Life & Mortality Quote by Hu Shih

Hu Shih is trying to pull a culture out of the grip of metaphysical consolation and into something tougher: continuity without guarantees. By grounding his claim in "biological, sociological, and historical knowledge", he plants a flag in modernity. No karma ledger, no cosmic justice, no afterlife loophole. The individual self ends; bodies fail; memory frays. That bluntness matters because early 20th-century China was arguing over what could replace collapsing certainties - classical tradition, imperial legitimacy, and imported religions alike - while the country lurched through revolution and warlord rule. Hu, a leading voice in the New Culture Movement, wanted a workable ethics that didn't depend on supernatural enforcement.

The phrase "for better or worse" is the moral sting. He refuses the comforting story that history trends upward or that our contributions will be redeemed by posterity. What survives is not your purified essence but your effects: institutions, habits of mind, language reforms, scientific attitudes, political disasters. Immortality becomes accountability.

"The Larger" is deliberately abstract, almost annoyingly so. It's not the nation in a chest-thumping sense, not a church, not a party line. It's a composite made from countless small actions accumulating into culture and structure. That vagueness is strategic: it invites commitment to public work while warning against ego. If your afterlife is the downstream consequences of what you do now, the quote quietly argues for pragmatism, civic responsibility, and intellectual humility - not self-erasure, but self-scaling.