They would persuade us that their impersonal and unconscious immortality is a brighter hope than an eternity of personal and conscious existence, the very thought of which they say is torture. This assumes, what there seems to be no ground for assuming, that eternity is an endless extension of time; and, in the same way, that infinity is a boundless space. It is more natural to conceive of them as emancipation respectively from time and space, and from the conditions which time and space involve; and among the conditions of time may apparently be reckoned the palling of pleasure or of existence by mere temporal protraction. Even as we are, sensual pleasure palls; so does the merely intellectual: but can the same be said of the happiness of virtue and affection? It is urged, too, that by exchanging the theological immortality for one of physical and social consequences, we get rid of the burden of self, which otherwise we should drag for ever. But surely in this there is a confusion of self with selfishness. Selfishness is another name for vice. Self is merely consciousness. Without a self, how can there be self-sacrifice? How can the most unselfish motive exist if there is nothing to be moved? "He that findeth his life, shall lose it; and he that loseth his life, shall find it," is not a doctrine of selfishness, but it implies a self. We have been rebuked in the words of Frederick to his grenadiers--"Do you want to live for ever?" The grenadiers might have answered, "Yes; and therefore we are ready to die." It is not when we think of the loss of anything to which a taint of selfishness can adhere--it is not even when we think of intellectual effort cut short for ever by death just as the intellect has ripened and equipped itself with the necessary knowledge--that the nothingness of this immortality of conservated forces is most keenly felt: it is when we think of the miserable end of affection. How much comfort would it afford anyone bending over the deathbed of his wife to know that forces set free by her dissolution will continue to mingle impersonally and indistinguishably with forces set free by the general mortality? Affection, at all events, requires personality. One cannot love a group of consequences, even supposing that the filiation could be distinctly presented to the mind. Pressed by the hand of sorrow craving for comfort, this Dead Sea fruit crumbles into ashes, paint it with eloquence as you will.