If you sit down in the quiet of your own room and calmly ask yourself what it is in reference to a life after death that you really desire and what you may reasonably expect, you will probably be surprised to find what a blank your mind is upon the subject. I doubt if you will find that you inwardly desire it, in the same manner, for example, that you desire wealth, or fame, or beauty. You have grown up in the belief that it is right to desire and believe, but that, you know, is quite a different affair from actual yearning.

Nearly every one puts the thought aside as beyond solution. One says, "My thinking will not change the fact nor my longing bring it about. The duty of the passing day is all I can fulfil." Under this cover of postponed examination the world has grown as indifferent to the question as it was formerly engrossed by it. Fear of offending delicate sensibilities and established beliefs keeps the doubter and modifier silent; whilst the extreme of the omnivorous believer is set over against the out-and-out denier. But the great majority of people are neither believers nor disbelievers, but indifferentists—slowly settling toward an agnostic non-committalism that is destructive of all intellectual and moral earnestness.

It is my conviction that this abrogation of curiosity and examination is a most culpable and dangerous fact. If we live after death it is of tremendous importance; if we do not it is of no less vital import, and the belief, the disbelief, or the evasion is of the most constant influence, unconsciously, subtly, upon every thought and act of every day's living.

Suppose now we divest ourselves of the creeps and shudders usually accompanying a discussion of death and immortality, and fearlessly test the common dogma with a little analysis in the light of scientific research and reason. Let us suppose you are a believer: what is it you believe? You desire: what is it you desire, and how far is your desire feasible? You are convinced: but what is the truth? If possible, in what way and to what extent is a future life possible? If attainable, by whom and by what means? Moreover, the kind of belief makes all the difference in the world. I have read somewhere about an African chief who killed his wife's lover, and was defeated at last by his wife's unswerving belief in immortality, she committing suicide in order to join her lover. But the chief was equal to the emergency and he in turn killed himself in order to follow the pair and break up their tÊte-À-tÊtes in the other world! It all depends upon what you propose doing with a future life after you get it. You might just as well be digging clams on this earth as "singing Hosannas around the throne" in heaven.

Do you believe in or fervently desire what, with splendid bravery and abandon the old creed called "the resurrection of the body"? Terrible counter-queries arise: At what age in your life would you choose as best representing the ideal body for your resurrection? Would you prefer your body as it was when you were a child, when youthful, when mature, or when old? Moreover, it is changing every minute, this body. It is estimated that something like five million blood-corpuscles die every second of your life. Even the two or three pounds of minerals in one's bones are only a little more permanently fixed. All component parts are undergoing change every instant: they soon become grass, grain, or tree, passing again into others' bodies, and so on forever. Is it the form and feature you desire to preserve and not the constituent particles? But form and feature change every day or year, and are as impossible to fix as the atoms themselves. Indeed, is not the whole matter put beyond choice by the evident fact that unless by the fiat of an extramundane deity the only moment possible to fix the bodily form in the mould of eternity would be the death-moment? And yet this were the most undesirable of all seasons, since at that hour the body is in the weakest, most useless, and most wretched condition of all the hours it has served us. Supposing therefore, that you are so in love with your own body that you would wish to call it into life again and for forever, we see at once that no moment or phase of development could be chosen, except perhaps the dying moment, the least desirable of all, and that the particles of one's body have served their turn in myriad other bodies each having an equally valid claim to his "property." Besides this the absurdity of the whole is emphasised by the crushing fact that all the organic matter of the world has been used over and over for bodies and the earth has not enough hydrocarbons to fit out again with bodies a small fraction of the souls that have lived upon it. Doubtless the combined weight of all the organic bodies that have lived on the earth would be many times the total weight of the globe including its minerals, elements, and gases. It may be frankly admitted that no bodily resurrection is possible.

And it is as certainly undesirable. The old dogma was the crudest materialism, wholly unworthy of the credence of those who pretended to believe that God was a spirit, and that they were his children. The belief in bodily resurrection was a natural concomitant of the age of sensualism before the mind and spirit had risen to their modern heritage. The desire for such a resurrection stamps the person with a self-confessed imperfection of mental and moral development. The impossibility of such a resurrection is one of many proofs that life is no sensualist at heart and that ideality is the final outcome, the trend of actuality. Nature compels us to take wings though the sluggish Psyche lingers lovingly in the pretty little cocoon of materiality she has built about herself.

