What is the Rationalistic explanation of that essence of the "religious instinct," belief in an after life? It may, I think, be summed up briefly in some such words as these: "The conception of non-existence is an effort beyond the power of human intellect. As long as man thinks, his ego is fully conscious of its existence, and not able to grasp the idea of non-existence. Thus religion is a functional weakness." [313] The instinct of self-preservation does the rest; it transforms the speculation into an ardent desire. "The theory of a continued existence after death is nothing more than a certain manifestation of the impulse for self-preservation, as the instinct for self-preservation itself is nothing more than the form under which our vital energies, that have their seat in every cell of our organism, manifest themselves to our consciousness." [314] Is not this a perfectly natural explanation of the craving for immortality? This craving, as we have seen, is not universal; while, in Buddhism, it is assumed that man ought to strive for extinction. Even among Western nations the craving is not so common as it is generally supposed to be, and as the Church confidently takes for granted. In support of this conclusion, I should mention that my readers will find a startling confirmation in an article on "Human Sentiment with regard to a Future Life," which appears in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research for October, 1904. The article is written by a well-known psychologist, Mr. F. C. S. Schiller, Fellow and tutor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and author of various well-known works on the mind (Riddles of the Sphinx, 1891; Humanism, 1903, etc.). He reviews the results of a laborious inquiry by the American branch of the S. P. R., and comes to the conclusion that "the returns show a hitherto hardly suspected weakness of the desire for knowledge of a future life," [315] and that, "amid all the various phenomena of human psychology, distress due to uncertainty about one's fate after death seems to be one of the rarest." [316] Mr. Schiller, the apostle of Professor W. James in this country, shows that he himself possesses the craving for an after life in no ordinary degree, and this adds all the more force to his statement that the instinct is in nowise universal. I, too, once had a craving so intense that hell itself seemed less awful than total annihilation. To those who have built up high hopes their destruction must come as a terrible shock--a shock eventually relieved by a feeling of resignation to the inevitable.