302 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



materialism give way, and yield place for a chance 

 and hope that we may be immortal, — instead of simply 

 leaving room for the imperishable eternity of the 

 universal mother sea of Mind, — lays sure the founda- 

 tions for a certainty that we each belong to the 

 eternal world, not simply to the world of shifting and 

 transient experience. It provides for oii-r selves, for 

 each of them individually, a place in the world not 

 merely of consequences and mediated effects, but of 

 primary and unmediated causes. Hence it gives us 

 assurance that death no more than any other event in 

 experience is our end and close, but that we survive 

 it, ourselves the springs that organise experience. It 

 shows us possessed, intrinsically, of the very roots 

 and sources of perception, not merely of its experi- 

 enced fact, and so presents us as possessed of power 

 to rise beyond the grave — yes, in and through the 

 very act of death — into new worlds of perception. 

 Accordingly, it matches the Christian improve- 

 ment upon the older conception of the future exist- 

 ence — the ascent to the doctrine of "resurrection" 

 or avdaraaL^, the supplementing of immortality by 

 the exaltation of the " body," or sense-perceptive life. 

 As ourselves the causal sources of the perceived 

 world and its cosmic order, we are not destined to 

 any colourless life of bare ideas, to " some spectral 

 woof of impalpable abstractions or unearthly ballet 

 of bloodless categories," but are to go perceptively 



