xni THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 235 



of fact men mostly prefer (and probably always have 

 preferred) the former alternative, and for ever strive to 

 thrust the unwelcome thought into the background of 

 consciousness. This is why all but the most inevitable 

 mention of it is tabooed in polite society. The method 

 on the whole is a social success, though it probably breaks 

 down at least once in the final crisis of every one s life. 



The next step in our investigation will be to consider 

 how our attitude towards death affects the desire for a 

 future life. Now we know that most of the religions have 

 insisted on the fact of immortality and made it man s 

 great consolation in view of the prospect of death. Or, 

 at least, that is what the religious doctrines appear to aim 

 at. But it also seems probable that the great majority 

 of men, instead of thinking of death tempered with 

 immortality, prefer not to think of death at all. Hence 

 it is natural that what is associated with the thought of 

 something so distasteful should itself become distasteful. 

 Need we look further for the reason why the prospect of 

 a future life is, by the generality of men, regarded without 

 enthusiam and, as far as may be, ignored ? Nor is it 

 strictly accurate to say that this attitude has passed quite 

 unobserved in the literature. Plato, who, in spite of efforts 

 of modern commentators to prove the contrary, was of all 

 thinkers perhaps the most seriously interested in the 

 question of immortality and the most resolutely bent on 

 moralising the doctrine and rendering it effective, exactly 

 hits off the great underlying mass of human feeling in 

 the description he gives of the psychological history of 

 Kephalos, the good old man who has learnt wisdom from 

 the experience of a long life. In the Republic (331) he 

 is represented as confessing that, throughout youth and 

 manhood, he paid no heed to the legends about Hades, 

 laughing them to scorn, but now that he had come to 

 realise that his days were drawing to a close, he was 

 tormented by the fear lest there should after all be some 

 foundation for the belief in a future life. 1 Very much 



1 I find that Mr. Norman Pearson has taken much the same view as I have of 

 man s actual feelings, in the Nineteenth Century for August 1883. 



