But although my vitality was so strong that I could not imagine my own
death, I knew well enough that my terrestrial life, like all other
men's, would come to an end. But I felt all the more strongly that it
was impossible everything could be at an end then; death could not be a
termination; it could only, as the religions preached and as eighteenth-
century Deism taught, be a moment of transition to a new and fuller
existence. In reward and punishment after death I could not believe;
those were mediaeval conceptions that I had long outgrown. But the dream
of immortality I could not let go. And I endeavoured to hold it fast by
virtue of the doctrine of the impossibility of anything disappearing.
The quantity of matter always remained the same; energy survived every
transformation.

Still, I realised that this could not satisfy one, as far as the form
which we term individuality was concerned. What satisfaction was it to
Alexander that his dust should stop a bung-hole? or to Shakespeare that
Romeo and Juliet were acted in Chicago? So I took refuge in parallels
and images. Who could tell whether the soul, which on earth had been
blind to the nature of the other life, did not, in death, undergo the
operation which opened its eyes? Who could tell whether death were not,
as Sibbern had suggested, to be compared with a birth? Just as the
unborn life in its mother's womb would, if it were conscious, believe
that the revolution of birth meant annihilation, whereas it was for the
first time awakening to a new and infinitely richer life, so it was
perhaps for the soul in the dreaded moment of death....

But when I placed before my master these comparisons and the hopes I
built upon them, they were swept away as meaningless; he pointed out
simply that nothing went to prove a continuation of personality after