If we subordinate the individual to the species, sacrificing his inherent worth and unique value, and then subordinate species to genus and all genera to the All, we lose ourselves in the Infinite substance in which everything is swallowed up. Again, Pantheism tends to speak of the perfection of individuals, and speaks loudly of progress from one generation to another. But it tells only of a future which involves the entire sacrifice of all that has worth or value in the past. It shows endless sacrifice, improvement too, but all for naught. “What does it matter to say that the best is yet to be, if the best must perish as the good, to give place to a yet better ‘best’ which will not have the virtue of enduring any more than the others? Do we offer any real consolation to Sisyphus,” asks Renouvier, “by promising him annihilation, which is coupled with the promise of successors capable of lifting his old rock higher and still higher up the fatal slope, by offering him the eternal falling of this rock and successors who will continually be annihilated and endlessly be replaced by others?” The rock is the personal life. On this theory, however high the rock be pushed, it always is destined to fall back to the same depth, as low as if it had never been pushed up hill at all. We refuse to reconcile a world containing real ends and purposes within it with such a game, vast and miserable, in which no actor plays for his own sake, and all the false winners lose all their gains by being obliged to leave the party while the play goes on for ever. This is to throw away all individual worth, the value of all personal work and effort, to declare individuality a sham, and to embrace fatality. It is this mischievous Pantheism which is the curse of many religions and many philosophies. Against it Renouvier wages a ceaseless warfare. The individuals, he asserts exist both for their own sake and worth, also for the sake and welfare of others. In the person, the law of finality finds its highest expression. Personality is of supreme and unique value.
This being so, it becomes a necessary postulate of our philosophy, if we really believe in the significance of personalities and in progress (which Renouvier considers to have no meaning apart from them), to conclude that death is but an event in the career of these personalities. They are perpetuated beyond death.