The most respectable motive which leads men to desire a continuance of active participation in the affairs of time is that which Tennyson expresses in the often-quoted line, ’Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.’  We may feel that we have it in us to do more for God and our fellow-men than we shall be able to accomplish in this life, even if it be prolonged to old age.  Is not this a desire which we may prefer as a claim?  And in any case, it is admitted that time is the form of the will.  Are we to have no more will after death?  Further, is our probation over when we die?  What is to be the fate of that large majority who, so far as we can see, are equally undeserving of heaven and of hell?  To these questions no answer is possible, because we are confronted with a blank wall of ignorance.  We do not know whether there will be any future probation.  We do not know whether Robert Browning’s expectation of ‘other tasks in other lives, God willing,’ will be fulfilled.

         ’And I shall thereupon
          Take rest, ere I be gone
    Once more on my adventure brave and new.’

The question here raised is whether there is such a thing as reincarnation.  This belief, so widely held at all times by eminent thinkers, and sanctioned by some of the higher religions, cannot be dismissed as obsolete or impossible.  But if it is put in the form, ’Will the same self live again on earth under different conditions?’ it may be that no answer can be given, not only because we do not know, but because the question itself is meaningless.  The psycho-physical organism which was born at a certain date and which will die on another date is compacted of idiosyncrasies, inherited and acquired, which seem to be inseparable from its history as born of certain parents and living under certain conditions.  It is not easy to say what part of such an organism could be said to maintain its identity, if it were housed in another body and set down in another time and place, when all recollection of a previous state has been (as we must admit) cut off.  The only continuity, it seems to me, would be that of the racial self, if there is such a thing, or of the directing intelligence and will of the higher Power which sends human beings into the world to perform their allotted tasks.

The second objection, which, as I have said, is closely connected with the first, is that idealism offers us a merely impersonal immortality.  But what is personality?  The notion of a world of spiritual atoms, ‘solida pollentia simplicitate,’ as Lucretius says, seems to be attractive to some minds.  There are thinkers of repute who even picture the Deity as the constitutional President of a collegium of souls.  This kind of pluralism is of course fundamentally incompatible with the presuppositions of my paper.  The idea of the ‘self’ seems to me to be an arbitrary fixation of our average state of mind, a half-way house which belongs to no