INDIVIDUALITY F you want to know what an occult and unresolved being you are, both to yourself and your nearest of kin, read Prof. Royce's scholarly little volume on "The Conception of Immortality." If you want to know how to attain a hope of ever finding yourself and immortality together, read it again to the last syllable. Between whiles ponder on your loneliness and consider whether it is worth while to cheat yourself into the idea that you know anybody or give your affections to anything but the unique and elusive ideal of somebody. It is all a question of individuality, and though that seems easy to the superficial observer, who thinks only that you are you and I am I, it takes, as Prof. Royce shows, an "entire system of philosophy" to give it one peg to hang on. But when you have compassed that philosophy you have got at the heart of all things and attained not only your own unique place as an individual, but your true and everlasting relation "to other individuals and to the all-inclusive individual God himself." Hence the pledge of immortality in this idea and demand of individuality-uniqueness of being-which here finds no fulfillment. Meantime there is the lonesomeness of it. "For we love individuals, we trust in them, we honor and pursue them, we glorify them and hope to know them. But we know, if we are sufficiently thoughtful, that we can never either find them with our eyes or define them in our minds." And this hopelessness of finding what we most love, this loneliness of the soul in the critical light of life, "constitutes one of the deepest tragedies of human existence." Prof. Royce commits this tragedy of loneliness, this mocking vanity of the search for the true beloved mainly to the "keenly critical," the "worldly wise," but in reality it has been the throbbing pain of all humanity since time and love began. The vain strivings "to find one another," to express ourselves to one another, lie at the root of half man's bitterest experiences and defeated days. The long history of art and literature is little more than the story of their efforts to help us in this sad business, and the gauge of their success is the exact measure of their power in this direction. It is for this that we fall down and worship Shakespeare; for this that we forgive Balzac his coarseness, Browning his hard rhymes, Maeterlinck his cloudy symbolisms, and for this that we rush madly after any Dudeney or Wharton who promises to offer us some new touchstone of the inner being. "Do we know anybody? Ah, dear me, we are very lonely in the world," murmurs the gentle Thackeray, and every master writer since writing began has sounded the same chord. "Man is born alone, grows up alone, learns alone, works alone, thinks alone, dies alone," writes Walter Besant. "The only thing that seems to take away his loneliness is his marriage. Then, because he has another person always in the house with him, he feels perhaps that he is not quite so lonely. It is an illusion; every man is quite alone." That is the measure of it. Every man is quite alone, and too often doubly alone when he has some one in the house with him. Prof. Royce is right. "An individual is a being that no finite search can find. Not even in case of our most trusted friends, not even after years of closest intimacy, can men as they now are either define in thought or find di rectly presented in experience the individual beings whom they most love and trust." As he quotes you from Browning, that most excellent lady of your choice and worship is not to be found even in the house you "inhabit together," though you "search room after room." From the wing to the center She goes out as you enter. However, she goes somewhere. Helen may desert you Prof. Royce is sure that she is not a pure abstraction; she is "somehow certainly real," and that she is and that you can not find her here, yet preserve the vision of her, is the sweet assurance of some beyond where you shall find her. Wherefore hang to your ideals, cling to your spirit loves? for Paris, Abelard prove, as Mark Twain has it, "an unprincipled humbug," Launcelot and Guinevere tear up a king's household, but that unique and glorious being who represents to you what nobody else ever was or could be still lives for you "in a higher and richer realm" of perfected being. There, says Royce, shall your friend's life "glow with just that unique position of the divine that no other life in all the world expresses," and meet your first demand that there shall be none beside it. And this because the very uniqueness of the divine life demands it. "Just because God attains and wins and finds this uniqueness, all our lives win, in our union with him, the individuality which is essential to their true meaning." This is better than being “swallowed up in Brahm," after the conception of the Hindoo, or even sharing in the "personality of the absolute," after the idea of Hegel. But why, since individuality and ideals can only be realized through union with God, in the end they should not seek this method in the beginning is more than any of the philosophers can make clear to us. All the saints and seers since Augustine down have been plainly declaring to us that such union was all we needed. "Restless till we rest in Thee" is the verdict of all who have known man, or in anywise read the spirit that is within him. Nevertheless, we go chasing up and down the earth in pursuit of the "elusive goal," of an individual to meet our needs, or sit down in a great, wide, loneliness and stare into the faces of the specters we have captured, and wonder why life is empty. The tragedy of seeking what we most love and finding it not lies heavy upon us, while all the time it is nigh us, even at the door. By no mystic vision, says Prof. Royce, can we win our union with God. We must toil for it. No doubt. Yet other voices have whispered that is was simply to feel after if haply we might find him. The "finite strivings" that consciously intend "oneness with God" are vain, indeed, if they do not consciously find oneness with Him. It is in the silence and the darkness and the loneliness of these finite strivings, and gropings, and yearnings, that no brother man can understand or lighten, that the soul most needs the consciousness of union with the all-good and powerful. It may be as set forth that the fulfillment of that union is "not here, not now, in time and amid the blind striving of the present." But it is somehow through the darkness that the shining link is forged that binds man to the eternal, and, as the poet tells us, Through the dim, Close prison bars that shut man from his kind. SCIENCE AND LAUGHTER A WORLD of no laughter is the refined estate which threatens us. "Mirth and jollity are well-nigh banished from the globe," writes a British scientist and “laughter holding both its sides" has been kicked from circle to circle of life's playhouse till even the pit has incontinently turned it out of doors. A mechanical hand-clapping of solemn, bored-looking spectators is all that the most rollicking farce can elicit from an audience of to-day. Man, as a laughing animal, is no longer distinguished from the brute creation. Indeed, science finds that dogs, apes and other happy beasts can refresh themselves with a grin, while care-burdened man is losing even the muscles that could shape themselves into a laugh. Incidentally, too, the mind and the morals. No man is wholly bad who can laugh, said the ancient student of his kind, and the modern scientist is beginning to consider what, by inference, he must become when he can not laugh. Saturnine, if not satanic, is the moral phase of it. And, as for the mental, the distance from the grim troglodyte to the laughing philosopher is the measure of that. The cave man, it is said, did not laugh. It took unfathomed deeps of time and thought to resolve him into an Aristophanes or a Rabelais. However, even "when the bird walks we see that it has wings," and, having learned to laugh, it may not be easy to wipe the impress of that laugh out of the human family. It is a curious circumstance that the cry of its decline should come at just the time when all creation is recommending the |