Book 4 — CHAPTER II BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY (continued 2)

It may well be that the unsympathetic critic will regard such an imaginative invasion of the unseen as a freak of lawless fancy, hardly worth chronicling. And like all similar attempts, the apocalypse of Plutarch may easily be treated with an airy ridicule. To a more serious criticism, it seems vitiated by a radical inconsistency. Starting with the principle of the absolutely immaterial nature of the immortal part of man, it yet depicts its future existence in the warmest colours of the world of sense. Its struggles, its tortures, its beatitude are described in terms which might seem fitting only to a corporeal nature. All this is true; and yet the answer which Plutarch would probably have made to any such cavils is very simple. How can you speak of pure disembodied spirit at all, how can you imagine it, save in the symbolism of ordinary speech? Refine and subtilise your language to the very uttermost, and it will still retain associations and reminiscences, however faint and distant, of the material world. Myth and symbol are necessary to any expression of human thought alike about God and the future of the soul. The Infinite Spirit and the future destiny of the finite, which is His child, are equally beyond the range of human sense and speech. When the human spirit has exhausted all its efforts of imagination to pierce the darkness of the world beyond the grave, it takes refuge in some religious system which claims to have a divine message and speaks in the tones of another world. The voice from eternity came to troubled heathendom from Egypt and the East.

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