The reverent relation to one’s own past, which depends on a real continuity of memory, and which is possible only by comprehension, can be shown in relation to a still wider and deeper subject. Whether a man has a real relationship to his own past or not, involves the question as to whether he has a desire for immortality, or if the idea of death is indifferent to him. The desire for immortality is to-day, as a rule, treated shamefully, and in a very different spirit. Not only is the problem treated as merely ontological, but the psychological side of it is only trifled with. It has been held that it is connected, like the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, with the feeling that we have all experienced, when, in doing something certainly for the first time, we seem to remember having gone through the same experience before. Another generally adopted view is to derive the idea of immortality from the belief in spirits, as has been done by Tylor, Spencer, Avenarius, and others, although in any other age than this age of experimental psychology it would have been dismissed _a priori_. I am sure that it must seem impossible to the majority of thinking men to regard a belief so important to mankind, about which there has been so much strife, as merely the last stage in a syllogism of which the first premiss is the midnight dream of a dead man. How can phenomena of that kind explain the belief in the continuity of their lives after death held so firmly by Goethe or Bach, or the desire for immortality which speaks to us in Beethoven’s last sonatas? The desire for the persistence of the conscious self must spring from sources mightier than these feeble rationalistic guesses.