Miss Martineau ceased to believe in immortality; and immediately all believers in immortality became, to her mind, selfish or stupid, or both. "I neither wish to live longer here," she says, "nor to find life again elsewhere. It seems to me simply absurd to expect it, and a mere act of restricted human imagination and morality to conceive of it." There is "a total absence of evidence for a renewed life." "I myself utterly disbelieve in a future life." She would submit, though reluctantly, to live again, if compelled to. "If I find myself conscious after the lapse of life, it will be all right, of course; but, as I said, the supposition appears to me absurd." Under the instructions of Mr. Atkinson, Miss Martineau ceased to believe in a personal God, or any God but an unknown First Cause, identical with the Universe. The argument for Design, on which Mr. John Stuart Mill, for instance, lays such stress, seemed to her "puerile and unphilosophical." The God of Christians she calls an "invisible idol." He "who does justice to his own faculties" must give up "the personality of the First Cause." She considered the religion in her "Life in the Sick-Room" to have been "insincere;" which we, who know the perfect honesty of Harriet Martineau, must take the liberty to deny. Though declaring herself to be no Atheist, because she believes in an unknown and unknowable First Cause, she regards philosophical Atheists as the best people she had ever known, and was delighted in finding herself unacquainted with God, and so at peace.