lled to make this assumption by reason of
the inherent nature of love. For it is of the nature of love when
confronted by two alternatives one of which lays the stress upon
personal advantage and the other _upon love itself_ apart from any
personal advantage, whether one's own or another's, to choose, as
the assumption upon which it shall live, the latter of these two
alternatives. For it is the nature of love to seek love and nothing
else than love. And as long as the assumption which the soul
makes is the assumption that it survives the death of the body, that
emotion of love which is the soul's creative essence is debarred
from the full and complete integrity of its desire.

For the desire of love is not for immortality but for the eternal; and
the eternal is not something that depends upon the survival of any
individual soul, whether our own or another's. The eternal is
something which can be realized in one single moment; something
which completely destroys in us any desire for survival after
death; something which reconciles us to existence _considered in
the light of love alone_; something that does not assume anything
at all about the universe, except that love exists.

Thus we return to that assumption about the soul, which it is
better--leaving the open question still an open question--for the
mind to accept as its working assumption; namely that the soul
uses the body in its own ends, is conscious of its existence through
the senses of the body, lives _in_ the body, and perishes when the
body perishes. Nor is it only the emotion of love which rejects the
dogma of the immortality of the soul. Were the soul proved
beyond all possibility of doubt to be immortal, there would at once
fall upon us a despair more appalling than any which we have
known. For just as the idea of the eternal satisfies the very depths
of our soul with an infinite peace, so the idea of immortality
troubles the very depths of our soul with an infinite doubt.
Something unutterable in our aesthetic sense demands that life
should be surrounded by death and ended by death. Thus and not
otherwise should we ourselves have created the world at the
beginning. Thus and not otherwise by the rhythmic play of the
complex vision, do we create the world.

But meanwhile, whatever happens, as long as we live we possess
the reality of the soul. This is, and always has been, the
rallying-ground of heroic and sensitive personalities, struggling with
the