ON IMMORTALITY : COUNTERTHESIS. 185 



Reason. I have already given the result in the preced- 

 ing chapter. Let me briefly restate it. Kant believes 

 in a future life. He confesses that he has not proved it 

 speculatively. It can never be so proved that doubts 

 may not be raised respecting it doubts which are of the 

 very essence of the question, and which it is scarcely 

 desirable should be wholly removed. A future life is 

 a necessary postulate of the practical reason; though 

 whether the real ego which is to survive remembers, or 

 cares to remember, the present life, is a point necessarily 

 left obscure from the fact that the doctrine has not been 

 proved from the side of the speculative reason. 



4. Another existence, then, is possible, likely, 

 certain ; nay, more than one such. Somewhere else 

 after this existence closes, I may find myself again slowly 

 awakening from a second birth, into conscious being, as 

 once before on the earth, and in a manner wholly in- 

 explicable even as then. But what species of conscious 

 being animal, angel, man once more, or something 

 greater than any of these ? and where ? in another 

 planet, in the stars as Plato surmised, once again in our 

 old earth, or haply out of relation to any space as 

 Kant thought possible, who dare pretend to say with 

 certainty ? 



Further yet, as consciousness itself may rise to 

 highest or sink to lowest content, as it may vary from 

 the worm's to the man's, from faintest sensation to the 

 inspirations of genius, so there may be in an infinite 

 universe something grander and greater than any actual 

 or conceivable consciousness. There may be species of 

 existence, modes of being unnamable by us, which are 

 yet infinitely superior to consciousness, more to be 

 desired than consciousness ; and this chapter of greater 

 chances is open to us likewise. But by no means are we 



