Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/243

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Conscious and Unconscious Immortality
223

sponding breadth—ought not to be the limit of our claim. Yet it is significant that, in their demand for personal immortality, so many thinkers have found sufficient satisfaction in the idea of an extended survival through time into eternity, without making a corresponding demand for extension into unity through space. They are willing, that is to say, to put up for all eternity with those limitations of personality which they enjoy—the relations of meum and tuum upon which the possessive life of the senses is based, but not with those limitations (the prospect of which they do not enjoy), the termination of those same relationships imposed by death. It seems rather a one-sided way of doing things—this narrowing of the claim in a two-dimensional direction (one might almost say in a one-dimensional), yet it has been very generally done—I shall presently hope to show why—and most of our Western theology has built up our future hopes for us entirely on those lines. Personality, the sort of personality we have learned to enjoy, is based upon limitations. Abolish limitations in your conception of future life, and for the majority of those pious minds which now clamour for it as their due you abolish personality also; it is swallowed up not in death but in a life from which the individual power to focus and to enjoy has disappeared.

It is true that there has now begun, in modern socialistic Christianity, a yeasting of