By FLORA ANNIE STEEL, the Well-known Novelist

"What value, what interest, can an immortality-have for me," asks Dr. Max Nordau, "in which I should no longer love what I have loved, no longer hate what I have hated, no longer remember my past life, with all its small and great adventures, joys, sorrows, ambitions, etc. etc.?"

What value indeed? None to one so strictly limited by human personality as Dr. Nordau seems to be. But there are other thinkers who, thank Heaven, have learnt a deeper wisdom; others who have spoken of the "self within the heart, greater than the earth, greater than Heaven. A self that encircles all, bright, incorporeal, scathless, pure, untouched by evil." And, of a truth, he who beholds all things in this self, and this self in all things, never turns away from it. Sorrow, joy, even death are left far behind.

Mystical as this may sound, to me, at any rate, it is more satisfactory than Dr. Nordau's alternatives. Personally, I should be terribly bored by the memory of mundane loves and hates through all eternity. Those who cling to this memory seem to forget that love is not always a "grande passion," and that hate is often despicable. But if they mean that only those things that are honest and of good repute will survive, I am with them, with this difference - that I hold humanity will disappear altogether, in so far as it is frail.

Then nothingness is inconceivable. It is one of the unthinkables of life. So far as our two-foot rule enables us to judge, nothing that has been can ever cease to be.

As for the question of an immortal personality, verily there is one for those who recognise in this life that they are but part of a great whole.