part of the soul flings that "point"
into a yet further remoteness. And this creative power in the soul
of man may apply in ways which at present our own race has
hardly dared to contemplate. It may apply, for instance, to the idea
of personal immortality.

Personal immortality may be a thing which the soul, by a
concentrated act of creative will, can secure for itself, or can
reject for itself. It may be, if we take the whole conscious and
subconscious purpose of a man's life, a _matter of choice_.

But when a man makes a choice of such a kind, when a man
concentrates his energy upon surviving the death of his body, he is
deliberately selecting a "lower" purpose for his life in place of a
"higher." In other words, instead of concentrating his will upon the
evocation of the emotion of love, he is concentrating his will upon
self-realization or self-continuance. What he is really doing is even
worse than this. For since what we call "emotion" is an actual
projection into the matrix of the objective mystery, of the very
substance and stuff of the soul, when the will thus concentrates
upon personal immortality, it takes the very substance of the soul
and perverts it to the satisfaction of inert malice. In other words it
actually transforms the stuff of the soul from its positive to its
negative chemistry, and produces a relative victory of malice over
love.

The soul's desires for personal immortality is one of the aspects of
the soul's "possessive" instinct. The soul desires to "possess"
itself--itself as it exactly is, itself in its precise and complete
"status quo"--without interruption for ever. But love has a very
different desire from this. Love is not concerned with time at all--
for time has a "future"; and any contemplation of a "future"
implies the activity of something in the soul which is different
from love, implies something which is concerned with outward
events and occurrences and chances. But love is not concerned
with outward events, whether past or future. Love desires eternity
and eternity alone. Or rather it does not "desire" eternity. It _is_
eternity. It is an eternal Now, in which what _will_ happen and
what _has_ happened are irrelevant and unimportant.

All this offers us an intelligible explanation of a very bewildering
phenomenon in human life. I mean the instinctive disgust
experienced by the aesthetic sense when men, who otherwise seem
gentle and good, display an undue and unmeasured ag