CHAPTER XVIII.
THE CHRISTIAN HEAVEN OR PERSONAL IMMORTALITY.
The unwedded and ascetic life is the direct way to the heavenly, immortal life, for heaven is nothing else than life liberated from the conditions of the species, supernatural, sexless, absolutely subjective life. The belief in personal immortality has at its foundation the belief that difference of sex is only an external adjunct of individuality, that in himself the individual is a sexless, independently complete, absolute being. But he who belongs to no sex, belongs to no species; sex is the cord which connects the individuality with the species, and he who belongs to no species, belongs only to himself, is an altogether independent, divine, absolute being. Hence only when the species vanishes from the consciousness is the heavenly life a certainty. He who lives in the consciousness of the species, and consequently of its reality, lives also in the consciousness of the reality of sex. He does not regard it as a mechanically inserted, adventitious stone of stumbling, but as an inherent quality, a chemical constituent of his being. He indeed recognises himself as a man in the broader sense, but he is at the same time conscious of being rigorously determined by the sexual distinction, which penetrates not only bones and marrow, but also his inmost self, the essential mode of his thought, will, and sensation. He therefore who lives in the consciousness of the species, who limits and determines his feelings and imagination by the contemplation of real life, of real man, can conceive no life in which the life of the species and therewith the distinction of sex is abolished; he regards the sexless individual, the heavenly spirit, as an agreeable figment of the imagination.
But just as little as the real man can abstract himself from the distinction of sex, so little can he abstract himself from his moral or spiritual constitution, which indeed is profoundly connected with his natural constitution. Precisely because he lives in the contemplation of the whole, he also lives in the consciousness that he is himself no more than a part, and that
