Creed and Deed: A Series of Discourses. Felix Adler
and purer joys in reserve. Man is eminently a social being; he has the need of sympathy and depends upon the affections of his fellows. The presence of cherished companions and friends becomes a necessity to him; in absence he yearns for it, and the lack of it is one of the most serious afflictions of human life. "Woe unto him who, far from parents and loved kinsmen, a lonely life must lead. His present joys devouring grief doth snatch. His thoughts are ever straying in the distance back to his father's hall, where the sun of life first rose upon him, and where children of the common home, playfully, with gentle bonds, close and closer drew their hearts together."* The tranquil delight which we derive from the enlargement of intellect, and the exquisite inward satisfaction that results from high fidelity to duty, may be mentioned as the last to crown the scale of pleasures.
* Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris, Act I.
Now, it is evident that all these elements of happiness, these diverse rays that nowhere melt into the perfect light, are dependent upon the physical organization of man, such as it is, even for their partial attainment; of the lower pleasures, this is at once evident. But a little reflection will show the same to be the case with the higher. If we consider the aesthetic faculty, we find its gratification conditioned by a physical basis. What were music without the ear; what the symmetry of form, without the eye and touch? The intellect, in its turn, fashions-the rough timber of experience, which an ever flowing stream of sensation carries into the workshop of the brain. Can the mind feed upon itself? Can the laws of thought act otherwise than upon the material afforded by the senses? The same is also true with respect to our moral qualities, and the exercise of the virtues is inconceivable beyond the pale of human society. All virtue presupposes a tendency to err; the failings and limitations of our mortal condition. Justice is the adjustment of limitations common to all men in such manner that their stress shall not bear more heavily upon one than upon the other. Love is the expansion of one limited nature in another and their mutual enrichment by such union. Charity, fortitude, continence, whatever we applaud in human conduct, is but an indirect testimony to the natural imperfections inherent in the human heart, and is accounted admirable only in so far as it tends to ensure the best interests of the race on earth. When therefore this body is corrupted, when we depart from out the fellowship of men, the gratification of the appetites, the enjoyment of beauty, the exercise of reason, and the practice of virtue become alike unthinkable.
We desire larger happiness than we can here achieve; but because we desire a thing, are we therefore at all warranted in believing that we shall obtain it? Is the course of the world's affairs such as to encourage so flattering an hypothesis? Is not the fatality that so often attends our best efforts in this life, an argument against, rather than in favor of increasing felicity in another? We should assume a wiser attitude as against fate. There are those who fret under disappointment, and murmur and rebel as if they had been defrauded of a right; as if they had entered into a compact with destiny to their advantage, as if the myriad worlds moved through space for their especial good. This is an insane spirit. We need something of the vim of stoicism to grapple with the difficulties of life; we need to cultivate a larger patience; an humble spirit prepared for every loss, and welcoming every hour of joy as an unlooked for gain. There are a thousand pleasures too in little things which we, with the petulance of children, daily spurn, because we cannot have all we ask for. In every stone there is instruction, in every varying aspect of the sky there is beauty, wherever men congregate and commune, lessons of wisdom are revealed to the observer. The movement of everlasting laws quivers in the meanest trifles, and the eternities, thinly veiled, look out upon us with their solemn gaze from every passing mask of time. These let us study; art will help us; science will open to us a wondrous chain of workings which the mind cannot exhaust, and active exertions for the common weal will give a generous glow to our lives, and still the unquiet yearnings which we may never entirely set at rest. You have seen how the flowers grow, how that many seeds are scattered and but few take root; how the germ slowly and with difficulty develops. The rain waters it, the warm sunbeam fosters it; storms sweeping over the earth, may crush it while it is still a young and tender shoot. At last, sometimes after years of preparation, it buds and opens and blooms and becomes a delight and a glory, a fount of fragrance, a crown of beauty. A few days pass and it droops; what the long process of time has slowly created, a single moment may suffice to destroy; and yet though its time was brief, the flower fulfilled its nature only in that passing bloom; all the previous stages of its existence had a meaning only as they led up to this, the final revelation of its purpose.
The bloom of human life is morality; whatever else we may possess, health, and wealth, power, grace, knowledge, have a value only as they lead up to this; have a meaning only as they make this possible. Nor should we complain that the blight of death so quickly withers what the course of threescore years has scarce sufficed to produce. In the hour of our destruction, we will lift up our hearts in triumph – we have blossomed! We have blossomed!
But it will be said, that the flower when it is wilted and withered here, may be transplanted to fairer regions; that the soul may take on new organs, when it has abandoned its earthly habitation, and in a series of transformations of which, it is true, we can form no definite conception, may enter afresh upon its struggles for worthiness in other spheres. This is, indeed, the loftiest expression which the hope of immortality has found. Unlike the arguments previously considered, it is unalloyed by any selfish motive, is founded upon a really exalted sentiment, and it is Love and Virtue themselves that here take up the strain, and sing us their animating song of ceaseless progress toward the good. The argument in this shape, involves the further question whether the existence of an independent and indestructible soul is assured, and upon this point the whole problem of immortality finally hinges.
The question whether what we are accustomed to call the soul is a distinct and indivisible entity, or merely the result of material processes, has divided mankind for more than two thousand years, and some of the ablest thinkers have ranged themselves on either side. As early as the fifth century B. C. the philosopher Democritus propounded materialistic doctrines among the Greeks. According to him, the soul is a combination of smooth, round, polished and moving atoms, and to the motions of these atoms the phenomena of life are to be ascribed.
Among the Romans, Lucretius advanced similar views. He took particular pains to combat the "vulgar fear of death," protesting that the prospect of dissolution would lose its terrors, did we not foolishly imagine ourselves conscious of being dead, forgetting that death implies the entire cessation of consciousness. The followers of materialistic opinions among the ancients, were not a few. But during the ascendancy of the Christian Church, these opinions retired into the background, until in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were revived by such men as Gassendi and La Mettrie, and others. In modern times they have been widely spread.
The list of names on the opposite side is headed by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and embraces the great majority of writers and public teachers, down to the present day.
It may appear strange that when the belief in immortality had once become current, men should have been tempted to forego its pleasing prospects, and even, with a certain vehemence, to urge their sceptical views upon others. Let us consider for a moment, what it was that induced the materialists to assume their position. The observed correspondence between mental and physical phenomena doubtless led them in the first instance to adopt their peculiar views.
We see in the tiny body of the new born babe, barely more than the faint stirrings of animal life; months pass by before it is able to form any clear conception of the persons and things in its vicinity, the simpler mental processes appearing simultaneously with the growth of the bodily organs. The intellect reaches its highest development in the age of manhood and womanhood, when we stand in the maturity of our physical powers. In that middle age of life lies, with rare exceptions, the best work we are destined to accomplish. Having entered upon the downward slope, our faculties gradually lose their vigor, until we sink into the final stage of drivelling old age, and become feeble in mind, as we are helpless in body. In this manner the close connection between our spiritual and material parts, is brought home forcibly, even to the unreflecting; as the one enlarges so does the other: as the one diminishes so does the other: together they increase, together they are weakened; the inference is drawn, shall it not be, that together they will perish?
The phenomena of sleep and of coma seem to convey the same lesson. A haze steals