our brain or of the energies of our spirit should vanish out of the
world, as that any other particle of matter or energy could do so. At our
death there disappears only the individual form in which the
nerve-substance was fashioned, and the personal "soul" which represented
the work performed by this. The complicated chemical combinations of that
nervous mass pass over into other combinations by decomposition, and the
kinetic energy produced by them is transformed into other forms of
motion.

"Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O that that earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw."

On the other hand, the conception of a personal immortality cannot be
maintained. If this idea is still widely held, the fact is to be
explained by the physical law of inertia; for the property of persistence
in a state of rest exercises its influence in the region of the
ganglion-cells of the brain, as well as in all other natural bodies.
Traditional ideas handed down through many generations are maintained
with the greatest tenacity by the human brain, especially if, in early
youth, they have been instilled into the childish understanding as
indisputable dogmas. Such hereditary articles of faith take root all the
more firmly, the further they are removed from a rational knowledge of
nature, and enveloped in the mysterious mantle of mythological poesy. In
the case of the dogma of personal immortality, there comes into play also
the interest which man fancies himself to have in his individual future
existence after death, and the vain hope that in a blessed world to come
there is treasured up for him a compensation for the disappointed hopes
and the many sorrows of his earthly life.