(2) ’Suppose however that the intellectual and vital principle differs in the most marked and essential manner from all other known substances; that they have all some resemblance between themselves which it in no degree participates.  In what manner can this concession be made an argument for its imperishability?  All that we see or know perishes[18] and is changed.  Life and thought differ indeed from everything else:  but that it survives that period beyond which we have no experience of its existence such distinction and dissimilarity affords no shadow of proof, and nothing but our own desires could have led us to conjecture or imagine.  Have we existed before birth?  It is difficult to conceive the possibility of this....  If we have not existed before birth; if, at the period when the parts of our nature on which thought and life depend seem to be woven together, they are woven together; if there are no reasons to suppose that we have existed before that period at which our existence apparently commences; then there are no grounds for supposition that we shall continue to exist after our existence has apparently ceased.  So far as thought and life is concerned, the same will take place with regard to us, individually considered, after death, as had place before our birth.  It is said that it is possible that we should continue to exist in some mode totally inconceivable to us at present.  This is a most unreasonable presumption....  Such assertions ... persuade indeed only those who desire to be persuaded.  This desire to be for ever as we are—­the reluctance to a violent and unexperienced change which is common to all the animated and inanimate combinations of the universe—­is indeed the secret persuasion which has given birth to the opinions of a Future State.’

(3.  Note to the chorus, ‘Worlds on worlds are rolling ever,’ &c.) ’The first stanza contrasts the immortality of the living and thinking beings which inhabit the planets and (to use a common and inadequate phrase) clothe themselves in matter, with the transcience of the noblest manifestations of the external world.  The concluding verses indicate a progressive state of more or less exalted existence, according to the degree of perfection which every distinct intelligence may have attained.  Let it not be supposed that I mean to dogmatise upon a subject concerning which all men are equally ignorant, or that I think the Gordian knot of the origin of evil can be disentangled by that or any similar assertions....  That there is a true solution of the riddle, and that in our present state that solution is unattainable by us, are propositions which may be regarded as equally certain:  meanwhile, as it is the province of the poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted to have conjectured the condition of that futurity towards which we are all impelled by an inextinguishable thirst for immortality.  Until better arguments can be produced than sophisms which disgrace the cause, this desire itself must remain the strongest and the only presumption that eternity is the inheritance of every thinking being.’