ind and matter,
of the soul and body, must terminate somewhere, must merge in
identity. Whether that identity be the Creator of theology or the
soul of speculation does not much matter, since the final result
is the same, namely, the immortality of that suprasumption, the
soul.

But the individual, what becomes of the individual in this
assumption of an all-pervading, immortal soul, of which all things
animate and inanimate are but so many activities?

The body, which for a time being is a part of the local
manifestation of the pervading soul, dies and is resolved into its
constituent elements; it is inconceivable that those elements
should ever gather themselves together again and appear in
visible, tangible form. No one could possibly desire they ever
should; those who die maimed, or from sickness and disease, or in
the decrepitude and senility of age, could not possibly wish that
their disordered bodies should appear again; nor could any person
name the exact period of his life when he was so satisfied with
his physical condition that he would choose to have his body as it
then was. No; the body, like the trunk of a fallen tree, decays
and disappears; like ripe fruit, it drops to the earth and
enriches the soil, but nevermore resumes its form and semblance.

The pervading soul, of which the body was but the physical
manifestation, remains; it does not return to heaven or any
hypothetical point in either space or speculation. The dissolution
of the body is but the dissolution of a particular manifestation
of the all-pervading soul, and the immortality of the so-called
individual soul is but the persistence of that, so to speak, local
disturbance in the one soul after the body has disappeared. It is
quite conceivable, or rather the reverse is inconceivable, that
the activity of the pervading soul, which manifests itself for a
time in the body, persists indefinitely after the physical
manifestation has ceased; that, with the cessation of the physical
manifestation, the particular activity which we recognize here as
an individuality will so persist that hereafter we may recognize
it as a spiritual personality. In other words, assuming the
existence of a soul of which the universe and all it contains are
but so many manifestations, it is dimly conceivable that with the
cessation, or rather the transformation, of any particular
manifestation, the effects may so persist as to be forever known
and recognizable,--not by