1860 THE STANDARD OF BELIEF 315 



Measured by this standard, what becomes of the 

 doctrine of immortality ? 



You rest in your strong conviction of your personal 

 existence, and in the instinct of the persistence of that 

 existence which is so strong in you as in most men. 



To me this is as nothing. That my personality is 

 the surest thing I know may be true. But the attempt 

 to conceive what it is leads me into mere verbal subtleties. 

 I have champed up all that chaff about the ego and the 

 non-ego, about noumena and phenomena, and all the rest 

 of it, too often not to know that in attempting even to 

 think of these questions, the human intellect flounders at 

 once out of its depth. 



It must be twenty years since, a boy, I read Hamilton's 

 essay on the unconditioned, and from that time to this, 

 ontological speculation has been a folly to me. When 

 Mansel took up Hamilton's argument on the side of 

 orthodoxy (!) I said he reminded me of nothing so much 

 as the man who is sawing off the sign on which he is 

 sitting, in Hogarth's picture. But this by the way. 



I cannot conceive of my personality as a thing apart 

 from the phenomena of my life. When I try to form 

 such a conception I discover that, as Coleridge would 

 have said, I only hypostatise a word, and it alters nothing 

 if, with Fichte, I suppose the universe to be nothing but a 

 manifestation of my personality. I am neither more nor 

 less eternal than I was before. 



Nor does the infinite difference between myself and 

 the animals alter the case. I do not know whether the 

 animals persist after they disappear or not. I do not 

 even know whether the infinite difference between us 

 and them may not be compensated by their persistence 

 and my cessation after apparent death, just as the humble 

 bulb of an annual lives, while the glorious flowers it has 

 put forth die away. 



Surely it must be plain that an ingenious man could 

 speculate without end on both sides, and find analogies 



