spring, there has arisen the
thought, 'Shall I ever again see the buds unfold? Shall I ever again
be awakened at dawn by the song of the thrush?' Now that the end is
not likely to be long postponed, there results an increasing tendency
to meditate upon ultimate questions."... Then he tells us that these
ultimate questions--"of the How and the Why, of the Whence and the
Whither"--occupy much more space in the minds of those who cannot
accept the creed of Christendom, than the current conception fills
in the minds of the majority of men. The enormity of the problem of
existence becomes manifest only to those who have permitted themselves
to think freely and widely and deeply, with all such aids to thought
as exact science can furnish; and the larger the knowledge of the
thinker, the more pressing and tremendous the problem appears, and the
more hopelessly unanswerable. To Herbert Spencer himself it must have
assumed a vastness beyond the apprehension of the average mind; and
it weighed upon him more and more inexorably the nearer he approached
to death. He could not avoid the conviction--plainly suggested in his
magnificent Psychology and in other volumes of his great work--that
there exists no rational evidence for any belief in the continuance of
conscious personality after death:--

"After studying primitive beliefs, and finding that there is
no origin for the idea of an after-life, save the conclusion
which the savage draws, from the notion suggested by dreams,
of a wandering double which comes back on awaking, and
which goes away for an indefinite time at death;--and after
contemplating the inscrutable relation between brain and
consciousness, and finding that we can get no evidence of the
existence of the last without the activity of the first,--we
seem obliged to relinquish the thought that consciousness
continues after physical organization has become inactive."

In this measured utterance there is no word of hope; but there is
at least a carefully stated doubt, which those who will may try
to develop into the germ of a hope. The guarded phrase, "we _seem_
obliged to relinquish," certainly suggests that, although in the
present state of human knowledge we have no reason to believe in the
perpetuity of consciousness, some larger future knowledge might help
us to a less forlorn prospect. From the prospect as it now appears
even this mightiest of thinkers recoiled:--

.