But when the majority of those who believe in personal immortality are asked for the ground of their belief, it generally resolves itself into this: they have an intense individual conviction that it is so--so intense that to hold the contrary becomes “unthinkable.” But that intense, individual conviction, over things we greatly care about, is a constant phenomenon of the working of the human mind, and is not limited to belief in a future state. To a convinced Liberal it is “unthinkable” that he should ever pass into such a state of mental annihilation as to become a Conservative. To a convinced Conservative it is unthinkable that he should fall from the grace which guides him into the slough of Liberalism. It is the same with Protestant or Catholic, with Socialist, Universalist, or Sectarian: conviction always presents an adamantine front to opposing forces and arguments--so long as it lasts. The same phenomenon constantly occurs in the domain of the amative passion. The lover (if he be really in love), believes that his love will last for ever--that nothing can possibly change it; and all the evidence in the world that lovers of a like faith have too often lived to see the immortal dream put on mortality, will fail to convince him (while he is in the toils) that his own love is liable to any such change as theirs. The reason is that strongly vitalised forces always carry with them a sense of permanence. The vital spark (focused within us by strong conviction or emotion), is but an individually apprehended part of a great whole: for this thread of life passing through us has already stretched itself out over millions of years, and countless atavisms have touched it to individual ends which were not ours; the will to live has clung to it by myriads of adhesions, feelers, tentacles, and not by human hands alone (though our palms still moisten, and our arms fly upward to the imaginary branch overhead when danger of falling threatens us, because the instinct of our arboreal ancestry still prevails in us over reason). And through those atavisms, the struggle to secure survival for the family, the clan, the race, has left an impress which may very naturally convey from the general to the individual a sense of immortality. For of all these constituent forces the majority knew and thought very little about death, except in their instinctive and spasmodic efforts to escape from it; and when at last man began to envisage death consciously and philosophically, straightway, with all these atavisms behind him, he belittled it with dreams of a future life.