270 SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 



or might be dew in the heart of a rose, or car- 

 bonic acid gas in a bottle of soda-water. There 

 can be no remobilising of the molecules that made 

 a man. They were carefully extracted from the 

 nebula, they were carefully stored in the mother's 

 ovary, they were carefully gathered from the 

 mother's blood, they were carefully and wondrously 

 built up into the magic machinery of the body ; 

 but once they are disarranged, and rearranged, and 

 jumbled together, and torn apart, they can never 

 go together again. There is no power known 

 which can remake the digested or decayed egg, or 

 rebuild the structure it evolved when once that 

 structure is destroyed. 



If, then, consciousness depends on a certain 

 motion and disposition of molecules, death, with 

 its rigor mortis, and its corruption and decay, is 

 the end of consciousness for ever. Can science give 

 us no hope of conscious life beyond death ? Even 

 up to the very moment when the heart stops and 

 the jaws stiffen, the mind may be quite clear and 

 the senses most acute; and men who have been mis- 

 taken for dead, or who have been considered com- 

 pletely unconscious, have reported, on recovery, 

 that they were quite conscious all the time. In 

 cases of drowning, too, it is well known that just 

 before unconsciousness the brain often works with 

 extraordinary rapidity. Is it not possible that 



