THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHERS 375
him while he lived, and when he is dead his influence brings others to
the same absorption, making them, through that ideal identity with the
best in him, reincarnations and perennial seats of all in him which he
could rationally hope to rescue from destruction. He can say, without any
subterfuge or desire to delude himself, that he shall not wholly die; for he
will have a better notion than the vulgar of what constitutes his being. By
becoming the spectator and confessor of his own death and of universal
mutation, he will have identified himself with what is spiritual in all
spirits and masterful in all apprehension; and so conceiving himself, he
may truly feel and know 26
that he is eternal."
5.
REASON IN SOCIETY
The great problem of philosophy is to devise a means whereby men
may be persuaded to virtue without the stimulus of supernatural hopes
and fears. Theoretically it solved this problem twice; both in Socrates and
in Spinoza it gave the world a sufficiently perfect system of natural or
rational ethics. If men could be moulded to either philosophy, all would
be well. But "a truly rational morality or social regimen has never existed
in the world, and is hardly to be looked for"; it remains the luxury of
philosophers. "A philosopher has a haven in himself, of which I suspect
the fabled bliss to follow in other lives ... is only a poetic symbol; he
has pleasure in truth, and an equal readiness to enjoy the scene or quit
it" (though one may observe a certain obstinate longevity in him). For
the rest of us the avenue of moral development must lie, in the future as
in the past, in the growth of those social emotions which bloom in the
generous atmosphere of love and the home/927
It is true, as Schopenhauer argued, that love is a deception practised
that "nine-tenths of the cause of love
and that love
upon the individual by the race;
are In the lover, for one-tenth that may be in the object";
"fuses the soul again into the impersonal blind flux." Nevertheless, love
has its recompenses; and in his greatest sacrifice man finds his happiest
fulfilment. "Laplace is reported to have said on his deathbed that science
was mere trifling, and that nothing was real but love." After all, romantic
love, despite its poetical delusions, ends normally in a relationship of
parent and child far more satisfying to the instincts than any celibate
security. Children are our immortality; and "we commit the blotted
manuscript of our lives more willingly to the flames, when we find the
28
immortal text half engrossed in a fairer copy."
The family is the avenue of human perpetuity, and therefore still the
basic institution among men; it could carry on the race even if all other
A- # P- 54*
P-
**Ibid. p. *73. **R- in S., p, 239; $"