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THE

PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY.

INTRODUCTORY.

Value of an hypothesis.—Units of being briefly indicated.—Reasons for an appeal to Nature.

A

N unchanging and an unending conscious iden

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tity, with an ever increasing accumulation of added new experience, is the one thing to be desired by every sentient nature which has been so constituted that it finds in life much more of pleasure than of pain. And if life is eternal, if the personal consciousness is as indestructible as the material atóm, and if both are as lasting as the existing nature of things in which they are securely and unchangeably grounded, then each intelligent person must desire to know this, that he may bring himself into line with those harmonious influences which can increase the happiness and diminish the suffering of existence.

What can we know, then, concerning life and immortality? Can Nature teach us that we must live forever? Can she convince us that each individual consciousness is a persisting unity established and sustained by immutable law? Can she instruct us as to how this consciousness is related to all other things, and is necessarily coöperative with them?

If these are facts in Nature, if they represent real and positive data held in her keeping, then to the eyes which can perceive and interpret them, she can and will undoubtedly reveal the true and exact state of the case in all of these respects. Soon or late, therefore, we might expect such knowledge would be attainable by mankind. To our faltering human intelligence the waiting lesson might be but slowly learned and repeatedly misapprehended; but if personal immortality is one of Nature's abiding facts, what can hinder us from finally learning to perceive it and to comprehend its true import?

Negative evidence can be of but little value in disproof of any supersensual existence. Life, whether a simple persisting unit, or whether, as has been latterly assumed, a highly complex and ever varying

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