He smoked for a few moments in silence and then said abruptly: “Don’t imagine that I am going to discuss religion with you; it is a question which does not interest me at all. But do you believe in the immortality of the soul?”
“No,” said Hermia.
“Why not?”
Hermia lifted her shoulders: “I have never thought agnosticism needed defense.”
“Agnosticism is the religion of the intellectual, of course. But I have some private reasons for going a step beyond agnosticism, and believing in the persistence of personality. Do you want to hear them?”
“Yes,” said Hermia, “but it all comes down to the same proposition. Religion has its stronghold in Ego the Great. La vie, c’est moi! I am, therefore must ever be! Now and forever! World without end!”
“I refuse to be snubbed beforehand. Why are children so frequently the ancestors of their family’s talent? When heredity cannot account for genius, what better explanation than that of the re-embodiment of an unquenchable individuality? The second reason is a more sentimental one. Why is a man never satisfied until he meets the woman he really loves, and why are his instincts so keen and sure when he does meet her? Why, also, does he so often dwell with the ideal of her before he sees her in material form?”
Hermia felt herself paling, but she exclaimed impatiently: “Don’t talk to me of ideals—those poor, pale photographs of ourselves, who have neither mind nor will nor impulse; who jump out like puppets as the strings are pulled; who respond to every mood and grin to every smile! They are born of the supreme egoism of human nature, which admits no objective influence to any world of its own creating—an egoism which demands vengeance for the humiliation of spirit one is called upon to endure in the world of men. Your other arguments were good, however. I like them, although I will not discuss them until you have further elaborated. In the mean time solve another problem. What is the reason that, when a woman falls in love, she immediately, if a believer, has an increase of religious feeling; if a non-believer, she has a desire to believe, so that she may pray? Sentimentality? The softening of her nature under the influence of love? The general awakening of her emotional possibilities?”
“Neither—or all, indirectly. She is not drawn to God in the least. She is drawn to the idealized abstraction of her lover, who, in the mists of her white-heated imagination, assumes the lineaments of the being most exalted by tradition. If there were a being more exalted still than God, her lover’s phantom would be re-christened with his name instead. It is to her lover that she prays—the intermediate being is a pretty fiction—and she revels in prayer, because it gives her a dreamy and sensuous nearness to her lover.”
Hermia sprang to her feet and paced the narrow platform with rapid steps. “It is well I have no ‘pretty fictions,’” she said, “you would shatter them to splinters.”