Ambrose Bierce
The San Francisco Examiner/August 20, 1899
Many recent utterances on human immortality—some of them suggested, naturally enough, by the death of Colonel Ingersoll—seem to signify a revival of interest in the subject. It would be more accurate to say an added interest, for in no place where the doctrine is taught does the interest ever entirely lapse. An enormous capital is invested in the business of keeping it alert and attentive.
Among the signs and portents of the rising storm of discussion I may mention the assurance of a certain college professor, whose name I have not the happiness to remember, who declares that he will shortly prove the truth of the soul’s immortality—at least its existence after death—in a way that will command universal assent as certainly as a mathematical axiom. If the gentleman should have the bad luck to die before completing his proof of a self-evident fact, it is to be hoped that his immortal part will carry on the good work Elsewhere, climate permitting.
Coincidentally in point of time with this comforting assurance, the late Sidney Hall, of Hartford, Connecticut, protrudes his pale pow from the tomb, and with a preliminary “O, yes, O yes,” offers a reward of ten thousand dollars to any one proving that the doctrine of immortality is not true. The Rev. O. B. Fassett of Auburn, New York, has made a bid for the prize by publication of a book entitled “Immortality: The Soul’s Immortality Conditional.” From this title it would seem that the reverend author has not clearly understood: immortality is not disproved by showing that it has to be worked for. When Mr. Fassett goes into the court to claim his prize, under the late Mr. Hall’s “last ill-will and contestament,” his reception will be bleak.
Mr. Hall’s own notion of immortality (when living) has an interest apart from his testamentary intentions regarding the worth of one who can prove a negative. In a tract on “The Good Time Coming,” as he is pleased to call annihilation, he signifies his view as follows:
The truth is, the whole theory is a vain chimera—a senseless fiction—a mere human dogma; and to overthrow it nothing more is necessary than to call for the evidence of its truth. No person has ever produced any proof of a distinct entity in man called the soul, or anything regarding its nature or properties, from any source whatsoever.
The chief value of this (many will think) lies in its indication of what, when living, Mr. Hall would have been willing to accept as proof that the doctrine of the soul’s immortality is false. If to “overthrow” that doctrine one has but to “call for the evidence of its truth” his posthumous benefaction might consistently be flung to the first comer. Possibly, though the courts, or whoever under Mr. Hall’s will, has the awarding of the prize, may think that the testator would now be less easily satisfied and will hold the claimant to a more exacting requirement.
Comes now the famous and popular Frenchman, professor of Spectacular Astronomy, Camille Flammarion, who affirms immortality because he has talked with departed souls who said that it was true. Yes, monsieur, but surely you know the ruin about hearsay evidence. We Anglo-Saxons are very particular about that.
M. Flammarion says:
I don’t repudiate the presumptive arguments of school men. I merely supplement them with something positive. For instance, if you assumed the existence of God, this argument of the scholastics is a good one. God has implanted in all men the desire of perfect happiness. This desire cannot be satisfied in our lives here. If there be not another life wherein to satisfy it then God would be a deceiver, Voila tout.
There is more: the desire of perfect happiness does not imply immortality, even if there is a God, for
(1) God may not have implanted it, but merely suffers it to exist, as he suffers sin to exist, the desire of wealth, the desire to live longer than we do in this world. It is not held that God implanted all the desires of the human heart.Then why hold that he implanted that of perfect happiness?
(2) Even if he did—even if a divinely implanted desire entails its own gratification—even if it cannot be gratified in this life—that does not imply immortality. It implies only another life long enough for its gratification just once. An eternity of gratification is not a logical inference from it.
(3) Perhaps God is a “deceiver”—who knows that he is not? Assumption of the existence of a God is one thing; assumption of the existence of a God who is honorable and candid according to our finite conceptions of honor and candor is another.
(4) There may be an honorable and candid God. He may have implanted in us the desire of perfect happiness. It may be—it is—impossible to gratify that desire in this life. Still, another life is not implied, for God may not have intended that we should draw the inference that he is going to gratify it. If omniscient and omnipotent, God must be held to have intended whatever occurs, but no such God is assumed in M. Flammarion’s illustration, and it may be that a god exists whose knowledge and power are limited, or one of them is limited.
