"Much of the evidence offered on this subject is doubtless utterly untrustworthy. But there is a good deal which investigation has failed to break down. And there is much to be said in support of the view that, after all deductions have been made for fraud, error and coincidence, there is still a sufficient residuum to justify the belief that such apparitions are in some cases caused by the dead man whose body they represent. "But the mere proof that there was this causal connexion between the dead man and the apparition would not suffice to prove that the dead man had survived his death. A chain of effects may exist long after its original cause is destroyed. . . . And, so far as I know, all stories of apparitions would be equally well explained by the theory that a man. might, before his death, initiate a chain of circumstances which would cause his body to appear, after his death, under certain conditions, to men still alive. In this case, nothing would be proved about his existence after death." To answer his third question, "Is there any reason to suppose that my self does not share the transitory character which I recognize in all the material objects around me?" Dr. M'Taggart points out that what perishes does so only through being resolved again into the separate parts which compose it. Forms of energy cease to be, as one form passes into another; but science holds that the energy itself is neither destroyed nor diminished. Though the self is complex, it is not, in Dr. M'Taggart's view, a compound; and so could not be destroyed, as a brick wall might be, by removing and scattering its elements without those elements themselves being destroyed. "If it did cease to exist, it could only be by annihilation. It is not only the form that would have changed, but that the form and content alike would have perished." And for this there. is no analogy in science. Dr. M'Taggart acknowledges, at once, that this is very far from showing that the self must be immortal-though he reaffirms his conviction that a thorough metaphysical discussion of the nature of reality must indubitably support such a conclusion. But the argument, as given, does at least tend to suggest that so far as the self is one thing and not many, a unit and not a mere congeries-that is, so far as a man's life and will is the expression of a single coherent purpose-it is not subject to the transitoriness which experience shows us is the fate of compounds, but which science does not ascribe either to universal energy or to what it views as irreducible into parts. We close this first chapter, therefore, with the feeling that Dr. M'Taggart has fulfilled the purpose he set himself in it. He has shown us the unconscious materialism of common thought as the self-created, illogical veil of illusion which it in fact is, and he has made us more eager than before to penetrate that veil, and to examine anew the reality beneath. What is that reality? What is the truth of our own being and of the life about us? What is the self, of whose immortality we speak? Our mind turns back, in review of the path along which we have been led, to the initial statements and questions from which we started. "It is better," Dr. M'Taggart told us in his opening paragraphs, "to speak of the immortality of the self, or of men, than of the immortality of the soul. The latter phrase suggests untenable views. For in speaking of the identity of a man during different periods of his bodily life, we do not usually say he is the same soul, but the same self, or the same man. And to use a different word when we are discussing the prolongation of that identity after death, calls up the idea of an identity less perfect than that which lasts through a bodily life. The form in which the question is put thus suggests that the answer is to be in some degree negative-that a man is not as much himself after death as he is before it, even if something escapes from complete destruction. "Moreover, it is customary, unfortunately, to say that a man has a soul, not that he is one. Now if our question is put in the form 'Has man an immortal soul?' an affirmative answer would be absurd. So far as it would mean anything it would mean that the man himself was the body, or something which died with the body-at any rate was not immortal-and that something, not himself, which he owned during life, was set free at his death to continue existing on its own account. For these reasons it seems better not to speak of the soul, and to put our question in the form 'Are men immortal?" " As we reflect upon these paragraphs, it is clear that the mere survival, after death, of some abstract essence of our being-the mere continuity of the life principle which animates us now-would be very far from giving us the immortality we desire. What we crave, if not for ourselves yet certainly for those we love, is a personal immortality which shall preserve even the subtile, indefinable but unmistakable, personal traits, which now stamp thought and speech and act with the hallmark of their individuality. What promise does Dr. M'Taggart's argument give us that such an immortality will be ours? And how perfect is the "identity" which lasts even through one bodily life? We look back over the years we have lived to what we were in youth. We are the same, yet not the same. Some who were then our friends are such no longer. They say of us, "He has changed; he is not the man he was": and when this is repeated to us, we know that it is true, and are, on the whole, glad that it is true. We have put away some of the toys of childhood, and the touch of reality has transformed us. We would not have it otherwise. We would not now change places with those erstwhile friends who are still, at fifty, essentially the same as they were at fifteen-still playing at dolls in the nursery, still living in a world of their own fancy, still without eyes or nerves for the great drama of real life, still ignorant of reality's vibrant touch on naked heart and soul, still feeding their poor, starved emotions on the counterfeit presentment of fiction and the stage. What they are still, we were once; but we would not wish that what then constituted our identity-in our own eyes, no less than in theirs-had remained unchanged and "perfect." We are grateful that that self was not immortal. Not to have changed would have been not to have lived. It is immortal life we seek; not undying death. Looking at our life thus, we see that to live is to die. It is doubtful if we can ever know the self, or find its permanent identity, in any single cross section of our being. It inheres, rather, in those dynamic, deephidden loyalties, whose unchanging purposes compel the change we suffer. In obedience to them, we see, with St. Paul, that we "die daily," and the passing of each moment leaves us other than we were. The tragedy of death, if it be tragedy, is not confined to the final act of dissolution of