persist that hereafter we may recognize it as a spiritual personality.  In other words, assuming the existence of a soul of which the universe and all it contains are but so many manifestations, it is dimly conceivable that with the cessation, or rather the transformation, of any particular manifestation, the effects may so persist as to be forever known and recognizable,—­not by parts of the one soul, which has no parts, but by the soul itself.

Therefore all things are immortal.  Nothing is so lost to the infinite soul as to be wholly and totally obliterated.  The withering of a flower is as much the act of the all-pervading soul as the death of a child; but the life and death of a human being involve activities of the soul so incomparably greater than the blossoming of a plant, that the immortality of the one, while not differing in kind, may be infinitely more important in degree.  The manifestation of the soul in the life of the humming-bird is slight in comparison with the manifestation in the life of a man, and the traces which persist forever in the case of the former are probably insignificant compared with the traces which persist in the case of the latter; but traces must persist, else there is no immortality of the individual; at the same time there is not the slightest reason for urging that, whereas traces of the soul’s activity in the form of man will persist, traces of the soul’s activity in lower forms of life and in things inanimate will not persist.  There is no reason why, when the physical barriers which exist between us and the soul that is within and without us are destroyed, we should not desire to know forever all that the universe contains.  Why should not the sun and the moon and the stars be immortal,—­as immortal in their way as we in ours, both immortal in the one all-pervading soul?

“The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and the magazine of the soul.  In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not solve,” said Emerson in the lecture he called “Over-Soul.”

What a pity to use the phrase “Over-Soul,” which removes the soul even farther aloof than it is in popular conception, or which fosters the belief of an inner and outer, or an inferior and a superior soul; whereas Emerson meant, as the context shows, the all-pervading soul.

But, then, who knows what any one else thinks or means?  At the most we only know what others say, what words they use, but in what sense they use them and the content of thought back of them we do not know.  So far as the problems of life go we are all groping in the dark, and words are like fireflies leading us hither and thither with glimpses of light only to go out, leaving us in darkness and despair.

It is the sounding phrase that catches the ear.  “For fools admire and like all things the more which they perceive to be concealed under involved language, and determine things to be true which can prettily tickle the ears and are varnished over with finely sounding phrase,” says Lucretius.  We imagine we understand when we do not; we do not really, truly, and wholly understand Emerson or any other man; we do not understand ourselves.