s of life whether human aims can be realised satisfactorily
only in the agent's singular person, so that the fruits of effort would
be forth-with missed if the labourer himself should disappear.

[Sidenote: Ignoble temper of both.]

To establish justice in the world and furnish an adequate incentive to
virtue was once thought the chief business of a future life. The Hebraic
religions somewhat overreached themselves on these points: for the
grotesque alternative between hell and heaven in the end only aggravated
the injustice it was meant to remedy. Life is unjust in that it
subordinates individuals to a general mechanical law, and the deeper and
longer hold fate has on the soul, the greater that injustice. A
perpetual life would be a perpetual subjection to arbitrary power, while
a last judgment would be but a last fatality. That hell may have
frightened a few villains into omitting a crime is perhaps credible;
but the embarrassed silence which the churches, in a more sensitive age,
prefer to maintain on that wholesome doctrine--once, as they taught, the
only rational basis for virtue--shows how their teaching has to follow
the independent progress of morals. Nevertheless, persons are not
wanting, apparently free from ecclesiastical constraint, who still
maintain that the value of life depends on its indefinite prolongation.
By an artifice of reflection they substitute vanity for reason, and
selfish for ingenuous instincts in man. Being apparently interested in
nothing but their own careers, they forget that a man may remember how
little he counts in the world and suffer that rational knowledge to
inspire his purposes. Intense morality has always envisaged earthly
goods and evils, and even when a future life has been accepted vaguely,
it has never given direction to human will or aims, which at best it
could only proclaim more emphatically. It may indeed be said that no man
of any depth of soul has made his prolonged existence the touchstone of
his enthusiasms. Such an instinct is carnal, and if immortality is to
add a higher inspiration to life it must not be an immortality of
selfishness. What a despicable creature must a man be, and how sunk
below the level of the most barbaric virtue, if he cannot bear to live
for his children, for his art, or for country!

[Sidenote: False optimistic postulate involved.]

To turn these moral questions, however, into arguments for a physical
speculation, like that about human lon