“Do you shrink from approaching Death? and crave immortality? Live on in the All! Long after you vanish the All will remain!” Rückert, in lines almost equally well known, expresses the same idea:— “Vernichtung weht dich an, so lang Du Einzles bist. O, fühl’ im Ganzen dich, das unvernichtbar ist.” “Annihilation fills you with terror, because you are self-centred. You must feel your unity with the All, which is indestructible.” A volume might be filled with the attempts of thinkers of different countries to present these poetical ideas in a form less vague and more philosophical. I shall select only a few of the more modern instances. Renan’s[251] ideas may be taken as typical of the compromise between poetry and philosophy. Speaking of immortality, he said “that we shall each live again by the traces we leave on the bosom of the Infinite.”[252] The views elaborated by Guyau[253] are equally poetic. Like so many others he is unable to accept without protest the prospect of the inevitability of death. Brought face to face with this end, he declares that he feels “not sorrow but indignation, as against an injustice of nature.” “It is with justice,” he cries, “that we look on nature as a murderess if she kills what is morally best in ourselves and in others.”[254] It is chiefly in the name of love that Guyau protests against death: “The death of others, the annihilation of those we love, is insupportable to men, who are essentially thinking and loving creatures.”[255] This problem, so vast and so difficult to solve, is presented by him as follows: “As regards the question of individual immortality, human thought is dragged in opposite directions by two great forces—science, in the name of evolution, prepared to sacrifice the individual completely; love, in the name of an evolution, morally and socially higher, which would preserve the individual at all hazards. There is no more disturbing dilemma proposed to the philosopher.”[256] Guyau hopes that in the course of evolution there will come about a merging of individual consciousness in the consciousness of the whole. “One may ask,” he says, “if it may not be that these conscious entities mingling and interpenetrating, may come to live on from one to the other, and so to acquire a new duration?” On such a hypothesis he can foresee “an epoch not, indeed, certain to come, but far from inconceivable, in which individual consciousnesses will have achieved a corporate integrity and a complex intercommunion, without themselves being lost by the union.”[257]