sand shooting from
the upper bell is dissipated by the passing aerial currents as it
issues; but that stream will run on, unnoticed though it remain, until
the whole store in that upper receptacle is exhausted.

So you may destroy the body, but not the appointed period of sentient
existence, foredoomed (because simply the effect of a plexus of
causes) to intervene before the dissolution of the personality; this
must run on for its appointed period.

This is so in other cases, _e.g._, those of the victims of accident or
violence; they, too, have to complete their life-term, and of these,
too, we may speak on another occasion--but here it is sufficient to
notice that, whether good or bad, their mental attitude at the time of
death alters wholly their subsequent position. They, too, have to wait
on within the "Region of Desires" until their wave of life runs on to
and reaches its appointed shore, but they wait on, wrapped in dreams
soothing and blissful, or the reverse, according to their mental and
moral state at, and prior to the fatal hour, but nearly exempt from
further material temptations, and, broadly speaking, incapable (except
just at the moment of real death) of communicating _scio motu_ with
mankind, though not wholly beyond the possible reach of the higher
forms of the "Accursed Science," Necromancy. The question is a
profoundly abstruse one; it would be impossible to explain within the
brief space still remaining to us, how the conditions immediately
after death differ so entirely as they do in the case (1) of the man
who deliberately _lays down_ (not merely _risks_) his life from
altruistic motives in the hope of saving those of others; and (2) of
him who deliberately sacrifices his life from selfish motives, in the
hope of escaping trials and troubles which loom before him. Nature or
Providence, Fate, or God, being merely a self-adjusting machine, it
would at first sight seem as if the results must be identical in both
cases. But, machine though it be, we must remember that it is a
machine _sui generis_--

Out of himself he span
The eternal web of right and wrong;
And ever feels the subtlest thrill,
The slenderest thread along.

A machine compared with whose perfect sensitiveness and adjustment the
highest human intellect is but a coarse clumsy replica, _in petto_.

And we must remember that thoughts and motives are material, and at
times marvellously potent material, forces, and