with his purely scientific position. Even while fully accepting his
declaration of the identity of the power that "wells up in us under
the form of consciousness" with that Power Unknowable which shapes
all things, most disciples of the master must have longed for some
chance to ask him directly, "But how do _you_ feel in regard to the
prospect of personal dissolution?" And this merely emotional question
he has answered as frankly and as fully as any of us could have
desired,--perhaps even more frankly. "Old people," he remarks
apologetically, "must have many reflections in common. Doubtless
one which I have now in mind is very familiar. For years past, when
watching the unfolding buds in the spring, there has arisen the
thought, 'Shall I ever again see the buds unfold? Shall I ever again
be awakened at dawn by the song of the thrush?' Now that the end is
not likely to be long postponed, there results an increasing tendency
to meditate upon ultimate questions."... Then he tells us that these
ultimate questions--"of the How and the Why, of the Whence and the
Whither"--occupy much more space in the minds of those who cannot
accept the creed of Christendom, than the current conception fills
in the minds of the majority of men. The enormity of the problem of
existence becomes manifest only to those who have permitted themselves
to think freely and widely and deeply, with all such aids to thought
as exact science can furnish; and the larger the knowledge of the
thinker, the more pressing and tremendous the problem appears, and the
more hopelessly unanswerable. To Herbert Spencer himself it must have
assumed a vastness beyond the apprehension of the average mind; and
it weighed upon him more and more inexorably the nearer he approached
to death. He could not avoid the conviction--plainly suggested in his
magnificent Psychology and in other volumes of his great work--that
there exists no rational evidence for any belief in the continuance of
conscious personality after death:--