Is it perhaps your understanding, reason, or intellect that you desire to perpetuate forever? Frankly, now, are you so in love with your mental outfit? In your more modest and sane hours are you not sadly conscious how very imperfect it is? While we are young and very conceited we may be filled with self-satisfaction and trust in our own judgment, but as the years drag by, we, looking back over the past, grow more and more conscious that our intellect is not to be trusted. Think of the interminable series of blunders of which your life is the record! How poorly you have misjudged people and circumstances! How your reason has fooled you many times and again! How many illusions and delusions you have lived through! With what sad clearness you now see your former stupidities, and with what blindness you fail to see your present ones! Looking about you, you find others equally as gifted as yourself holding your opinions as loathsome. Looking above you, you see the most intellectual and the most educated diametrically opposed in their opinions of God, man, and nature. Two great men, two brothers learned and trained in dialectic and logic, soon grow apart. One becomes a cardinal of the Romish church, accepting papal infallibility and a thousand such absurdities, the other as firmly convinced that the fallacies of the English church are God's gospel. Looking below you, you see the great mass of men wrecking their minds and lives upon a thousand outrageous beliefs and prejudices. There is no sadder spectacle in the world than this that the people love error. But each one with imperturbable conceit is convinced that he sees better and plainer than another. Every partisan democrat or republican has no sort of doubt that he is right about every financial or governmental measure, though he has never studied finance, history, or political economy five minutes. He does not dream that he is a dupe of the lousy politicians and of his own lack of intellect. All history is a tangle of such poverty-stricken intellection. One can but be amazed at the proneness of everybody to see things and do things every way but the right way. And this is the kind of a mental equipment you would stamp with the seal of eternity!

Possibly you may protest that it is a more perfect and purified intellect that you wish. Ah, yes, but that would not be your intellect. You want to be made over, made into another person. That would not be your immortality but that of another. That would imply that it is pure intellect and perfect, in the abstract, that you are interested in. Have you shown much interest in that sort of intellect in the past? If you wish such an immortality of a perfected intellect you must certainly possess it before it can be made everlasting.

Perhaps, again, you will say that it is the ever-progressive ever-growing intellect you desire. This is subterfuge. That is not what you wish but what you would take in default of your first choice. Lessing said that if God held out to him absolute truth in one hand and in the other the everlasting search for truth he would choose the latter. But the condition of everlasting search would be the condition of everlasting imperfection of intellect. Lessing's choice seems to me impious.

I therefore conclude, that at heart you do not wish to eternalise your crude imperfect intellect, and that the sole method of getting an exalted and perfected intellect is to cultivate it here and now. Have you in the past obeyed reason and not passion or self-interest? Have you studied logic, history, and science with a sincere desire to do your political and social duty, and to free yourself from prejudice, error, superstition, and conceit? If not why should God suddenly endow you with a perfect intellect ready-made? Is it God's way in this world, to give excellencies unasked and unearned? Rest assured he will not do it at your dying hour. It is no particular merit in you to die; why should you be rewarded with a new intellect then?

Or, again, you may say that it is not so much your intellect that you wish to make immortal as it is your emotional nature, affection, etc. Love and friendship, you complain, are cut off by death and the tendrils of the heart die because they find nothing to cling to or rest upon. You would like to renew beyond the grave the love and sympathy that has made the earth-life endurable, and even beautiful. Now is this, in very truth, just so? Are you really satisfied with your devotion and love? Have not your outgoings of the heart been quite fickle, illogical, selfish, and calculating? Has not your love and gratitude been often a lively sense of benefits to come? Has your love to woman not been of the "Kreutzer-Sonata" type, a little better and more subtly-concealed perhaps, but at heart the same? If you are a woman have you been seeking to get or to give love, and has your little affection been but payment for protection and a home? Have you chosen true and noble friends and been true and noble to them? Has your charity been but alms-giving without kind sympathy and helpfulness? Have you as married folk, perhaps, been, as the cant phrase has it, "devoted to each other," but oblivious of the duty of affection toward the rest of the world,—grinning examples of Égoisme À deux? Is your family a fetich, an enlarged sort of selfishness? Do you at heart care much for anybody except your own precious self? And a too exclusive love, even of the purest type may be sin in God's eyes. If you bind all your affection upon one weak life you risk a precious value upon too single and narrow an object, and deprive others of the sympathy that need it more. "Just wrapt up in one," as the sentimental jargon has it, is often if not always a pleasant way of great sin. Affection may become morbid—a disease, quite as well as any abuse or exaggeration of any other characteristic.

I take it that they who are the most satisfied with the strength, purity, and constancy of their love and emotional nature are precisely they that have neither actual strength, purity, and constancy of sentiment, and are thus accurately they that should not have immortality.

