ibility would be to be doomed to an
immortal personal life without losing the restrictions and
limitations of our present personal life. If the soul survives the
body it must do so on the strength of its possession of some
transforming energy which shall enable it to supply the place in its
organic being which is at present occupied by the attribute of
sensation. It is quite obvious that if the life of the soul depends
upon the active functioning of all its attributes; and if one of its
attributes, namely sensation, is entirely dependent for its active
functioning upon the life of the body; the life of the soul itself
must also depend upon the life of the body, unless, as I have
hinted, it can transmute its attribute of sensation into some other
attribute suitable to some unknown plane of spiritual existence.

There are indeed certain ecstatic moments when the soul feels as if
such a power of liberation from the bodily senses were actually
within its grasp; but it will inevitably be found, when the great
rhythmic concentration of the apex-thought is brought to bear
upon such a feeling as this, that it either melts completely away, or
is relegated to unimportance and insignificance. Such a feeling,
ecstatic and intense though it may have been, has been nothing
more than a disproportioned activity of the attribute of intuition;
intuition misled in favour of the immortality of the soul, even as
the pure reason is often misled in the direction of the denial of the
soul's existence.

The revelation of the complex vision has no word to say, on either
side, with regard to whether the soul does or does not survive the
death of the body; but it has a very distinct word to say as to the
importance of this whole question; and what it says in regard to
this is--that it is not important at all! The revelation of the complex
vision implies clearly enough that what man were wise to
"assume"--leaving always the ultimate question as an open
question--is that the individual soul and the individual body perish
together.

This assumption is in direct harmony with what we actually _see_;
even though it is in frequent collision with what we sometimes
_feel_. But the essence of the matter is to be found in this, that our
assumption as to the soul's perishing, when the body perishes, is
an assumption, untrue though it may turn out to be, which the soul
itself, when under the power of its apex-thought, is compelled to
make. And it is compe