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08638_Field_TCGG T403.txt
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to lose its absolute, or even its imaginary, values: unless
it manifested itself incessantly through new mortal
incarnations, it practically ceased to be immortality. The
King could not die, was not allowed to die, lest scores of
fictions of immortality were to break down; and while
kings died, they were granted the comfort of being told
that at least “as King” they “never died.” The jurists
themselves, who had done so much to build up the myths
of fictitious and immortal personalities, rationalized the
weakness of their creatures, and while elaborating their
surgical distinctions between the immortal Dignity and its
mortal incumbent and talking about two different bodies,
they had to admit that their personified immortal Dignity
was unable to act, to work, to will, or to decide without
the debility of mortal men who bore the Dignity and yet
would return to dust.