Lastly, if neither body, intellect, nor the affectional nature are such as you wish made eternal, are you any better contented with your moral nature? The question at once raises a smile. The feeling of our own ethical unworthiness has crystallised into the great Christian dogma of Christ's vicarious sacrifice. In the words of the old hymn, "Jesus died and paid it all, all the debt I owe." No man hoped to get to heaven on his own merits. Much of the zeal of religion has consisted in the joy of the belief that by a sleight-of-hand trick, a big sponge of forgiveness was wiped over the ethical debit and credit account by the lachrymose deity, whose occupation, as Heine said, was to forgive. History is one long monotonous list of man's sins and inhumanities. I think it probable that you will not urge the ethical aspect; I would leave that plea aside. We all know that we are very much like a lot of pigs, each after the most and best corn and the warmest bed. The amazing immorality of trying to get to heaven on another's merits was the most brazen example of how little heavenliness there was in the heaven-hunters and heaven-scalers. Of course the desire for heaven itself, the desire for one's happiness was immoral when conditioned upon the misery of others. Nature in this respect is better than man, denying him his childish materialistic desires and forcing him to wait for immortality until he can learn to live in the spirit and seek no selfish heaven.

Just as the body is ever changing, and it is impossible to seize upon any hour when we could eternalise it, except at the undesirable death-hour, so it is the same in reference to intellect, love, and morality. There are no two days in life when we are the same. As to intellect we have little before adult life is reached, and most people have little after fifty or sixty years. It is proverbial that no one changes his opinion after that age, but lives on old prejudices and ideas. The mental powers get into ruts and habits, true reason being abrogated. As to love we laugh at our fickleness, and our habits and ideals of friendship get sordid as each year strips off the freedom and expansiveness of youth and the dear cold ghost of self is more exclusively worshipped. And our ethical standards change with each day's passing. We have at every hour to clutch ourselves by the throat and cry, "Stay! Who art thou?" And lo! while we ask our protean self the question, we have become another. We seek perpetuity of existence for something ever becoming other. We seek personal identity after death, but we have no personal identity before death: how then can we have it afterward? Do you not see that what makes you recognisable, different from other individuals, and what would make personal immortality possible depends upon the accidents of organisation,—depends firstly upon the bodily peculiarity, and secondly upon imperfections of mind that you do not wish to perpetuate? Twins sometimes wear a knot of ribbon as a signal whereby their friends may recognise them. Our faces and bodies are but such little symbols or signals that our souls have hung out for the day. Divest your best friend of his body and would you recognise him? Have you ever thought how the photograph of your friend's soul would look? If bodily form and imperfections make up the most of what we call individuality it becomes evident that in casting off imperfection we become less narrow, less individual. As you become freed from the cramping littleness of self-love and the bonds of self-gratification, as you rise into the life of the spirit, you find yourself less individual. One fitted for a true heaven would not care for the old immortality. What is good to carry over into the future life is not so much personal identity as personal non-identity, not so much the imperfections that make us individuals as the perfections that free us from individualism. We must lose our life to find it. We have overestimated the value of individuality. Self-consciousness has become hypertrophied, and the summum bonum of life is held to be the preservation of a little puckered-up individuality. This over-development of individualism is doubtless due to the fierce struggle man has had to elevate himself out of savagery. It has been possible only through excessive carefulness and love of the ego. The struggle for existence is now taking on class and corporate characteristics so that the common weal is an ideal quite as much as individual satisfaction and safety. Hence the exaggeration of personality may now return to something like a healthy normalism. As a natural outgrowth and consequence of this over-development of the individual consciousness, there came the absurd attempt to carry over into the after-life the same sort of existence that had been developed here,—consisting in a neglect of the actual world of one's descendants, an ignoring of death that ends the body and products of organisation, and a failure to see that a future life after death must be a life of the spirit, of perfections, and of the common life, not of peculiarities and imperfections. If this seems an aery height and a too rare air it argues against your preparation for the only desirable as well as the only possible kind of immortality. It argues against you just in the same way that your horror of death does. It is only participation in the divine life of the spirit that can see death as right and good. Death comes to shatter our baseless trust in the evanescent physical and teach us dependence upon the everlasting spiritual. They dread death whose life is of the physical type. God never