are assured that the belief in Immortality is thus central and essential, it cannot remain mere belief, but must, like our belief in God, be found to rest upon experience and intuition. That means that we must cultivate a sense of our own imperishable essence; and that we can only do in the light of our relations with God. Just as our ordinary self-consciousness is evoked and sustained by intercourse with an external world, so we must develop a higher self-consciousness correlated in like manner with our personal knowledge of God. Then only will immortality appear to us not as a mere future fact which we can infer, but as an actual quality of our selfhood. Annihilation will be not only incredible, but unthinkable. This must be the ideal. But if we consider how difficult it is for most people to realize what is meant by a direct consciousness even of God -how ready they are to confuse it with feeling-then we shall not be surprised if such a consciousness of immortality seems peculiarly difficult to make good. For God, at least, is present; but everlastingness is future. I have stated the problem in a form which partly meets this difficulty. The soul may be conscious of itself as an eternal entity, and if eternal then necessarily everlasting. But even so, to some people "eternal" does not directly imply "everlasting." We need to see eternity in time; to view our own personal lives in the light of ultimate cosmic purpose. This leads to the crux of our problem.

In some sense, at least, the soul is in time, and death is in time. If we fail to do more than grasp our eternity by abstracting from time (as in more or less ecstatic conditions) then when we resume the ordinary time-thread our direct experience of our eternal being is left behind. We may still value the remembrance of it as evidence; we may even be able in some degree to reproduce it at will whenever we turn our thoughts in that direction: but, for all that, the mind may still oscillate between two mutually exclusive attitudes towards reality. The ordinary consciousness of self, as carried along with the general flow of things in this perishable world, cannot as such retain a sense of immortality which has been reached merely by rising above time and space. So it may become easy to explain away these exalted experiences, or, if not to explain them away, at least to think that they are satisfied by some theory of absorption into the universal life, with extinction of our individual being.

What we need is to fuse the two spheres of self-consciousness, the higher and the lower, self as in God and self as in the world. For each of us is one self, not two. Just as the one God is

both transcendent and immanent, above the world yet in the world, so it is with the spiritual man. Our regenerated self

consciousness-born anew in God-should show us that the higher self is one with the lower, embraces the spheres of common experience, and is the final arbiter in our reasonings on human destiny. For Reason itself must be its servant. Selfconsciousness is essentially intellectual. It is not mere selfenvisagement, but self-understanding. It is intuition; but all our intuitions are ideas, though something more, and as such they must take their place in the general system of our ideas. Note, for instance, how Mr. A. C. Benson, in his latest book, "Thy Rod and Thy Staff," takes intellectual hold of his newly won intuition of an imperishable selfhood, and makes it at home in the structure of his thought. Immortality will not be wholly rational to us unless the Immortal in us captures the machinery of Reason.

Various conditions are required for this. At present I merely want to insist that the belief in immortality need not be merely secondary and inferential, nor yet rest upon mere external authority: that it may, like our belief in God, become an inward possession; and that the reason of this is that the fear of extinction in or after death pre-supposes the quality of mortality a question of present fact-and that this quality of mortality is directly excluded from the higher self-consciousness that sees self in God.

The moral and religious conditions for realizing this higher self-consciousness need not detain us now, but they must never be forgotten. To live the eternal life is the way to realize our deathlessness. Then the general problem of human destiny beyond the grave can be approached from that standpoint. But what concerns us now-assuming the presence of those spiritual impulses and ideals that our religion demands-is simply to consider what intellectual conditions are necessary to bring home the assured hope of immortality.

Obviously, if we are agreed so far, it will be plain that mere logic, working with definitions and abstractions, will not suffice. Nor will equally abstract discussions based on science, though they may possess a relative value. The intellect can perform two services, however. First, it can bring the idea of immortality into relation with our other religious ideas, which are also themselves not mere ideas, but objects, more or less, of appropriation. and experience. Our ideas about God and our relation to Him. must determine what we understand by our own selfhood. Pantheism, for instance, corresponds to an imperfect self

consciousness, and lends itself to a denial of personal continuation after death. So, on the other hand, I believe it could be shown that the Christian religion not merely proclaims immortality, but so adjusts the focus of self-consciousness as to bring about its inward realization. We shall be able, I hope, to glance at one aspect of this most interesting question before it is necessary to close.* But the main point at present is that intellectual coherence, not merely mystic apprehension, is necessary for the stable and inward possession of an idea. The doctrine of Immortality, if it is really to hold us, must take its necessary place in the whole system of our thought. Then no one can pretend that it is a mere feeling, even though its roots lie deeper than the discursive intellect. Secondly, the intellect can rule out imperfect theories. There are many philosophic conceptions of personality which are untrue to the fullness of what we mean when in ordinary intercourse we say, "I," "he," or "you."

not.

