The question, however, is not whether in heaven the circumference of the soul’s life is indefinitely enlarged, but whether the centre remains.  These centres are centres of consciousness; and consciousness apparently belongs to the world of will.  It comes into existence when the will has some work to do.  It is not conterminous with life; there is a life which is below consciousness, and there may be a life above consciousness, or what we mean by consciousness.  We must remind ourselves that we are using a spatial metaphor when we speak of a centre of consciousness, and a temporal one when we ask about a continuing state of consciousness; and space and time do not belong to the eternal world.  The question therefore needs to be transformed before any answer can be given to it.  Spiritual life, we are justified in saying, must have a richness of content; it is, potentially at least, all embracing.  But this enhancement of life is exhibited not only in extension but in intensity.  Eternal life is no diffusion or dilution of personality, but its consummation.  It seems certain that in such a state of existence individuality must be maintained.  If every life in this world represents an unique purpose in the Divine mind, and if the end or meaning of soul-life, though striven for in time, has both its source and its achievement in eternity, this, the value and reality of the individual life, must remain as a distinct fact in the spiritual world.

We are sometimes inclined to think, with a natural regret, that the conditions of life in the eternal world are so utterly unlike those of the world which we know, that we must either leave our mental picture of that life in the barest outline, or fill it in with the colours which we know on earth, but which, as we are well aware, cannot portray truly the life of blessed spirits.  To some extent this is true; and whereas a bare and colourless sketch of the richest of all facts is as far from the truth as possible, we may allow ourselves to fill in the picture as best we can, if we remember the risks which we run in doing so.  There are, it seems to me, two chief risks in allowing our imagination to create images of the bliss of heaven.  One is that the eternal world, thus drawn and painted with the forms and colours of earth, takes substance in our minds as a second physical world, either supposed to exist somewhere in space, or expected to come into existence somewhen in time.  This is the heaven of popular religion; and being a geographical or historical expression, it is open to attacks which cannot be met.  Hence in the minds of many persons the whole fact of human immortality seems to belong to dreamland.  The other danger is that, since a geographical and historical heaven is found to have no actuality, the hope of eternal life, with all that the spiritual world contains, should be relegated to the sphere of the ‘ideal.’  This seems to be the position of Hoeffding, and is quite clearly the view of thinkers like Santayana.  They accept the dualism of value and existence, and place the highest hopes of humanity in a world which has value only and no existence.  This seems to me to be offering mankind a stone for bread.  Martineau’s protest against this philosophy is surely justified: