ABSTRACT
There have been two predominant ways of conceiving human immortality. The first is to regard human personality as consisting of two separable parts, each in some sense complete in itself, a material body and an immaterial soul. The second way of regarding immortality is that adopted in the Christian creeds, which envisage a soul separable from the body, but consider the resurrection of the body essential for the preservation in an after-life of the individuality of each particular person. This chapter discusses the conception itself, for it leaves difficulties unresolved and significant implications in Spinoza's theory undeveloped. It highlights that consciousness, the basic sense of Spinoza's idea, even at its most primitive level, is never, qua consciousness, confined or limitable to a bare particular of any sort. All that Spinoza writes in the final propositions of the Ethics about human blessedness and the eternal nature of man's mind follows from what has here been set out.
