DEATH 



conversation with educated people of all classes, that 

 no other dogma is so firmly established and highly 

 valued as athanatism, or the belief in personal im- 

 mortality. Most men will not give up at any price 

 the hope that a better life awaits them beyond the 

 grave, which will compensate them for all the pain and 

 suffering they endure here. In the picturing of this 

 future life the mediaeval geocentric idea still forms the 

 chief feature. Troelslund has shown, in his Idea of 

 Heaven and of the World, how this theory still dominates , 

 the metaphysics of the majority of men; in spite of 

 Copernicus and Laplace, heaven is still for most people 

 the semicircular blue glass bell that overarches the 

 earth. We still hear the praises of our life in this heaven 

 sung daily in sermons and speeches and festive orations. 

 The orator extends his right hand "upward" to the 

 infinite starry space of heaven, forgetting that the radius 

 of the direction he is pointing towards changes every 

 second, and in twelve hours reaches the precisely op- 

 posite direction, and becomes "downward." Other be- 

 lievers endeavor to be still more concrete, and point out 

 definite celestial bodies as the homes of immortal souls. 

 Modern cosmology, astronomy, and geology entirely 

 exclude these pretty fictions from science; and modern 

 psychology, physiology, ontogeny, and phylogeny rigor- / 



ously refuse an inch of ground for athanatism. \ 



Optimism regards the world on its good and bright and 

 admirable side: pessimism looks to the shades and 

 tragedies of life. In some philosophic and religious 

 systems one or other of these tendencies is consistently 

 and exclusively worked out; but in most systems the 

 two are mingled. Pure and consistent realism is I 

 generally neither optimistic nor pessimistic. It takes 

 the world as it is, a unified whole, the nature of which 

 is neither good nor bad. Dualistic idealism, however, __ 

 generally combines the two, and distributes them be- 



109 



