As a proof of this he affirms that he himself
had no such desire.
This came as a great shock to me, since up to the moment of reading it
I had in my ignorance taken It for granted that the desire is inherent
in every human being from the dawn of consciousness to the end of
life, that it is our chief desire, and is an instinct of the soul like
that physical instinct of the migratory bird which calls it annually
from the most distant regions back to its natal home. I had also taken
it for granted that our hope of immortality, or rather our belief in
it, was founded on this same passion in us and in its universality.
The fact that there were those who had no such desire was sufficient
to show that it was no spiritual instinct or not of divine origin.
There were many more shocks of this kind - when I go back in memory to
that sad time, it seems almost incredible to me that that poor
doubtful faith in revealed religion still survived, and that the
struggle still went on, but go on it certainly did.
To many of my readers, to all who have interested themselves in the
history of religion and its effect on individual minds - its
psychology - all I have written concerning my mental condition at that
period, will come as a twice-told tale, since thousands and millions
of men have undergone similar experiences and have related them in
numberless books.
