Yet it is not on this ground that acceptance can be hoped
for the conception of immortality here crudely and vaguely presented ill
contrast to that bourgeois eternity of individualism and the family
affections, which is probably the great charm of Spiritualism to the
majority of its proselytes. It is doubtful whether the things that "eye
hath not seen, nor ear heard," have ever taken stronghold of the
imagination, or reconciled it to the loss of all that is definitely
associated with the Joy and movement of living. Not as consummate bliss
can the dweller on the lower plane presume to command that transcendent
life. At the utmost he can but echo the revelation that came to the
troubled mind in "Sartor Resartus," "A man may do without happiness, and
instead thereof find blessedness." It is no sublimation of hope, but
the necessities of thought that compel us to seek the condition of true
being and immortality elsewhere than in the satisfactions of
individualism. True personality can only subsist in consciousness by
participation of that of which we can only say that it is the very
negation of individuality in any sense in which individuality can be
conceived by us.
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