M. Flammarion is a learned if somewhat “yellow” astronomer. He has a tremendous imagination, which naturally is more at home in the marvelous and catastrophic than in the orderly regions of familiar phenomena. To him the heavens are an immense pyrotechnicon and he is the master of the show and sets off the fireworks. But he knows nothing of logic, which is the science of straight thinking, and his views of things have therefore no value whatever; they are nebulous.
Now that the doctrine of immortality has taken its rightful place among subjects of discussion legitimate to the layman, and the New York “Journal” has declared its editorial opinion in the matter and doubtless defined its policy, I venture to submit a few random options of my own.
The Journal’s position is plainly defined as follows: The only point in which we fully agree with the Theosophists is this—that if there is immortality for man in the future, there must have been immortality in the past. We must always have existed. Pre-existence is logically necessary to immortality.
I shall not consider too curiously the logic of this, nor inquire if eternal duration necessarily runs both ways from any given point. As a loyal retainer of the great paper I reverently accept its creed and renounce whatever vestigial hope of a future life I may unconsciously have cherished. For nothing is clearer than that our pre-existence there is dream, having absolutely no basis whatever in anything that we know or can hope to know. Of after-existence there is said to be evidence, or rather testimony, in assurances of those who are in present enjoyment of it—if it is enjoyable. Whether this testimony has ever actually been given—and it is the only testimony worth a moment’s consideration—is a disputed point. Many persons while living this life have professed to have received it. But nobody professes, or ever has professed to have received a communication of any kind from one in actual experience of the fore-life. “The souls as yet ungarmented,” if such there be; are dumb to question. The Land beyond the Grave has been, if not observed, yet often and variously described: if not explored and surveyed, yet carefully charted. From among so many accounts of it that we have he must be fastidious indeed who cannot be suited. But of the Fatherland that spreads before the cradle—the great Heretofore, wherein we all dwelt if we are to dwell in the Hereafter, we have no account. Nobody professes knowledge of it. No hearsay evidence reaches our ears of flesh concerning its topographical or other features; no one has been so enterprising as to wrest from its actual inhabitants any particulars of their character and appearance, to refresh our memory withal. And among educated experts and professional proponents of worlds to be there is a general denial of its existence.
I am of their way thinking about that. The fact that we have no recollection of a former life is entirely conclusive of the matter. To have lived an unrecollected life is impossible and unthinkable, for there would be nothing to connect the new life with the old—no thread of continuity—nothing that persisted from the one life to the other. The later birth is that of another person, an altogether difference being, unrelated to the first—a new John Smith succeeding to the late Tom Jones.
Let us not be misled here by a false analogy. To-day I may get a thwack on the mazzard which will give me an intervening season in unconsciousness between yesterday and to-morrow. Thereafter I may live to a green old age with no recollection of anything that I knew, or did, or was before the accident; yet I shall be the same person, for between the old life and the new there will be a nexus, a thread of continuity, something spanning the gulf, from the one state to the other, and the same in both–namely, my body with its habits, capacities and powers. That is I; that identifies me as my former self—authenticates and credentials me as the person that incurred the cranial mischance, dislodging memory.
But when death occurs all is dislodged if memory is; for between two merely mental or spiritual existences memory is the only nexus conceivable: consciousness of identity is the only identity. To live again without memory of having lived before is to live another. Reexistence without recollection is absurd: there is nothing to reexist.
To the Theosophist greeting and joy! May he live a million times. But for his chastening let it be known to him that each time he will be as much I as he. But this will not at all matter and cuts no figure in the end, as I shall show.
The confidence men tell us that “a sucker is born every minute.” In fact several are born every second. No sooner does Harry lie down and die in the sure and certain hope of a blessed reincarnation than Dick is born to do his little turn upon the stage of life. It is now or no importance to Harry that he died in a false hope; he lives again in Dick in precisely the same sense as he would have done had his hope been true; for although Dick does not know himself as Harry, yet Harry never had a hope of knowing himself as Dick
Wherefore, how charming is divine philosophy!
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