So the difference between this chapter and the former chapter is merely one of emphasis. The double character of the individual, however, as it is now before us, starts an inevitable question. Is the individual as immortal as real? If he is immortal, does the immortality belong to both sides of his character, to his body and to his soul, or only to one? And, admittedly, this question offers more serious difficulties than the suspicion of inconsistency. How can it be met?
To write a useful essay on immortality has long been one of my ambitions, and, as regards the views in that essay, my faith and my reason alike have so far brought me to this thesis: _Whatever is real is immortal_.[5] "A most meagre contribution to the subject," I hear some one exclaim. But is it so very meagre after all? "A most gloomy contribution," says another, "for evil, and above all death, are real." But is it so gloomy? Remember, not even death can be real alone. Possibly, too, the meagreness will seem less and the gloom will be illuminated if the need of the real being also the ideal, is brought to mind. That the real must be ideal, that the world must be so [p.235] constituted that the law of whatever is good will prevail in it, has been a faith manifested among all men and expressed through history in countless ways. True, no particular experience ever satisfies it. Not even the particular things we adjudge to be best are adequate to it, and the things we think evil, the suffering and the hardships of all kinds, the always tragic death and the too often offensive life, seem its eternal rebuke. Yet the faith remains, and you and I and all others are forever calling out to it. Our very doubts are its altars; our honest, rational thoughts, as they are uttered, are prayers; perhaps the only prayers to which we have any right.
So the real, which must be also the ideal, is immortal; and this, quite apart from any particular questions about the body or the soul, makes a world to live in and to hope in, whatever happens. Of body and soul, too, it says something. These, in just so far as they are real, are immortal, and any real relation between them is immortal also, for the conclusive test of immortality is just reality, reality here and now. Whatever is real in your life or in mine, whatever reality our present personality may possess, be it physical or spiritual, be it both or neither of these, that and only that is immortal. That and only that, however, let it be said again, is now or never. The most serious error, so it seems to me, in all the controversy about immortality, is the notion, or the superstition, that something that is real now can pass away, or that something real in the future is not real, not freely real now. With this error corrected, of course at the expense of certain attempts to bind reality to [p.236] something that is visible, if not to the natural eye, at least to the eye of the mind, man has nothing to fear. Reality will hold him to itself, will support whatever truly inheres in his friendships or his family ties, in his best hopes or in his personal conceits, for ever and ever. Reality can never betray what it has ever harboured.