Immortality

These attempts at prolonging life and putting off death are reflections of the irrepressible tendency of all forms of life to gravitate toward immortality. This is because of the eternal nature of the soul, which inhabits each living form. The form is temporary, but the soul is not, and it is trying, in ignorance, to get back to its original position. And, in its ignorance, the struggle for survival, the competition with other life forms, goes on, and consumes the energy, the attention, the hopes of the creature, until it dies and takes a new body, to try again.

Now the difficulty in trying to "please evolution"-that is, develop oneself so that the race, if not the individual, can continue to survive-is that no one really knows what will work and what won't in the long run. Many a modern moralist has tried to construct an ethical system on such foundations, but the fact that evolution remains a theory, remains uncertain in so very many of its details, must frustrate every effort at coherence and consistency. No one knows what activities of the human race will "eliminate it from evolution," as Lecomte de Nouy has rephrased sin. And no one knows what activities will help it to survive. There are no known principles here, the theories of life origins change almost monthly, and so the attempt to establish a "moral" system, or any system whatever, must come to nil.

Morality means how to act towards some goal. But if the goal is unknown, uncertain, untried, unstable, and unfriendly-then where is the scope for a workable morality? And yet, without morality, without mutually agreed-upon patterns of behavior, society cannot exist. And society, we have been told, "pleases evolution"-it will help us to survive .

So we come to a double bind, an irreconcilable fault in the whole scheme of materialistic moralizing. We are trying to "please evolution" without knowing what it wants.