"If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once"

Dostoevsky imagines that belief in immortality is the sustaining groundwater of human love and moral energy. Remove it, the springs vanish; people lose reasons to care beyond self-preservation. He ties immortality to an ultimate horizon, God, soul, eternity, that guarantees significance and justice beyond the grave. Without it, altruism becomes calculus; sacrifice seems irrational; suffering seems meaningless. Love longs for permanence; to love fully is to see the beloved as more than temporary matter, and immortality affirms that dignity.

It need not be only a literal afterlife; symbolic survivals, legacy, memory, art, often substitute. Yet he would argue these are derivative and fragile. When the horizon is strictly finite, short-term pleasure and fear dominate, and the old suspicion that everything is permitted returns. Parents may still nurture and scientists still inquire, but the emotional oxygen, hope that outlives death, grows thin.

Psychologically, consciousness of mortality can paralyze; belief in transcendence buffers anxiety, releasing energy for creativity and tenderness. Ethically, the prospect of ultimate accountability keeps conscience awake; without it, cynicism spreads and power justifies itself. Existentially, a sense of continuity invests actions with meaning and binds generations in mutual obligation.

A counterpoint remains: many love fiercely without faith in eternity. Yet even their devotion may draw upon a cultural reservoir long nourished by transcendence. The provocation is aimed less at disproving secular love than at exposing its vulnerability: when every horizon collapses into extinction, what sustains fidelity in the face of loss?

The answer is stark: belief in immortality, however conceived, is the nerve of human warmth and striving. The danger is not merely hedonism but a slow desiccation of purpose, a spiritual anemia. To keep the living forces, mercy, fidelity, courage, flowing, one must trust that being is deeper than decay. Without such trust, patience withers, forgiveness seems foolish, and the future looks like an arithmetic of dust.