392 IMMORTALITY. 



whatever its philosophic merits, and as to these 

 what has been said about Pantheism will mutatis 

 mutandis be applicable, it Is pretty clear that the 

 eternity of Universal Soul Is not what men bar- 

 gained for, nor anything that men desire, or perhaps 

 ought to desire ; It may or may not be an excellent 

 doctrine philosophically, but It will hardly do duty 

 Instead of a personal Immortality. 



§ 7. And the arguments against the possibility of 

 a future life are equally Inconclusive. 



The most popular of these is also the most 

 worthless ; for the different forms of materialism are 

 fatal only to the mistaken dualism which regards 

 body and soul as separable entitles. They do not 

 touch the Idealist view which refutes the materialist 

 inference from the facts by the reply that the con- 

 nection of " body " and '' soul " Is at least as well 

 explained by regarding Matter as a phase of the 

 content of Spirit as vice versa {cp. ch. ix. § 28). 



§ 8. And idealism also enables us to see the 

 Inconclusiveness of the phenomena of death, which 

 form a silent but continual protest against the belief 

 In a future life, all the more forcible because It ap- 



as for Plato, the founder of the philosophic doctrine of immortal- 

 ity, there has been no lack of commentators ready to show that 

 if he had understood his principles as well as they did, he could 

 never have asserted a doctrine so contrary to them as that of a 

 personal immortality, and that his very explicit assertions must 

 be interpreted as figurative expressions designed to mislead the 

 vulgar. And though we may doubt whether deliberately ambi- 

 guous language upon so vital an issue is not rather a modern 

 refinement of professional philosophy, alien to the frankness and 

 freedom of the ancients, it must yet be confessed that, owing to 

 his dualism, Plato's theory of the soul, with its mortal and im- 

 mortal parts, does not admit of being combined into a consistent 

 and tenable whole. 



