If the basis of our faith in the world-order is the conviction that the
Ideas of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are fully real and fully
operative, we must try to form some clear notion of what these Ideas
mean, and how they are related to each other. The goal of Truth, as an
absolute value, is unity, which in the outer world means harmony, in the
intercourse of spirit with spirit, love; and in the inner world, peace
or happiness. The goal of Goodness as an absolute value is the
realisation of the ought-to-be in victorious moral effort. Beauty is the
self-recognition of creative Spirit in its own works; it is the
expression of Nature's own deepest character. Beauty gives neither
information nor advice; but it satisfies a part of our nature which is
not less Divine than that which pays homage to Truth and Goodness.
Now, these absolute values are supra-temporal. If the soul were in time,
no value could arise; for time is always hurling its own products into
nothingness, and the present is an unextended point, dividing an unreal
past from an unreal future. The soul is not in time; time is rather in
the soul. Values are eternal and indestructible. When Plotinus says that
'nothing that really _is_ can ever perish' (hapolehitai ohyden thon
honton), and when Hoeffding says that 'no value perishes out of the
world,' they are saying the same thing. In so far as we can identify
ourselves in thought and mind with the absolute values, we are sure of
our immortality.
But it will be said that in the first place this promise of immortality
carries with it no guarantee of survival in time, and in the second
place that it offers us, at last, only an impersonal immortality. Let us
take these two objections in turn, though they are in reality closely
connected.
We must not regard time as an external, inhuman, unconscious process.
Time is the frame of soul-life; outside this it has no existence. The
entire cosmic process is the life-frame of the universal Soul, the
Divine Logos. With this life we are vitally connected, however brief and
unimportant the span and the task of an individual career may seem to
us. If my particular life-meaning passes out of activity, it will be
because the larger life, to which I belong, no longer needs that form of
expression. My death, like my birth, will have a teleological
justification, to which my supra-temporal self will consent. When a good
man's work in this world is done, when he is able to say, without
forgetting his many failures, 'I have finished the work that Thou gavest
me to do,' surely his last word will be, 'Lord, now lettest Thou Thy
servant depart in peace'; not, 'Grant that I may flit for a while over
my former home, and hear what is happening to my country and my family.'
We may leave it to our misguided necromancers to describe the adventures
of the disembodied ghost--
'Quo cursu deserta petiverit, et quibus ante
Infelix sua tecta supervolitaverit alis.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account