l, is incapable of failing. Now expectation,
never without its requisite antecedents and natural necessity, often
lacks fulfilment, and never finds its fulfilment entire; so that the
necessity of a postulate gives no warrant for its verification.
Expectation and action are constantly suspended together; and what
happens whenever thought loses itself or stumbles, what happens whenever
in its shifts it forgets its former objects, might well happen at
crucial times to that train of intentions which we call a particular
life or the life of humanity. The prophecy involved in action is not
insignificant, but it is notoriously fallible and depends for its
fulfilment on external conditions. The question accordingly really is
whether a man expecting to live for ever or one expecting to die in his
time has the more representative and trustworthy notion of the future.
The question, so stated, cannot be solved by an appeal to evidence,
which is necessarily all on one side, but only by criticising the value
of evidence as against instinct and hope, and by ascertaining the
relative status which assumption and observation have in experience.

The transcendental compulsion under which action labours of envisaging a
future, and the animal instinct that clings to life and flees from death
as the most dreadful of evils are the real grounds why immortality seems
initially natural and good. Confidence in living for ever is anterior to
the discovery that all men are mortal and to the discovery that the
thinker is himself a man. These discoveries flatly contradict that
confidence, in the form in which it originally presents itself, and all
doctrines of immortality which adult philosophy can entertain are more
or less subterfuges and after-thoughts by which the observed fact of
mortality and the native inconceivability of death are more or less
clumsily reconciled.

[Sidenote: A solipsistic argument.]

The most lordly and genuine fashion of asserting immortality would be to
proclaim one's self an exception to the animal race and to point out
that the analogy between one's singular self and others is altogether
lame and purely conventional. Any proud barbarian, with a tincture of
transcendental philosophy, might adopt this tone. "Creatures that
perish," he might say, "are and can be nothing but puppets and painted
shadows in my mind. My conscious will forbids its own extinction; it
scorns to level itself with its own objects and instruments.