On this hypothesis, “the problem is to be at the same time loving enough and loved enough to live and endure in another.[258]... Those who vanish and those who remain must love one another so greatly that the shadows cast by them on the universal consciousness are identical.” “We should then feel ourselves passing and ascending from this life to an immortality of love,” and “the point of contact between life and immortality would be discovered.”[259] A solution recently offered by Finot[260] is much less poetical. According to him, it is only “when death is conceived of as annihilation that it is repugnant. On the other hand, if we regard it merely as a change of life, we shall cease to fear it, and even come to love it.”[261] But what is this “change of life” that is to prove so consoling? It is the “immortality of the body,” that is to say, the life of the creatures developed at the expense of the human body. “Flies begin the work of the labourers on the dead,” giving birth to worm-like larvæ that writhe in the decomposing flesh. The same vermin that horrified Tolstoi when he thought of his own death (see chap. vi. p. 123) became Finot’s symbol of consolation. He describes the whole succession of the fauna of corpses, and concludes by saying, “and so goes on the routine of life, from birth to the tomb, of noisy, clamorous life, ceaselessly renewed. Ever loving, giving birth, living and dying. The peace of the tomb is as filled with life as the dust into which we think our bodies will fall.”[262] I have given the above quotation as an instance showing to what lengths men have gone in their search for a solution of the problem of death and in their desire for a gleam of hope that the end may not be final. I need not say that this idea of the fauna of the corpse has no place in the philosophy of death. Thinkers, no doubt, would prefer the most vague ambiguities to certainties of such a nature. Most contemporary philosophers regard the problem in a very different fashion. In my opinion, Meyer-Benfey, a scholar at Göttingen, has summed up the present condition of the problem very clearly and exactly, in essays on Modern Religion.[263] He realises that it is impossible to accept the immortality of the soul. Personality must utterly and inevitably perish. But, just as no single atom of our bodies can be annihilated, so “no parts of our souls can be lost.” Our actions during life leave traces so much the deeper as the life has been fuller. It is this reuniting “of the actions of individuals with the life of the whole of humanity, that constitutes the true immortality or Nirvâna.” He says, too, “In accustoming our minds to this thought, and in educating ourselves with a view to the accomplishment of this end, lies the only possible means of overcoming the fear of death and the terror of annihilation.”