Dr. Gurgoyle, however, had an equal horror, on the one hand, of anything involving resumption of life by the body when it was once dead, and on the other, of the view that life ended with the change which we call death.  He did not, indeed, pretend that he could do much to take away the sting from death, nor would he do this if he could, for if men did not fear death unduly, they would often court it unduly.  Death can only be belauded at the cost of belittling life; but he held that a reasonable assurance of fair fame after death is a truer consolation to the dying, a truer comfort to surviving friends, and a more real incentive to good conduct in this life, than any of the consolations or incentives falsely fathered upon the Sunchild.

He began by setting aside every saying ascribed, however truly, to my father, if it made against his views, and by putting his own glosses on all that he could gloze into an appearance of being in his favour.  I will pass over his attempt to combat the rapidly spreading belief in a heaven and hell such as we accept, and will only summarise his contention that, of our two lives—­namely, the one we live in our own persons, and that other life which we live in other people both before our reputed death and after it—­the second is as essential a factor of our complete life as the first is, and sometimes more so.

Life, he urged, lies not in bodily organs, but in the power to use them, and in the use that is made of them—­that is to say, in the work they do.  As the essence of a factory is not in the building wherein the work is done, nor yet in the implements used in turning it out, but in the will-power of the master and in the goods he makes; so the true life of a man is in his will and work, not in his body.  “Those,” he argued, “who make the life of a man reside within his body, are like one who should mistake the carpenter’s tool-box for the carpenter.”

He maintained that this had been my father’s teaching, for which my father heartily trusts that he may be forgiven.

He went on to say that our will-power is not wholly limited to the working of its own special system of organs, but under certain conditions can work and be worked upon by other will-powers like itself:  so that if, for example, A’s will-power has got such hold on B’s as to be able, through B, to work B’s mechanism, what seems to have been B’s action will in reality have been more A’s than B’s, and this in the same real sense as though the physical action had been effected through A’s own mechanical system—­A, in fact, will have been living in B. The universally admitted maxim that he who does this or that by the hand of an agent does it himself, shews that the foregoing view is only a roundabout way of stating what common sense treats as a matter of course.