r strong desire that a certain occurrence should happen
should be put forward as evidence that it will happen. If my intense
desire to see the friend, from whom I have parted, does not bring him
from the other side of the world, or take me thither; if the mother's
agonised prayer that her child should live has not prevented him from
dying; experience certainly affords no presumption that the strong
desire to be alive after death, which we call the aspiration after
immortality, is any more likely to be gratified. As Hume truly says,
"All doctrines are to be suspected which are favoured by our passions;"
and the doctrine, that we are immortal because we should extremely like
to be so, contains the quintessence of suspiciousness.

In respect of the existence and attributes of the soul, as of those of
the Deity, then, logic is powerless and reason silent. At the most we
can get no further than the conclusion of Kant:--

"After we have satisfied ourselves of the vanity of all the
ambitious attempts of reason to fly beyond the bounds of
experience, enough remains of practical value to content us. It is
true that no one may boast that he _knows_ that God and a future
life exist; for, if he possesses such knowledge, he is just the
man for whom I have long been seeking. All knowledge (touching an
object of mere reason) can be communicated, and therefore I might
hope to see my own knowledge increased to this prodigious extent,
by his instruction. No; our conviction in these matters is not
_logical_, but _moral_ certainty; and, inasmuch as it rests upon
subjective grounds, (of moral disposition) I must not even say: _it
is_ morally certain that there is a God, and so on; but, _I am_
morally certain, and so on. That is to say: the belief in a God and
in another world is so interwoven with my moral nature, that the
former can no more vanish, than the latter can ever be torn from
me.

"The only point to be remarked here is that this act of faith of
the intellect (_Vernunftglaube_) assumes the existence of moral
dispositions. If we leave them aside, and suppose a mind quite
indifferent to moral laws, the inquiry started by reason becomes
merely a subject for speculation; and [the conclusion attained] may
then indeed be supported by strong arguments from analogy, but not
by such as are competent to overcome persistent sc