would.

Measured by this standard, what becomes of the doctrine of immortality?

You rest in your strong conviction of your personal existence, and in
the instinct of the persistence of that existence which is so strong in
you as in most men.

To me this is as nothing. That my personality is the surest thing I
know--may be true. But the attempt to conceive what it is leads me into
mere verbal subtleties. I have champed up all that chaff about the ego
and the non-ego, about noumena and phenomena, and all the rest of it,
too often not to know that in attempting even to think of these
questions, the human intellect flounders at once out of its depth.

It must be twenty years since, a boy, I read Hamilton's essay on the
unconditioned, and from that time to this, ontological speculation has
been a folly to me. When Mansel took up Hamilton's argument on the side
of orthodoxy (!) I said he reminded me of nothing so much as the man who
is sawing off the sign on which he is sitting, in Hogarth's picture. But
this by the way.

I cannot conceive of my personality as a thing apart from the phenomena
of my life. When I try to form such a conception I discover that, as
Coleridge would have said, I only hypostatise a word, and it alters
nothing if, with Fichte, I suppose the universe to be nothing but a
manifestation of my personality. I am neither more nor less eternal than
I was before.

Nor does the infinite difference between myself and the animals alter