e reflect,
the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated
we shall be by the experience of death; yet, without our knowing it,
perhaps, this very conviction and experience will have raised us, in a
way, above mortality. That was a heroic and divine oracle which, in
informing us of our decay, made us partners of the gods' eternity, and
by giving us knowledge poured into us, to that extent, the serenity and
balm of truth. As it is memory that enables us to feel that we are dying
and to know that everything actual is in flux, so it is memory that
opens to us an ideal immortality, unacceptable and meaningless to the
old Adam, but genuine in its own way and undeniably true. It is an
immortality in representation--a representation which envisages things
in their truth as they have in their own day possessed themselves in
reality. It is no subterfuge or superstitious effrontery, called to
disguise or throw off the lessons of experience; on the contrary, it is
experience itself, reflection itself, and knowledge of mortality. Memory
does not reprieve or postpone the changes which it registers, nor does
it itself possess a permanent duration; it is, if possible, less stable
and more mobile than primary sensation. It is, in point of existence,
only an internal and complex kind of sensibility. But in intent and by
its significance it plunges to the depths of time; it looks still on the
departed and bears witness to the truth that, though absent from this
part of experience, and incapable of returning to life, they
nevertheless existed once in their own right, were as living and actual
as experience is to-day, and still help to make up, in company with all
past, present, and future mortals, the filling and value of the world.

[Sidenote: The glory of it.]

As the pathos and heroism of life consists in accepting as an
opportunity the fate that makes our own death, partial or total,
serviceable to others, so the glory of life consists in accepting the
knowledge of natural death as an opportunity to live in the spirit. The
sacrifice, the self-surrender, remains real; for, though the
compensation is real, too, and at moments, perhaps, apparently
overwhelming, it is always incomplete and leaves beneath an incurable
sorrow. Yet life can never contradict its basis or reach satisfactions
essentially excluded by its own conditions. Progress lies in moving
forward from the given situation, and satisfying as well as ma