The question of personal immortality stands on a somewhat different footing. Here evidence either way is possible. Persons are part of the everyday world with which science is concerned, and the conditions which determine their existence are discoverable. A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be sceptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal, and that the organised energy of a living body becomes, as it were, demobilised at death, and therefore not available for collective action. All the evidence goes to show that what we regard as our mental life is bound up with brain structure and organised bodily energy. Therefore it is rational to suppose that mental life ceases when bodily life ceases. The argument is only one of probability, but it is as strong as those upon which most scientific conclusions are based.

Bertrand Russell, What I Believe

When I sit quietly, as I did this evening, in the soft breeze from the open window, with the sounds of the birds mingling with the street sounds – human voices, tyres on the road, a distant train horn – merely being alive is infinitely precious, its own stillness bright with presence. And yet I know very well that this one life that I have known is entirely finite; its perfect whatness would not be were it not.

Seen like this, death is a dear friend, as necessary to life’s loveliness as being born. What is there to fear? To dissolve in the end into simple light, the plain isness that underlies all things and yet is no thing? Not fearful, but just right; all things finding their duration as their place – and in that their beauty, and all the wonder that they are.

(See also my post earlier this year, Making friends with death)