ame
time so that their minutest shades of intonation are preserved, let the
slides be coloured by a competent artist, and then let the scene be
called suddenly into sight and sound, say a hundred years hence. Are
those people dead or alive? Dead to themselves they are, but while they
live so powerfully and so livingly in us, which is the greater paradox--to
say that they are alive or that they are dead? To myself it seems that
their life in others would be more truly life than their death to
themselves is death. Granted that they do not present all the phenomena
of life--who ever does so even when he is held to be alive? We are held
to be alive because we present a sufficient number of living phenomena to
let the others go without saying; those who see us take the part for the
whole here as in everything else, and surely, in the case supposed above,
the phenomena of life predominate so powerfully over those of death, that
the people themselves must be held to be more alive than dead. Our
living personality is, as the word implies, only our mask, and those who
still own such a mask as I have supposed have a living personality.
Granted again that the case just put is an extreme one; still many a man
and many a woman has so stamped him or herself on his work that, though
we would gladly have the aid of such accessories as we doubtless
presently shall have to the livingness of our great dead, we can see them
very sufficiently through the master pieces they have left us.

As for their own unconsciousness I do not deny it. The life of the
embryo was unconscious before birth, and so is the life--I am speaking
only of the life revealed to us by natural religion--after death. But as
the embryonic and infant life of which we were unconscious was the most
potent factor in our after life of consciousness, so the effect which we
may unconsciously produce in others after death, and it may be even
before it on those who have never seen us, is in all sober seriousness
our truer and more abiding life, and the one which those who would make
the best of their sojourn here will take most into their consideration.

Unconsciousness is no bar to livingness. Our conscious actions are a
drop in the sea as compared with our unconscious ones. Could we know all
the life that is in us by way of circulation, nutrition, breathing, waste
and repair, we should learn what an infinitesimally small part
consciousness plays in our present existen