gave to man a greater blessing, after life itself, than death, and nothing more strikingly proves the divine government of the world than the certainty of its coming to us all. If death is your enemy, life is not your friend. The brutal attempt to ignore the fact, the belief that the body with its pack of heathenish appetites and needs could push through death and come out fresh and renewed on the other side is the very insanity of individualism and the intoxication of materialism. The mourning, shudder, gloom, and horror of death,—God-sent if anything is—is practical pessimism and reckless atheism. Death's one lesson is that we must love and cultivate what he cannot touch. One who has lived a life of kindness and spirituality has no horror of death, and to him it has little mystery. But to him whose divinity has been self and whose religion the worship of his physiological senses, death must be the ugliest of enemies who is to rob him of his all. Did you ever notice how life is plastic and free when first fashioning for itself a body? "All heaven lies about us in our infancy." In youth we are unselfish, aspiring, and noble. As the years go by the power of the organisation, the material grows, and limits more and more the freedom of the spirit. Frankenstein turns upon its maker. With age men get narrow, cold, calculating; women snakey, scheming, cruel. The soul finds itself more and more the slave instead of the master, and by and by when the slavery becomes unendurable, it takes flight, and this you call death. It is the body's reward for insubordination. I think we deserve little sympathy for dying. Most of us have well-merited death before it comes—I speak, of course only of the death of those in life's afternoon. Few keep the young life pliant and free beyond the age of fifty. If people could see that life is the maker and moulder of organisation, and if they would seek immortality upon earth, I believe men might come to live a hundred years. Trees learn to live thousands of years, but they keep youth, and spring, and trust, and love, forever nestling with the birds among the rejuvenescent leaves of spring. We die not because the body is weak, but because it has become too strong. We die because there is no real continuance and strength in anything but the non-physical, and we have trusted in the physical. Matter without free life is inert, moved only from without: the dead body is simply matter without life. It is not the blacksmith's arm that is strong: without nerve-force it cannot raise an ounce, cannot raise itself. Whence the nerve-force? From the ganglionic gray cells of the spinal cord and brain. And whence these little gray cells? The dear stupid physiologist has now reached his limit, and you can confidently answer for him that it was Life created these things, Life that existed before muscles, nerves, and cells, and that slowly fashioned them; Life, an order of existence in no imaginable way analogous to, or to be confounded with matter or mechanics. There is in the history of thought no more ludicrous and dismal failure than the attempt to explain life in terms of mechanics. The hope of the materialist that science would prove his prejudice is torn to tatters. The children of the spirit are amazed at the bat-blind inability to see the fact,—to see that life is more certain and enduring than matter, soul than sense. The organs of the body are changed, diseased, die; the body itself dies; generations of bodies die, but like a containing cord of silk, on which all the glittering beads of flesh are strung, there is the soul, the life, ever the same, persisting unchanged through all change, giving unity to diversity, moulding, making, discarding, choosing, healing, working to far-away ends with blind, and dead, and obstinate materials. You love the flesh over-much and jealous life says to you, "Take it then, this so loved and wondrous flesh; me you have not loved,"—and lo! the dead body, useless, decaying, lies before you. Let no materialistic misreading of science hoodwink you into any blurring of the outlines between matter and life.[78] The two are as far apart as heaven and earth, are as dissimilar as thought can conceive,—perhaps in a final analysis, are the only two things of the universe. There is no fact of science showing the faintest warrant for confounding the two. Even Huxley calls materialism the most baseless of all dogmas. It will probably be found that there is but one element, of which all others are duplications and combinations, atoms being but centres of force. But life is irresolvable into any form of matter or mechanical energy. It is not only unthinkable that matter could originate life, but it is demonstrably absurd. No scientist to-day believes in spontaneous generation. Omne vivum ex vivo is an axiom. The plant has no nervous system and yet has every physiological function possessed by the human body. It has contractility, irritability, respiration, anabolism, catabolism, and reproductivity,—that is, it has spontaneous movement, it responds to stimulation, it breathes, it assimilates, it excretes, it begets its like,—and physiologically this is all you can do. Nay, more than this, even a drop of the jelly-like protoplasm that makes up the basis of all cell-structures, animal or vegetable, has also all of these qualities or powers.