mystic death, which is as truly a death as that which restores our physical body to the elements.  “Neither I am, nor is aught mine, nor do I exist,” a passage which has been well explained by a Hindu Theosophist (Peary Chand Mittra), as meaning “that when the spiritual state is arrived at, I and mine, which belong to the finite mind, cease, and the soul, living in the universum and participating in infinity with God, manifests its infinite state.”  I cannot refrain from quoting the following passage from the same instructive writer:—­

Every human being has a soul which, while not separable from the brain or nerves, is mind or jivatma, or sentient soul, but when regenerated or spiritualized by yoga, it is free from bondage and manifests the divine essence.  It rises above all phenomenal states—­joy, sorrow, grief, fear, hope, and in fact all states resulting in pain or pleasure, and becomes blissful, realizing immortality, infinitude and felicity of wisdom within itself.  The sentient soul is nervous, sensational, emotional, phenomenal, and impressional.  It constitutes the natural life and is finite.  The soul and the non-soul are thus the two landmarks.  What is non-soul is prakriti, or created.  It is not the lot of every one to know what soul is, and therefore millions live and die possessing minds cultivated in intellect and feeling, but not raised to the soul state.  In proportion as one’s soul is emancipated from prakriti or sensuous bondage, in that proportion his approximation to the soul state is attained; and it is this that constitutes disparities in the intellectual, moral, and religious culture of human beings and their consequent approximation to God.—­Spiritual Stray Leaves, Calcutta, 1879.

He also cites some words of Fichte, which prove that the like conclusion is reached in the philosophy of Western idealism:  “The real spirit which comes to itself in human consciousness is to be regarded as an impersonal pneuma—­universal reason, nay, as the spirit of God Himself; and the good of man’s whole development, therefore, can be no other than to substitute the universal for the individual consciousness.”

That there may be, and are affirmed to be, intermediate stages, states, or discrete degrees, will, of course, be understood.  The aim of this paper has been to call attention to the abstract condition of the immortalized consciousness; negatively it is true, but it is on this very account more suggestive of practical applications.  The connection of the Theosophical Society with the Spiritualist movement is so intimately sympathetic, that I hope one of these may he pointed out without offence.  It is that immortality cannot be phenomenally demonstrated.  What I have called psychic survival can be, and probably is.  But immortality is the attainment of a state, and that state the very negation of phenomenal existence.  Another consequence refers to the direction our culture should take.  We have to compose ourselves to