The best and most plausible ground for athanatism is found in the hope that immortality will reunite us to the beloved friends who have been prematurely taken from us by some grim mischance. But even this supposed good fortune proves to be an illusion on closer inquiry; and in any case it would be greatly marred by the prospect of meeting the less agreeable acquaintances and the enemies who have troubled our existence here below. Even the closest family ties would involve many a difficulty. There are plenty of men who would gladly sacrifice all the glories of Paradise if it meant the eternal companionship of their "better half" and their mother-in-law. It is more than questionable whether Henry VIII. would like the prospect of living eternally with his six wives; or Augustus the Strong of Poland, who had a hundred mistresses and three hundred and fifty-two children. As he was on good terms with the Vicar of Christ, he must be assumed to be in Paradise, in spite of his sins, and in spite of the fact that his mad military ventures cost the lives of more than a hundred thousand Saxons. Another insoluble difficulty faces the athanatist when he asks _in what stage of their individual development_ the disembodied souls will spend their eternal life. Will the new-born infant develop its psychic powers in heaven under the same hard conditions of the "struggle for life" which educate man here on earth? Will the talented youth who has fallen in the wholesale murder of war unfold his rich, unused mental powers in Walhalla? Will the feeble, childish old man, who has filled the world with the fame of his deeds in the ripeness of his age, live forever in mental decay? Or will he return to an earlier stage of development? If the immortal souls in Olympus are to live in a condition of rejuvenescence and perfectness, then both the stimulus to the formation of, and the interest in, personality disappear for them. Not less impossible, in the light of pure reason, do we find the anthropistic myth of the "last judgment," and the separation of the souls of men into two great groups, of which one is destined for the eternal joys of Paradise and the other for the eternal torments of hell--and that from a personal God who is called the "Father of Love"! And it is this "Universal Father" who has himself created the conditions of heredity and adaptation, in virtue of which the elect, on the one side, were _bound_ to pursue the path towards eternal bliss, and the luckless poor and miserable, on the other hand, were _driven_ into the paths of the damned?