[79] There are bundles of wholly structureless, unorganised jelly that exhibit these capacities in a wonderful degree. There is, for instance, Hydra viridis, that has no eyes and yet sees, no brain or nerves and yet lies in wait for prey, pursues and fights, or flees from danger. Turned inside out it lives and digests its food as well as before. It holds live worms down with an improvised arm when they try to get out of its stomach. Any part reproduces all. Cut off the bottom of its stomach and it goes on eating, quite untroubled by the little accident,—and so on. A great, wise, blind man has defined evolution, or life, as the integration of matter and the dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the motion undergoes a parallel transformation. Some one else improved upon this by saying that it was "a change from a no-howish, untalkaboutable all-alikeness, to a some-howish and in general talkaboutable not-all-alikeness, by continuous something-elsifications and all-togetherations." Schelling said that life was the tendency to individuation. But the crystal or the planet shows that, and they are not living. As the hand cannot grasp itself, neither can life define itself. All definitions I have seen miss the essential and primal characteristics of spontaneous movement. But all definitions begin by begging the question,—assuming the thing explained. The truth is that there is no definition or explanation possible. The dualism of matter and life must be accepted. There is no monism can bridge the gulf between mechanics and life. Inorganic matter with its inherent forces and laws cannot be conceived as ever coming into or as passing out of existence. From all eternity it was as it is, and so it will remain. The physical universe shows no hint of design, no glimpse of freedom, no trace of intelligence, no suggestion of a maker or God. It has no power of choice, no spontaneous motion. But the merest speck of living matter is utterly and absolutely different. It may have eyes or no eyes, and yet it sees, ears or not and yet it hears, nerves or not and yet it feels and reacts, brain or not and yet it thinks and plans, and acts in accordance with intellectual resolves. The dead body of your child is most inconceivably different from the living body of an hour ago. The one fundamental mystery of the explainable world is why life seeks objectification in material forms, and why it seeks it with such vehemence and ardor. Life seems to bite at matter as if with famishing hunger. One wonders if from some other planet life is being suddenly starved out or banished by some catastrophe, and as a consequence there is thence an over-emigration of the hungry Huns upon our earth. Certain confused and confusion-breeding philosophers in the interests of a theoretical monism or pantheism pretend to find, or to believe that the organic is born out of the inorganic, that the physical world shows evidence of design, that life and mentality were implicate and latent in pre-existent matter. Yet they will accept the evidence against spontaneous generation derived from the fact that if you kill all organic life by intense heat and then exclude life from without you will never find life to arise. But it is plain that in the condensation of the dust of space into suns and planets all organic life was killed in the hottest of all conceivable heat. But as the planets cool, life appears. It must have come from without, and must therefore be an universal self-existent power. Why, or how, or whence life comes to us we do not know now, but the transcendent miracle is ever before our eyes: infinitely rich and free, life is filling, thrilling, surcharging every molecule of matter to which with wondrous power and ingenuity it can gain access. It covers every thousandth of an inch of the earth's surface, dives into the deepest ocean depths, fills the air as high as the mountain tops, ever unsatisfied, ever grasping up a million million renaissant forms, never resting, never baffled. Before this omnipresent god one stands in rapt amazement and worship. To matter, then, life first brought, and still ever brings the power of organisation, of adaptation, of spontaneous energy, and of movement. But when the death of the organisation takes place, the life that preceded and formed it is not lessened or affected. When the watch wears out does it prove that the watchmaker is dead? It is more rational to suppose that the watchmaker has kept on with his work, that he has made and will make many more watches, and I therefore judge that the life of each of us, that existed before our bodies, that formed our bodies, will still form other bodies after ours. The Oriental doctrine of the transmigration of souls is not to be accepted in its crude details, but it is doubtless a great truth. It is more rational and more consonant with what we know of life, than the theory of wasted life implicate in the barbaric notion of sending numberless millions of souls to hell to do nothing but suffer useless pain, and other millions to heaven to suffer (I use the word advisedly) useless pleasure. Any theory of immortality that rests upon the assumption of uselessness and waste may be quickly set aside. Just as matter and force are indestructible, various forms of force being interchangeable, so it must be with life. There must be a conservation of life-energy just as rigid, and this truth must remake and remould the whole conception of immortality. When a mechanical force disappears in one phase, it at once reappears in another aspect. So vegetable, animal, and mental life are but different aspects of life-force, and suffer no loss when transformed one into the other, or when the body disappears altogether. And as it is the inherent nature of force never to rest so there is no rest for life. Banishment of life to a heaven of inaction is as impossible as it is absurd.

