Suns yield up their ghosts of flame; but out of their graves new suns rush into being. Corpses of worlds pass all to some solar funeral pyre; but out of their own ashes they are born again. This earth must die: her seas shall be Saharas. But those seas once existed in the sun; and their dead tides, revived by fire, will pour their thunder upon the coasts of another world. Transmigration--transmutation: these are not fables! What is impossible? Not the dreams of alchemists and poets;--dross may indeed be changed to gold, the jewel to the living eye, the flower into flesh. What is impossible? If seas can pass from world to sun, from sun to world again, what of the dust of dead selves,--dust of memory and thought? Resurrection there is,--but a resurrection more stupendous than any dreamed of by Western creeds. Dead emotions will revive as surely as dead suns and moons. Only, so far as we can just now

discern, there will be no return of identical individualities. The reapparition will always be a recombination of the preexisting, a readjustment of affinities, a reintegration of being informed with the experience of anterior being. The Cosmos is a Karma.

Merely by reason of illusion and folly do we shrink from the notion of self-instability. For what is our individuality? Most certainly it is not individuality at all: it is multiplicity incalculable. What is the human body? A form built up out of billions of living entities, an impermanent agglomeration of individuals called cells. And the human soul? A composite of quintillions of souls. We are, each and all, infinite compounds of fragments of anterior lives. And the universal process that continually dissolves and continually constructs personality has always been going on, and is even at this moment going on, in every one of us. What being ever had a totally new feeling an absolutely new idea? All our emotions and thoughts and wishes, however changing and growing through the varying seasons of life, are only compositions and recompositions

of the sensations and ideas and desires of other folk, mostly of dead people,--millions of billions of dead people. Cells and souls are themselves recombinations, present aggregations of past knittings of forces,--forces about which nothing is known save that they belong to the Shadow-Makers of universes.