PRACTICAL IMMORTALITY ON EARTH

The talk at a dinner given by the Easy Chair to some of its most valued friends was of the life after death, and it will not surprise any experienced observer to learn that the talk went on amid much unserious chatter, with laughing irrelevancies more appropriate to the pouring of champagne, and the changing of plates, than to the very solemn affair in hand. It may not really have been so very solemn. Nobody at table took the topic much to heart apparently. The women, some of them, affected an earnest attention, but were not uncheerful; others frankly talked of other things; some, at the farther end of the table, asked what a given speaker was saying; the men did not, in some cases, conceal that they were bored.

"No," the first speaker said, after weighing the pros and cons, "for my part, I don\'t desire it. When I am through, here, I don\'t ask to begin again elsewhere."

"And you don\'t expect to?" his closest listener inquired.

"And I don\'t expect to."

"It is curious," the closest listener went on, "how much our beliefs are governed by our wishes in this matter. When we are young and are still hungering for things to happen, we have a strong faith in immortality. When we are older, and the whole round of things, except death, has happened, we think it very likely we shall not live again. It seems to be the same with peoples; the new peoples believe, the old peoples doubt. It occurs to very, very few men to be convinced, as a friend of mine has been convinced against the grain, of the reality of the life after death. I will not say by what means he was convinced, for that is not pertinent; but he was fully convinced, and he said to me: \'Personally, I would rather not live again, but it seems that people do. The facts are too many; the proofs I have had are irresistible; and I have had to give way to them in spite of my wish to reject them.\'"

"Yes," the first speaker said, "that is certainly an uncommon experience. You think that if I were perfectly honest, I should envy him his experience? Well, then, honestly, I don\'t."

"No," the other rejoined, "I don\'t know that I accuse your sincerity. But, may I ask, what are your personal objections to immortality?"

"It wouldn\'t be easy to say. If I could have had my way, I would not have been at all. Speaking selfishly, as we always do when we speak truly, I have not had a great deal of happiness, though I have had a good deal of fun. But things seem to wear out. I like to laugh, and I have laughed, in my time, consumedly. But I find that the laugh goes out of the specific instances of laughability, just as grieving goes out of grief. The thing that at the first and third time amused me enormously leaves me sad at the fourth, or at least unmoved. You see, I can\'t trust immortality to be permanently interesting. The reasonable chances are that in the lapse of a few ?ons I should find eternity hanging heavy on my hands. But it isn\'t that, exactly, and it would be hard to say what my objection to immortality exactly is. It would be simpler to say what it really is. It is personal, temperamental, congenital. I was born, I suspect, an indifferentist, as far as this life is concerned, and as to another life, I have an acquired antipathy."

"That is curious, but not incredible, and of course not inconceivable," the closest listener assented.

"I\'m not so sure of that," a light skirmisher broke his silence for the first time. "Do you mean to say," he asked of the first speaker, "that you would not mind being found dead in your bed to-morrow morning, and that you would rather like it if that were actually the end of you?"

The first speaker nodded his head over the glass he had just emptied, and having swallowed its contents hastily, replied, "Precisely."

"Then you have already, at your age, evolved that \'instinct of death,\' which Metchnikoff, in his strange book, thinks the race will come to when men begin living rightly, and go living on to a hundred and fifty years or more, as they once did."

"Who is Metchnikoff, and what is the name of his strange book?" the light skirmisher cut in.

"He\'s the successor of Pasteur in the Pasteur Institute at Paris, and his book is called The Nature of Man."

"That blighting book!" One of the women who had caught on to the drift of the talk contributed this anguished suspiration.

"Blighting? Is it blighting?" the first speaker parleyed.

"Don\'t you call it blighting," she returned, "to be told not only that you are the descendant of an anthropoid ape—we had got used to that—but of an anthropoid ape gone wrong?"

"Sort of simian degenerate," the light skirmisher formulated the case. "We are merely apes in error."

The closest listener put this playfulness by. "What seems to me a fundamental error of that book is its constant implication of a constant fear of death. I can very well imagine, or I can easily allow, that we are badly made, and that there are all sorts of \'disharmonies,\' as Metchnikoff calls them, in us; but my own experience is that we are not all the time thinking about death and dreading it, either in earlier or later life, and that elderly people think less about it, if anything, than younger people. His contention for an average life four or five times longer than the present average life seems to be based upon an obscure sense of the right of a man to satisfy that instinct of life here on earth which science forbids him to believe he shall satisfy hereafter."

"Well, I suppose," the first speaker said, "that Metchnikoff may err in his premises through a temperamental \'disharmony\' of Russian nature rather than of less specific human nature. The great Russian authors seem to recognize that perpetual dread of death in themselves and their readers which we don\'t recognize in ourselves or our Occidental friends and neighbors. Other people don\'t think of death so much as he supposes, and when they do they don\'t dread it so much. But I think he is still more interestingly wrong in supposing that the young are less afraid of death than the old because they risk their lives more readily. That is not from indifference to death, it is from inexperience of life; they haven\'t learned yet the dangers which beset it and the old have; that is all."

"I don\'t know but you\'re right," the first speaker said. "And I couldn\'t see the logic of Metchnikoff\'s position in regard to the \'instinct of death\' which he expects us to develop after we have lived, say, a hundred and thirty or forty years, so that at a hundred and fifty we shall be glad to go, and shall not want anything but death after we die. The apparent line of his argument is that in youth we have not the instinct of life so strongly but that we willingly risk life. Then, until we live to a hundred and thirty or forty or so, we have the instinct of life so strongly that we are anxious to shun death; lastly the instinct of death grows in us and we are eager to lay down life. I don\'t see how or why this should be. As a matter of fact, children dread death far more than men who are not yet old enough to have developed the instinct of it. Still, it\'s a fascinating and suggestive book."

"But not enough so to console us for the precious hope of living again which it takes away so pitilessly," said the woman who had followed the talk.

"Is that such a very precious hope?" the first speaker asked.

"I know you pretend not," she said, "but I don\'t believe you."

"Then you think that the dying, who almost universally make a good end, are buoyed up by that hope?"

"I don\'t see why they shouldn\'t be. I know it\'s the custom for scientific people to say that the resignation of the dying is merely part of the general sinking and so is just physical; but they can\'t prove that. Else why should persons who are condemned to death be just as much resigned to it as the sick and even more exalted?"

"Ah," the light skirmisher put in, "some of the scientific people dispose of that point very simply. They say it\'s self-............