86 
C. L. Herrick 
visions of heaven, and made many gentle and religious minds incredu- 
lous . — Edwin Arnold. 
But the fact that a conclusion is deemed impossible never yet 
acted as a deterrent to philosophical speculation; and, even if the 
main question must remain forever unanswered, there remains the 
possibility of a closer definition of its bearings. Nor is it alto- 
gether unprecedented that sufficiently close analysis of a ques- 
tion has set at rest the curiosity which asked it. 
In the present case humanity finds itself in the position of a 
man who is awakened from sleep by the cry of ^^Fire’’ to the 
certainty of loss of his possessions and who must make instant 
choice of the precarious salvage of precipitate flight. Such choice 
as one makes in the emergency of our illustration is not more 
unpredictable or more irrational than the good the average human 
aspirant for immortality would select to take with him into the 
other world, if the selection were permitted to him. Witness the 
ideas of various peoples as to the nature of ^^heaven.^’ It will, 
however, be very instructive and helpful toward further dis- 
cussion to examine briefly the bare conception of immortality, 
and especially what it is that should possess this property. 
Perhaps the most immediate reply would be that people 
generally desire immortality each for his own self. Ordinarily 
it is not even felt to be necessary to inquire what this self is or 
what elements it contains, nor yet as to the completeness of its 
independence of others; but such inquiry is a necessary pre- 
liminary to any true conception of immortality. 
When confronted with the phenomena of dissolution, the idea 
of the self which is a candidate for immortality is at once deprived 
of a large and important portion of the empirical self. The savage 
who is visited in dreams by his departed ancestor, while con- 
vinced of the reality of the apparition, is also forced to conclude 
that the vision lacks the corporeal presence of a living man and 
presents to our sense only a shadowy vestige of the bodily self 
once laid away in the grave or consumed upon the funeral pyre. 
So the consensus of humanity is that the inviolable self is spirit- 
ual; and even though this spirit be endowed with the power of 
assimilating to itself a body such as may be suited to the sphere 
within which it resides, yet, at any rate, the body which now 
clothes myself is of the earth earthy. 
