(3) And as to the supposed directly beneficial effects of a positive denial of Immortality, such as have been sung for us by George Eliot and Giovanni Pascoli, we can safely affirm that the special tendernesses and quiet heroisms, deduced by them from such a negation, are too obviously dependent upon spiritual implications and instincts, for us to be able to put them directly to the credit of that denial. Only in so far as Immortality were not a postulate intrinsically connected with belief in objective and obligatory Beauty, Truth, and Goodness,--in God as our origin and end,--could its persistent and deliberate denial not be injurious to these fundamental convictions and to the ultimate health of the soul’s life: and of this intrinsic non-connection there is no sufficient evidence.--Certainly, in such a case as Spinoza’s, the same strain of reasoning which makes him abandon individual Immortality Ought, in logic, to prevent him, a mere hopelessly determined link in the _Natura Naturata_, from ever attaining to the free self-dedication of himself, as now a fully responsible member of the _Natura Naturans_. And if not all the grand depth of his spiritual instinct and moral nobility, and its persistence in spite of its having no logical room in the fixedly naturalistic element of his teaching, can be urged as an argument in favour of the ultimate truth and ethical helpfulness of that whole element, neither can it be urged with respect to what is presumably one part of that element, his denial of personal Immortality. II. CATHERINE’S GENERAL AFTER-LIFE CONCEPTIONS. Now Catherine’s general After-Life Conceptions in part bring into interesting prominence, in part really meet and overcome, the perplexities and mutually destructive alternatives which we have just considered. I shall here again leave over to the next chapter the simply ultimate questions, such as that of the pure Eternity _versus_ the Unendingness of the soul; but shall allow myself, as to one set of her general ideas, a little digression as to the probability of their ultimate literary suggestion by Plato.--These Platonic passages probably reached her too indirectly, and by means and in forms which I have too entirely failed to discover, for me to be able to discuss them in my chapter devoted to her assured and demonstrably direct literary sources. But these sayings of Plato greatly help to illustrate the meaning of her doctrine.--I shall group these, her general, positions and implications under four heads, and shall consider three of these as, in substance, profoundly satisfactory, but one of them, the second, as acceptable only with many limitations, although this second has obviously much influenced the form given by her to several of those other conceptions. 1. _Forecasts of the Hereafter, based upon present experience._