かうした前提に立てば、精神の在り様は脳に依存するが、脳が消えても、それを通して見えてゐた真実在は存続する、といふのである。なほ、文中に引用されてゐるのは、Percy Bysshe Shelley といふ詩人の詩らしい。Suppose, for example, that the whole universe of material things -- the furniture of earth and choir of heaven --- should turn out to be a mere surface-veil of phenomena, hiding and keeping back the world of genuine realities. Such a supposition is foreign neither to common sense nor to philosophy. Common sense believes in realities behind the veil even too superstitiously ; and idealistic philosophy declares the whole world of natural experience, as we get it, to be but a time-mask, shattering or refracting the one infinite Thought which is the sole reality into those millions of finite streams of consciousness known to us as our private selves.
"Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity."
Suppose, now, that this were really so, and suppose, moreover, that the dome, opaque enough at all times to the full super-solar blaze, could at certain times and places grow less so, and let certain beams pierce through into this sublunary world. These beams would be so many finite rays, so to speak, of consciousness, and they should vary in quantity and quality as the opacity varied in degree. （中略）
Admit now that our brains are such thin and half-transparent places in the veil. What will happen?
Our christian ancestors dealt with the problem more easily than we do. We, indeed, lack sympathy ; but they had a positive antipathy for these alien human creatures, and they naïvely supposed that the Deity to have the antipathy, too. Being, as they were, 'heathen,' our forefathers felt a certain sort of joy in thinking that their Creator made them as so much mere fuel for the fires of hell. Our culture has humanized us beyond that point, but we cannot yet conceive them as our comrades in the heaven. We have, as the phrase goes, no use for them, and it oppresses us to think of their survival. Take, for instance, all the Chinamen. Which of you here, my friends, sees any fitness in their eternal perpetuation unreduced in numbers? Surely not one of you. At most, you might deem it well to keep a few chosen specimens alive to represent an interesting and peculiar variety of humanity ; but as for the rest, what comes in such surpassing numbers, and what you can only imagine in this abstract summary collective manner, must be something of which the units, you are sure, can have no individual preciousness. God himself, you think, can have no use for them
