Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/239

Rh without—(and with no very marked set-back as regards health, efficiency, or general morals)—is a questionable way of forcing home conviction that these things or beliefs are indispensable. It is quite possible that beer, meat, the pursuit of game, the personality of Charlie Chaplin, and a belief in immortality are all alike capable of giving stimulus to the human soul (especially to those souls which have come by habit to depend upon them). But it is quite certain that other human souls have found without them sufficient stimulus to make life worth living. And though, against that fact, it may be argued that these unconsciously receive their driving force, their social and ethical standards, from those whose motive power they reject as superfluous, and that we, who do not go to see Charlie Chaplin on the films, are winning this war somewhat circuitously through the powers of those who do—the argument is hardly a convincing one, since it remains for ever in the nature of an unproved hypothesis.

But when the majority of those who believe in personal immortality are asked for the ground of their belief, it generally resolves itself into this: they have an intense individual conviction that it is so—so intense that to hold the contrary becomes "unthinkable." But that intense, individual conviction, over things we greatly care about, is a constant phenomenon of the working of the human mind, and is not limited to belief in a future