[78] Those who think this view is the voice of faith and not of true science may profitably read a little book that has come to my notice since writing these pages: Life Theories and Religious Thought, by Lionel S. Beale.

[79] According to the latest scientific researches the dependence of all organisation upon life is more clearly shown than ever. My friend Dr. Edmund Montgomery twenty-five years ago, as a result of extended experiment and research, showed that the body of animals is not an aggregation of cells, the force of the whole being derived from the enslaving and utilising these subordinate organisms, but that the whole body is a single protoplasmic living connected mass or unit with functionally specialised parts. That this view is the scientific view of to-day and that the cell-aggregate theory is dead may be seen by consulting the article "Zelle," by Prof. Frommen in Eulenburg's Real-EncyclopÄdie der gesammten Heilkunde, 1890.

This extension of the law of the conservation of force to things biologic and psychic is a two-edged sword: it offers conclusive evidence of the fallacy of the materialist and unbeliever. There is no annihilation; your life at death not only may not stop but cannot stop. Life is as inextinguishable as physical force. On the other hand this sword deals the death blow to two equally shallow fallacies of believers. Just so sure as it insures the preservation of your life, of all that is worth preservation, just so sure it denies the possibility of preserving what was bound up with and produced by organisation,—that is individuality and personal identity. These things, if not entirely, are certainly largely the products of your peculiar physical and physiological organisation. Whatever is born of the flesh must perish with the flesh; what is born of the spirit shall inherit eternal life. But the profoundest and most distinguishing rebuke is given the unscientific, puerile, selfish assumption of the waste, loss, and uselessness of life involved in the old theory of heaven and hell. When from a chemical compound you take away and liberate one element or compound radicle, does it then shoot off into space, to "flock all by itself" for eternity? By no means! It at once rushes into a new combination with its nearest neighbor, quickly picking up again the round of its duty and function. The curious notion that after having done work in one body, life or souls should at once rush off to some far-away star, there to sing or howl for eternity was a childish absurdity. One wonders where even an omnipotent God could get material for such an amazing manufacture and loss of souls. The theory also forgot that logic demands that what should live forever in the future must perforce have lived forever in the past. A rope if it have one end, must have two ends. What, therefore have our souls been doing during this past eternity? The truth is that absolutely speaking there cannot be souls, but only soul. Life is a unit, and indivisible. The tiniest bit of bioplasm holds and represents all of life. Neither you nor it are separable from the whole. There may be education and progressive evolution of life as a whole but there can be no individual and selfish salvation apart from the salvation of all other souls. The idea that release from the body at once releases a soul from action, duty, and the work of life, is an illogicality that could have arisen in no mind conversant with the demonstrated law of the non-wastage of force in any work of energy elsewhere. Life is never tired; it is the body that requires rest not the spirit. The old doctrine of heaven, an eternity of laziness, was the sigh of the sluggish flesh whipped to ceaseless work by the unresting life. The desire of heaven was the desire of eternal death.

This extension of the idea of the non-wastage, the rigid conservation and interconvertibility of force to things of life, gains a new significance and grandeur when we consider that whatever proves the immortality of man proves the immortality of every other animal or vegetable form. The tree and horse have a soul quite as well as you, and must live after death quite as surely as you will. It is the flimsiest of conceits that makes men think they are endowed with a special sort of soul or divine life, different from that of animals or plants. Don't flatter yourself. God takes quite the same loving pains and care in the elimination of a leaf that he does of a brain-cell. Man is but a small part of the animal world, and the whole animal world is but a small part of the total life of the globe. Don't despise the vegetable kingdom: it can do something you cannot do—make living matter out of mineral substances. You could not live a day without the food furnished you by "your brothers, the plants." Hence if human life or souls cannot be sent off into space to do nothing, neither can the souls of animals and plants. If we are to have our heaven they must have theirs also. Does not this tangential theory begin to be clumsy and work with huge creakings and difficulties? It looks like reductio ad absurdum.

Not only is the tangential theory contradictory of all physical analogies and all known laws, but it is positively immoral. It is but a refined selfishness. Worldliness is none the less sinful because it is other-worldliness. If billions of souls could thus be wasted in an eternity of useless pain or pleasure, could thus, drunken with individuation, hug their own sweet ghosts for never-ending time—then were life a farce, the universe a huge meaningless machine for grinding out waste and useless souls. But if all life, past or future, is one and indivisible, purposive, educational, then the world becomes full of meaning and the face of the Father, Life, smiles out at us from every living thing. The faith of all good men that goodness is at the heart of things is justified. The Earth becomes our home, that we can love; our Father ever dwelleth here; we cannot be banished. When we have finished our task, when our body has worn out, tireless life, of which we are the children and heirs, gives us here and now other work to do.

