once had three boys, whom we
loved better than life; one by one they were taken from us,--they
all died, and my wife and I were left alone in the world; but
after a time a boy was born to us and we gave him the name of the
oldest who died, and then another came and we gave him the name of
my second boy, and then a third was born and we gave him the name
of our youngest;--and so in some mysterious way our three boys
have come back to us; we feel that they went away for a little
while and returned. I have sometimes looked in their eyes and
asked them if anything they saw or heard seemed familiar, whether
there was any faint fleeting memories of other days; they say
'no;' but I am sure that their souls are the souls of the boys we
lost."

And why not? Is it not more than likely that there is but one soul
which dwells in all things animate and inanimate, or rather, are
not all things animate and inanimate but manifestations of the one
soul, so that the death of an individual is, after all, but the
suppression of a particular manifestation and in no sense a
release of a separate soul; so that the birth of a child is but a
new manifestation in physical form of the one soul, and in no
sense the apparition of an additional soul? It is difficult to
think otherwise. The birth and death of souls are inconceivable;
the immortality of a vast and varying number of individual souls
is equally inconceivable. Immortality implies unity, not number.
The mind can grasp the possibility of one soul, the manifestation
of which is the universe and all it contains.

The hypothesis of individual souls first confined in and then
released from individual bodies to preserve their individuality
for all time is inconceivable, since it assumes--to coin a word--
an intersoulular space, which must necessarily be filled with a
medium that is either material or spiritual in its character; if
material, then we have the inconceivable condition of spiritual
entities surrounded by a material medium; if the intersoulular
space be occupied by a spiritual medium, then we have simply souls
surrounded by soul,--or, in the final analysis, one soul, of which
the so-called individual souls are but so many manifestations.

To the assumption of an all-pervading ether which is the physical
basis of the universe, may we not add the suprasumption** of an
all-pervading soul which is the spiritual basis of not only the
ether but of life itself? The seeming duality of m