Even in the heart of the thief or the murderer it insists: I ought to
do this, I ought not to do that, and when he disobeys this mysterious
law within him he is compelled to drag himself up for judgment and
fierce remorse for wrong that no one else knows of, that no one else
can punish him for. What do you think of that mysterious fact about
this Conscious Personality within you? Does it not look as if it
belongs to God, that every soul is stamped with God's image and
superscription, as every coin of King George is stamped in the mint
with the image and superscription of the King?

Section 6

And this suggests a further question. Why is there in us this sense of
imperfection, of incompleteness--of ideals always away in the front
that we can never even approximately reach on earth? Look at this
conscience which we have just been thinking about. It is always
holding high above us an ideal of perfect goodness and insisting that
we must strive after it. But we can never get even near it on earth.
The very best man at the close of life sees his ideal still high above
him and feels how much better he might be and ought to be and then he
dies feeling the incompleteness of this life. Does not this unfinished
life thus broken off, with its aim still far in the future, demand
something further? The great German philosopher Kant founded on this
fact his famous argument for Immortality.

Or look at our efforts after knowledge. It takes nearly all this life
to fit the student for his search after truth, and when he is just
ready and the great ocean of truth lies before him, Death comes. Oh,
how incomplete and unfinished his life seems! Just the scaffolding put
up for his work, just the tools got into good order. Then he dies.

"For half a century," said Victor Hugo, "I have been writing my
thoughts in prose and verse, history, philosophy, drama, romance,
tradition, satire, ode, song. But I feel that I have not said a
thousandth part of what is in me. When I go down to the grave I shall
have finished my day's work." And this thought of incompleteness
compels in him the hope, "another day will begin next morning."

Was Victor Hugo right? Was the old pagan philosopher right? "You may
catch my body," said Socrates, "but no man can catch me, myself, to
bury me." Victor Hugo did not believe in the Christian Bible.
Socrates had no revelation from God, except the revelation of this self
within him. You have the r