It is even at times hard to withstand the conviction that there must be an author. One could almost suspect him of breaking off at a crisis on purpose to make us eager for the next installment. The figure of speech may perhaps make clear to us the primary trouble of our being transitional, namely, the difficulty of being both scientific and unscientific at the same time, for our instinct to understand and explain tends to destroy our pleasure even in the torn chapter we hold in hand; it is hard to work up a proper reading enthusiasm in the face of the positive assertion by science that there will be no “continued-in-our-next.”
The most cursory study of our bygone belief reveals at once other troubles for the present generation in trying too suddenly to get along without a future. We suffer from the working within us of old instincts and superstitions not to be violently uprooted--rheumatic heritage of souls in process of transformation. While our reason admits that there is no valid excuse for being immortal and that our perverse hankering after such a condition argues us self-centered and self-important, all the same there is peril in too abruptly removing the props to personal prestige promised by the mythical joys of our lost fairyland. Our anticipated survival gave us a sense of superiority to the insects, prevented our being sensitive to the silent scoffings of the roadside stones that so long outlast us. Evanescence tends also to undermine our personal affections. It hardly seems worth while to be overfond of relative or friend whom a breath of wind may snuff out like a flame. Why should beings more brittle than beetles go about loving each other as if they were gods? Morally, human frailty was often subconsciously controlled by keeping ourselves fit for the society we expected ultimately to enter, that of saints and sages and perhaps of God Himself.
The first effect of destroying all these expectations is disastrous for people who were far more dependent on them than they dreamed, for, to tell the truth, eternity in the old days had so little apparent relation to our daily conduct that the complete rejection of the concept is like that of some bodily organ whose functioning is deemed negligible until it ceases. Our suffering is no less keen because we recognize it as purely evolutional and temporary. In a few generations people will find as much inspiration in being finite as we used to find in being infinite. Meanwhile, for us who have the luck to be transitional there is perhaps a compromise.