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162 has also his compensations; but, wishing to eat his cake and have it, he insists that his increased self-consciousness is the hall-mark of an immortality which he is unwilling to concede to others. He sees (or the majority of those see, who preach personal immortality after death) no moral necessity for conceding immortality to the worm because the early bird cuts short its career, or to the wild deer because it enjoys life, shrinks from death, and endures pain; or to the peewit, because she loves her young; or to the parrot, because it dies with a vocabulary still inadequate for expressing that contempt for the human species with which the caged experience of a life-time has filled its brain. Yet, for these and similar reasons applied to himself, man thinks that immortality is his due.

In doing so, he does but pursue, to a rather injudicious extent, that instinct for the ornamentation and embellishment of the facts of life which I spoke of to begin with. For whether it be well-founded or not, a belief in immortality gives ornament to existence.

Of course, it may be bad ornament; and I think it becomes bad ornament the moment he bases it upon the idea that this life is evil and not good. If he says "Life is so good that I want it to go on for ever and ever," and thinks that he can make it better by asserting that it will go on for ever and ever, that is a playful statement which may have quite a stimulating effect on his career, and