Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/363

302 materialism give way, and yield place for a chance and hope that we may be immortal, — instead of simply leaving room for the imperishable eternity of the universal mother sea of Mind, — lays sure the foundations for a certainty that we each belong to the eternal world, not simply to the world of shifting and transient experience. It provides for our selves, for each of them individually, a place in the world not merely of consequences and mediated effects, but of primary and unmediated causes. Hence it gives us assurance that death no more than any other event in experience is our end and close, but that we survive it, ourselves the springs that organise experience. It shows us possessed, intrinsically, of the very roots and sources of perception, not merely of its experienced fact, and so presents us as possessed of power to rise beyond the grave — yes, in and through the very act of death — into new worlds of perception.

Accordingly, it matches the Christian improvement upon the older conception of the future existence — the ascent to the doctrine of “resurrection” or, the supplementing of immortality by the exaltation of the “body,” or sense-perceptive life. As ourselves the causal sources of the perceived world and its cosmic order, we are not destined to any colourless life of bare ideas, to “some spectral woof of impalpable abstractions or unearthly ballet of bloodless categories,” but are to go perceptively