10 REV. A. R. WHATELY, ON IMMORTALITY. 



are assured that the belief in Immortality is thus central and 

 essential, it cannot remain mere belief, but must, like our belief 

 in God, be found to rest upon experience and intuition. That 

 •means that we must cultivate a sense of our own imperishable 

 essence ; and that we can only do in the light of our relations 

 with God. Just as our ordinary self-consciousness is evoked 

 and sustained by intercourse with an external world, so we 

 must develop a higher self-consciousness correlated in like 

 manner with our personal knowledge of God. Then only will 

 immortality appear to us not as a mere future fact which we can 

 infer, but as an actual quality of our selfhood. Annihilation 

 will be not only incredible, but unthinkable. This must be the 

 ideal. But if we consider how difhcult it is for most people 

 to realize what is meant by a direct consciousness even of God 

 — how ready they are to confuse it with feeling — then we shall 

 not be surprised if such a consciousness of immortality seems 

 peculiarly difficult to make good. For God, at least, is 'present ; 

 but everlastingness is future. I have stated the problem in a 

 form which partly meets this difficulty. The soul may be 

 conscious of itself as an eternal entity, and if eternal then 

 necessarily everlasting. But even so, to some people " eternal " 

 does not directly imply " everlasting," We need to see eternity 

 m time ; to view our own personal lives in the light of ultimate 

 cosmic purpose. This leads to the crux of our problem. 



In some sense, at least, the soul is in time, and death is in 

 time. If we fail to do more than grasp our eternity by 

 abstracting from time (as in more or less ecstatic conditions) 

 then when we resume the ordinary time- thread our direct 

 experience of our eternal being is left behind. We may still 

 value the remembrance of it as evidence ; we may even be able 

 in some degree to reproduce it at will whenever we turn our 

 thoughts in that direction : but, for all that, the mind may still 

 oscillate between two mutually exclusive attitudes towards 

 reality. The ordinary consciousness of self, as carried along 

 with the general flow of things in this perishable world, cannot 

 as such retain a sense of immortality which has been reached 

 merely by rising above time and space. So it may become easy 

 to explain away these exalted experiences, or, if not to explain 

 them away, at least to think that they are satisfied by some 

 theory of absorption into the universal life, with extinction of 

 our individual being. 



What we need is to fuse the two spheres of self-consciousness, 

 the higher and the lower, self as in God and self as in the world. 

 For each of us is one self, not two. Just as the one God is 



