But is an eternal and endless life after death indeed thinkable?  How can we conceive the life of a disembodied spirit?  How can we conceive such a spirit?  How can we conceive a pure consciousness, without a corporal organism?  Descartes divided the world into thought and extension, a dualism which was imposed upon him by the Christian dogma of the immortality of the soul.  But is extension, is matter, that which thinks and is spiritualized, or is thought that which is extended and materialized?  The weightiest questions of metaphysics arise practically out of our desire to arrive at an understanding of the possibility of our immortality—­from this fact they derive their value and cease to be merely the idle discussions of fruitless curiosity.  For the truth is that metaphysics has no value save in so far as it attempts to explain in what way our vital longing can or cannot be realized.  And thus it is that there is and always will be a rational metaphysic and a vital metaphysic, in perennial conflict with one another, the one setting out from the notion of cause, the other from the notion of substance.

And even if we were to succeed in imagining personal immortality, might we not possibly feel it to be something no less terrible than its negation?  “Calypso was inconsolable at the departure of Ulysses; in her sorrow she was dismayed at being immortal,” said the gentle, the mystical Fenelon at the beginning of his Telemaque.  Was it not a kind of doom that the ancient gods, no less than the demons, were subject to—­the deprivation of the power to commit suicide?

When Jesus took Peter and James and John up into a high mountain and was transfigured before them, his raiment shining as white as snow, and Moses and Elias appeared and talked with him, Peter said to the Master:  “Master, it is good for us to be here; and let us make three tabernacles; one for thee and one for Moses and one for Elias,” for he wished to eternalize that moment.  And as they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them that they should tell no man what they had seen until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead.  And they, keeping this saying to themselves, questioned one with another what this rising from the dead should mean, as men not understanding the purport of it.  And it was after this that Jesus met the father whose son was possessed with a dumb spirit and who cried out to him, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark ix.).

Those three apostles did not understand what this rising from the dead meant.  Neither did those Sadducees who asked the Master whose wife she should be in the resurrection who in this life had had seven husbands (Matt. xxii.); and it was then that Jesus said that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.  And the other life is not, in fact, thinkable to us except under the same forms as those of this earthly and transitory life.  Nor is the mystery at all clarified by that metaphor of the grain and the wheat that it bears, with which Paul answers the question, “How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?” (1 Cor. xv. 35).