Is it not reassuring to know that we cannot get out of the universe--that whatever is real about us cannot be destroyed, but can only suffer change? All the elements that enter into my body must persist; they always have persisted through all the vicissitudes of astronomic and geologic time. We are as sure of that as we are sure of anything, and we are sure that they will continue in some form to exist. We believe it without proof. Our scientific faith carries us over this gulf--our faith in the oneness and integrity of the universe. Is there anything real, in the same sense, in what we call our minds or souls? Huxley was convinced that consciousness was as real as matter and energy, and must persist like them--persist in other persons who follow us; but how about our individual selves? And how about consciousness when the race of man becomes extinct? We can only take refuge in the thought that consciousness will dawn and continue in other worlds through all time, or rather endless time, since the all of a thing implies limits. Equally to make consciousness coeval with matter and energy, we must think of it as having existed in other worlds throughout an endless and beginningless past. But my consciousness and your consciousness are bound up with certain combinations of matter which we know are unstable--in fact, are the result, in a sense, of their instability, their ceaseless change. In the final change, which we call death, what happens to consciousness? When we try to think of it in terms of our actual experience with tangible bodies, we think of it as gone out, non-existent, as truly so as is the flame of the candle when we blow it out, or as is the star form of the snowflake when it is melted. Does it help us any to think of the soul, or consciousness, in terms of the imponderable bodies--light, electricity, radio-activity? Do all these wireless messages that go forth into the air, go on forever? Do these impulses reach the farthest stars, and still persist? Do our thoughts persist upon the ether? Here, in this room, here in this air that you may inclose with your two hands, are vibrating wireless messages from far and near, though we are not able to detect them. Here also the ether may be tremulous with the thoughts of our friends on the other side of the globe, yes, and with the thoughts of our friends who have ceased to live, as we know life. The ether of space may still be vibrating with the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle, of Moses and Solomon. Do we impress ourselves momentarily upon the ether around us, and is this what the mediums and the clairvoyants recover? Is the persistence of our thoughts upon the ether the secret of the mind-reader’s art, and of all the marvelous things disclosed by psychic research? Is this the only immortality, the immortality of the endless persistence of vibrations from our brains? Or must we think of our personalities as disembodied and drifting about as separate entities in the great Nowhere?