“’...  Every day my sense of joy Grows more acute, my soul (intensified By power and insight) more enlarged, more keen; While every day my hairs fall more and more, My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase—­ The horror quickening still from year to year, The consummation coming past escape, When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy—­ When all my works wherein I prove my worth, Being present still to mock me in men’s mouths, Alive still in the phrase of such as thou, I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man, The man who loved his life so over-much, Shall sleep in my urn.’

“You see the point; indeed, it is so familiar, I have laboured it, perhaps, too much.  But the result seems to be, that while it is natural enough that in youth, for those who are capable of Good, life should seem to be pre-eminently worth the having, yet the last judgment of age, for those who believe that death is the end, will be a doubt, and perhaps more than a doubt, even in the case of those most favoured by fortune, whether after all a life has been worth the trouble of living which has unfolded such infinite promise only to bury it fruitless in the grave.”

“I think that’s rather a morbid view!” said Parry.

“I do not know,” I said, “whether it is morbid, nor do I very much care; the question is, whether it is reasonable, and whether it is not the position naturally and perhaps inevitably adopted not by the worst but by the best men among those who have abandoned the belief in personal immortality.”

“That,” interposed Wilson, “is surely not the case.  One knows of people who, though they have no belief in survival after death, yet maintain a perfectly cheerful and healthy attitude towards life.  Harriet Martineau is one that occurs to me.  To her, you may remember, life appeared not less but more worth living when she had become convinced of her own annihilation at death; and she awaited with perfect equanimity and calm its imminent approach, not as a deliverance from a condition which was daily becoming more intolerable, but as a fitting crown and consummation to a career of untiring and fruitful activity.”

“That,” exclaimed Parry with enthusiasm, “is what I call magnanimous!”

“I don’t!” retorted Leslie, “I call it simply stupid and unimaginative.”

“Call it what you like,” said Wilson; “anyhow it is a position which can be and has been adopted.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “but one which, I think, a clearer analysis of the facts, a franker survey and a more penetrating insight, would make it increasingly difficult to sustain.  And after all, an estimate which is to endure must be not only magnanimous but reasonable.”

“But to her, and to others like her, it did and does appear to be reasonable.  And you ought to admit, I think, that there are cases in which life is well worth living quite apart from the hypothesis of personal immortality.”