And if the belief in the immortality of the soul has been unable to find vindication in rational empiricism, neither is it satisfied with pantheism.  To say that everything is God, and that when we die we return to God, or, more accurately, continue in Him, avails our longing nothing; for if this indeed be so, then we were in God before we were born, and if when we die we return to where we were before being born, then the human soul, the individual consciousness, is perishable.  And since we know very well that God, the personal and conscious God of Christian monotheism, is simply the provider, and above all the guarantor, of our immortality, pantheism is said, and rightly said, to be merely atheism disguised; and, in my opinion, undisguised.  And they were right in calling Spinoza an atheist, for his is the most logical, the most rational, system of pantheism.

Neither is the longing for immortality saved, but rather dissolved and submerged, by agnosticism, or the doctrine of the unknowable, which, when it has professed to wish to leave religious feelings scathless, has always been inspired by the most refined hypocrisy.  The whole of the first part of Spencer’s First Principles, and especially the fifth chapter entitled “Reconciliation”—­that between reason and faith or science and religion being understood—­is a model at the same time of philosophical superficiality and religious insincerity, of the most refined British cant.  The unknowable, if it is something more than the merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of limitation.  And upon this foundation no human feeling can be built up.

The science of religion, on the other hand, of religion considered as an individual and social psychic phenomenon irrespective of the transcendental objective validity of religious affirmations, is a science which, in explaining the origin of the belief that the soul is something that can live disjoined from the body, has destroyed the rationality of this belief.  However much the religious man may repeat with Schleiermacher, “Science can teach thee nothing; it is for science to learn from thee,” inwardly he thinks otherwise.

From whatever side the matter is regarded, it is always found that reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts it.  And the truth is, in all strictness, that reason is the enemy of life.

A terrible thing is intelligence.  It tends to death as memory tends to stability.  The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely individual, is, strictly, unintelligible.  Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one single and self-same content in whatever place, time, or relation it may occur to us.  And there is nothing that remains the same for two successive moments of its existence.  My idea of God is different each time that I conceive it.  Identity, which is death, is the goal of