becomes a characteristic distribution and order of will-influences. That Plato's life lies temporally far behind you means then for your real historical will that Plato makes demands on you, but that you do not make demands on Plato, and that you feel yourself influenced by a multitude of personalities which them- selves show the influence of Plato. It is thus not enough to say that 40 THE ETERNAL LIFE from the highest point of view thou- sands of years may be grasped in one act and may thus appear to us in in- spired moments like one present ex- perience in which the whole chain of successive temporal acts is perceived at once, just as in listening to music we may grasp at once in one span of consciousness the successive tones of the whole musical phrase. We should then see classical times and mediaeval times and yesterday and to-day in one glance, just as we might see in a bird's- eye view the various places along a road over which we have wandered slowly. But no, in such a case each place still keeps its space-extension, and one lies beside the other, and just so each historical event would still keep its time-relation and its THE ETERNAL LIFE 41 place in a successive chain, even if we could look on all of them in one span of consciousness. The truth is, as I said, that they really have not any time-extension, and that they really do not come one after the other, and that thus, however many we may glance at together, we falsify their char- acter in constructing them as such a temporal series. Their whole reality lies merely in their free agreement or disagreement with other will-attitudes, and fills as such neither a second nor a century. The practical life does not ask the question, how long a time or when our will shall go on, but merely the question what is to be affirmed and what is to be rejected. It has no du- ration and no predecessor and no suc- cessor, just as it has no corners and 42 THE ETERNAL LIFE no outlines, no taste and no smell ; it has nothing but the purpose, and is thus in every phase timeless, without beginning and without end. If you insist on metaphors, I should liken our will to a circle ; a circle has no beginning and it has ho end ; it is endless, infinite. If you go forward in the circle, you land just where you came from ; before and after are iden- tical. Thus in our will-act the end which we try to reach, and which we expect as lying before us, must be given to us in advance, otherwise it were no will; and while we realize it, we appreciate it as our own purpose just because we started from this pur- pose. It is one act, the will-act, in which the purpose becomes real, and yet that which we aim at is identical THE ETERNAL LIFE 43 with that which we start from; the end which we expect as lying before us and the purpose from which we started as lying behind us must always be identical in every will : fu- ture and past coincide in the present will like the beginning and the end of the circle. And yet all this is merely a metaphor. It indicates merely that our idea of time is destroyed, future and past become identical as soon as we venture on the hopeless task of expressing the real meaning of will in the form of time. Then we do wiser to leave the field to psychology. The psychologist can really give us a tem- poral picture of the will, for he does not care to deal with the true histori- cal man, but substitutes for him the organism and its functions, and offers 44 THE ETERNAL LIFE us instead of the will the actions of the organism and its accompani- ments among the mental phenomena. Then the will becomes of course a describable and explainable series of successive events of which each one takes its little time. But, my friend, the meaning is gone, the value of the will evaporates, it is not really any longer the will which we are willing, it is nothing but the will which we are perceiving, like the snowflakes there outside of the window pane. You ask what is, then, after all, the va~tue of such a real life ? Even if it is "independent of time, why is its eternal timeless reality more valuable than the passing events in the physical world of objects? What, then, does value mean ? *^WHM> I do not hesitate to reply That your THE ETERNAL LIFE 45 question itself gives you the answer. You ask your question for the pur- pose of finding the truth, what does it mean to find truth ? Is truth merely an idea glowing for an instant in your mind like the sparks here in the fire- place before us ? No, you seek truth in your questioning because the truth of the idea means that you respect it, that you feel the truth as something which is an end in itself, something which is absolute, something which demands submission. It does not al- low any further question as to whether or not it is useful for something else, but it is itself the end of all question- ing. Only that which is such an ulti- mate end for us is really a value. Yet truth is certainly not the only value to which we submit our will. The com- 46 THE ETERNAL LIFE plete perfection of the beautiful, the moral deed, the intellectual