To matter, this tremendous cosmical game of incarnation can mean nothing. We see the dead flesh break up into simpler chemical forms and the atoms finally spin off unaltered by their flesh-dance, again to be caught up by the mystic and unseen Master, again to be pressed into organic forms,—forms that like empty sea-shells only show where life has been. And so on forever. But to life some educative purpose must be operative through it all. Life that made eyes must see more than eyes; life that made brains must know more than brains. There is doubtless pain and strain; but is there to be no ultimate justification? We may catch glimpses of reasons. Do we not see an increase both of quantity and quality of life in geologic times? Is life trying to do away with death and heredity? Are they but makeshifts, death but a discarding of too obstinate material? Birth but a retempering and reworking of the same material? Heredity but the temporary means of passing life and its experiences onward until death and birth shall be found unnecessary in a growing command of chemical and physical forces that shall banish old age out of the world? There is no inherent reason why a body should grow decrepit. If it can be made to preserve its suppleness for fifty years why not for a thousand? It may transpire that the dream of an elixir of life may come true through scientific progress despite the savage death-blow given it by Brown-SÉquard. The more sin, selfishness, and wrong there is the shorter is the average length of human lives. If you will look into the rich and awful science of statistics you will find proof of this in every class of society. When we apply ourselves to enrich and lengthen our life-time with the same zeal we now use in killing each other—when the endowments of the world's scientific schools equal the cost of the world's armies then there will be a very different life-table found in the insurance-offices.

Finally with mournful echoing recurrence comes the old question: How much of individuality persists and passes untouched through death's fingers? How far does the graduate life carry with it the results of experience? I would answer: all that you ought to desire, all that is best, all that you will want when you fully understand how little and poor is individuality and that there is something including it and far better. I have a strange inability, personally, to understand the to me absurd hunger after personal identity. It appears to me a childish obtuseness of character. The great and glorious freeness and largeness of life, the decentralised, impersonal quality of it seems to be unappreciated. I do not see how people can fail to understand that personal identity is not only impossible, does not exist now and here, but that the desire of it is the renunciation of progress. We grow and advance only by change, only by breaking up identity and becoming other. Think also of the lack of identity or individuality in nature. There is no personality and individualism there, and yet there is something that includes personality and is much more. There is will, consciousness, intelligence, life,—but not identity or individuality. So the life that is the heart of us invites us to leave our little self and find a larger self. Religion is our yes to that invitation. Materialism and pessimism is the saying no to it. The immortality that is alone possible or desirable is the losing our life, the individual identity-loving life, again to find it as the impersonal but richer, deeper life of nature and God. God denies you an immortality of individualism and identity because he loves you so well that he refuses you your crude childish desire in order to offer you something infinitely better. People do not seem to see how narrow, small, and partial is the dissociate speck of the individual, and that as an individual progresses in all the virtues of character he evermore becomes proportionally less individual and less centralised, always more like the divine prototype of his impersonal father, Life. The love of individualism is the love of imperfection. This may to some seem a hard doctrine. It is not perhaps an easy task for the butterfly to break its way out through the million-fold bonds of its cocoon, but when risen into the large air and sunshine does it regret the birth-struggle? They who think they are being cheated of reality for a metaphysic illusion will find in breaking through the bonds of flesh that they also have brought with them splendid wings for rising in the no less real but rarer air of spiritual trust in life. It is not that we love less the thousand ties of flesh, home and kindred, but that in recognising the paternity and fraternity of all life, we find love commensurate with that life. I do not think there was any cold stony harshness in the face of Jesus when he uttered those most profoundly significant of all words, "Who is my mother, and who are my brethren? Whosoever shall do the will of my Father, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother." What a recall to the common life of the spirit! What unity with the common life based upon loving obedience to the will of the Father. What a wonderful rebuke of the love of individualism. He did not love his mother less but humanity more. The more we rise into that impersonal atmosphere the more are we careless of the fate of personal identity. The composite photograph shows the fundamental and enduring quality, the average feature. In a certain sense life and history are taking humanity's composite photograph; but, inordinately-loving individualism, each sitter conceitedly demands that his own picture be left untouched and unblurred by that of the others, and that his poor little portrait shall stand alone and forever—precisely what the divine photographer does not wish and will not permit. Obstinacy persists and God smashes the negative to the ground with the unanswerable argument called death. Because it is more than metaphor that in any ways your body may be likened unto a photographer's negative: created, for example, by the in-flashing of a heavenly ray of light among the highly unstable chemicals of matter; useless, except as an intermediate step to a clearer showing of the character; black and invisible unless shone through by the pure light of life and love; fragile as glass,—and lastly the poor, weak, shadowy, dead counterfeit of a throbbing, marvellous, living reality. The hunger for an immortality of the body, of the senses, the lust of immortality, is, in empty fatuousness, only comparable to the mania of a crazy photographer interested only in his negatives, and who never "develops" one, or to the foolishness that values photographs more than the friends themselves. If we once get our spiritual eye fixed upon the deep reality and unity hidden by the Maia-veilings of individuality and flesh, the cravings of our weak hearts for eternal continuance of our little bundle of littlenesses, would fall away from us as softly as the wayward longings of childhood. We could then see that it is the quality of all life, the progressive purity, power, and increase of life in the abstract, that become all-important. Religion would become the love and veneration of Life the Father of us; morality the cheerful obedience of the individual to that Father; Heaven the re-entrance of the individual life into the great unity. Much of the old religion was irreligious; its God a far-away dead abstraction, not a living, ever-present love; its immortality was at heart a desire for death, its spiritualism at heart a barbaric materialism. To this death of faith and irreligious religion, comes the sympathetic study and love of nature—that is, science—and reveals to us the opulence of life, the infinity of intellect in nature, the inexhaustibleness of her resources and of her diversity, her beauty, and her splendor. The old materialistic degradation of religion forefelt its doom would come from this spiritualistic revivification, and the devotees cried out against science as atheistic. And science found some foolish enemies in her own camp who, misreading their divine book, joined in the cry—"Nothing but mechanics." It was a dismal short-lived croak. We now see that not only are science and her workers religious, but without scientific knowledge there can be no adequate idea or practice of religion. You can't love God unless you love and know what he is doing in this universe. The man who in a walk goes neglectfully and obliviously by a million mysteries and wonders that God has been toiling to eliminate for ages,—such a man cannot lay much claim to God's friendship. If we love our friend, we have some interest in the deepest concern of his life. The foolishest of all fears is the fear that science is somehow going to destroy all good things of faith and life. In truth it reveals all good things. It demonstrates and manifests both God and immortality,—God as the Father of all life, immortality as the surety of the conservation and non-wastage of that life. Much of the fear of science, is as I have said the fear of the old materialistic religion in presence of the larger faith that burns up its beloved errors. They who had been promised and had argued themselves into a groundless belief in the value and immortality of a bundle of sensual appetites, selfish desires, and imperfections saw far in advance that any large study of life and nature would dash their wretched faith to atoms. And science has overridden this unfaithful faith. "He that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." This is as true scientifically as it is true morally and religiously.

