If ever there were a withdrawal of the maintaining power, all things must return to the source from which they issued—­that is, they must return to God, and be absorbed in him.  All visible Nature must thus pass back into “the Intellect” at last.  “The death of the flesh is the auspices of the restitution of things, and of a return to their ancient conservation.  So sounds revert back to the air in which they were born, and by which they were maintained, and they are heard no more; no man knows what has become of them.  In that final absorption which, after a lapse of time, must necessarily come, God will be all in all, and nothing exist but him alone.”  “I contemplate him as the beginning and cause of all things; all things that are and those that have been, but now are not, were created from him, and by him, and in him.  I also view him as the end and intransgressible term of all things. . . .  There is a fourfold conception of universal Nature—­two views of divine Nature, as origin and end; two also of framed Nature, causes and effects.  There is nothing eternal but God.”

The return of the soul to the universal Intellect is designated by Erigena as Theosis, or Deification.  In that final absorption all remembrance of its past experiences is lost.  The soul reverts to the condition in which it was before it animated the body.  Necessarily, therefore, Erigena fell under the displeasure of the Church.

It was in India that men first recognized the fact that force is indestructible and eternal.  This implies ideas more or less distinct of that which we now term its “correlation and conservation.”  Considerations connected with the stability of the universe give strength to this view, since it is clear that, were there either an increase or a diminution, the order of the world must cease.  The definite and invariable amount of energy in the universe must therefore be accepted as a scientific fact.  The changes we witness are in its distribution.

But, since the soul must be regarded as an active principle, to call a new one into existence out of nothing is necessarily to add to the force previously in the world.  And, if this has been done in the case of every individual who has been born, and is to be repeated for every individual hereafter, the totality of force must be continually increasing.

Moreover, to many devout persons there is something very revolting in the suggestion that the Almighty is a servitor to the caprices and lusts of man, and that, at a certain term after its origin, it is necessary for him to create for the embryo a soul.

Considering man as composed of two portions, a soul and a body, the obvious relations of the latter may cast much light on the mysterious, the obscure relations of the former.  Now, the substance of which the body consists is obtained from the general mass of matter around us, and after death to that general mass it is restored.  Has Nature, then, displayed before our eyes in the origin, mutations, and destiny of the material part, the body, a revelation that may guide us to a knowledge of the origin and destiny of the companion, the spiritual part, the soul?