Turning aside, however, from the antiquated views of Haeckel--views which, as he himself bitterly complains, some of his most {234} illustrious scientific compeers in his own country, men like Virchow, Du Bois-Reymond and Wundt lived to repudiate[8]--we may for a moment glance at an argument on behalf of belief brought forward by so distinguished and modern a spokesman of physical science as Sir Oliver Lodge. His contention, set forth in the course of a paper on _The Permanence of Personality_,[9] is really identical with that which Browning expresses with such passionate conviction in the words, "There shall never be one lost good." While we have become familiar with such a conception as the conservation of energy, Sir Oliver Lodge brings before us Professor Hoeffding's axiom of the "conservation of value," and applies it to the question under discussion. According to him, "the whole progress and course of evolution is to increase and intensify the Valuable--that which 'avails' or is serviceable for highest purposes"; and he accordingly defines immortality as the persistence of things which the universe has gained and which, once acquired, cannot be let go. "From this point of view," he says, "the law of evolution is that Good shall on the whole increase in the universe with the process of the suns: that immortality itself is a special case of a more general law, namely, that in the whole universe nothing really finally perishes that is worth keeping, that a thing once attained {235} is not thrown away." The soul, in other words, will not perish--just as we had already argued--because it is too valuable to perish; if we may trust this latest interpretation of the meaning and purpose of evolution, the spiritual element in man will endure because it is worthy to endure. But how are we to think of its enduring? As a separate self, conscious of its identity, able to form the proposition "I am I," or swallowed up in the Whole, with a final merging and loss of selfhood? Must we think of man's ultimate destiny in the terms of the concluding distichs of Mr. Watson's great _Hymn to the Sea_--a consummation When, from this threshold of being, these steps of the Presence, this precinct, Into the matrix of Life darkly divinely resumed, Man and his littleness perish, erased like an error and cancelled, Man and his greatness survive, lost in the greatness of God? That is the query with which we opened this chapter; and, in answering it, it is but fair to say that Sir Oliver Lodge shows a marked inclination to take up a position identical with that of Mr. Watson: "Everything sufficiently valuable," he says, "be it beauty, artistic achievement, knowledge, unselfish affection, may be thought of as enduring henceforth and for ever, _if not with an individual {236} and personal existence, yet as part of the eternal Being of God_."