vi] Immortality \ 9 1 



If there were no memory in a being that was still 

 undergoing change the consciousness would be so differ- 

 ent that it would be meaningless to speak of the same 

 personality at all 1 . The statement does not hold, how- 

 ever, of the completed and transcendent personality, 

 where, it seems, there can be no memory either, if Berg- 

 son is right in his analysis of the nature of memory. 



The fact of everyday experience is that / change 

 that the same personality persists, though it is con- 

 stantly being added to. There is, then, something of me 

 that perdures through change, yet is constantly growing 

 and expanding through the additions which experience 

 of change brings. 



I am immanent ; I indwell time ; but I am also tran- 

 scendent; I perdure, undestroyed by time's changes. 

 Part of me is not in time at all. Is this perduring but 

 illusion ? When earthly change ceases, shall I cease also? 

 Is human transcendence but a mirage that mocks the 

 traveller who thirsts to drink of the water of eternal life? 



We can go back to the time-worn argument from the 

 intelligibility of the universe. Experience shows that 

 the world is ordered and intelligible. Life seems to be 

 dominated by rationality. To say that man will cease 

 to be himself when he ceases to act on the world's stage, 

 becoming something else, as Hamlet celebrates the end- 

 ing of a run by a gay supper, or Pepper's ghost becomes 

 a thirsty commonplace drinking beer in the 'wings,' is 

 to deny all real meaning to our chief experience: still 

 more, to say that he will simply cease to be. If person- 

 ality can be extinguished, the universe is not rational, 

 for all development is crowned with the emergence of 

 personality tends to it ; achieves apparent meaning in 

 it and personality itself becomes meaningless. The 

 age-long processes of evolution lead nowhither. The 

 oyster is as good for itself as Francis of Assisi for himself. 

 1 Cf. M. Benson, Th* Venture of Rational Faith, p. 202. 



