THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 213 



would like the prospect of living eternally with his 

 six wives ; or Augustus the Strong of Poland, who 

 had a hundred mistresses and three hundred and 

 fifty-two children. As he was on good terms with 

 the Yicar of Christ, he must be assumed to be in 

 Paradise, in spite of his sins, and in spite of the fact 

 that his mad military ventures cost the lives of more 

 than a hundred thousand Saxons. 



Another insoluble difficulty faces the athanatist 

 when he asks in what stage of their individual develop- 

 ment the disembodied souls will spend their eternal 

 life. Will the new-born infant develop its psychic 

 powers in heaven under the same hard conditions of 

 the ''struggle for life" which educate man here on 

 earth ? Will the talented youth who has fallen in 

 the wholesale murder of war unfold his rich, unused 

 mental powers in Walhalla ? Will the feeble, childish 

 old man, who has filled the world with the fame of 

 his deeds in the ripeness of his age, live for ever in 

 mental decay ? Or will he return to an earlier stage 

 of development ? If the immortal souls in Olympus 

 are to live in a condition of rejuvenescence and 

 perfectness, then both the stimulus to the formation 

 of, and the interest in, personality disappear for 

 them. 



Not less impossible, in the light of pure reason, do 

 we find the anthropistic myth of the " last judgment," 

 and the separation of the souls of men into two great 

 groups, of which one is destined for the eternal joys 

 of Paradise and the other for the eternal torments of 

 hell — and that from a personal God who is called 

 the "Father of Love" ! And it is this "Universal 

 Father " who has himself created the conditions of 

 heredity and adaptation, in virtue of which the elect, 



