mics" can give us no unchanging self-hood. Growing with the growth of associated elements, our individuality must change as they change, from infancy to age. We are never the same yesterday and today. Is this Nature's truth? Not to me.

True personal identity, in the present and in the future, is the vested kingdom of all religious aspiration! Continuous individual rectitude becomes impossible otherwise. To exist, yet to be shorn of all that has constituted existence hitherto, explain the fact on whatever theory we may, is a woful outcome for science in this 19th century. Matter may be proved indestructible, force may be proved indestructible, but the great question to us all is: Is there an actual, continuous, unchanging personal unity, the living me, which is also indestructible? Science and religion are equally interested in grounding themselves upon the basis of an imperishable self-hood, if this be possible.

Then is it possible? The present work is an earnest attempt to answer this question in the affirmative. It claims to be in the direct line of modern science; to accept, in their fullest significance, the

generally accepted facts and principles of the physical universe, including the great law of "the correlation and conservation of forces;" in other words, "the new dynamism." But it presumes to offer a new theory of reconciliation between the facts of personal identity and the associated facts of the mutual convertibility of equivalent physical energies. It is worth while to make a life-long personal study of these great questions. Everything is at stake. So long as the wisest men can neither live, nor can cease to live, for any one of us; resolutely attempting to study for oneself, directly from Nature's open book, the character and the duration of personal existence, can involve no undue presumption.

And so long as science fails to come forward in the character of her accredited apostles with a definite answer to the question which is in every heart and on almost every lip; Is my life, immortal life? even the feeblest effort in this direction must be far from really contemptible. The authors of the Unseen Universe have tried to show us that immortality is a physical possibility, perhaps even a natural probability. But more than ever the soul cries

out; Give me a positive assurance that my present conscious life is so deeply grounded in the very constitution of Nature that while this existing order of Nature remains unchanged, I also shall continue unchanged in true personal identity!

Trusting, religious natures, who can find God and Immortality in the Scriptures and in the unquestioned assurances of the soul's own plainest affirmations, may be repelled by this inquiry, at the outset. They believe that immortal life cannot be revealed to us through observation and reasoning. This slow, cold, passionless progress, to them will seem as sheer presumption. To them, this whole discussion will be but as the pitiful attempt of total blindness to portray to others a light of which it knows nothing.

And if there is no Rational Mind behind the universe as its intelligent Architect; if the present order of nature has arisen without plan or prevision, there can be but little expectation that human beings will be able to penetrate to a knowledge of the real nature of ultimate units of being, even if such exist. There may be no definite structures

and no indestructible unities. There may exist no order in phenomena which is not itself destructible with some new turn in the vast cycle of eternal changes. Whatever is, is. That is all.

If, on the other hand, the universe is an infinite, related system of applied thought, in a sense as actual and as literal as that in which a machine or a garden are practical realizations of the thoughts of menthere must be excellent grounds of expectation that we shall yet be able to discover Nature's Basis of Immortal Life. We know that in some sense we are ourselves individualized. We have a present unity of individual consciousness. This consciousness, whether it is to be regarded as destructible or as indestructible, must have a definite structure or constitution. It exists and acts in connection with all the other powers of Nature. Then, by adapted methods of study, mankind can assuredly unravel the present mysteries of physical and psychical individuation.

We can imagine ourselves to be indestructible unities which are conserved in the midst of all changes. But if an Infinite Beneficent Mind has

coördinated the universal constitution of all things, it is hardly reasonable that our conceptions should rise higher than his achievements. A half truth may bewilder and mislead; but the whole truth is organic in the deepest heart of Nature. Men may yet reasonably hope to find a more comprehensive rendering of the scheme through which definite units of being, physical and psychical, may persist as units, and yet be able to coöperate endlessly in a system of universal changes.

But, if possibly this truth can be discovered, no other pursuit in life is at all comparable to this one. So I reasoned. And so I enlisted for the search fully a quarter of a century ago. During all these intervening years, life and immortality have both seemed waiting to be brought into the light of established science. They have been waiting to be proved as admitted facts in nature which could become known to us through a mass of cumulative evidence, all converging toward the truth that the ultimate elements of Universal Nature are all simple and indestructible.

A class of investigators may declaim against the