defeated. Philosophers ought then to imitate me, and attack immortality to the advantage of virtue. It is a strange axiom to presuppose the truth of an opinion from its indemonstrability. Either immortality can be proved, then one half of your argument is right, or it cannot, then the whole of it is wrong. Besides, if the belief in immortality makes virtue selfish, the experience of it in the next world would make it more so. Does the belief in it deter the common man from doing what his confessor forbids, and forgives him? As little as the first stroke of apoplexy deters the drunkard from rushing to the second."