and our arms fly upward to the imaginary branch overhead when danger of falling threatens us, because the instinct of our arboreal ancestry still prevails in us over reason). And through those atavisms, the struggle to secure survival for the family, the clan, the race, has left an impress which may very naturally convey from the general to the individual a sense of immortality.
For of all these constituent forces the majority knew and thought very little about death, except in their instinctive and spasmodic efforts to escape from it; and when at last man began to envisage death consciously and philosophically, straightway, with all these atavisms behind him, he belittled it with dreams of a future life.
It was as perfectly natural a thing to do as for the lover to declare that his love for his mistress was eternal and not merely for a season, since any lesser statement would fail to convey adequately the intensity of the force by which he was moved. Moreover, though in millions of individual cases the statement and the sincere belief that the love experienced will remain changeless and eternal, are contradicted by later fact, it is at least true that the passion itself is an ever-recurring phenomenon of life, and does, by its infinite recurrence and resurrection in form beyond form through evolving generations, present to finite minds an aspect of immortality. Just as the water we drink is an imperishable thing,
