Modern Spiritualism itself testifies to something of the same sort.  Thus we are told by one of its most gifted and experienced champions, “Sometimes the evidence will come from an impersonal source, from some instructor who has passed through the plane on which individuality is demonstrable.” (M.A. (Oxon.), “Spirit Identity,” p. 7.) Again, “And if he” (the investigator) “penetrates far enough, he will find himself in a region for which his present embodied state unfits him:  a region in which the very individuality is merged, and the highest and subtlest truths are not locked within one breast, but emanate from representative companies whose spheres of life are interblended.” (Id., p. 15.) By this “interblending” is of course meant only a perfect sympathy and community of thought; and I should doubtless misrepresent the author quoted were I to claim an entire identity of the idea he wishes to convey, and that now under consideration.  Yet what, after all, is sympathy but the loosening of that hard “astringent” quality (to use Bohme’s phrase) wherein individualism consists?  And just as in true sympathy, the partial suppression of individualism and of what is distinctive, we experience a superior delight and intensity of being, so it may be that in parting with all that shuts us up in the spiritual penthouse of an Ego—­all, without exception or reserve—­we may for the first time know what true life is, and what are its ineffable privileges.  Yet it is not on this ground that acceptance can be hoped for the conception of immortality here crudely and vaguely presented ill contrast to that bourgeois eternity of individualism and the family affections, which is probably the great charm of Spiritualism to the majority of its proselytes.  It is doubtful whether the things that “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,” have ever taken stronghold of the imagination, or reconciled it to the loss of all that is definitely associated with the Joy and movement of living.  Not as consummate bliss can the dweller on the lower plane presume to command that transcendent life.  At the utmost he can but echo the revelation that came to the troubled mind in “Sartor Resartus,” “A man may do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.”  It is no sublimation of hope, but the necessities of thought that compel us to seek the condition of true being and immortality elsewhere than in the satisfactions of individualism.  True personality can only subsist in consciousness by participation of that of which we can only say that it is the very negation of individuality in any sense in which individuality can be conceived by us.  What is the content or “matter” of consciousness we cannot define, save by vaguely calling it ideal.  But we can say that in that region individual interests and concerns will find no place.  Nay, more, we can affirm that only then has the influx of the new life a free channel when the obstructions of individualism are already removed.  Hence the necessity of the