time comes I shall depart without much of what is usually called pain, for the heart seems to be my weak place, and I may reasonably hope that even though if attacked by other ailments, it will be the heart that will give way. There will probably be suffering through difficulty of breathing, and I dread this somewhat, for I know how unpleasant it has been in the attacks which I have survived. Still, it can hardly be compared with the agonising pain of many diseases. Rationally, then, I ought not to have much fear on the physical side.

On the spiritual side I confess with Oliver Wendell Holmes that I have never quite got from under the shadow of the orthodox hell. I had a Puritan upbringing, not severe in its home theology I am thankful to say, but involving attendance at an Independent Chapel where the minister—a good man and no hypocrite—was wont to preach very terrible sermons. I shall never quite get over the baneful effect of those damnatory fulminations. They branded my soul. They caused me more pain than anything else has ever done throughout my life—and this is saying a great deal. They made me hate God. Remember, I was a defenceless child. I knew of no other God. I thought all decent people believed like those about me. I was the only heretic—a rebel, an outlaw, an Ishmael. Conceive, if you can, the agony of a sensitive child struggling with that thought! Condemned to eternal torment, with those who, in Dante’s terrible line, “have no hope of death.” (“Inferno,” iii, 46.)

Then I fell in with O. W. Holmes’s Autocrat and Professor, and found a friendly hand in the darkness. It led me to Emerson and Carlyle; then I found Darwin, Spencer, and the rest of them. My loneliness was mitigated, but the seared place in my soul was not healed, and never will be healed. I cannot read the Inferno and Purgatorio of Dante without horror, and thus the poetic beauty of those great cantos is darkened for me. I cannot worship “God,” for “God” is the fiend whose image was stamped into my mind in its most plastic, most defenceless period. Truly that early teaching has much to answer for. It has poisoned a great part of my life. I suppose if I could have “accepted” that Being as my God, accepting also the sacrifice—the Blood—by which that Being’s anger was supposed to be assuaged—I suppose I should have been happy, feeling myself “saved.” (But I have lately been surprised to find how ineffective this belief can be. An acquaintance of mine, an orthodox churchwoman who has no religious doubts, and who talks much of the Bible, confesses to “a fear of death which clouds even her brightest moments”—an ever-present, unconquerable dread.) However, I could not accept the dogma. Why, I don’t know. Somehow my whole mind and heart revolted against the entire plan of salvation. I never believed any of it. I felt it could not be true. And yet it tortured me. Illogical? Yes: human beings are illogical. I am no exception. The Christian who believes he will go to heaven is equally illogical in his unwillingness to die.

When or if we succeed in getting rid of hell, the spiritual fear of death becomes less torturing, remaining only as a vague dread, as in Hamlet’s soliloquy. Bacon says that we fear death as children fear to go in the dark. In my own case, it is somewhat thus that the fear now presents itself. The old hell-fear, though not utterly obliterated, is becoming less all-swallowing. This very desirable state of affairs is partly the result of the conclusions to which I have been led by psychical research. After many years of experiment and close study, I can say that I know something about after-death conditions. Not that I pretend to be able to coerce other people into a similar belief, even if I wanted to. Each must travel his own path. Moreover, psychical research being a science, its results are not more certain than those of other sciences. Alternative theories in explanation of any phenomenon are always possible. There is no such thing as knock-down proof. But for my part I can say that I know—in the same way that I know the truth of Mendeleef’s law, or Avogadro’s law, or Dalton’s atomic theory—that human beings do not become extinct when they die, that they are often able to communicate with us after that event, and that they are not in any orthodox heaven or hell. My knowledge is based partly on a lengthy and carefully-conducted series of sittings which some intimate friends of mine have had with a medium known to me; partly on my own results over a period of several years of systematic investigation; and partly on various curious experiences of psychic friends of mine who are in no sense professional mediums. (Details to some extent in my New Evidences in Psychical Research (Rider, 1911) and Psychical Investigations (Cassell, 1917.) I now believe, with the Bishop of London, that a man is essentially the same five minutes after death as he was five minutes before. As the old woman says in David Copperfield, “death doesn’t change us more than life”—no, nor as much!

The upshot is, of course, that my spiritual fear of death has, I am thankful to say, almost vanished. The lurid future has taken on a milder radiance.

It is not that I want assuring of “happiness” in a future state as compensation for misery in this. I should be quite contented if I could be assured that death is annihilation. It would at least be a cessation of suffering; and that is much. I could agree with Keats:

Easeful death—it is a good word. Keats knew disease, and was content with prospect of ease; though at the end there is a note of depression or despair at the thought of becoming a “sod,” deaf and blind to beauty.

This reminds us of the attitude of other poets towards the great problem. Tennyson is mildly optimistic and placid; stretches, indeed, somewhat lame hands of faith in his sorrowful moments when his friend has died, but on the whole is healthily disposed; friendly to the most cheerful way of looking at it; inclined, with true British burliness, to make the best of a bad job—a job which, after all, may not be so very bad when we come to closer quarters with it. Afar, death is the spectre feared of man; seen nearer, he may metamorphose into a beautiful Iris, sent by heavenly mercy. And, afterwards, the new spiritual state will probably be an improvement—Aeonian evolution through all the spheres. Therefore, away with all selfish mourning either about our own prospective fate or that of those who have left us. Let us hate the black negation of the bier: