“I think there are two good answers,” I said. “First, it is extremely unlikely that the race is immortal. Even if we thought our immortality unlikely, it is far more likely, and much less of an act of faith, to believe in it than to believe in race-immortality. We know that every planet dies and parches. We know that every race, every physical manifestation comes to an end, but we know that the spirit of life lives forever, and forever grows. I have heard people say that when this planet dries and freezes, men will have advanced so far in science that they will find their way in airships to another planet. But to me it seems far more unlikely than that the spirit of life, the self within us, should go on forever. The second answer seems to me to be Florence’s answer, that we are not immortal in the race, that although we give our children much, we give to no one our power of love, of understanding, of sympathy.” Henry asked: “Don’t we give it through example and teaching?” “We give much,” I said. “We can teach and train, but we give no one that understanding self, the power for love and sympathy, which is in us, and cannot be made.” Henry did not see how one could find satisfaction in living for the race, since forever and ever each successive generation would be mortal and would disappear. I said I did not believe that in a world which to us was all intellect, the intellect could die. Then I read aloud the following passage from “John Percyfield,” by C. Hanford Henderson: “It is an old mistake, that of calling desires beliefs. But I think I have allowed for this. I have said, if death end all, if that be the truth of it, then that is what I want to believe. For no man in his right senses wishes to be either self-deceived, or other-deceived. I have doubted immortality, even disbelieved it, but now I believe it on as strong warrant as I have for any of my scientific beliefs. In one sense, immortality cannot be experienced; it is not a fact of experience in the same immediate way that certain minor scientific facts are. But neither can the paleozoic age be experienced, nor space, nor time, nor cause and effect. They are inductions from experience. And so to me is immortality. It is an induction from experience. In a world where every reality is essentially spiritual, or intellectual, whichever term you prefer, where even the study of nature, as soon as it passes from mere observation into orderly science, becomes a mental rather than a physical fact, I can only imagine the disappearance of spirit by picturing the annihilation of the universe itself. Without the mental part that we give to all of our so-called facts, they would cease to exist. It is possible that the universe does shrivel up in this way and disappear, but it is less probable, I think, than any one of the great possibilities which science rejects, and feels warranted in accepting their opposite as fact.”