xvm ETHICS AND IMMORTALITY 341 



Still more radical than the objections we have con 

 sidered is a third objection which denounces the essential 

 immorality of looking to a future life at all in connexion 

 with our conduct here. The habit of contemplating a 

 future life, it is urged, engenders a pernicious other- 

 worldliness most detrimental to proper behaviour in this 

 world. We cannot live for two worlds at once. The 

 future life dwarfs the present ; the supposed significance 

 of the eternal life hereafter destroys the real significance 

 of our life here and now. 



Again, I think the objection labours under a mis 

 conception. It holds good only against a conception of 

 immortality which, like the Buddhist Nirvana, for example, 

 conflicts and competes with the ethical view of this world : 

 We cannot live for two worlds at once, only if the 

 principles of conduct required in them are fundamentally 

 different. If extinction is the end to which we should 

 aspire hereafter, then certainly it would be folly to prepare 

 for it by a strenuous life on earth. The objection is 

 irrelevant to an immortality which is postulated as the 

 completion of mundane morality, which is not so much 

 other- worldliness as better -worldliness, suggested by the 

 ethical defects of our actual experience. In reality such 

 a view indefinitely deepens the significance of the present 

 life. Think what is involved in the assertion that char 

 acter is permanent and indestructible, and passes not 

 from us however the fashion of our outward life may 

 change ! Think of it, that we can never escape from 

 ourselves, from the effect of our deeds on our character, 

 and that every deed leaves its mark upon the soul, a mark 

 which may be modified and counterbalanced, but can never 

 be undone to all eternity ! Will not the effect of such a 

 belief be to make us realize the solemnity of life as we never 

 did before, to nerve us to that unremitting self-improvement 

 without which there is no approximating to the moral 

 ideal ? Instead of losing its significance, does not every 

 act of life become fraught with infinite significance ? 

 Instead of becoming careless about ourselves, will it not, 

 then, become worth our while to bestow upon our own 



