MAN’S SURVIVAL OF BODILY DEATH.—What the circulation of the _Quest_ is I have no idea, but it should be ten times greater. Is there, however, a sufficiently large class of cultured persons in England—in the Empire—in the world? Assuming that the spread of culture can be reckoned numerically as well as qualitatively, can we pride ourselves on the extension of culture while the number of free intelligences is relatively decreasing? But how does one know that this class is really on the decrease? Only by the same means that we judge the number of the curious lepidoptera in any area—by holding a light up in the dark and counting the hosts attracted by it. In the case of the _Quest_ there is no doubt whatever that a light is being held up in our darkness. Its articles are upon the most exalted topics; they are, for the most part, luminously written, and their purity of motive may be taken for granted. The _Quest_ is the literary Platonic Academy of our day. Yet it is seldom spoken of in literary circles. We “good” are very apathetic, and it is lucky for the devil that his disciples are unlike us in this respect. They see to it that everything evil shall flourish like the bay-tree, while we allow the bays of the intelligent to fade into the sere. Mr. Mead contributes an article on a topic which has not yet been exhausted, “Man’s Survival of Bodily Death.” Mr. Randall is not the first to deny “immortality” while affirming an absolute morality, nor even the first to attempt to explain religion without recourse to a dogma of survival. The Sadducees did it before him; and the Confucians managed somehow or other to combine ancestor-worship with a lively denial of their continued existence. There is, moreover, an ethical value in the denial which almost makes the denial of survival an act of moral heroism. For if a man can pursue the highest moral aims without the smallest hope of personal reward hereafter, and, still less, here, his disinterestedness is obvious; he pursues virtue as the pupil is enjoined in the _Bhagavad Gita_ to act, namely, without hope or fear of fruit. I am not of the heroic breed myself, and, in any case, the problem is one of fact as well as of moral discipline. It may be heroic to put the telescope of truth to a deliberately blinded eye, but unless you suspect yourself of being unable to master the fact, I see no indispensable virtue in its wilful denial. At all risks to my morality I should prefer to keep my weather-eye open for such evidences of survival as may loom up behind the fog.