32 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



mind of man at its highest has striven to emancipate itself from it 

 altogether. The evidence for this statement lies within the reach of 

 all, but I will just adduce three names whose very juxtaposition, by 

 the sense of incongruous oddity stirred up, may make their joint testi- 

 mony the more important. I mean Moses, Buddha, and Julius Csesar, 

 all of whom, though widely separated in time, race, and character, 

 representing absolutely different types of human nature, approaching 

 the subject from widely different points of view, do, nevertheless, agree 

 in this, that the consciousness of immortality formed no part of the 

 furniture of their minds. 



Moses lived one of the most exalted lives, whether regarded from 

 the religious or political side, that has ever been lived on earth, ana 

 yet, as is well known, there is not a shadow of a trace to prove that he 

 was moved by the hope of a reward after death, or that the idea of ex- 

 istence after death was ever consciously presented to his mind. He 

 may be, on the whole, claimed by modern science (the miraculous ele- 

 ment being by it excluded) as an example of those who perform the 

 greatest practical duties, and are content to stand before the mystery 

 of the Unknowable without inquiry and without alarm, so far as the 

 doctrine of man's immortality is concerned. Here is another of those 

 strange links that unite the earliest thinker and legislator with so 

 much of the spirit of modern thought and law. Buddha, on the con- 

 trary (or his disciples, if it be true that his original teaching is lost to 

 us), cannot be quoted as one who did not realize the possibility of life 

 after death, nor is any scheme of philosophy that is practically Pan- 

 theistic inconsistent with immortality, if we limit the word to the bare 

 idea of existing somehow after death. But I rather quote him as one 

 of those who show that the very consciousness of undying personal 

 life, the existence of a self-reflecting ego, which gives all its shape and 

 force to the desire for life after death, may come to be regarded as a 

 positive evil, and painless extinction be maintained as the ultimate 

 hope and destiny of man. And the case of Julius Caesar is, in some 

 respects, stronger still. He is one of the world's crowning intellects, 

 and he lived at a time when men such as he were the heirs of all the 

 ages, the possessors of the treasures of thought in which, for genera- 

 tions past, the greatest men had elaborated doctrines concerning re- 

 ligion, duty, and life. And he represents the views of those whom 

 the truest voice of science now repudiates as running into unscientilio 

 extremes. With him non-existence after death was a matter of prac- 

 tical belief. It colored his opinions upon politics, as really as Crom- 

 well's religion affected his. He spoke against the infliction of the 

 penalty of death upon the conspirators in Catiline's case, because 

 death was a refuge from sorrows, because it solved all mortal miseriec 

 and left place for neither care nor joy. And Cato expressly applaud- 

 ed his sentiments, though with a touch of reaction from popular the- 

 ology, which sounds strangely modern. To this, then, all the original 



