The other cardinal doctrine of religion--the immortality of the soul,--Transcendentalism was proud of having rescued from death in the same way. The philosophy of sensation could give no assurance of personal immortality. Here, too, its fundamental axiom, "_Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu_," was discouraging to belief. For immortality is not demonstrable to the senses. Experience affords no basis for conviction, and knowledge cannot on any pretext be claimed. The sensational school was divided into two parties. The first party confessed that the immortality of the soul was a thing not only unprovable, but a thing easily disproved, a thing improbable, and, to a clear mind, impossible to believe. The soul being a product of organization, at all events fatally implicated in organization, conditioned by it in all respects, must perish with organization, as the flower perishes with the stem. Of a spirit distinct from body there is, according to this school, no evidence, either before death or after. Man's prospect, therefore, is bounded by this life. Dreamers may have visions of another; mourners may sigh for another; ardent natures may hope for another; but to believe in another is, to the rational mind, according to this philosophy, impossible. The sentence "dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return," may seem a hard one; but as it cannot be reversed or modified, it must be accepted with submission; and in default of another life, the honest man will make the most of the life he has; not necessarily saying with the sensualist: "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die;" but with the hero reminding himself that he must "Work while it is day, for the night cometh in which no man can work." The modern disciples of this doctrine of annihilation speak in a tone of lofty courage of their destiny, and disguise under shining and many-colored garments of anticipation, the fact of their personal cessation. The thinkers find refuge in the intellectual problems of the present; the workers pile up monuments that shall endure when they are gone; poets like George Eliot, make grand music on the harp-strings of the common humanity; but the fact remains that the philosophy of experience abandons, or did before the advent of spiritualism--the expectation of an existence after death.