by day
by impressions and ideas, by experience and action. Nobody questions the
commonplace phenomena of the shaping of individuality and character.
Habits, occupation, tastes, and desires mould a distinct personality out
of the common clay. The experience of death cannot dissolve the
personality. The death-process can neither whitewash a man's sin nor
exalt him beyond his virtue.

And thus it is that he who dearly loved a joke may joke still, and he
who thought he was collecting fine old pictures may still indulge his
taste. Delusions! Not impossible or even unlikely. Kant demonstrated
once for all our complete enslavement by phenomena and our inability to
approach things-in-themselves. Spiritualistic interpretation of
post-mortem conditions offers no exception. Imagination continues to
master our souls. Spiritualism offends us by offering bread-and-butter
when we expect moonshine.

We are loath to part with the belief that death transforms the
character by one great stroke of spiritual lightning. Vanity, envy,
meanness, greed, the foibles and frailties of human nature, repel us
when we imagine their persistence in others after death. We infinitely
prefer the thought that they should be purged and radiant with spiritual
effulgence. We are not so sure about ourselves, for the objective
classification of the qualities which go to form our own character is a
difficult achievement. And the idea of dispensing with essential parts
of our mental equipment does not commend itself to us. There is a point
in all our philosophy where speculation seeks the natural repose of the
unknowable. It is quickly reached when we attempt to probe the mystery
of selfhood.

The plain question whether the dead can communicate with the living
persists in spite of the imperfections of the answer. The war has made
it paramount, and only second in importance to the crucial query: Do
they live? There is a clamour for evidence, signs, messages, testimony.
The human heart cries out for comfort. "Yesterday he breathed the same
air, felt and thought as I do. To-day he lies dead, his body shattered,
his hopes wrecked, his happy laughter silent. Does he know? Does he
feel and remember? Is there an eternal gulf of silence between us?"

O! for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still.

The Church tries vainly to ban the new inquisitiveness. The intercourse
with familiar spirits is condemned as a theological offence, a