achieve- ment, the work of civilization, the re- ligious faith, the repose of philosophi- cal conviction, each is such an end in itself, which we respect as final. But the fact that truth and beauty, morality and culture, religion and philosophy demand our submission, that we re- spect them as something which needs no further purpose, means that they are more than our individual personal experiences. They satisfy our own will, but we then know our will as at the same time more than an individual volition ; our own will-acts are to us then expressions of an absolute will. Again, my mend, 1 beg you not to mistake me as speaking of a holiday world which condemns all that we en- THE ETERNAL LIFE 47 joy and attributes value with puritan- ical austerity merely to that which demands the self-denial of our whole personality and the suppression of our instincts. Nothing lies farther from my mind. The absolute values are, as I said, certainly not confined to our own actions. The simplest beautiful or- nament has its perfection, the simplest mathematical equation has its validity, the least progress of civilization is an achievement, and all love and friend- ship has its complete value. Our whole world is thus overspun with values which have in themselves no- thing to do with our actions and simply demand our faithful assent. That truth is more valuable than error, that beauty is more valuable than vulgarity, that harmony of souls is more valuable than 48 THE ETERNAL LIFE discord, that civilized life is better than savagery, all this stands independent of the further value of the honest action as over against the dishonest one. Of course the value of our action is linked with all those other values of the world inasmuch as it is a demand of moral- ity that whenever we are acting we shall create values. Whenever we think, we ought to think the truth, whenever we choose, we ought to pre- fer the perfect and the beautiful, we ought to secure harmony and happi- ness and progress. But at first we must have faith in all those values be- fore we can acknowledge them as goals of our moral action. It seems as if there were a chaos of values, and yet I do not think that it is out of the question to bring order THE ETERNAL LIFE 49 into that abundance of absolute aims. You know I am not a philosopher, and I should not dare to play the role of the systematic metaphysician, and yet I cannot help here, too, having my own thoughts. I think there are four large grauj3s_of values which re- fer to the four fundamental attitudes of our will towards the world. We submit ourselves to the world, or we approve the world, or we demand a change in the world, or we demand something beyond the world. Of course we can do that from our merely individual standpoint ; you or I may approve the given thing as we like it and as its taste pleases us, but that is nothing more than a sensual enjoy- ment ; and we may approve a certain change because it is useful for our 50 THE ETERNAL LIFE personal profit ; or we may go beyond our experience in a personal supersti- tion. On such paths, of course, there lies no absolute value. You or I, on the other hand, might submit or ap- prove or believe with the meaning that this act of ours is not for us as individuals here in these chairs and be- fore this fireplace ; that it belongs to every personality with whom' we can share at all our world of thought and feeling and will, that every one ought to submit and to enjoy and to approve and to accept what our will aims at. Then the purpose of our will takes indeed the character of an absolute value and that to which we submit then means for us the absolute validity of knowledge, and that which we approve as it is given means the absolute per- THE ETERNAL LIFE 51 fection of harmony and beauty, and that which we approve as change means the achievement of morality and law and civilization, and that which we believe in gives the absolute com- , pleteness of religion and philosophy. Well, all this sounds musty and abstract, and this hour is not the time to show to you how in my deepest thoughts all those scattered values hang together. For indeed I do think that they are all expressions of the same principle. Over-individual value is given to our will in everything which we can acknowledge as identi- cal with itself. Our causal knowledge ^^q.