The burning of conscious selfhood, That fights with pitiless fate! God grant that deliverance stay not, Till it come at last too late; Till the crushed out instinct waver, And fainter and fainter grow, And by suicide, through unusing, Seek freedom from its woe. Oh! despair of constant losing The life that is clutched in vain! Is it death or a joyous growing That shall put an end to pain? A DIALOGUE ON IMMORTALITY. BY ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER. (Translated from the German, by Chas. L. Bernays.) _Philalethes._—I could tell you that, after your death, you will be what you were previous to your birth; I could tell you that we are never born, and that we only seem to die—that we have always been precisely the same that we are now, and that we shall always remain the same—that _Time_ is the apparatus which prevents us from being aware of all this; I could tell you that our consciousness stands always in the centre of _Time_—never on one of its termini; and that any one among us, therefore, has the immovable centre of the whole infinite _Time_ in himself. I then could tell you that those who, by that knowledge, are assured that the present time always originates in ourselves, can never doubt the indestructibility of their own essence. _Thrasymachus._—All of that is too long and too ambiguous for me. Tell me, briefly, what I shall be after death. _Phil._—All and nothing. _Thras._—There we are! Instead of a solution to the problem you give me a contradiction; that is an old trick. _Phil._—To answer transcendental questions in language that is only made for immanent perceptions, may in fact lead us into contradictions. _Thras._—What do you mean by “transcendental” and “immanent” perceptions?