o a supramundane immortality is the length of time during
which human spirits may be condemned to operate on earth after their
bodies are quiet. In other words, spectral survivals would at most
enlarge our conception of the soul's physical basis, spreading out the
area of its manifestations; they could not possibly, seeing the
survivals are physical, reveal the disembodied existence of the soul.

[Sidenote: Moral grounds for the doctrine. The necessary assumption of a
future.]

Such a disembodied existence, removed by its nature from the sphere of
empirical evidence, might nevertheless be actual, and grounds of a moral
or metaphysical type might be sought for postulating its reality. Life
and the will to live are at bottom identical. Experience itself is
transitive and can hardly arise apart from a forward effort and
prophetic apprehension by which adjustments are made to a future
unmistakably foreseen. This premonition, by which action seeks to
justify and explain itself to reflection, may be analysed into a group
of memories and sensations of movement, generating ideal expectations
which might easily be disappointed; but scepticism about the future can
hardly be maintained in the heat of action. A postulate acted on is an
act of genuine and dogmatic faith. I not only postulate a morrow when I
prepare for it, but ingenuously and heartily believe that the morrow
will come. This faith does not amount to certitude; I may confess, if
challenged, that before to-morrow I and the world and time itself might
conceivably come to an end together; but that idle possibility, so long
as it does not slacken action, will not disturb belief. Every moment of
life accordingly trusts that life will continue; and this prophetic
interpretation of action, so long as action lasts, amounts to continual
faith in futurity.

[Sidenote: An assumption no evidence.]

A sophist might easily transform this psychological necessity into a
dazzling proof of immortality. To believe anything, he might say, is to
be active; but action involves faith in a future and in the fruits of
action; and as no living moment can be without this confidence, belief
in extinction would be self-contradictory and at no moment a possible
belief. The question, however, is not whether every given moment has or
has not a specious future before it to which it looks forward, but
whether the realisation of such foresight, a realisation which during
waking life is roughly usua