Beneath the unanswered question now, there is the abiding sense of the reality that endures, a conviction that, though we do not understand its purpose, life is not purposeless, and that though we cannot lift the veil of death it is only a covering which hides from our eyes a wider and greater world than ours. It may be that some will feel that all such talk of faith is meaningless to them. Religion and faith convey no such notions to their minds as they seem to imply to others. What they want is the clear demonstration, which a physicist might give us. If life goes on after death there must surely be some proof of it. If we try and look at life merely from the stand-point of the physiologist, we do indeed perceive that we only observe it in connection with certain structures of organic matter, and that, as far as we are able to see, every act of human conscious ness is accompanied by certain processes and changes in the grey tissues of the brain. When those tissues are injured, the expression of this consciousness is interfered with, and when a certain condition of the brain material comes about life ceases, as far as our observation goes. So far as we can observe, indeed, every act of life is accompanied by and connected with some material condition, or at least some material concomitant. But this is as far as the physi- [p.120] ologist can take us. What life is he is still unable to say. To speak of life as energy, and to say that energy is a potential property of matter, is only to hide from ourselves with words the fact that life can only be explained to us in terms of life: the physicists cannot tell us what life is. If we admit that we cannot explain what it is in its ultimate nature, we are yet all of us conscious enough of what we mean ourselves by life. The word has a real significance to us, although we cannot define it or explain it in any way. Can we then find any answer from physical science as to whether or no our life continues when the bodily change which we call death happens? Since life is always connected, as far as we are able to observe it, with certain physical conditions of the body, can it continue when those conditions are no longer present? There have been many thinkers impressed by the sense of a universe governed by necessary and unchanging laws, who have felt that they could only answer that since life is in our experience always accompanied by certain material conditions, it must cease to exist when those conditions have been removed. There is one great assumption, however, which consciously or unconsciously underlies this position, that the only universe which exists is one that is intelligible to our thought, and that something [p.121] which we cannot possibly understand, necessarily cannot possibly exist.