[Footnote 35: It is rash to condemn a human custom which has prevailed for centuries or millenniums, and it is wrong to treat it _de haut en bas_. I would not be understood as doing so, in this brief and inadequate reference to the contents of Egyptian tombs. Their fuller interpretation awaits the labour of students now working at them. In the same spirit I wish to leave open the question of what possible rational interpretation may be given to the mediæval phrase "Resurrection of the body"; a subject on which much has been written. What I am contending against is not the scholarly but the popular interpretation. For further remarks on this subject see Chapter VII below.] CHAPTER IV CONTINUED EXISTENCE DIFFICULTY OF BELIEF IN CONTINUED EXISTENCE "Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatsoever abysses Nature leads."--HUXLEY. People often feel a notable difficulty in believing in the reality of continued existence. Very likely it is difficult to believe or to realise existence in what is sometimes called "the next world"; but then, when we come to think of it, it is difficult to believe in existence in this world too; it is difficult to believe in existence at all. The whole problem of existence is a puzzling one. It could by no means have been predicated _a priori_. The whole thing is a question of experience; that is, of evidence. We know by experience that things actually do exist; though how they came into being, and what they are all for, and what consequences they have, is more than we can tell. We have no reason for asserting that the kind we are familiar with is the only kind of existence possible, unless we choose to assert it on the ground that we have no experience of any other. But that is becoming just the question at issue: have we any evidence, either direct or indirect, for any other existence than this? If we have, it is futile to cite in opposition to it the difficulty of believing in the reality of such an existence; we surely ought to be guided by facts. At this stage in the history of the human race few facts of science are better established and more widely appreciated than the main facts of Astronomy: a general acquaintance with the sizes and distances, and the enormous number, of the solar systems distributed throughout space is prevalent. Yet to the imaginative human mind the facts, if really grasped, are overwhelming and incredible. The sun a million times bigger than the earth; Arcturus a hundred times bigger than the sun, and so distant that light has taken two centuries to come, though travelling at a rate able to carry it to New York and back in less than the twentieth part of a second,--facts like these are commonplaces of the nursery; but even as bare facts they are appalling.