The deeper source of the belief depends on the relation of a man to his own past. Our consciousness and vision of the past is the strongest ground for our desire to be conscious in the future. The man who values his past, who holds his mental life in greater respect than his corporeal life, is not willing to give up his consciousness at death. And so this organic primary desire for immortality is strongest in men of genius, in the men whose pasts are richest. This connection between the desire for immortality and memory receives strong support from what is related by those who have been rescued from sudden death. Even if they had not thought it out before they relive their past in a few moments, at once and with frantic rapidity. The feeling of what is impending brings in violent contrast the intensity of the present consciousness and the idea that it may cease for ever. In reality we know very little of the mental state of the dying. It takes more than an ordinary person to interpret it, and for reasons connected with what I have been saying men of genius usually avoid death-beds. But it is quite wrong to ascribe the sudden appearance of religion in so many people who are fatally ill, to a desire to make sure of their future state. It is extremely superficial to assume that the doctrine of hell can for the first time assume such an importance to the dying as to make them afraid to pass away “with a lie on their lips.”[10]
[10] I venture to remind readers how often at the approach of death those who have been occupied with purely scientific matters have turned to religious problems, _e.g._, Newton, Gauss, Riemann, Weber.
The important point is this: Why do men who have lived throughout a lying life feel towards the end a sudden desire for truth? And why are others so horrified, although they do not believe in punishment in the next world, when they hear of a man dying with a lie on his lips or with an unrepented action? And why have both the hardness of heart until the end and the death-bed repentance appealed so forcibly to the imagination of poets? The discussion as to the “euthanasia” of atheists, which was so popular in the eighteenth century, is more than a mere historical curiosity as F. A. Lange considered it.