“Yes,” said he, “it is important; but I can’t come to any conclusion. I am not convinced.”
Some people feel sure one cannot know anything about immortality, and that therefore it is not worth thinking of it at all.
Henry said: “Because one does not know a thing now is no reason why one should not try to find out. And I believe we shall know, some time. If people had felt so about other equally difficult things, we would never have got on.”
I said: “What is knowledge? We cannot know immortality as an experience, through our senses; but I believe we can know through our reason, just as so much other scientific knowledge is a matter of reason, of analogy, of deduction. It can’t be proved, as one might prove that two and two are four. But then I once read in a book that nothing could be proved, except the things not worth proving.
“If we saw a red rose, and we all called it a red rose, there would be no doubt of its redness. But if we differed, and some called it red, some pink, some yellow, we should soon be in grave doubt. Our eyes might be wrong. There have been so many opinions regarding immortality, because people had different ‘eyes,’ that now we are full of doubts.”
We spoke of the time when the earth was thought flat because it looked flat.
Alfred said: “Immortality of what, do you mean?”
“Immortality of everything,” I answered. “We might, of course, believe that the universe will die, will be extinct. But it is an unthinkable thought. We all believe in something eternal. We know that force does not die, but is changed and transmitted; we know that no substance is destroyed; we know that every action, every circumstance has endless consequences and endless antecedents. They—and I—are forever a part of the universe. How could we be destroyed? Why should we think that everything is immortal, excepting self, which seems the motive force?”
Alfred said: “I don’t believe it is destroyed; but it goes out of me, and that is the end of me.”
The others asked how Alfred could have agreed with us all so far, and not agree now, since it seemed to them that what we had said before, the idea of progress, implied immortality. How could he believe in the Self as God, the vast Self which comes to complete understanding, and yet believe that he, who was a part of it, that in him, and he in that, could be utterly destroyed?