ady argued--because it is too
valuable to perish; if we may trust this latest interpretation of the
meaning and purpose of evolution, the spiritual element in man will
endure because it is worthy to endure.

But how are we to think of its enduring? As a separate self, conscious
of its identity, able to form the proposition "I am I," or swallowed up
in the Whole, with a final merging and loss of selfhood? Must we think
of man's ultimate destiny in the terms of the concluding distichs of
Mr. Watson's great _Hymn to the Sea_--a consummation

When, from this threshold of being, these steps of the
Presence, this precinct,
Into the matrix of Life darkly divinely resumed,
Man and his littleness perish, erased like an error
and cancelled,
Man and his greatness survive, lost in the greatness
of God?

That is the query with which we opened this chapter; and, in answering
it, it is but fair to say that Sir Oliver Lodge shows a marked
inclination to take up a position identical with that of Mr. Watson:
"Everything sufficiently valuable," he says, "be it beauty, artistic
achievement, knowledge, unselfish affection, may be thought of as
enduring henceforth and for ever, _if not with an individual {236} and
personal existence, yet as part of the eternal Being of God_."

Now this is not only a wholly unsatisfactory conclusion from the point
of view of religion; it is a surrender of the very point at
issue--_viz._, the permanence of personality--and in reality lets slip
what Sir Oliver Lodge himself was contending for. It is unsatisfactory
from the point of view of religion; for such a re-absorption of the
soul into a "grand self-conscious totality of being," involving of
necessity the end of all we mean by individuality, consciousness,
character, is not immortality at all--to all intents and purposes it
is, as we said, annihilation. There is not an iota to choose, so far
as the religious believer is concerned, between this theory and the
frank materialism of Lucretius, so wonderfully rendered by Mr.
Mallock:--

The seeds that once were we take flight and fly,
Winnowed to earth, or whirled along the sky,
Not lost but disunited. _Life lives on_.
_It is the lives, the lives, the lives that die_.

They go beyond recapture and recall,
Lost in the all-indissoluble All:
Gone like the rainbow from the fountain's foam,
Gone like the spindrift shuddering down the squall,