rn life and not mere
significance or ideal definition, that which endures must be an
individual creature with a fixed nucleus of habits and demands, so that
its persistence may contain progress and achievement.

Herewith we may dismiss the more direct attempts to conceive and assert
a future life. Their failure drives us to a consideration of indirect
attempts to establish an unobservable but real immortality through
revelation and dogma. Such an immortality would follow on transmigration
or resurrection, and would be assigned to a supernatural sphere, a
second empirical world present to the soul after death, where her
fortunes would not be really conceivable without a reconstituted body
and a new material environment.

[Sidenote: Possible forms of survival.]

Many a man dies too soon and some are born in the wrong age or station.
Could these persons drink at the fountain of youth at least once more
they might do themselves fuller justice and cut a better figure at last
in the universe. Most people think they have stuff in them for greater
things than time suffers them to perform. To imagine a second career is
a pleasing antidote for ill-fortune; the poor soul wants another chance.
But how should a future life be constituted if it is to satisfy this
demand, and how long need it last? It would evidently have to go on in
an environment closely analogous to earth; I could not, for instance,
write in another world the epics which the necessity of earning my
living may have stifled here, did that other world contain no time, no
heroic struggles, or no metrical language. Nor is it clear that my
epics, to be perfect, would need to be quite endless. If what is foiled
in me is really poetic genius and not simply a tendency toward perpetual
motion, it would not help me if in heaven, in lieu of my dreamt-of
epics, I were allowed to beget several robust children. In a word, if
hereafter I am to be the same man improved I must find myself in the
same world corrected. Were I transformed into a cherub or transported
into a timeless ecstasy, it is hard to see in what sense I should
continue to exist. Those results might be interesting in themselves and
might enrich the universe; they would not prolong my life nor retrieve
my disasters.

For this reason a future life is after all best represented by those
frankly material ideals which most Christians--being Platonists--are
wont to despise. It would be genuine happiness for a Jew to