So do all beliefs that are not grossly utilitarian and material,
promising houris and deathless appetite or endless hunting or a cosmic
mortgage. The Peace of God passeth understanding, the Kingdom of Heaven
within us and without can be presented only by parables. But the
unapproachable distance and vagueness of these things makes them none
the less necessary, just as a cloud upon a mountain or sunlight remotely
seen upon the sea are as real as, and to many people far more necessary
than, pork chops. The driven swine may root and take no heed, but man
the dreamer drives. And because these things are vague and impalpable
and wilfully attained, it is none the less important that they should be
rendered with all the truth of one's being. To be atmospherically vague
is one thing; to be haphazard, wanton and untruthful, quite another.

But here I may give a specific answer to a question that many find
profoundly important, though indeed it is already implicitly answered in
what has gone before.

I do not believe I have any personal immortality. I am part of an
immortality perhaps; but that is different. I am not the continuing
thing. I personally am experimental, incidental. I feel I have to do
something, a number of things no one else could do, and then I am
finished and finished altogether. Then my substance returns to the
common lot. I am a temporary enclosure for a temporary purpose; that
served, and my skull and teeth, my idiosyncracy and desire, will
disperse, I believe, like the timbers of a booth after a fair.

Let me shift my ground a little and ask you to consider what is involved
in the opposite belief.

My idea of the unknown scheme is of something so wide and deep that I