Cicero, again, discussing old age and death, tried to establish belief in a future life. “I am convinced,” said Cicero to Scipio and Laelius, “that your illustrious fathers, who were so dear to me, are still full of life, and of the only life worthy of the name; for the body is, as it were, our prison-house, within which we must accomplish the tasks laid on us by necessity. When I think of the activity of the human spirit, its vast memory, its prevision, its store of art and knowledge, and experience, I am convinced in the depths of my being that an existence with such qualities cannot be mortal. The soul is continually active, and its activity comes not to it from without; the soul is a self-supporting activity, and cannot come to an end. Moreover, as the soul is a simple substance, unalloyed by any mixture of materials, it can neither be divided nor made to perish.” By such arguments Cicero sought to prove the immortality of the soul. “I will tell you,” he said, “why old age, so far from being grievous to me, is full of delight.” But in the end, he himself saw the weakness of his proof, and the note of scepticism appeared in him more strongly than in his predecessors, so that he came to say as follows: “If I am deceived as to the immortality of the soul, I am deceived gladly, and I would not have the belief torn from me while I live. If, when I am dead, all feeling is arrested within me, as some pretended philosophers hold, at least I have not to fear that after my death they will come and mock me for my error.” Scepticism becoming more and more definite, belief in the immortality of the soul persisted only in the purely religious form. Philosophical systems freed themselves of it, and replaced it by a vague form of pantheism. Seneca tried to support the thesis of immortality, but one gets the impression strongly that there was no vigour in his belief. He is content with poetry rather than with reason. “The events of this mortal life,” he wrote in one of his celebrated “Letters,” “are the mere prelude of a better and more lasting existence. As our mother’s womb, bearing us for nine months, shapes us not to live there for ever, but for our place in this world in which it places us, with the strength to breathe this air and to withstand surrounding things: so, also, the time that passes from our infancy to our old age is a preparation for a second birth. Another beginning and another world await us. Until then, we could not endure, save from afar, the splendour of the heavens. Learn then, O man, to face without a shudder the decisive hour, the last hour of the body, but not of the soul. What you see around you consider but as the furniture of an inn; soon you are going further on. The day that you dread as your last day is your birthday into immortality.”