em to suggest, it might be better to
confine ourselves to our own experience and consider whether for
ourselves, so far as we can see, we should think life much worth
having, supposing death to be the end of it all."

"Oh, as to that, of course I should, for my part," cried Ellis, "and
so, I hope, should we all. In fact, I consider it rather monstrous to
ask the question at all."

"My dear Ellis," I protested, "you are really the most inconsistent of
men! Not a minute ago you were laughing at Wilson for his acquiescence
in the extinction of the individual 'with his opportunities
unrealized, his faculties undeveloped,' and all the rest of it. And
now you appear to be adopting precisely the same attitude yourself."

"I can't help it," he replied; "consistent or no, life's good enough
for me. And so it should be for you, you ungrateful ruffian!"

"I am not so sure," I said, "that it should be; not so sure as I was a
few years ago."

"Why, you Methuselah, what has age got to do with it?"

"Just this," I replied, "that up to a certain time of life all the
Good that we get we take to be prophetic of more Good to come. What
we actually realize we value less for itself than for something else
which it promises. The moments of good experience we expand till they
fill all infinity; the intervening tracts of indifferent or bad we
simply forget or ignore. Life is good, we say, because the universe
is good; and this goodness we expect to grasp in its entirety, not
to-day, perhaps, nor to-morrow, but at least the day after. And so,
like the proverbial ass, we are lured on by a wisp of hay. But being,
at bottom, intelligent brutes, we begin, in time, to reflect; we put
back our ears, and plant our feet stiff and rigid where we stand, and
refuse to budge an inch till we have some further information as to
the meaning of the journey into which we are being enticed. That,
at least, is the point that has been reached by this ass who is now
addressing you. I want to know something more about that bundle of
hay; and that is why I am interested in the question of personal
immortality."

"Which means--to drop the metaphor----?"

"Which means, that I have come to realize that I am not likely to get
more Good out of life than I have already had, and that I may very
likely get less; or if more in some respects, then less in others.
For, in the first place, the world, as it seems, is just as much bad
as good, and whether Good or Bad pre