"Most of them do, who count, my dear chap. The presence of a vital spark—a spark that cannot be put out—is merely a theory with nothing to prove it. When he dies, the animating principle doesn't leave a man, and go off on its own. It dies too. It was part of the man—as much as his heart or brain."
"That's only an opinion. Nobody can be positive. We don't know anything about what life really means, and we haven't got the machinery to find out."
"By analogy we can," argued Tom. "Where are you going to draw the line? Life is life, and a sponge is just as much alive as a herring; a nettle is just as much alive as an oak-tree; and an oak-tree is just as much alive as you are. What becomes of its vital spark when you eat an oyster?"
"You wouldn't believe in a life after death at all, then?"
"It's a pure assumption, Henry. I'd like to believe in it—who wouldn't? Because, if you honestly did, it would transform this life into something infinitely different from what it is."
"It ought to—yet it doesn't seem to."
"It ought to, certainly. If you believe this life is only the portal to another of much greater importance, then—well, there you are. Nothing matters but trying to make everybody else believe it, too. But as a matter of fact, the people who do believe it, or think they do, seem to me just as concentrated on this life and just as much out to get the very best they can from it, and wring it dry, as I am, who reckon it's all."
"They believe as a matter of course, and don't seem to realize how much their belief ought to imply," confessed Henry.
"Why do they believe? Because most of them haven't really thought about it more than a turnip thinks. They dwell in a foggy sort of way on the future life when they go to church on Sundays; then they return home and forget all about it till next Sunday."
Lennox brought him back to the present difference.