ves and aims at its own arrest or transformation, that
activity is thereby proved to be instrumental and servile, imposed from
without and not ideal.

[Sidenote: Even vicarious immortality intrinsically impossible.]

Not only is man's original effort aimed at living for ever in his own
person, but, even if he could renounce that desire, the dream of being
represented perpetually by posterity is no less doomed. Reproduction,
like nutrition, is a device not ultimately successful. If extinction
does not defeat it, evolution will. Doubtless the fertility of whatever
substance may have produced us will not be exhausted in this single
effort; a potentiality that has once proved efficacious and been
actualised in life, though it should sleep, will in time revive again.
In some form and after no matter what intervals, nature may be expected
always to possess consciousness. But beyond this planet and apart from
the human race, experience is too little imaginable to be interesting.
No definite plan or ideal of ours can find its realisation except in
ourselves. Accordingly, a vicarious physical immortality always remains
an unsatisfactory issue; what is thus to be preserved is but a
counterfeit of our being, and even that counterfeit is confronted by
omens of a total extinction more or less remote. A note of failure and
melancholy must always dominate in the struggle against natural death.

[Sidenote: Intellectual victory over change.]

This defeat is not really problematical, or to be eluded by reviving
ill-digested hopes resting entirely on ignorance, an ignorance which
these hopes will wish to make eternal. We need not wait for our total
death to experience dying; we need not borrow from observation of
others' demise a prophecy of our own extinction. Every moment
celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor; and the
possession of memory, by which we somehow survive in representation, is
the most unmistakable proof that we are perishing in reality. In
endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly
unimaginable to the unflective creation, the truth of mortality.
Everything moves in the midst of death, because it indeed _moves_; but
it falls into the pit unawares and by its own action unmakes and
disestablishes itself, until a wonderful visionary faculty is added, so
that a ghost remains of what has perished to reveal that lapse and at
the same time in a certain sense to neutralise it. The more w