^ seeks identities of cause and effect, our historical knowledge seeks identi- ties of aims, our logical knowledge seeks identities of propositions ; in 52 THE ETERNAL LIFE sympathy we have identities of desire, in art we have identity between the whoTeHancl the part, in progress we have identity between the purpose and the realization, in morality we have identity between will and action, in religion we have identity between the world and its superstructure, in philo- sophy we seek the identity between the world and its substructure ; in short, wherever we posit something identical, there we find an ultimate end, something in which our will rests, something which has, therefore, ab- solute value. And why does our will rest in identity, and can never rest until it finds identity ? Certainly be- cause that is the very meaning of will itself. The identity of purpose and realization expresses the whole signifi- THE ETERNAL LIFE 53 cance of the will, and as we are will, only identity in the world can have for us absolute value. I beg your pardon, my friend ; my thoughts have ranged too far. I was grasping for deeper problems which lie beyond the simple hour of serious talk. Your thoughts have left me in my solitary wandering and have gone back to the dear memory of our friend; but pray mark that which is after all alone important to me, that nothing has value for us, that there is no truth and no perfection and no progress and no eternity but in that world which is given to our will and in which we our- selves are will ; that all values are lost forever when our actuality is elimi- nated, when we become the passive spectator of the world, and the world 54 THE ETERNAL LIFE itself thus becomes a series of objec- tive phenomena. In our temporal, causal world there is not, and there cannot be, anything 'pfreal value, ^because ever-ylhing .comes to view as the cause of something else, and nothing is an end in itself. /The "clay may be valuable because you can make bricks from it ; and those bricks .valuable because you can make houses from them ; and the houses valuable because they protect the human body; and the human body is valuable be- cause it preserves the nation ; and the nation is valuable because it preserves the human race ; and the human race is valuable why, I do notknow. In ''^^'"^fa^'^E^^^H^^^^^^^ It temporal order of things that hu- man race may fall into the sun, or a comet may overturn the whole earth, THE ETERNAL LIFE 55 why are the atoms of the universe not just as good if they go on without that swarming humanity on the sur- face of the earth-planet ; why was the earth not just as good before that surface protoplasm grew into human shape ? Who has the right to say that one combination of atoms is better than another ? it perhaps produces a special effect, but why is that effect better than another ? In thattemora]_ world there is no good and bad, no value and no ideal, but merely a f \/ change in complication. If people carelessly speak of development, they really mean a change to greater and greater differentiation ; but the end of the so-called development is not better than the beginning, as in that world nothing is valuable in itself. 56 THE ETERNAL LIFE r alues are found merely in the world of subjects. But there values have re- ality, because our will assumes attitudes in which ultimate ends are acknow- ledged and respected, they are good in themselves, they are absolute val- ues, they give to life that which makes it worth living : and these subjects and their acts are real outside of caus- ality and time, valid in the world of eternity. And now, my friend, speak for yourself : What can you and what can I desire for ourselves and for our chil- dren as the fulfillment of our warmest hopes ? Those absolute values of truth and morality, of beauty and complete- ness, are over-personal ideals ; but what can we desire for ourselves as in- dividual personalities ? If we are really THE ETERNAL LIFE 57 will, and thus outside of time, there is " * * -. i ininiinmii^ ^ i. .1,,, ,.. 1 1 *ir.i no longer any meaning in the desire Tor a protracted duration, this one hope in which the open and the masked materialists find themselves together. The only longing which can be a personal desire of the real sub- ject must speak again the language of the will and not that of phenomena. A will can never strive for more space and time, but only for more signifi- cance and influence and value and sat- isfaction. Our will issignificantif it involves and absorbs as much of the will-attituiies or' others as possible~flt | m V m IJI U , > "': "" has influence if its demands determine the free-will decisions of others, and it has value if it realizes through itself the over-individual absolute values, that is, if it creates truth and beauty, hap- 58 THE ETERNAL LIFE piness and progress, law and morality and religion. And the significance and the influence and the value of our will are finally held together by our longing for complete satisfaction, which is, after all, but another name for the perfect harmony of all our will- actions. No endless duration is our goal, but complete repose in the perfect satisfaction which the will finds when it has reached the significance, the influence, and the value at which it is aiming. This aim itself is different for every one of us, and it is just this difference which gives us our personal practical individuality. Each one aims toward significance by responding to partic- ular influences. They may come to us through friends or through books, THE ETERNAL LIFE 59 through the customs of our nation or through the nature which surrounds us, through church and state, through school and family. And each one him- self again aims at particular influences. No one desires to control with his will state and art, science and law, music and