It may, however, be argued that an instinct for immortality is still subconsciously at work within us, colouring our actions and directing us on right ethical lines. But if it be a subconscious direction which thus works in us for righteousness, it may equally be to a subconscious end. The subconscious impulse may merely be guiding us to a subconscious realisation which would not at all satisfy the advocates of conscious immortality after death. What works subconsciously can in all probability find satisfaction in a subconscious reward. The chemic processes of the stomach and of the blood, for instance, are largely subconscious in their operation; and their needs may be subconsciously appeased without the brain being told anything about it through the usual intermediaries of taste and mastication. We have a preference for a conscious performance of the functions of life which we have always been accustomed to perform consciously; but a very large proportion of our life-functions work themselves out subconsciously and independently of our will. Our hearts beat, our blood circulates, our nails grow, our stomachs digest, our wounds heal, whether we tell them to or no, and yet we are quite happy about them. We do not consider (because they operate by a volition of which we are unaware), that therefore we carry about with us a body of death from which our conscious ego must needs shrink in disgust--a dead heart, dead stomach, dead blood--that the unconsciousness which accompanies health is a state nearer to annihilation, and so less to be desired, than the pains accompanying functional disturbances. When those things happen--functional disturbances--we are conscious of something more immediately relating to death than to life: it is because of local mortification that we become so much aware of things which our immortal part helps us to use unconsciously and without thought. Virtue itself, when engrained, tends to become instinctive and subconscious instead of an effort. There is quite as much evidence, therefore, in our own bodies that unconsciousness is the real gate to immortal life, and the condition toward which all that is best and highest in us is seeking, as of the contrary teaching that increased self-consciousness is man’s final goal. In the functional working of our own bodies an enormous amount of self-consciousness has been eliminated, and we do not for our happiness or self-realisation wish it restored to us; whole tracts and areas are immune from it, or only make a spasmodic grab at our consciousness when things go ill with them. “If you go on doing that,” they say, when you misuse them, “we will make you know that we are here.” And so you become conscious of them: but that doesn’t make you happier. Yet in a sort of way, I suppose, a man would realise himself more completely if he had sciatica all over him, and could count up his nerves, and tell all his bones by the aches and pains attaching to them.