234 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xvi 



Your letter leads me to think he was right, though not perhaps 

 in the sense he attached to his own words. 



To begin with the great doctrine you discuss. I neither deny 

 nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing 

 in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it. 



Pray understand that I have no a priori objections to the 

 doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature 

 can trouble himself about o priori difficulties. Give me such 

 evidence as would justify me in believing anything else, and I 

 will believe that. Why should I not? It is not half so wonder- 

 ful as the conservation of force, or the indestructibility of 

 matter. Whoso clearly appreciates all that is implied in the 

 falling of a stone can have no difficulty about any doctrine simply 

 on account of its marvellousness. But the longer I live, the 

 more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a man's 

 life is to say and to feel, " I believe such and such to be true." 

 All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties of exist- 

 ence cling about that act. The universe is one and the same 

 throughout; and if the condition of my success in unravelling 

 some little difficulty of anatomy or physiology is that I shall 

 rigorously refuse to put faith in that which does not rest on 

 sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that the great mysteries 

 of existence will be laid open to me on other terms. It is no use 

 to talk to me of analogies and probabilities. I know what I 

 mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, 

 and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convic- 

 tions. I dare not if I would. 



Measured by this standard, what becomes of the doctrine of 

 immortality ? 



You rest in your strong conviction of your personal exist- 

 ence, 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 intel- 

 lect 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 re- 



