h all religion sums itself up and
comes to full blossoming: the certainty that world and existence are
insufficient, and the strong desire to break through into the true being,
of which at the best we have here only a foretaste and intuition. The
doctrine of immortality stands by itself as a matter of great solemnity
and deep rapture. If it is to be talked about, both speaker and hearers
ought to be in an exalted mood. It is the conviction which, of all
religious convictions, can be least striven for consciously; it must well
forth from devotional personal experience of the spirit and its dignity,
and thus can maintain itself without, and indeed against much reasoning.
To educate and cultivate it in us requires a discipline of meditation, of
concentration, and of spiritual self-culture from within outwards. If we
understood better what it meant to "live in the spirit," to develop the
receptivity, fineness, and depth of our inner life, to listen to and
cultivate what belongs to the spirit, to inform it with the worth and
content of religion and morality, and to integrate it in the unity and
completeness of a true personality, we should attain to the certainty that
personal spirit is the fundamental value and meaning of all the confused
play of evolution, and is to be estimated on quite a different scale from
all other being which is driven hither and thither in the stream of
Becoming and Passing away, having no meaning or value because of which it
must endure. And it would be well also if we understood better how to
listen with keener senses to our intuitions, to the direct
self-consciousness of the spirit in regard to itself, which sleeps in
every mind, but which few remark and fewer still interpret. Here, where
the gaze of self-examination reaches its horizon, and can only guess at
what lies beyond, but can no longer interpret it, lie the true motives and
reasons for our conviction of immortality. An apologetic cannot do more
than clear away obstacles, nor need it do much more than has hitherto been
done. It reminds us, as we have already seen, that the world which we know
and study, and which includes ourselves, does not show its true nature to
us; hidden depths lie behind appearances. And it gathers together and sums
up all the great reasons for the independence and underivability of the
spiritual as contrasted with the corporeal. The spiritual has revealed
itself to us as a reality in itself, which cannot be explained