Our author's abiding conviction is that 'the spirit does but mean the breath' (In Memoriam, lvi.), so that man and the lower animals have 'one spirit' and alike end in dust. Pulvis et umbra sumus. It is true, some of his contemporaries hold the new doctrine of Immortality, but Koheleth, in his cool scepticism, hesitates to accept it. Which indeed of its enthusiastic advocates can claim to 'know' that which he asserts; or can prove to Koheleth's satisfaction that God (as a psalmist in Ps. xlix. 15 puts it) will 'receive' the spirit of man, in spite of the fact that the vital principle of beasts loses itself in the dust of death? It is no doubt an awkward construction which Koheleth adopts: he seems to express an uncertainty as to the fate of the lower animals. To convey the meaning which I have given, the construction ought to have been disjunctive, as in this line from a noble modern poem,
Friend, who knows if death indeed have life, or life have death
for goal?[1]
But there is, or rather there ought to be, no doubt as to Koheleth's
meaning. Dean Plumptre frankly admits that 'it is
not till nearly the close of the book, with all its many wanderings
of thought, that the seeker rests in that measure of the
hope of immortality which we find' [but this is open to considerable
doubt] 'in xii. 7.'
- ↑ Swinburne, On the Verge.