It requires but a little study of neurology and psychology to give demonstration to this truth. The products of organisation die with disorganisation. Most, if not all, of what people mean by individuality and personal identity is a product of organisation, is an accident of incarnation. Children are similar to each other; they are lovable partly because idiosyncrasy and individualism haven't yet developed. As we grow older we cultivate individuality, until the very old are usually angular, cranky, individual with a vengeance! Death, thank heaven, is the end of that, the certainty of a non-eternalising of the imperfect. Birth is a new trial. Incarnation and reincarnation are the ever-renewed work of Life. Through the laws of heredity, through physiology, sociology, and biology, science is tirelessly illustrating to us how all life holds together, how individualism is valueless, and sacrificed to the common weal. There is no escape, sensual or supersensual from the world's great common life. The old selfish dream of a heaven apart from incarnation, from doing and becoming was a pitiful mistake. You cannot clutch your cake of happiness and like a spoiled child run into the attic of heaven to eat it alone. Life will see to it that you do not slip off. And if you have been born again of the spirit you will have no such desire, but will beg for kindred work upon the old earth-home.

In the meantime the conclusion is clear: to love and aid the work of our master Life we need not wait for death. We may not seek our own salvation; it is no matter whether you and I are saved or not. The reincarnation of life is our work here and now. It took you twenty years to fashion out of a microscopically-small speck of unorganised protoplasm your body and brain. Within us we are to keep that organisation from cramping and binding the life,—keep life as large and free and pliant as possible. Outside of us the incarnation goes on as well, and every person you influence either for good or for ill, thus by the fact, becomes a product of your incarnating work. Every day you have a hundred opportunities to give, without lessening your own supply, some of your own life, to increase the quantity and to elevate the quality of the general stock of the world's life. Help the young, they inherit the world and will use it well or ill according to your teaching and example. Stop cruelty to animals, they are your brothers, filled with the same life as your own; fight the political ruin we are preparing for ourselves by partisanship, bribery, and class-legislation; discourage war and intemperance and lessen the tyranny of the strong and wealthy. Wage a ceaseless war to the death against luxury, the poison that is eating and rotting the hearts of all of us; love trees, meadows, clear brooks, the mountains and silences of Nature. Love, not so much your own or another's individual life, as Life itself. There is otherwise no immortality.

The divine story tells us that after measureless suffering and self-purification, Buddha had gained the right to enter Nirvana. With compassion filling his heart he put his merited reward aside and resolved to remain without to teach and to help until every child of earth should have become his disciple, and until every disciple should have entered Nirvana before him. Such must be the resolve of every true lover of life and of every right seeker after immortality.

GEORGE M. GOULD.