316 HUMANISM 



XVII 



preachers. Many of their happiest efforts are concerned 

 with castigating this particular form of human weakness 

 and exhibiting its insensate folly. And in so doing our 

 teachers have been no doubt abundantly justified. Only 

 it appears to have escaped their notice that this count of 

 their indictment against human nature accords none too 

 well with their doctrine that death and immortality are 

 absorbing objects of meditation. If it be true that we 

 are culpably careless of the future, recklessly bent on 

 suppressing all thought of death, it can hardly be that 

 we live oppressed by the shadow of death, and consumed 

 with desire for the consolations of a future life. 



For if there is something wrong about the tradition as 

 to the psychological importance of the thought of death, 

 a similar error will probably be found to pervade also the 

 traditional estimate of the importance of immortality. 

 Unless men think constantly of death, they have no 

 occasion to think of a future life. And as a matter of 

 fact there seems to be the same dearth of tangible and 

 indisputable evidence to attest the existence of a wide 

 spread preoccupation with the possibility of a future life. 



Subjects which arouse wide and deep human interest 

 will not down : from their deep-seated springs they 

 bubble up through the crust of convention and inundate 

 the arid surface of human life. They are constantly talked 

 about, they fill the columns of the newspapers, they demand 

 and obtain State support, they are lectured upon at the 

 universities, they are cultivated by societies of enthusiasts, 

 they are fostered by abundant supplies of the sinews of 

 war. But of any symptom of the kind, to bear out the 

 doctrine that men are keenly desirous of establishing 

 their immortality, or even interested in the question at 

 all, our Martian philosopher would detect little or nothing. 

 It is a subject hardly ever mentioned in conversation, and 

 indeed one which it would be bad form to allude to 

 seriously. Ghost stories, usually of a palpably absurd 

 and apocryphal kind, find admission into the newspapers 

 only towards the end of the silly season, when the giant 

 gooseberry has ceased to grow and the sea-serpent to 



