The first view, as usual, is the one which M. Bergson has prevailingly in mind, and communicates most plausibly; while he holds to it he is still talking about the natural world, and so we still know what he is talking about.  On this view, however, personal immortality would be impossible; it would be, if it were aimed at, a self-contradiction in the aim of life; for the diversity of persons would be due to impediments only, and souls would differ simply in so far as they mutilated the message which they were all alike trying to repeat.  They would necessarily, when the spirit was victorious, be reabsorbed and identified in the universal spirit.  This view also seems most consonant with M. Bergson’s theory of primitive reality, as a flux of fused images, or a mind lost in matter; to this view, too, is attributable his hostility to intelligence, in that it arrests the flux, divides the fused images, and thereby murders and devitalises reality.  Of course the destiny of spirit would not be to revert to that diffused materiality; for the original mind lost in matter had a very short memory; it was a sort of cosmic trepidation only, whereas the ultimate mind would remember all that, in its efforts after freedom, it had ever super added to that trepidation or made it turn into.  Even the abstract views of things taken by the practical intellect would, I fear, have to burden the universal memory to the end.  We should be remembered, even if we could no longer exist.

On the other more profound view, however, might not personal immortality be secured?  Suppose the original message said:  Translate me into a thousand tongues!  In fulfilling its duty, the universe would then continue to divide its dream into phantom individuals; as it had to insulate its parts in the beginning in order to dominate and transform them freely, so it would always continue to insulate them, so as not to lose its cross-vistas and its mobility.  There is no reason, then, why individuals should not live for ever.  But a condition seems to be involved which may well make belief stagger.  It would be impossible for the universe to divide its images into particular minds unless it preserved the images of their particular bodies also.  Particular minds arise, according to this philosophy, in the interests of practice:  which means, biologically, to secure a better adjustment of the body to its environment, so that it may survive.  Mystically, too, the fundamental force is a half-conscious purpose that practice, or freedom, should come to be; or rather, that an apparition or experience of practice and freedom should arise; for in this philosophy appearance is all.  To secure this desirable apparition of practice special tasks are set to various nuclei in felt space (such, for instance, as the task to see), and the image of a body (in this case that of an eye) is gradually formed, in order to execute that task; for evidently the Absolute can see only if it looks, and to look