technique, his country and the antipodes, his generation and the thou- sandth generation after his. You are this man just because you confine yourself to will this work and not to do God's work all over the world ; and every one aims towards particular actual values, and lives to his own chosen ideals. But no life would mean to us the life of a personality in which the will does not aim towards some significance, towards some influence, towards some value, and finally to- 60 THE ETERNAL LIFE wards the happiness of complete sat- isfaction in the harmonization of his aims and of his experience. You have never wished anything else for your- self, you cannot have wished anything else for our friend. Each one of us is more than merely^ an individual. The norms of the good and the beautiful and the true and the religious are our own deepest aims and attitudes, but we will them not as individuals. They are our will-acts only in so far as we are absolute sub- jects, in so far as our consciousness is the over-individual consciousness, the oversoul. Its will-attitudes working in us determine the constitution and the meaning and the value of the world which we as individuals find as given to us, and to whose laws and obliga- THE ETERNAL LIFE 61 tions we as personalities have to sub- mit. In so far as we are such oversoul, our aim can never find complete sat- isfaction in any finite experience. Its completeness of realization lies in the absolute totality of the world, to which every individual belongs through its particular intentions, but whose real- ization endlessly transcends the aims of any individual. The self-realization of our oversoul can thus never be our desire as practical individuals, and no disappointment and no sadness be- longs to the fate of the individual in failing to complete in itself the aims of the over-individual will. If that were the aim of the personality, it would flow over into the absolute and would lose every meaning of indi- viduality. For us in so far as you and 62 THE ETERNAL LIFE I are not the same, as we are not the one absolute Oversoul, but are differ- ent and unique, all our desires have thus a meaning only when they refer to those will-attitudes in us which have the particular limited historical affilia- tions. Outside of time, and thus eternal, is our individual will no less than our oversoul will ; but while our absolute personality can find harmonization of its aims merely in the totality of the world, our individual personality never seeks and never longs for another com- plete set of facts than through the sig- nificance, the influence, and the value which belong to the particular histori- cal situation. A personality which has found complete satisfaction of its aims has no possible further intention, and THE ETERNAL LIFE 63 it would be meaningless to attach to it externally a supplement of indi- vidual existence. The life which we live in the world of eternity has no possible other measure than that of its significance, its influence, and its value. If in those directions the aim is ful- filled, our life-work is so completed that we should become disloyal to our- selves and should deny the meaning of our particular individuality if we were aiming towards influences which do not belong to us and towards a sig- nificance to which we have no right; in short, if we demand more than this, our particular life. In this sense we have not even the right to translate the hope for individual endless duration from the sphere of phenomena into the sphere 64 THE ETERNAL LIFE of will-relations. In the sphere of phenomena it deprived our life of every meaning and value. If we were to substitute for that empty thought of a continuation of time the deeper thought of an endless personal influ- ence of will, endless not in time but endless in personal relations, it would seem as if we had really expressed an ultimate goal. Something like this gave life to the old ideas of the trans- migration of souls, but even that un- canny thought mostly took the form that each new life of the old soul was conceived as beginning anew, not knowing anything of its own past and thus without any inner unity and with- out any consciousness of continuous personality. The very thought of this break in recollection expresses clearly THE ETERNAL LIFE 65 that we are no longer personalities if our individuality is not limited. If it seriously hopes for an unlimited ex- pansion of its will-influence and its will-significance, the individual would completely transform itself into the over-individual absolute ; our over- soul would throwjjff^our Historically given personality, and you and I would > S? lii ii.. ii 1 r" / ii mini not mourn here for our friend if we believed that he and you and I are \ / *' n i . iia..iM^i.^i^A^.'