264 HUMANISM xiv 



by the ethical argument is as complete as any that can 

 be devised. But, to enforce the point, allusion may be 

 made to the fact that demonstration is in its very nature 

 what the logicians call hypothetical. It proceeds in the 

 form, If A is, then B must be. But how are we to know 

 that A is ? The premiss has to be assumed or conceded 

 in every demonstration. The utmost we can do is to rest 

 our demonstration on an assumption so fundamental that 

 none will dare to question it ; and this we here seem to 

 have accomplished. For what could be more fundamental 

 than the assumption on which the ethical argument rests 

 that the elements of our experience admit of being 

 harmonised, that the world is truly a cosmos ? If this be 

 not absolute certainty, it is at least certainty such that, 

 while no assertion of any special science is less hypothetical, 

 none rests upon an equally indispensable assumption. 



On the whole, then, the ethical argument for im 

 mortality seems logically as sound and metaphysically as 

 legitimate as any argument can well be ; but it will not 

 be amiss to allude in closing to two points about which 

 nothing has so far been said. The first is the fact that, 

 when immortality has been shown to be an ethical 

 postulate, nothing has been decided as to the content of 

 that idea. All we know is that immortality must be of 

 such a sort as to be capable of being an ethical postulate. 

 And it is quite possible that the science of ethics would 

 on this ground find much to protest against in many of 

 the traditional forms of the belief in immortality, while it 

 would find little to object to in others which are less 

 familiar. It is difficult, for instance, to see how eternal 

 damnation could be regarded as an ethical postulate, 

 while some appropriate modification of the Hindu notion 

 of karma might seem ethically welcome. But though 

 ethics could thus prohibit certain ethically outrageous 

 beliefs in immortality, it cannot aspire positively to 

 determine the way in which its postulate is to be realised. 

 That problem lies beyond its scope, and has to be 

 determined, if at all, by considerations of a scientific and 

 metaphysical character. Hence the moral argument for 