the body, but is inherent in every act; and every moment shows us the mystery of outer change in obedience to an inner permanence. If this be true, it would appear that we have more data than we have believed for the study of death and immortality. We may examine them, in little, as familiar facts of experience; and instead of only being able to look forward to a unique and unknown change, of which we can form no more than a priore judgments from our present standpoint, we can also look back upon changes, essentially similar in kind, however less in degree, and thus gain an analogy for death more as it may appear to one who has died. From this new viewpoint the tragedy of change takes on a different aspect. What we most regret is not that so much of what we were has passed away, but that we were so little of what we could wish to have endure not that the waste products of the years have been left behind, but that the years were wasted, and that we have not now the permanent possessions we might have gained from them. Our true loss is not in the severing of youthful friendships which were never real, but that so many of our real friendships have been only of our maturity, and so are not enriched by the common memories of love and hope and labour, shared in youth. The closer the tie of recent years, the more we miss in it the past it does not hold. But where true friendship has long persisted, the past lives on in the present. At a word, a look, a trick of speech or gesture, the man who is my friend stands before me as the boy who was my friend. It does not matter that he is old and grey; he is also the child; also in his prime. And the reason is simply this: childhood and prime and age have alike been given to the unchanged current of our common love and common purpose. By its permanence all that was given to it has become permanent too. May it be that this familiar characteristic of long friendships is but one manifestation of a far deeper principle, upon which the personal immortality we crave in fact depends? That there is a contagion of permanence a divine river of immortal reality that imparts immortality to all immersed in it-as well as a contagion of corruption and decay? That what is of itself mortal may become immortal as it is given to immortal purposes? If there is not some such principle in life as this -making valid the statement that whoso giveth his life, for his Master's sake, shall keep it unto life eternal-it is difficult to see that Dr. M'Taggart's arguments can prove more than the immortality of some spiritual principle within us, which may have little likeness to what we are to-day in our own eyes and the eyes of our friends. If the leaving behind us of the environment and interests, that once absorbed our thought and desires, works such changes as we have ourselves experienced in this one bodily life, will not the falling away, at death, of all that is dependent upon the body, of necessity work a far greater change upon all that has not been taken up and absorbed in loyalties, desires and purposes that are independent of the body, and which death, therefore, cannot touch? Do not the very questions Dr. M'Taggart propounds, the very arguments he uses, suggest that personal immortality, as distinct from the immortality of the soul, is something that must depend, not upon the nature of pure spirit, but upon the nature of the individual personality; that personal immortality is not something that is assured,, but something that must be won? What part of what I am to-day is but an activity of my body, depending solely upon it? What part of the thought, desire and will that make up my personal consciousness, and constitute my personality, are concerned only with bodily things? What part could persist unchanged when death takes my body from me? To what extent is my life a single coherent whole, animated by an eternal, indivisible principle or purpose; or to what extent is it a mere congeries and compound of conflicting or incongruous elements? These are the central questions in Dr. M'Taggart's discussion of immortality; and they return to us, no longer abstract or metaphysical, but as of immediate and intimate application to ourselves. They are questions for heart-searching self-examination, and as such we commend them to all readers of his work. HENRY BEDINGER MITCHELL. (To be continued) The more the marble wastes NCE I was painting a plaster angel, a dear little creature, modelled by some deft Italian hand, guided by a heart urging it to seek for something of the smooth clear sweetness that is the birthright of little angels. Through some miscalculated gesture the tiny face became irreparably injured-it is so minute that the least marring destroys all human, or rather, angelic semblance. Ruin stared me in my own face, too, for I needed the figure for the redemption of a promise and there was no time to replace it. The only solution was to procure some plaster and try to repair damages. It was with a jumping heart, and armed only with a potato knife and some sandpaper, that I started to model for the first time in my life. I had heard that a sculptor was a man who makes faces-and busts, and I felt sure it was true. To begin with, there was only the indistinguishable mass of fresh plaster, and the potato knife, and infinite space, and me. I said to myself, "Hidden under this grotesqueness there lurks a little creature of God and it is up to me to find her," and at once went to meet a wonderful experience, epochal, fruitful in spiritual lessons. The first lesson was that a most fastidious patience was of the essence of the job. One slip, one thousandth of a thousandth of an inch, and you slip backwards through the æons. Angels are not made as quickly as Rome was built. As I scratched and chipped and smoothed, something emerged-something not human, but living, animal, uncanny. Were the biological processes of time's beginnings to be enacted before my shuddering gaze? I tried again, and a human being showed itself-a blood-curdling horror of a human being, a thousand years old, seamed with nameless evil, icily malignant; I chipped off some more and achieved Hindenburg with a thyroid enlargement-not prepossessing but encouraging, as indicating that I might be approaching the laggards of the Fourth Race. It was impossible to linger there; my next creation was a portly and pompous elderly lady, you could positively hear her say "Can you recommend a cook?" A few strokes reduced her to youth, but she was a young woman who once caused me grave annoyance at a glove counter. How sculptors ever dodge a high spiritual insight baffles me, for they live with an arc light turned on the Divine scheme. Let them but take a tool and a lump of plaster, and deep mysteries unfold for them-cosmic processes, reincarnations, recessions, ascensions! They may pass in an hour through the dark abysses of time to the dawn of light, from the dawn of light to |