The Way of the World
It is so long since the science-worshipper conisdered religion seriously that when he brings himself to do so he acts like a professor who, being asked if he plays chess, remembers that long ago he did play bridge. He assumes, for instance, that life and the soul are one and the same - as indeed they were thought to be by a good many savage tribes and are still thought to be by many theologians: and no doubt he would remind us that the word "pneuma" meant both "spirit" and "breath". Some day, perhaps, a chemist, combining certain properties, will produce (instead of reproducing) "life"; this seems even more probable nowadays that scientists are on the verge of cracking the genetic code inside out and about to play God on a truly Nietschean scale; but it is more than unlikely that he will have put together a "soul". We have no cause for supposing that life and consciousness are identical; and most our scepticism concerning the soul is due simply to this ancient confusion. The evidence of psychic research, if our sceptical mind would allow us to accept it, powerfully suggests that life and consciousness have no more intimate connection than a river and the boat that glides upon it or the earth and our fleeting passage through time and space. Our personality can exist when life in our body has been snuffed out by that very force that impels us to believe in our very survival although we must perforce admit that our life and our personality were distinct the one from the other.Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we think of a great sea of consciousness breaking for ever against the substance of the physical universe, we shall then look upon the evolution of forms as a result of that great sea for ever striving to force its way through the obstacles of our three dimensions; gradually getting through it and, in the course of so doing, continually forcing matter to take finer and finer forms in order that more and more of consciousness may flow through.
Mere life itself, it would seem, has a thoroughly bad record. In fact, we might say that, in respect of this world at least, it plays the part which the medieval Christians and the ancient Persians attributed to the Devil. No sooner does life arise within a fragment of matter than it shows a ferocious determination not to let go. All that it wants, and wants with the utmost vehemence, is to save itself from extinction and oblivion: with the result that Nature, by which we mean the life-principle, has no moral sense, no fellow-feeling, no mercy and no justice, but, quite contrariwise, maintains itself by that abominable system whereby no scrap of life can persist except by eating up some other scrap. Here, then, we may see why every man is afraid of death and yet also feels that his fear is at least unworthy. It is the life in him that dreads death, acting as instinctively as the eyelid which closes when any object approaches it; and it is the soul in him that scorns this instinct. I suspect, indeed, that no man is any more able to conceive of his consciousness going out altogether than he can conceive of unoccupied Space. He is muddled because, though his soul knows that it cannot expire, his life knows that it must; and the life in most men is stronger than the soul.
Now, it looks as though for an immense period of the world's pre-history hardly a trickle of spirit made its way through matter; as though the rage of life was all that the world could show for perhaps a million years. Think of a brontosaurus, a mammoth, a tiger and a flea, and you perceive at once that they are all the abject slaves of "the life-force". In fact, if a selfless impulse could arise within a flea, it would probably explode his little mechanism. And then conceive how gradually a sense of fellow-feeling silted into the world. How did it begin to make its way? Some people might tell us that it began in the mother-animal's instinct to protect the life of her offspring from the father-animal's instinct to gobble it up; and others might tell us that certain insects and animals refrained from killing their kind because they felt or learned that there is safety in numbers. It does not matter at all how life was forced, or (as it were) beguiled, into letting a little selflessness come through. What does matter is that in course of time it did come through; and that fellow-feeling grew into love, and that love proceeded to rebel against the edicts of life; until at last the earth achieved a few men and women - who disregarded the tremendous instinct of self-preservation which is perhaps the one and only characteristic of life, and thought less of their own safety or continuity than of the welfare of other creatures. Even now most men and women are little more than Nature's automata, driven onward solely by the raw passion that is in life. There are monsters without conscience or sympathy who, because of their physical appearance, are considered to be men. Moreover, these ingenious, tricky little brains in which we human beings have specialised are as fecund a source of trouble in the world as life itself is. They enable life to be a thousand times more cunning than its own plain instinct could ever make it. The little scrap of spiritual force within us has now, indeed, a hard time, asailed on the one side by the selfishness of life and on the other by the resourcefulness of intelligence. From the first we derive our cruelty, from the second our craftiness - the two chief blots upon human nature, the two characteristics of man which prevent the earth from becoming, at least for men and women, an earthly paradise.