A great scientist, coldly analyzing the chemical processes
essential to the creation of each new human being, scoffs at any
possibility of immortality. With the microscope at his eye, he
magnifies nature's mysteries; he sums up the investigations of
the Hertwig brothers; he discourses learnedly of the nucleolus of
the Cytula--or progeny cell. He declares that science is able to
watch the creation of a human being, as it watches the progress
of a chick in the egg. He asserts that each new creature is
merely the result of a chemical process blending qualities of the
mother and father. Having a "final beginning," man must have a
final end. Man--a mixture of two sets of qualities--has no more
chance of immortality than has beer, which is a mixture of malt
and hops.

Read and think over this cold summing-up of our mean, limited
destiny as science farthest advanced now sees it:

"It must appear utterly senseless now to speak of the immortality
of the human person, when we know how this person, with all its
individual qualities of body and mind, has arisen. How can this
person possess an eternal life without end? The human person,
like every other many-celled individual, IS BUT A PASSING
PHENOMENON OF ORGANIC LIFE. With its death, the series of its
vital activities ceases entirely, just as it began."

That certainly is discouraging to a man who for fifty years has
sung "I want to be an angel."

Yet that is what Haeckel has to say about our chance of