Understand how the case stands.  The unhappy being revolting against the trials of life—­trials, the results of its own former actions, trials, heaven’s merciful medicine for the mentally and spiritually diseased—­determines, instead of manfully taking arms against a sea of troubles, to let the curtain drop, and, as it fancies, end them.  It destroys the body, but finds itself precisely as much alive mentally as before.  It had an appointed life-term determined by an intricate web of prior causes, which its own wilful sudden act cannot shorten.  That term must run out its appointed sands.  You may smash the lower half of the hand hour-glass, so that the impalpable sand shooting from the upper bell is dissipated by the passing aerial currents as it issues; but that stream will run on, unnoticed though it remain, until the whole store in that upper receptacle is exhausted.

So you may destroy the body, but not the appointed period of sentient existence, foredoomed (because simply the effect of a plexus of causes) to intervene before the dissolution of the personality; this must run on for its appointed period.

This is so in other cases, e.g., those of the victims of accident or violence; they, too, have to complete their life-term, and of these, too, we may speak on another occasion—­but here it is sufficient to notice that, whether good or bad, their mental attitude at the time of death alters wholly their subsequent position.  They, too, have to wait on within the “Region of Desires” until their wave of life runs on to and reaches its appointed shore, but they wait on, wrapped in dreams soothing and blissful, or the reverse, according to their mental and moral state at, and prior to the fatal hour, but nearly exempt from further material temptations, and, broadly speaking, incapable (except just at the moment of real death) of communicating scio motu with mankind, though not wholly beyond the possible reach of the higher forms of the “Accursed Science,” Necromancy.  The question is a profoundly abstruse one; it would be impossible to explain within the brief space still remaining to us, how the conditions immediately after death differ so entirely as they do in the case (1) of the man who deliberately lays down (not merely risks) his life from altruistic motives in the hope of saving those of others; and (2) of him who deliberately sacrifices his life from selfish motives, in the hope of escaping trials and troubles which loom before him.  Nature or Providence, Fate, or God, being merely a self-adjusting machine, it would at first sight seem as if the results must be identical in both cases.  But, machine though it be, we must remember that it is a machine sui generis—­

    Out of himself he span
      The eternal web of right and wrong;
    And ever feels the subtlest thrill,
      The slenderest thread along.

A machine compared with whose perfect sensitiveness and adjustment the highest human intellect is but a coarse clumsy replica, in petto.