HUMAN IMMORTALITY 29 1 



minds, not ours, perchance supposable behind the 

 scenes', abides or abide in the immutable eternity 

 which is its home or theirs — this concerns us not, 

 this consoles us not. What zve are, on this trans- 

 mission-theory of our selfhood, is members of the 

 dead. We were only the phantasmal results of a 

 contingent and passing condition to which the 

 Eternal Reality, by some impenetrable mystery, sub- 

 mitted itself or was submitted. In death that con- 

 dition has vanished, and so we too are gone. We 

 are not sharers in the imperishableness of the eter- 

 nal Consciousness, be it One or be it many. It (or 

 perchance they) alone has (or maybe have) life in 

 itself (or in themselves), alone is an End (or are 

 ends). We are not ends, but are only means, and 

 transient means at that. We are only stage super- 

 numeraries — nay, worse, only stage properties — of 

 the eternal drama, and not at all its proper person- 

 ages. We are only here as appurtenances of the real 

 dramatis personcB, — o.ily as masks and false shows. 

 We are made mere tools of a counsel in which we 

 do not share ; our personality is trod upon and put 

 to shame, in behoof of the invisible and inap- 

 proachable Lord or lords of our life, in whose 

 sight we are as nothing. It is just this that makes 

 the sting of our fate, far more tlian the cessation 

 of the joys belonging to sensuous perception. 



For this defect in the argument of our essayist 



