The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 6&8

to mention it here, but we fail to see how we can square its fundamental assertions and implications with the main mass of The Science of Life.

§ 6 The Survival of the Personality After Death

This obscure and often distressing and grotesque borderland of biological science would have demanded attention, if for no other reason, because it comes so close to another question we have all asked ourselves. Alone, in the silence of the night and on a score of thoughtful occasions we have demanded, Can this self, so vividly central to my universe, so greedily possessive of the world, ever cease to be? Without it surely there is no world at all! And yet this conscious self dies nightly when we sleep, and we cannot trace the stages by which in its beginnings it crept to an awareness of its Own existence.

Mr. Everyman sets down the printed word and reflects. “I am I,’ seems to him the statement of a veracity beside which number and space and time seem flimsy abstractions. But then he reflects upon a number of things The Science of Life has brought before him. All the way through this work has been throwing light upon the nature of individuality. We have recognized grades of individuality, the cell individual centred on a single nucleus, the individual metazoon, the individual colony made up of individual zooids. We have found it impossible to define individuality in the case of many creatures; in the case, for example, of the sponges and Obelia and other colonial polyps. We have seen individuals melt together and become one, and individuals break up into many. In our study of mental life we have seen that in one single brain it is possible for separate and even antagonistic individualities to exist. Even in clearly defined human individuals we are constantly aware of a conflict of motives, a war between a better and a worse self, a divergence of loyalties and ends. Is the whole subconscious and conscious self the immortal part, or is it the persona only? Is it an inflated self that survives ? Many of Mr. Everyman’s intensest passions do not so much further his individual interests as they do those of the race. Sometimes he would rather love than eat.

Some of the best things in our lives are the least individual things. When a man is exalted by high aims, possessed by some

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exquisite effort or occupied by profound study, he becomes altogether self-forgetful. In moments of great passion he “ forgets himself.” These are no metaphors. The conscious self is not the whole of a man. It is the central bureau for his general bodily behaviour, but it is subjected to systems of motivation, rational thought, scientific curiosity, loyalties, mass-suggestions, which come into his being from without, as general instructions from headquarters come into the semi-autonomous activities of a branch bank. Many of our senseimpressions undergo interpretation in the brain. Perhaps the collectivity of our senseimpressions is interpreted to suit the needs of our mind. It is possible that it has served the ends of survival that Mr. Everyman should think himself a much more independent being than he is. Personality may be only one of Nature’s methods, a convenient provisional delusion of considerable strategic value.

Moreover, individual death is one of the methods of life. That we have already enforced in our comments on rejuvenation in Book 4. Every individual is a biological experiment, and a species progresses and advances by the selection, the rejection or multiplication of these individuals. Biologically, life ceases to go forward unless individuals come to an end and are replaced by others. The idea of any sort of individual immortality runs flatly counter to the idea of continuing evolution. Mr. Everyman makes his experiments, learns and teaches his lesson, and hands on the torch of life and experience. The bad habits he has acquired, the ineradicable memories, the mutilations and distortions that have been his lot, the poison and prejudice and decay in him—all surely are better erased at last and forgotten. A time will come when he will be weary and ready to sleep.

It is the young who want personal immortality, not the old.

Yet these considerations do not abolish the idea of immortality; they only shift it from the personality. In the visible biological world, in the world of fact, life never dies ; only the individuals it throws up die. May there not be another side of existence of which our consciousnesses seem to be only the acutest expression we know, a perceptive side of matter, if one may strain a term, which also is more enduring than any individual experience ? Just as our bodily lives stipple out the form of the developing species, so our mental lives may stipple out its dawning conscious-