hese may be
counted the work of Frederic W.H. Myers on _Human Personality and its
Survival of Bodily Death_. No one ever approached more eagerly than
myself the two thick volumes of this work in which the leading spirit of
the Society for Psychical Research resumed that formidable mass of data
relating to presentiments, apparitions of the dead, the phenomena of
dreams, telepathy, hypnotism, sensorial automatism, ecstasy, and all the
rest that goes to furnish the spiritualist arsenal. I entered upon the
reading of it not only without that temper of cautious suspicion which
men of science maintain in investigations of this character, but even
with a predisposition in its favour, as one who comes to seek the
confirmation of his innermost longings; but for this reason was my
disillusion all the greater. In spite of its critical apparatus it does
not differ in any respect from medieval miracle-mongering. There is a
fundamental defect of method, of logic.

And if the belief in the immortality of the soul has been unable to find
vindication in rational empiricism, neither is it satisfied with
pantheism. To say that everything is God, and that when we die we return
to God, or, more accurately, continue in Him, avails our longing
nothing; for if this indeed be so, then we were in God before we were
born, and if when we die we return to where we were before being born,
then the human soul, the individual consciousness, is perishable. And
since we know very well that God, the personal and conscious God of
Christian monotheism, is simply the provider, and above all the
guarantor, of our immortality, pantheism is said, and rightly said, to
be merely atheism disguised; and, in my opinion, undisguised. And they
were right in calling Spinoza an atheist, for his is the most logical,
the most rational, system of pantheism.

Neither is the longing for immortality saved, but rather dissolved and
submerged, by agnosticism, or the doctrine of the unknowable, which,
when it has professed to wish to leave religious feelings scathless, has
always been inspired by the most refined hypocrisy. The whole of the
first part of Spencer's _First Principles_, and especially the fifth
chapter entitled "Reconciliation"--that between reason and faith or
science and religion being understood--is a model at the same time of
philosophical superficiality and religious insincerity, of the most
refined British cant. The unknowable, if it is something more than