Now, like all other European children, I had been brought up in the
theory of personal immortality, a theory which, amongst other things, is
one way of expressing the immense importance, the eternal importance,
which is attributed to each individual. The stronger the feeling of his
own _ego_ that the individual has, the more eagerly he necessarily
clings to the belief that he cannot be annihilated. But to none could
the belief be more precious than to a youth who felt his life pulsate
within, as if he had twenty lives in himself and twenty more to live. It
was impossible to me to realise that I could die, and one evening, about
a year later, I astonished my master, Professor Broechner, by confessing
as much. "Indeed," said Broechner, "are you speaking seriously? You
cannot realise that you will have to die one day? How young! You are
very different from me, who always have death before my eyes."
But although my vitality was so strong that I could not imagine my own
death, I knew well enough that my terrestrial life, like all other
men's, would come to an end. But I felt all the more strongly that it
was impossible everything could be at an end then; death could not be a
termination; it could only, as the religions preached and as eighteenth-
century Deism taught, be a moment of transition to a new and fuller
existence.
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