Florence said: “We must be immortal, because nothing dies, but is passed on. And there is something in us—I mean that which loves and knows sympathy—which we do not pass on. So I think it must be immortal.”
Marian said: “I am, so I don’t see how I could not be.”
I answered them: “Marian’s and Florence’s ideas seem to me very good. One cannot prove immortality. I have good reasons to believe it. But my best reason is not a reason at all; and if you don’t understand it, I cannot explain it to you. If I am, I must be forever. ‘I am’ means immortality. That is what Marian said, and what I believe. If I believe in the whole Self of the universe, and that Self is in me, and I am in it, then how can I die unless that Self dies? And if I believe in progress, which is toward complete understanding and wholeness of the Self, how can that progress be without me who am a part of it? Do you know who Robert Ingersoll was? Well, he, who passed for such a scoffer—though in reality he expressed only his own realization of his ignorance and his contempt for dogmatic faiths—once said: ‘I am a part of the world. Without me the world would be incomplete. In this there is hope.’ Hope, he meant, of eternal life with the world.”
The children were much impressed.
Marian said: “How can one face the horrible thought of extinction? It is unimaginable. What answer would you give,” she asked, “to those people who claim that we are immortal only in our children, in the race? I never know what to answer them, and yet I feel sure they are not right.”
“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: