These things are not said lightly, but embody a lifetime of thought and inquiry.

My message is that there is some great truth in the idea of pre-existence; - not an obvious truth, nor one easy to formulate, a truth difficult to express,-not to be identified with the guesses of re-incarnation and transmigration, which may be fanciful. We may not have been individuals before, but we are chips or fragments of a great mass of mind, of spirit, and of life, drops, as it were, taken out of a germinal reservoir of life, and incubated until incarnate in a material body.

This view is illustrated by Tennyson's

'Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
From that true world within the world we see,
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore.'

Or again by his famous simile of a tide pouring in from the ocean, filling the harbour with a copious flood, and then ebbing whence it came.

And the teaching of 'In Memoriam' is clearly that individuality begins with the construction of the body. It is surely true that Spirit unites, while Body separates. And so

each fragment of spirit is supposed to become a separate individual through incarnation:

'So rounds he to a separate mind

From whence clear memory may begin,

As thro' the frame that binds him in

His isolation grows defined.'

'This use may lie in blood and breath.'

--

Incarnation is the right word for conception and birth; it is an entering into flesh, a gradual incarnation, gradual accretion of terrestrial matter, gradual entering into relation with it. The soul may be said slowly to construct the body, and continuously to leak in and take possession of the gradually improving conditions. Constructing the body, I say, out of earthly particles,-particles picked up in the first instance by plants and animals, then utilised by us, guided and arranged and compacted into a body, so as to represent our practical and terrestrial aspect, that is, such part of us as can be represented by what Tennyson calls the house of a brute let to the soul of a man.'

For we are clearly taught by Science that

man on his bodily side must trace his ancestry through the animals; which are thus in a sense his remote kindred. There was evidently a long series of stages through which the physical mechanism of man must pass, before human faculties could efficiently utilise and manipulate terrestrial matter:

'Hints and previsions of which faculties,
Are strewn confusedly everywhere about
The inferior natures, and all lead up higher,
All shape out dimly the superior race,

The heir of hopes too fair to turn out false,
And man appears at last.'

The long period of preparation necessary, before the gradually improving body became tenantable by anything that could be called a human soul, is most impressive. Not suddenly, but through cosmic processes of evolution, was this brought about; and there must have come a time when a definite stage in the long history could in imagination be acclaimed with delight in a triumphant hymn: It is finished, man is made!'

"Of the earth, earthy,' the primeval man was, truly, but he stood erect, he felt himself to be risen above the beasts; and a splendid promise

must have shone in the eyes of that nascent intelligence who in some epoch of trouble and distress first on the earth uplifted hands of prayer.

'Through such fierce hours thy brute forefather won Thy mounting hope, the adventure of the son;

Such pains astir his glooming heart within
That nameless Creature wandered from his kin;

With hopes half-born, with burning tears unshed,
Bowed low his terrible and lonely head;

With arms uncouth, with knees that scarce could kneel
Upraised his speechless ultimate appeal; -

Ay, and Heaven heard, and was with him, and gave
The gift that made him master and not slave . . .
And some strange light, past knowing, past control,
Rose in his eyes, and shone, and was a soul.

Finished indeed?-no, far from finished, never finished. Anticipation lies ahead, to all infinity: but the evolution of the human body was a momentous achievement; for thereby a terrestrial existence was rendered possible for beings at a comparatively advanced stage of spiritual evolution. Plato and Shakespeare and Newton lay then in the womb of the future. And anticipation still forges ahead.

CHAPTER III

THE PERMANENCE OF PERSONALITY

HE beautiful animal body, thus slowly

fitted for our reception, we utilise; and with it we are associated, being able by its aid to manifest ourselves to others, and to operate and do work on the planet, for a short period of some seventy years. It is our machine, our instrument for manifestation, for living a practical and useful life, for coming into relation with other people, who are likewise temporarily associated with matter, and by it partly displayed and partly disguised. An infant is thus apostrophised by Tennyson:

'Oh dear Spirit half lost

In thine own shadow and this fleshly sign.'

The body is our only means of effecting physical movements in the realm of matter the only means we have for dealing with and altering the planet which is our temporary home. The body is by no means a perfect engine, al