gma
of the immortality of the soul. But is extension, is matter, that which
thinks and is spiritualized, or is thought that which is extended and
materialized? The weightiest questions of metaphysics arise practically
out of our desire to arrive at an understanding of the possibility of
our immortality--from this fact they derive their value and cease to be
merely the idle discussions of fruitless curiosity. For the truth is
that metaphysics has no value save in so far as it attempts to explain
in what way our vital longing can or cannot be realized. And thus it is
that there is and always will be a rational metaphysic and a vital
metaphysic, in perennial conflict with one another, the one setting out
from the notion of cause, the other from the notion of substance.

And even if we were to succeed in imagining personal immortality, might
we not possibly feel it to be something no less terrible than its
negation? "Calypso was inconsolable at the departure of Ulysses; in her
sorrow she was dismayed at being immortal," said the gentle, the
mystical Fenelon at the beginning of his _Telemaque_. Was it not a kind
of doom that the ancient gods, no less than the demons, were subject
to--the deprivation of the power to commit suicide?

When Jesus took Peter and James and John up into a high mountain and was
transfigured before them, his raiment shining as white as snow, and
Moses and Elias appeared and talked with him, Peter said to the Master:
"Master, it is good for us to be here; and let us make three
tabernacles; one for thee and one for Moses and one for Elias," for he
wished to eternalize that moment. And as they came down from the
mountain, Jesus charged them that they should tell no man what they had
seen until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead. And they,
keeping this saying to themselves, questioned one with another what this
rising from the dead should mean, as men not understanding the purport
of it. And it was after this that Jesus met the father whose son was
possessed with a dumb spirit and who cried out to him, "Lord, I believe;
help thou mine unbelief" (Mark ix.).

Those three apostles did not understand what this rising from the dead
meant. Neither did those Sadducees who asked the Master whose wife she
should be in the resurrection who in this life had had seven husbands
(Matt. xxii.); and it was then that Jesus said that God is not the God
of the dead, but of the living. And the other life is no