But it is in our endeavour to represent to ourselves what the life of the soul after death really means that uncertainty finds its surest foundation.  This it is that most shakes our vital desire and most intensifies the dissolvent efficacy of reason.  For even if by a mighty effort of faith we overcome that reason which tells and teaches us that the soul is only a function of the physical organism, it yet remains for our imagination to conceive an image of the immortal and eternal life of the soul.  This conception involves us in contradictions and absurdities, and it may be that we shall arrive with Kierkegaard at the conclusion that if the mortality of the soul is terrible, not less terrible is its immortality.

But when we have overcome the first, the only real difficulty, when we have overcome the impediment of reason, when we have achieved the faith, however painful and involved in uncertainty it may be, that our personal consciousness shall continue after death, what difficulty, what impediment, lies in the way of our imagining to ourselves this persistence of self in harmony with our desire?  Yes, we can imagine it as an eternal rejuvenescence, as an eternal growth of ourselves, and as a journeying towards God, towards the Universal Consciousness, without ever an arrival, we can imagine it as ...  But who shall put fetters upon the imagination, once it has broken the chain of the rational?

I know that all this is dull reading, tiresome, perhaps tedious, but it is all necessary.  And I must repeat once again that we have nothing to do with a transcendental police system or with the conversion of God into a great Judge or Policeman—­that is to say, we are not concerned with heaven or hell considered as buttresses to shore up our poor earthly morality, nor are we concerned with anything egoistic or personal.  It is not I myself alone, it is the whole human race that is involved, it is the ultimate finality of all our civilization.  I am but one, but all men are I’s.

Do you remember the end of that Song of the Wild Cock which Leopardi wrote in prose?—­the despairing Leopardi, the victim of reason, who never succeeded in achieving belief.  “A time will come,” he says, “when this Universe and Nature itself will be extinguished.  And just as of the grandest kingdoms and empires of mankind and the marvellous things achieved therein, very famous in their own time, no vestige or memory remains to-day, so, in like manner, of the entire world and of the vicissitudes and calamities of all created things there will remain not a single trace, but a naked silence and a most profound stillness will fill the immensity of space.  And so before ever it has been uttered or understood, this admirable and fearful secret of universal existence will be obliterated and lost.”  And this they now describe by a scientific and very rationalistic term—­namely, entropia.  Very pretty, is it not?  Spencer invented the notion of a primordial homogeneity, from which it is impossible to conceive how any heterogeneity could originate.  Well now, this entropia is a kind of ultimate homogeneity, a state of perfect equilibrium.  For a soul avid of life, it is the most like nothingness that the mind can conceive.