mutters from my colleagues of, “Why doesn't he shut up, he's done very well, he's said all he could, he's only spoiling it now”. Confidence, wonderful in itself, can sometimes lack the self-discipline of continence.
Nevertheless confidence is always to be preferred to fear, as a mechanism for deciding what, and how much, one should say or do. It is far more effective; though it should be disciplined. Nor can I see anything distinctive about advocacy; you can see the same mechanism of fear in some people's rock climbing, or in any other activity. But again confidence is best.
Real confidence, utterly superb and self-disciplined confidence, must I think be fearless, and that includes the absence of the fear of death, in all its forms literal and metaphorical. It is, I think, permissible to call this the consciousness of immortality, although the risk of death may be both close and obvious. So the practical question becomes this: “Is it permissible to have the consciousness of immortality, if death is in fact only round the corner; even worse, if death annihilates life, so as to leave no life after death? Is it consistent with mental health?”
It is easier to answer the second half of the question. If everything done in fear, is better done in confidence, then any sane man must desire confidence. Even repentance is better done with composure, than in a state of terror; because with composure you can repent the injury done to the other, and forget self, but in terror you think only of self. And if true confidence is unattainable until one has conquered the fear of death, then any man not mentally sick must desire to conquer the fear of death. If the fear of death once conquered leads straight to belief in immortality of a kind, then one must believe in that immortality. One must believe in it, for the sensible reason that rational, practical, conduct is not possible without it. Similarly if a sense of indwelling enables a man to do things, which he could not do without it, then if he wishes to do those things he…