him. He can, therefore, only predicate the inclinations of his waking hours; in sleep he may revert to a very strong affinity for that annihilation of self-conscious life against which, in his waking hours, he protests his dread.
And now a further word of comfort for those moral teachers who assure us that if once we let go the idea of personal immortality, with its accompanying implications of eternal reward or punishment, the conduct of the human race is bound to degenerate, and that man's only logical motto will then be, "Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die."
To refute that deduction we have but to remember that sociology is a thing of ancestry and evolution, and has committed us to a weight of facts against which precept and theory are powerless. We have only to look back into Nature to see how persistently (without, one must suppose, any promise of future reward after death) a contrary instinct emerges from the establishment of the social bond in nest and herd and hive. And why—if that emerging instinct leads on, in man's reasoned estimation, to foolishness—why do we so specially admire the communal life of ant and bee, and incline sometimes to wonder whether (behind so marvellous an order of altruistic energy) there be not concealed more and not less of spiritual apprehension than in the more individualistic forms of insect and animal life? And why, on the contrary,
