the fact that new ones are born conclusively proves that they are not
immortal. Do away with death and you do away with the need for birth: in
fact if you went on breeding, you would finally have to kill old people
to make room for young ones.

Now death is not necessarily a failure of energy on the part of the Life
Force. People with no imagination try to make things which will last for
ever, and even want to live for ever themselves. But the intelligently
imaginative man knows very well that it is waste of labor to make a
machine that will last ten years, because it will probably be superseded
in half that time by an improved machine answering the same purpose.
He also knows that if some devil were to convince us that our dream
of personal immortality is no dream but a hard fact, such a shriek of
despair would go up from the human race as no other conceivable horror
could provoke. With all our perverse nonsense as to John Smith living
for a thousand million eons and for ever after, we die voluntarily,
knowing that it is time for us to be scrapped, to be remanufactured, to
come back, as Wordsworth divined, trailing ever brightening clouds of
glory. We must all be born again, and yet again and again. We should
like to live a little longer just as we should like 50 pounds: that is,
we should take it if we could get it for nothing; but that sort of idle
liking is not will. It is amazing--considering the way we talk--how
little a man will do to get 50 pounds: all the 50-pound notes I have
ever known of have been more easily earned than a laborious sixpence;
but the difficulty of inducing a man to make any serious effort to
obtain 50 pounds is nothing to the difficulty of inducing him to make a
serious effort to keep alive. The moment he sees death approach, he gets
into bed and sends for a doctor. He knows very well at the back of
his conscience that he is rather a poor job and had better be
remanufactured. He knows that his death will make room for a birth; and