Book Description

Excerpt from The Belief in Personal Immortality Yet I should never have been so absorbed in the subject but for the pain that it originally cost me to lose, first of all, the belief in personal immortality, and finally even the hope of it. I cannot help feeling that there is a very strong presumption against any kind of survival that implies individual continuity or reunion with those whose presence here diffused incomparable happiness while they still lived. But if such a conviction forces itself upon any of us, surely we had better face it and adjust our philosophy of life - and, indeed, our most practical activities in life - to the conviction. If death has, indeed, any dazzling surprise in store for us, we shall have lost nothing by trying to put human affairs a little more in order without relying on any future settlement of bad balances, after the example of Mr. Micawber; if, on the other hand, death ends our conscious individuality once and for all, a great deal of it will still survive for others, if not for ourselves, so long as we have acted on what we really thought to be true. Character is immeasurably fortified in the ordinary course of life by the elimination of irrational hopes and fears from our motives, and surely the question of belief in the supernatural is no exception to this rule. I have freely used the personal pronoun, as there may be many members of the Rationalist Press Association who disagree with my own views on this question. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.