whether there is really such a thing as soul or self. Are we not deceiving ourselves when we condemn those who refuse to believe in the reality of self as agnostics, atheists, blasphemers, and charge them as immoral and faithless? Is not our own deception so fundamental and thoroughgoing as to put ourselves in a most puzzling position, difficult to extricate from when our cherished notion is brought out into the daylight and mercilessly examined by the tribunal of most advanced thoughts? Let us see how it is.

The first question I wish to ask is: What do we understand by the soul or ego? For instance, when we speak of the immortality of the soul, what mental image do we have about the soul? Do we not think that there is something, possibly within the body, as it cannot be abiding outside of us, which is so subtle and ethereal as to elude our gross senses, but which is a sort of concrete individual existence not belonging to any part of the body, and which departs from the latter when it breathes its last and either ascends to Heaven or goes into Hell, whereby this mythical entity receives its due and last judgment? As to the manner of its ascent or descent after the expiration of its earthly life, we are entirely ignorant, for no soul has ever come down among us to tell its unique experience, its flight through the air. It may be conceived that the soul performs this miraculous deed after the fashion of the Egyptian Ba, which

is pictured commonly with two wings, earthly and material. Does such a ghostly being really reside within us? The very idea seems ridiculous.

We wanted to make the soul as immaterial as possible, but we have only succeeded in making it as material as any body which we have around us. For, however ethereal and astral the soul may be conceived, it cannot be anything but material, as long as it is concrete and individual. And for this reason I can declare that those self-advertising spiritualists are no more nor less than crass materialists,--the designation they wanted so much to hurl upon others.

Next, let us search in our own minds whether there abides such a thing as the self, to which we are so fatally attached. Is the will my self? Is intelligence my self? Are my ideas my self? Is consciousness my self? Are my numerous desires my self? My instincts? my judgment? my imagination? my experience? They are all my self in a sense, to be sure, but are they of such nature as to be thoroughly simple, constant, self-willing, and permanent, as we imagine the soul to be? Consciousness seems to be so, but are there not many occasions in our mental life when consciousness is altogether gone? And, again, are there not many cases of double or triple personality? In these cases, which consciousness shall I have to call my own real, permanent self or soul, which goes after my death to some unknown region? And, again, every one