VII
THE IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL
But now as to one remaining aspect of the moral individual’s place in the order of the universe. As we empirically know this individual, he is found subject, as to the sequence of his experience, to countless caprices of fortune, amongst which the most generally noteworthy is the seemingly quite arbitrary physical accident of death. For while death, as we see it, is a fact of considerable cosmological importance, it is of almost no discoverable and essential moral significance. Hence, from the point of view of the moral Ego, it has to be called an arbitrary chance. Necessary and intelligible enough as a natural phenomenon, and so, when cosmologically viewed, as rational an event as is any other phenomenon of nature, death stubbornly refuses to have any constant relation to that ideal which gives the whole meaning to the life of an individual Ego; it simply seems, either abruptly or, in case of its slow approach, gradually, to interrupt the entire process that was to fulfil that ideal. But when the process is interrupted, the Ego of which we have been speaking vanishes from manifestation in so much of concrete experience as is within our direct human ken. The question arises: Is this seeming interruption the true temporal end of the Ego? If so, of course the individual Ego remains with its ideal unfulfilled, with its possibilities unrealised. For in this life the finite Ego is only a seeker of its goal, as a knight of his quest. Yet, by
