l and
historical heaven is found to have no actuality, the hope of eternal
life, with all that the spiritual world contains, should be relegated to
the sphere of the 'ideal.' This seems to be the position of Hoeffding,
and is quite clearly the view of thinkers like Santayana. They accept
the dualism of value and existence, and place the highest hopes of
humanity in a world which has value only and no existence. This seems to
me to be offering mankind a stone for bread. Martineau's protest against
this philosophy is surely justified:

'Amid all the sickly talk about "ideals," it is well to
remember that as long as they are a mere self-painting of
the yearning spirit, they have no more solidity than
floating air-bubbles, gay in the sunshine and broken by the
passing wind. You do not so much as touch the threshold of
religion, so long as you are detained by the phantoms of
your thought; the very gate of entrance to religion, the
moment of its new birth, is the discovery that your gleaming
ideal is the everlasting real.'[94]

But though our knowledge of the eternal world is much less than we could
desire, it is much greater than many thinkers allow. We are by no means
shut off from realisation and possession of the eternal values while we
live here. We are not confined to local and temporal experience. We know
what Truth and Beauty mean, not only for ourselves but for all souls
throughout the universe, and for God Himself. Above all, we know what
Love means. Now Love, which is the realisation in experience of
spiritual existence, has an unique value as a hierophant of the highest
mysteries. And Love guarantees personality, for it needs what has been
called _otherness_. In all love there must be a subject and an object,
and a bond between them which transcends without annulling their
separateness. What this means for personal immortality has been seen by
many great minds. As an example I will quote from Plotinus' picture of
life in the spiritual world. This writer is certainly not inclined to
overestimate the claims of separate individuality, and he is under no
obligation to make his doctrine conform to the dogmas of any creed.

'Spirits yonder see themselves in others. For there all
things are transparent, and there is nothing dark or
resisting, but everyone is manifest to everyone internally,
and all things are manifest; for light is manifest to light.