quarter cease.  But the memories and conceptual relations that have spun themselves round the perceptions of that person remain in the larger earth-life as distinct as ever, and form new relations and grow and develop throughout all the future, in the same way in which our own distinct objects of thought, once stored in memory, form new relations and develop throughout our whole finite life.  This is Fechner’s theory of immortality, first published in the little ‘Buechlein des lebens nach dem tode,’ in 1836, and re-edited in greatly improved shape in the last volume of his ‘Zend-avesta.’

We rise upon the earth as wavelets rise upon the ocean.  We grow out of her soil as leaves grow from a tree.  The wavelets catch the sunbeams separately, the leaves stir when the branches do not move.  They realize their own events apart, just as in our own consciousness, when anything becomes emphatic, the background fades from observation.  Yet the event works back upon the background, as the wavelet works upon the waves, or as the leaf’s movements work upon the sap inside the branch.  The whole sea and the whole tree are registers of what has happened, and are different for the wave’s and the leaf’s action having occurred.  A grafted twig may modify its stock to the roots:—­so our outlived private experiences, impressed on the whole earth-mind as memories, lead the immortal life of ideas there, and become parts of the great system, fully distinguished from one another, just as we ourselves when alive were distinct, realizing themselves no longer isolatedly, but along with one another as so many partial systems, entering thus into new combinations, being affected by the perceptive experiences of those living then, and affecting the living in their turn—­altho they are so seldom recognized by living men to do so.

If you imagine that this entrance after the death of the body into a common life of higher type means a merging and loss of our distinct personality, Fechner asks you whether a visual sensation of our own exists in any sense less for itself or less distinctly, when it enters into our higher relational consciousness and is there distinguished and defined.

—­But here I must stop my reporting and send you to his volumes.  Thus is the universe alive, according to this philosopher!  I think you will admit that he makes it more thickly alive than do the other philosophers who, following rationalistic methods solely, gain the same results, but only in the thinnest outlines.  Both Fechner and Professor Royce, for example, believe ultimately in one all-inclusive mind.  Both believe that we, just as we stand here, are constituent parts of that mind.  No other content has it than us, with all the other creatures like or unlike us, and the relations which it finds between us.  Our eaches, collected into one, are substantively identical with its all, tho the all is perfect while no each is perfect, so that we have to admit that