"After studying primitive beliefs, and finding that there is
no origin for the idea of an after-life, save the conclusion
which the savage draws, from the notion suggested by dreams,
of a wandering double which comes back on awaking, and
which goes away for an indefinite time at death;--and after
contemplating the inscrutable relation between brain and
consciousness, and finding that we can get no evidence of the
existence of the last without the activity of the first,--we
seem obliged to relinquish the thought that consciousness
continues after physical organization has become inactive."

In this measured utterance there is no word of hope; but there is
at least a carefully stated doubt, which those who will may try
to develop into the germ of a hope. The guarded phrase, "we _seem_
obliged to relinquish," certainly suggests that, although in the
present state of human knowledge we have no reason to believe in the
perpetuity of consciousness, some larger future knowledge might help
us to a less forlorn prospect. From the prospect as it now appears
even this mightiest of thinkers recoiled:--

... "But it seems a strange and repugnant conclusion that with
the cessation of consciousness at death there ceases to be any
knowledge of having existed. With his last breath it becomes
to each the same thing as though he had never lived.

"And then the consciousness itself--what is it during the time
that it continues? And what becomes of it when it ends? We can
only infer that it is a specialized and individualized form
of that Infinite and Eternal Energy which transcends both our