also with the dead. We know that they are no longer with us, but we have no reason to think that they have been destroyed or that they are worse off than they were before they left us. Even so the fact that we can not know what will be with us after death or what we were before wc had life, proves only that it is not given to us to know these things, and that therefore it is needless for us to know them. We know only one thing—^that our life is not in the changes of the body, but in that which dwells in our body, in our soul. And in the soul there can be no beginning or end, because it alone is,
3. "One or the other: either death is complete annihilation and disappearance of consciousness, or in accordance with tradition only a change and a migration of the soul from one place to another. If death is a complete destruction and consciousness and is like unto a deep sleep without dreams, then death is an indubitable blessing, for we have only to compare a night of such dreamless sleep in our own experience with those other nights and days filled with terror, anxieties and unsatisfied desire which we experience in sleep or waking, I am convinced few will find days and nights more blessed than the nights of dream-lessness. So that if death be such a sleep, I for one consider it a blessing. But if death be the passing from this world into another, and it is correctly related that we shall find there those wise men and holy who died before us, can there be a greater blessing than to live there in the company of these beings? I would long to die not once but a hundred times merely to be with them.
"Therefore I think that you, О judges, and all people, should not fear death but remember one thing: for a good man there is no evil either in life or in death."
Socrates,
4. He who sees the sense of life in striving after spiritual perfection can not believe in death, in the interruption of the striving after perfection. That which is on the way to perfection can not be destroyed, it can only be transformed.
5. Death is the cessation of that consciousness of life by which I now live. The consciousness of life ceases, this I see in the case of those who die. But what becomes of that which was conscious? I do not know, I can not know.
6. People fear death and desire to live as long as possible. But if death be a misfortune, is it not the same to die in thirty as in three hundred years? What joy can there be for the man condemned to die, if his execution is put off for thirty days, while his comrades are put to death in three days. A life that must terminate with death would be death itself. Scovoroda.
7. It is the feeling of everyone that he is not a mere nothing called into life at a certain moment by some other thing. Therefore the universal confidence that death may terminate life, but not by any means existence.
Schopenhauer.
8. Aged men lose the remembrance of recent events. But memory is that which binds all the things which occur in time into one "I." And in the case of the aged man this earthly "I" is done with, and a new "I" has commenced.
9. The more profoundly conscious you are of life, the less you believe in its destruction in death.
10. I do not believe in any of the existing religions, and for this reason I can not be suspected of blindly following any tradition or the influences of education. But
all through life I have thought as deeply as I could on the subject of the law of our life. I searched into it in the history of mankind and in my own consciousness and I have come to the unshakable conviction that there is no death; that life can not be other than eternal; that infinite perfection is the law of life, that every faculty, every thought, every striving implanted in me must have its practical development; that we have ideas and tendencies which far exceed the possibilities of earthly life; that the very fact that we possess them and can not trace their source to our feelings, proves that they proceed in us from a domain beyond this earth and may be realized only beyond it; that nothing perishes on earth but the appearance, and to think that we die because our body is dying is to think that the workman is dead because his tools have worn out. Mazzini.
11. If the hope of immortality be a delusion it is clear who are those who are deluded. Not those vulgar and darkened minds who had never approached this majestic thought, not the sleepy and frivolous people who are content with a sensual dream in this life and with the dream of oblivion in the future life, not those lovers of self, narrow of conscience and petty of thought and still more petty in love, no, not they. They would be right, and the gain would be theirs. The deluded would be all those great men and holy who have been and are venerated of all men. The deluded would be all those who have lived for something better than their own happiness and who have laid down their life to make others happy.
All these men deluded! Then even Christ must have suffered in vain yielding up his spirit to an imaginary father, and thought in vain that he manifested him in his life. The tragedy of Golgotha would then have been only
a mistake, and the truth in those days would have been on the side of those who then mocked him and cried for his death, and now on the side of those who are perfectly indifferent to that accord with human nature which is represented by this alleged piece of fiction. Whom are we to worship, whom shall we trust if the inspiration of the highest minds be a mere jtunble of cunningly devised fables? Parker.
II.
The Nature of the Change in Existence Which Occurs with the Death of the Body is Unfathomable to
the Mind of Man
1. We frequently endeavor to picture death as a passing into something, but such an endeavor leads us nowhere. It is just as impossible to picture death as to picture God. All that we can know of death is that death, even as everything else that proceeds from God, is a blessing.
2. Some ask: What will become of the soul after death? We do not know, we can not know. Only one thing is certain, that if you are going anywhere, you must have proceeded from somewhere. Even so in life. If you came into life, you must have proceeded from somewhere. From wherever or whomever you have proceeded, there and to him you will return.
3. I do not remember anything of myself before my birth, and therefore I think that I shall not remember after death anything of my present life. If there will be a life after death, it will be such as I am unable to picture to myself.
4. The entire life of man is a series of changes incomprehensible to an observer, yet perceptible to him. But the b^finning of these changes as culminating in birth,
and the end of these changes as culminatine in death, arc not even perceptible to obserration.
5. Only one thing is important for me: to know what God would fiave me do. And this is clearly manifested not only in all religions but also in my conscience, and therefore my concern is to learn to fulfill it all and to direct all my powers towards that end, knowing full well that if I devote all my strength to the fulfillment of the Master's will, he will not leave me, and that only that will happen to me which ought, and that it will be well with me,
6. No one knows what death is, yet all fear it, regarding it as the direst evil, although it may be the greatest blessing. Plato.
7. If we believe that all that has happened to us in our life has happened for our blessit^, we can not fail to believe that that which happens to us when we die will abo redound to our blessing.
8. No one can boast that he knows that there is a God and a future life. I can not say that I know beyond doubt that there is a God and that there is immortality, but I must say that I feel both that there is a God and that my "/" is immortal. This means that the faith in God and another world is so closely knit with my nature that this faith can not be severed from me. Kant.