say that this is a mockery, a piece of
special pleading, a giving of stones to those that ask for bread.
Life is not life unless we can feel it, and a life limited to a
knowledge of such fraction of our work as may happen to survive us
is no true life in other people; salve it as we may, death is not
life any more than black is white.

The objection is not so true as it sounds. I do not deny that we
had rather not die, nor do I pretend that much even in the case of
the most favoured few can survive them beyond the grave. It is only
because this is so that our own life is possible; others have made
room for us, and we should make room for others in our turn without
undue repining. What I maintain is that a not inconsiderable number
of people do actually attain to a life beyond the grave which we can
all feel forcibly enough, whether they can do so or not--that this
life tends with increasing civilization to become more and more
potent, and that it is better worth considering, in spite of its
being unfelt by ourselves, than any which we have felt or can ever
feel in our own persons.

Take an extreme case. A group of people are photographed by
Edison's new process--say Titiens, Trebelli, and Jenny Lind, with
any two of the finest men singers the age has known--let them be
photographed incessantly for half an hour while they perform a scene
in Lohengrin; let all be done stereoscopically. Let them be
phonographed at the same time so that their minutest shades of
intonation are preserved, let the slides be coloured by a competent
artist, and then let the scene be called suddenly into sight and
sound, say a hundred years hence. Are those people dead or alive?
Dead to themselves they are, but while they live so powerfully and
so livingly in us, which is the greater paradox--to say that they
are alive or that they are dead? To myself it seems that their life
in others would be more truly life than their death to themselves is
death. Granted that they do not present all the phenomena of life--
who ever does so even when he is held to be alive? We are held to
be alive because we present a sufficient number of living phenomena
to let the others go without saying; those who see us take the part
for the whole here as in everything else, and surely, in the case
supposed above, the phenomena of life predominate so powerfully over
those of death, that the people themselves must be held to be more
alive than dead. Our living