shall
live (such virtue hath my pen) Where breath most breathes, even in
the mouths of men."

And again in similar strain:

"My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since, spite of
him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er dull and
speechless tribes."

Napoleon is reported to have said, "My soul will pass into history
and the deathless memories of mankind; and thus in glory shall I
be immortal." This characteristically French notion forms the
essence of Comte's "positivist" doctrine of a future life. Those
deemed worthy after their death to be incorporated, by vote of the
people, in the Supreme Being, the Grand Etre, a fictitious product
of a poetic personification, through the perpetual fame and
influence thus secured have an immortal life in the thoughts and
feelings of a grateful posterity. Comte says, "Positivism greatly
improves immortality and places it on a firmer foundation, by
changing it from objective to subjective." Great and eternal
Humanity is God. The dead who are meritorious are alone
remembered, and, thus incorporated into the Divinity, they have a
"subjective immortality in the brains of the living." 45 It is a
poor shadow of the sublime truth which the soul craves. Leopardi,
in his Bruto Minore, expresses this "poor hope of being in the
future's breath:"

44 Cicero, Tusc. Quast., lib. i. cap. xv.

45 Catechism of Positive Religion, Conversation III.

"dell' atra morte ultima raggio Conscia future eta." That proud
and gifted natures should have seriously stooped to such a toy, to
solace themselves with it, is a fact strange and pathetic. With
reverential tenderness of sympathy must we yearn towards those
whose loving natures, baffled of any solid resource, turn
appealingly, ere they fade away, to clasp this substanceless image
of an image.

Another scheme is what may be called the "lampada tradunt" 46
theory of a future life. Generations succeed each other, and the
course is always full. Eternal life takes up new subjects as fast
as its exhausted receptacles perish. Men are the mortal cells of
immortal humanity. The individual must comfort himself with the
sympathetic reflection that his extinction destroys nothing, since
all the elements of his being will be manipulated into the forms
of his successors.

Life is a constant renovation, and its sum is forever full and
equal on the globe. The only genuine resurrection unto eternal
life is an unending re creation of