And this personal and affective starting-point of all philosophy and all religion is the tragic sense of life.  Let us now proceed to consider this.

FOOTNOTE: 

[10] The Foundations of Belief, being Notes Introductory to the Study of Theology, by the Right Hon. Arthur James Balfour London, 1895:  “So it is with those persons who claim to show by their example that naturalism is practically consistent with the maintenance of ethical ideals with which naturalism has no natural affinity.  Their spiritual life is parasitic:  it is sheltered by convictions which belong, not to them, but to the society of which they form a part; it is nourished by processes in which they take no share.  And when those convictions decay, and those processes come to an end, the alien life which they have maintained can scarce be expected to outlast them” (Chap. iv.).

III

THE HUNGER OF IMMORTALITY

Let us pause to consider this immortal yearning for immortality—­even though the gnostics or intellectuals may be able to say that what follows is not philosophy but rhetoric.  Moreover, the divine Plato, when he discussed the immortality of the soul in his Phaedo, said that it was proper to clothe it in legend, muthologein.

First of all let us recall once again—­and it will not be for the last time—­that saying of Spinoza that every being endeavours to persist in itself, and that this endeavour is its actual essence, and implies indefinite time, and that the soul, in fine, sometimes with a clear and distinct idea, sometimes confusedly, tends to persist in its being with indefinite duration, and is aware of its persistency (Ethic, Part III., Props.  VI.-X.).

It is impossible for us, in effect, to conceive of ourselves as not existing, and no effort is capable of enabling consciousness to realize absolute unconsciousness, its own annihilation.  Try, reader, to imagine to yourself, when you are wide awake, the condition of your soul when you are in a deep sleep; try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it.  The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.  We cannot conceive ourselves as not existing.

The visible universe, the universe that is created by the instinct of self-preservation, becomes all too narrow for me.  It is like a cramped cell, against the bars of which my soul beats its wings in vain.  Its lack of air stifles me.  More, more, and always more!  I want to be myself, and yet without ceasing to be myself to be others as well, to merge myself into the totality of things visible and invisible, to extend myself into the illimitable of space and to prolong myself into the infinite of time.  Not to be all and for ever is as if not to be—­at least, let me be my whole self, and be so for ever and ever.  And to be the whole of myself is to be everybody else.  Either all or nothing!