That is the query with which we opened this chapter; and, in answering it, it is but fair to say that Sir Oliver Lodge shows a marked inclination to take up a position identical with that of Mr. Watson: "Everything sufficiently valuable," he says, "be it beauty, artistic achievement, knowledge, unselfish affection, may be thought of as enduring henceforth and for ever, _if not with an individual { 236} and personal existence, yet as part of the eternal Being of God_."
Now this is not only a wholly unsatisfactory conclusion from the point of view of religion; it is a surrender of the very point at issue--_viz._, the permanence of personality--and in reality lets slip what Sir Oliver Lodge himself was contending for. It is unsatisfactory from the point of view of religion; for such a re-absorption of the soul into a "grand self-conscious totality of being," involving of necessity the end of all we mean by individuality, consciousness, character, is not immortality at all--to all intents and purposes it is, as we said, annihilation. There is not an iota to choose, so far as the religious believer is concerned, between this theory and the frank materialism of Lucretius, so wonderfully rendered by Mr. Mallock:--
The seeds that once were we take flight and fly, Winnowed to earth, or whirled along the sky, Not lost but disunited. _Life lives on_. _It is the lives, the lives, the lives that die_.
They go beyond recapture and recall, Lost in the all-indissoluble All: Gone like the rainbow from the fountain's foam, Gone like the spindrift shuddering down the squall,
Flakes of the water, on the waters cease! Soul of the body, melt and sleep like these. Atoms to atoms--weariness to rest-- Ashes to ashes--hopes and fears to peace!
{ 237} Pantheism may speak delusively of "the peace of absorption in the Infinite," or of the end of our being as submersion, "without reserve, in the infinite ocean of God"; but regarded from the standpoint of individuality, there is no difference between such a fate and the total extinction of the soul--
--preached with such haunting eloquence by the Roman poet. The truth, as Dr. Illingworth has well expressed it, is that in practice "Pantheism is really indistinguishable from Materialism; it is merely Materialism grown sentimental, but no more tenable for its change of name." [10]