Is this the condemnation of Philosophy? Most assuredly A popular error prevails, that Philosophy is essentially abstract and seeks to transcend experience. In truth, its proper aim is to interpret and to deepen experience. Any philosophy that fails to do this, fails as a philosophy, and only Philosophy can show it its mistakes. Empirical and would-be scientific explanations of first principles offend in this way just as much as Idealism.

Following up this second line of argument it may be well to enquire why the significance of personality so readily escapes reflection when we try to reflect upon it. We may divide the theories of the soul into two main divisions, the empirical and the idealistic.

Now the word " empirical" would strictly include that direct experience of a deathless selfhood which I have maintained to be the positive basis upon which our belief in immortality should rest. Professor Royce has said that Mysticism is Empiricism carried to the furthest point. This is true, strictly speaking, but it is just when one carries a principle to its furthest point that it becomes transformed. Empiricism ordinarily means, not the actual experience of the object we want to understand, but inferences from, or combinations of, other experiences. So the empirical self" is not the self experienced as such, but the self as supposed to be made up of a succession of psychic states. Hume treated these states as

See paragraph near top of p. 20.

essentially distinct, however closely running into one another. There was no internal connection between them. But the late William James may be taken to represent the more modern form of Psychological Empiricism. He refuses, like Hume, to call in a soul or principle of unity to connect all our thoughts and feelings into a whole; but he considers that Hume has not done justice to the actual unity which these psychic states present.* The "Thought" of the moment makes its own connections with past thoughts. If I recognize an object as a rose, that recognition itself connects the phenomenon with the other similar phenomena. If I recall a past experience, my thought of it appropriates it as my own, because the revival of that experience is characterized by a sense of "warmth and intimacy" which do not belong to our thoughts of the experiences of other people. And yet all the time it is only the thought of the moment that makes these connections. James finds all he wants for the explanation of the unity of the Ego in the actual phenomena of consciousness as a temporal stream of psychic states. True he is more than an Associationist. He is not satisfied with any mere external combinations of impressions with impressions. The connection is more inward than that. Old impressions never do return unchanged. But the new bear intrinsic reference to them. The form and colour of a rose is not more essential to my apprehension of it than its resemblance to other roses.

So there is a unity and a continuity, but only among the thoughts themselves. He sees no need to postulate an underlying "pure Ego," or a radical "unity of apperception." He criticizes Hume and the Associationists on purely psychological grounds. They have merely observed the phenomenon of consciousness imperfectly. On the other hand, those who have argued for a soul substance have introduced, according to him, a superfluous reduplication which explains nothing, because it is itself unknown. All the unity that the phenomena possess is itself phenomenal, and no more needs to be explained ab extra than the discontinuity and diversity which reveal themselves over against it.

It will be well to comment on this position in a broad and general manner so that the commentary may apply to the empirical attitude as a whole. Also we shall, I hope, be brought nearer to a positive conception.

*Principles of Psychology, vol. i, p. 352, see ch. x, passim.

James' theory may be sound enough as a mere matter of introspective observation, though in that case it is hardly a theory. But it only raises questions as to the position, value, and even possibility, of a purely phenomenal psychology. At any rate, what concerns us here is the abstractness of the whole point of view, with all its appeal to experience. James seems to think that we are bringing self-consciousness up to its highest point when we try to fix before our minds the "pure Ego," and that because we fail to do so we may discard it as a scholastic fiction. But consider what this psychological introspection is, how narrow its significance, how limited its scope. When I set my own mind before me as a specimen of Mind as such, I have abstracted already from my individual personality. For personality is always specific; my essential nature does not consist simply in being a member of the class person," but in being the particular person which I am. "I" is not really a particular, but a singular term; and as singular I am correlated with other persons, not merely by general links which science can classify, but by specific relationships, which are, in a measure, unique, as truly as the persons which they unite are unique. The differences, not merely the general fact of differences, are essential.

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Not, of course, all equally so. We do not ordinarily think of our circumstances and surroundings as if they were such that they could not be changed without the loss or weakening of our identity. But that is because we generally think of them in sections, not as a whole. It remains true that apart from what we become through our own free will—we are what we are by virtue of heredity and environment, and that both of these imply that we are units in a world of persons-the one from the point of view of time, the other of space. And to say "I am I," is meaningless as an abstract formula. To mean anything, it must mean I am that specific person, with specific differences from others, and with such and such a record of social life and action that is indicated by the use of my name.

Now, when we rise to the religious standpoint, which is assumed in this paper (and by no means repudiated by James himself), then this conclusion is further strengthened. It is in relation to ideals that the greatness of personality appears. And our individual differences stand out all the more strongly, when we think of all awakened humanity as travelling by different paths to the same ultimate goal, living, according to their widely different capacities and opinions, for those great ideals which are the same for us all, and are all summed up