..M*i-aaia.t^i. iu , I Jf nothing but the one same absolute I/ rf , i^n-r-r ^P- 11 ~" ! ' i"t r ^>iH'*i*iiiiiifiMnKiM*M^a*i^KHKaaMHIMfc lii ii ^^^yhni,^ Oversoul. Our limitation makes us individuals and gives meaning to our particular striving. All hopes which guide us from the cradle to the grave can refer merely to the complete har- monization of our aims for our limited significance, our limited influence, and our limited realization of values. With 66 THE ETERNAL LIFE that work completed or uncompleted we stand in eternity. And yet who dares to speak the word "uncompleted"? Are the in- fluences of our will confined to those impulses which work directly and with our knowledge on the nearest circle of our neighbors ? Will not our friend, who left us in the best energy of his manhood, influence you and me and so many others throughout our lives, and what we gained from his noble mind will it not work through us further and further, and may it not thus complete much of that which seemed broken off so uncompleted ? And yet who dares to speak the word " com- pleted " ? Do not our purposes grow, ,. , does not in a certain sense every new significance which our will reaches aim THE ETERNAL LIFE 67 towards new influences, does not every newly created value give us the desire for further achievement, is our par- ticular will really ever completely har- monized ? Is our life work really ever so completely done that no desire has still a meaning? And yet does not even that thought, with all its indi- vidual sadness of discord, add to the significance and to the value of our eternal being ? In eternity lies the reality of our friend, who will never sit with us again here at the fireplace. I do not^jhink that I should love him better if I hoped that he might be somewhere waiting through space and time to meet us again. I feel that I should then take his existence in the space- time world as the real meaning of his 68 THE ETERNAL LIFE life, and thus deprive his noble per- sonality of every value and of every ideal meaning. The man we love was O fffWV not in space and time ; he fought his "TTfeof strife and achievement as a sub- ject which calls not for our perception with its standards of causality, space, and time, but for our interpretation with its standards of agreement, of values, of ideals. We know him as a subject of his will, and thus as a per- fect part of the real world in its eter- nal fitness of valid values. He lived his life in realizing absolute values through his devotion to truth and beauty, to morality and religion. You and I do not know a reality of which he is not in eternity a noble part ; the passing of time cannot make his per- sonality unreal, and nothing would be THE ETERNAL LIFE 69 added to his immortal value if some object like him were to enter the sphere of time again. The man whom we love belongs to a world in which there is no past and future, but an eternal now. He is linked to it by the will of you, of me, of all whose will has been influenced by his will, and he is bound to it by his respect for abso- lute values. In a painting every color is related to the neighboring colors, and it belongs at the same time to the totality of the picture ; in the sym- phony every tone is related to the nearest tones, and yet belongs to the whole symphony. But when the sym- , phony or the painting is perfect, then most of all we do not wish the one beautiful color to sweep over the whole picture, or the one splendid tone to 70 THE ETERNAL LIFE last through the whole music. We do not desire the tone of this individual life to last beyond its internal, eternal role, throughout the symphony of the Absolute ; its immortality is its perfect belonging to that whole timeless real- ity, belonging there through its human relations to its neighbors, and through its ideal relations to the ultimate values. See, even these ashes of the wood which burns in the fireplace are made up of atoms which will last through- out all future time ; I do not long for that repulsive, intolerable endlessness which we should have to share with those ashes. They are in time, and can never escape the tracks of time, and however long they may last, there will be endless time still ahead of them. We are beyond time ; our hope and THE ETERNAL LIFE 71 our strife is eternally completed in the timeless system of wills, and if I mourn for our friend, I grieve, not because his personality has become unreal like an event in time, but because his per- sonality as it belongs eternally to our world aims at a fuller realization of its intentions, at a richer influence on his friends. This contrast between what is aimed at in our attitude and what is reached in our influence is indeed full of pathos, and yet inexhaustible in its eternal value. We ought to submit to its ethical meaning as we submit to the value of truth and beauty and duty and sanctity. It belongs to the ulti- mate meaning of each of us; through our aims, through our influences, through our relations to the aims of our fellows and to the ideals of the 72 THE ETERNAL LIFE Absolute, and, finally, through these pathetic contrasts between aims and influences we enter as parts ~ihtb~fhe jabsolute reality, not for calendar years and not ibr innumerable aeons, but for timeless eternity. (Cbe Ritocrsi&c press Ekctrotyped and printed by H. O. Hoiighton &> Co. Cambridge, Mast., U.S. A. 000759545 7