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change their names in each incarnation. A man may know a certain woman
as Miss Smith when she is a slip of a girl, free from care and with
little serious thought of life. Twenty years later she may be Mrs.
Brown, his wife, a thoughtful matron, the mother of children. She has
changed her name and greatly changed in character, too, but she is the
same individual.

It seems probable that a person may change quite as much between
infancy and old age as between one incarnation and the next. Even the
difference between a youth of twenty years who is an artist and the same
man at three score and ten who has given forty years to scientific study
and research, may be enormous, but the individuality is, of course,
identical. It has rapidly evolved and greatly improved, and that is just
what occurs to the soul by repeated rebirths--steady evolutionary
development of the eternal individual.

The reincarnating process by which the soul evolves is somewhat
analogous to the growth of a young physical body. The process consists
of alternating periods of objective and subjective activity. How does
the body of a child grow? It consumes food, the objective activity. It
then digests and assimilates it, the subjective activity. These periods
must alternate or there can be no growth, because neither alone is the
complete process. The one is the complement of the other. So it is in
the evolution of the soul by reincarnation. The experience of life is
the food on which the soul grows. The physical plane existence is the
objective period in which the food is gathered. At death the man passes
into the invisible realms where the subjective process is carried on. He
digests and assimilates his experiences and the gist is stored in the
causal body and its growth includes an actual increase in size, just as
in the case of the child's physical body.

The same law governs mental and moral growth as it operates in our
daily affairs. A young man is in college. How does his intellect grow?
By precisely the same process of alternating periods of objective and
subjective activity. In the class room the instructor puts a
mathematical problem on the blackboard and explains it. With the outward
senses of sight and hearing, aided by pencil and notebook, the student
gathers the food for mental growth. This period of objective activity
comes to an end and he then retires to the privacy of his room and there
the subjective period begins. He deeply thinks ove