6. Again, ideas must be given through something; and we are always prone
to argue about the soul from analogies of outward things which may serve to
embody our thoughts, but are also partly delusive. For we cannot reason
from the natural to the spiritual, or from the outward to the inward. The
progress of physiological science, without bringing us nearer to the great
secret, has tended to remove some erroneous notions respecting the
relations of body and mind, and in this we have the advantage of the
ancients. But no one imagines that any seed of immortality is to be
discerned in our mortal frames. Most people have been content to rest
their belief in another life on the agreement of the more enlightened part
of mankind, and on the inseparable connection of such a doctrine with the
existence of a God--also in a less degree on the impossibility of doubting
about the continued existence of those whom we love and reverence in this
world. And after all has been said, the figure, the analogy, the argument,
are felt to be only approximations in different forms to an expression of
the common sentiment of the human heart. That we shall live again is far
more certain than that we shall take any particular form of life.

7. When we speak of the immortality of the soul, we must ask further what
we mean by the word immortality. For of the duration of a living being in
countless ages we can form no conception; far less than a three years' old
child of the whole of life. The naked eye might as well try to see the
furthest star in the infinity of heaven. Whether time and space really
exist when we take away the limits of them may be doubted; at any rate the
thought of them when unlimited us so overwhelming to us as to lose all
distinctness. Philosophers have spoken of them as forms of the human mind,
but what is the mind without them? As then infinite time, or an existence
out of time, which are the only possible explanations of eternal duration,
are equally inconceivable to us, let us substitute for them a hundred or a
thousand years after death, and ask not what will be our employment in