time goes on—not merely because by such a definition the doctrine will be better able to hold its own against the inroads of science—but because it gives also a better response to that socialising genius of the human race which is coming more and more to demand a perfect unity as the ultimate expression of good.
That, then, we shall probably find to be the future tendency of idealism. There remains, of course, the Rationalistic school of thought, by which the possibility of individual or personal survival after death is from first to last either absolutely denied or very severely discountenanced as an idea based upon wholly insufficient evidence.
Nevertheless, in some form or another, immortality, conscious or unconscious, personal or impersonal, is accepted by all schools alike; the scientific law of the conservation of energy being one form of it which human reason would now find it very difficult to deny.
Let us for one moment apply that law to our own individual lives and consciousness.
Has life convinced us that we are all self-contained persons? Through social contact we have undergone many changes, many damages, and many repairs. Parts of us have gone to other people, parts of other people have come, to us. We have shed and have absorbed quite as much spiritually as materially; and though through our material changes we retain a certain likeness, so that friends
