ved merely to bring out its nature with greater or less
completeness. To somewhat the same effect the German transcendentalists
identified and distinguished the private and the universal spirit. What
lived in each man and in each moment was the Absolute--for nothing else
could really exist--and the expression which the Absolute there took on
was but a transitional phase of its total self-expression, which, could
it be grasped in its totality, would no longer seem subject to
contradiction and flux. An immortal agent therefore went through an
infinite series of acts, each transitory and relative to the others, but
all possessed of inalienable reality and eternal significance. In such
formulations the divorce was avoided between the intellectual and the
sensuous factor in experience--a divorce which the myth about immortal
gods and mortal men had introduced. On the other hand existential
immortality was abandoned; only an ideal permanence, only significance,
was allowed to any finite being, and the better or future world of which
ancient poets had dreamt, Olympus, and every other heaven, was
altogether abolished. There was an eternal universe where everything was
transitory and a single immortal spirit at no two moments the same. The
world of idealism realised no particular ideal, and least of all the
ideal of a natural and personal immunity from death.

[Sidenote: In neither case is the individual immortal.]

First, then, a man may refuse to admit that he must die at all; then,
abashed at the arrogance of that assertion, he may consider the immortal
life of other creatures, like the earth and stars, which seem subject to
no extinction, and he may ascribe to these a perpetual consciousness and
personality. Finally, confessing the fabulous character of those
deities, he may distinguish an immortal agent or principle within
himself, identify it with the inner principle of all other beings, and
contrast it with its varying and conditioned expressions. But scarcely
is this abstraction attained when he must perceive its worthlessness,
since the natural life, the concrete aims, and the personal career which
immortality was intended to save from dissolution are wholly alien to a
nominal entity which endures through all change, however fundamental,
and cohabits with every nature, however hostile and odious to humanity.
If immortality is to be genuine, what is immortal must be something
definite, and if this immortality is to conce