But to this doctrine Aristotle makes an exception in favour of the active reason. All the lower faculties perish with the body, including the passive reason. Active reason is imperishable and eternal. It has neither beginning nor end. It comes into the body from without, and departs from it at death. God being absolute reason, man's reason comes from God, and returns to him, after the body ceases to function. But before we hail this as a doctrine of personal immortality, we had best reflect. All the lower faculties perish at death, and this includes memory. Now memory is an essential of personality. Without memory our experiences would be a succession of isolated sensations, with no connecting link. What connects my last with my present experience is that my last experience was "mine." To be mine it must be remembered. Memory is the string upon which isolated experiences are strung together, and which makes them into that unity I call myself, my personality. If memory perishes, there can be no personal life. And it must be remembered that Aristotle does not mean merely that, in that future life--if we persist in calling it such--the memory of this life is obliterated. He means that in the future life itself reason has no memory of itself from moment to moment. We cannot be dogmatic about what Aristotle himself thought. He seems to avoid the question. He probably shrank from disturbing popular beliefs on the subject. We have, at any rate, no definite pronouncement from {303} him. All we can say is that his doctrine does not provide the material for belief in personal immortality. It expressly removes the material in that it denies the persistence of memory. Moreover, if Aristotle really thought that reason is a thing, which goes in and out of the body, an exception, in the literal sense, to his general doctrine of soul, all we can say is that he undergoes a sudden drop in the philosophic scale. Having propounded so advanced a theory, he sinks back to the crude view of Plato. And as this is not likely, the most probable explanation is that he is here speaking figuratively, perhaps with the intention of propitiating the religious and avoiding any rude disturbance of popular belief. If so, the statements that active reason is immortal, comes from God, and returns to God, mean simply that the world-reason is eternal, and that man's reason is the actualization of this eternal reason, and in that sense "comes from God" and returns to Him. We may add, too, that since God, though real, is not to be regarded as an existent individual, our return to Him cannot be thought as a continuation of individual existence. Personal immortality is inconsistent with the fundamentals of Aristotle's system. We ought not to suppose that he contradicted himself in this way. Yet if Aristotle used language which seems to imply personal immortality, this is neither meaningless nor dishonest. It is as true for him as for others that the soul is eternal. But eternal does not