Now it is easy enough for a man to say (I think it was H. M. Stanley, the explorer, who did say so) that he would rather endure torment for all eternity than accept a state of annihilation. In thus protesting he is talking through his hat of something too far beyond human experience for the mind to realise. Toothache he has probably always found bearable, because he knew that in course of time it would end. On the other hand, sound dreamless sleep is probably not less bearable to him because during that sleep he has not a ghost of a notion that he will ever wake up again. He is carried, that is to say, every day of his life while in health, into a state closely resembling annihilation of consciousness, in which such annihilation has no terrors for him at all; he accepts it as a comfortable part of existence, and goes to it with delight when his faculties are tired. Its attractions for him would naturally be less while all his senses were alert and fresh. But the waking man is not the whole man; the subconscious life, acquiescent to imposed conditions, occupies by far the larger part of him. He can, therefore, only predicate the inclinations of his waking hours; in sleep he may revert to a very strong affinity for that annihilation of self-conscious life against which, in his waking hours, he protests his dread. And now a further word of comfort for those moral teachers who assure us that if once we let go the idea of personal immortality, with its accompanying implications of eternal reward or punishment, the conduct of the human race is bound to degenerate, and that man’s only logical motto will then be, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.” To refute that deduction we have but to remember that sociology is a thing of ancestry and evolution, and has committed us to a weight of facts against which precept and theory are powerless. We have only to look back into Nature to see how persistently (without, one must suppose, any promise of future reward after death) a contrary instinct emerges from the establishment of the social bond in nest and herd and hive. And why--if that emerging instinct leads on, in man’s reasoned estimation, to foolishness--why do we so specially admire the communal life of ant and bee, and incline sometimes to wonder whether (behind so marvellous an order of altruistic energy) there be not concealed more and not less of spiritual apprehension than in the more individualistic forms of insect and animal life? And why, on the contrary, has the wise cuckoo become a sort of byword for the singular economy with which it has disentangled its life from care or responsibility? It is surely very unfair thus to erect the cuckoo into a moral emblem for reprobation, if it is only doing by instinct, what man would do by reason and logic were the darkness of his own destiny made clear to him.