XXXVI INTKODUCTION. 



The last is the greatest, but as it takes away the attribute 

 of Purpose from the Ultimate Reality and Power which 

 it acknowledges in the universe, it will fail so far to find 

 acceptance with men. 



4. The question of a future life does partly belong 

 to Science ; and physics, physiology, and natural history 

 under the light of the Darwinian theory, have all ap- 

 parently decided against the possibility of it. When the 

 cunningly constructed human machine breaks up ; when 

 the bodily organism, with all its functions, including 

 thought, collapses ; when man, the merely developed 

 animal, dies like the rest ; there is a common scientific 

 verdict that the end has veritably come, that the career 

 of man as a conscious individual being has for ever 

 closed. And it is not to be denied that the apprehension 

 that it is really so has been deepened in our generation 

 by the discoveries of Science. Nor has the apprehension 

 been lessened by the application of the new Historical 

 Method which tries to show the natural origin and 

 genesis of the doctrine itself, and which, moreover, points 

 to a period in the infancy of the species when the notion 

 of immortality did not even exist. Nevertheless, the 

 question of a future life is only in part a scientific one ; 

 nor is the doctrine disproved by showing that in the 

 infancy of the species it was no more thought of than it 

 now is in the infancy of the individual. The question is 

 also philosophical, or, if the reader is not afraid of the 

 word, metaphysical. It is metaphysical ; for on the two 

 questions of God and immortality, if one raises them at 

 all, there is no escape from metaphysics, which, in fact, 

 since the days of Kant, has been concentrating itself 

 mainly round these two questions. Happily, from the 

 side of philosophy, the question of a future life shows 



