ON IMMORTALITY: COUNTERTHESIS. 169 



leads to a conclusion so desperate and absurd. For who 

 -could really believe that this marvellous thing called 

 mind is but a brilliant meteor, that flashed for a brief 

 moment in the infinite night, and then faded again into 

 eternal darkness? that Nature, after her long, deep, 

 unconscious sleep, should have a bright dream called 

 consciousness, to be succeeded by her heavy slumber of 

 death again ? 



We cannot accept this conclusion, so that if immor- 

 tality, the continued existence of the individual, be as 

 Science maintains, inconceivable and incredible ; her own 

 conclusion, which is bound up with, and a corollary 

 from, her demonstrated impossibility of immortality, is 

 -still more incredible. The scientific argument leads to 

 an inconceivable terminus, equally with the opposite 

 argument for a future individual life. The mind, thus 

 placed between seemingly contradictory conclusions, 

 happily bethinks itself that it is after all only finite ; 

 that it cannot possibly exhaust the possibilities of being 

 and of existence ; that it does not even know, nor can 

 Science say, what the conditions of consciousness, and 

 still less of our own self-consciousness may be, so as to 

 be in a position to conclude positively that the latter 

 must cease at death. These things being borne in mind 

 together with a final mystery unexplored and inex- 

 plorable at the bottom of the universe .and of all exist- 

 ence, allow of the possibility of a state of mind, too 

 much overlooked by the dogmatists of science, called 

 doubt, or 'suspense of judgment ; and this suspense per- 

 mits a breathing space for the higher and healthier state 

 called hope, a thing which even a positive thinker like 

 Mill, building his philosophy on the data of positive 

 science, would not wholly take away from men. Thus, 

 in the final mystery of the universe, great, black, and 



