But it will be objected that there are other births of energy from lower to higher condition; but such births do not insure continued existence in the higher condition. In the gradual evolution of energy described on page 316, when a portion rises from physical to chemical, from chemical to vital, or from vital to sentient, it does not remain ever after in the higher condition--there is no immortality on the higher plane. On the contrary, all these lower forms of energy are continually ascending and descending; transformation is downward as well as upward. Why should there be an exception in this last birth? In these successive upward metamorphoses of energy why should the last only be permanent? I answer: Because it reaches at last its final goal, viz., complete individuation, as free, self-acting spirit; it reaches again the spiritual plane from which it sprang, and becomes thereby a partaker of the Divine nature; because it comes at last into moral relations with the absolute--the Divine--and therefore above the plane of shifting changes. If the scale of energy be likened to a ladder with many rounds, reaching from the plane of matter to the plane of spirit, then so long as energy is on the ladder it ascends and descends; but, once it reaches the plane of free spirit, it is in a wholly new world in which eternal ascent is the law. Perhaps I can best bring out the reasonableness of my view by comparing it with other possible alternative views. There are three possible views as to the nature, the origin, and the destiny of the human spirit: (1.) That it pre-existed always--uncreated, underived, eternal, both ways--backward as well as forward. Therefore, as it never began, so it will never end. It is _immortal of its own right_. This is substantially the view of Plato, of Leibnitz, and perhaps some other philosophers. (2.) That it is derived from God _directly_--created at once _without natural process_; that at the moment of creation of the first man Adam, and at some unknown time and in some inscrutable way in the history of each individual, it was _injected into the body from the outside_, and at the same time _endowed_ with immortality. This, I take it, is the orthodox view. (3.) That it was indeed derived from God, but not directly; created indeed, but only by natural process of evolution; that it indeed pre-existed, but only as embryo in the womb of Nature, slowly developing through all geological times, and finally coming to birth as _living_ soul in man. Thus it _attains_ immortality at a certain stage of development, viz., at spirit-birth. This is the view I have striven to enforce.