Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/155

118 human spirit as going on in its share of the everlasting existence of Nature. But I also see that this must be at the cost of its freedom. For in the one and only life of the Cosmic Consciousness, brooding upon Nature and upon all her offspring alike, there is after all but one real agent, and that is the Consciousness itself. On the other hand, were I to suppose — as some of Dr. Le Conte’s writings have at times seemed to mean — were I to suppose that death is the sublime moment in which our connexion with Nature at length comes to a close, and is thus in its truth the moment of birth for the freed spirit, so that by death the long toil of spirit-creation is completed, I should indeed be at first rapt away by this surprising suggestion; especially by the Platonic afterthought, that now the soul, set forth in her self-sufficing independence, is proof against all assaults forever, and has become indeed imperishable. But a second afterthought would follow, and I should ask: What must be the nature of this life dissevered from Nature, — bodiless, void of all sense-perception? What would be left in it except the pure elements of reason, the pure elements of perception, the pure formularies of science, and pure imagination? But what are these, altogether, but the common equipment, not of my mind or of some other individual mind, but of the universal human nature? And what is that universal nature but just the nature of the eternal Cosmic Consciousness? Yes, my personality has vanished; and death, in dissolving the tie to Nature under the alluring prospect of an existence for me wholly self-referred and self-sustaining, has