Finally there arises the question whether the personification of the Invisible King can really, in any comprehensible sense, and for any considerable number of normal human beings, rob death of its sting, the grave of its victory? On this point discussion cannot possibly be conclusive, for the ultimate test is necessarily a personal one. If any sane and sincere person tells me that a certain idea, or emotion, or habit of mind, or even any rite or incantation, has deprived death of its terrors for him, I can only congratulate him, even if I have to confess that my own experience gives me no clue to his meaning. It is not even very profitable to enquire whether a man can be confident of his own attitude towards death unless he has either come very close to its brink himself, or known what it means to witness the extinction of a life on which his whole joy in the present and hope for the future depended. All one can do is to try to ascertain as nearly as possible what the contemner of death really means, and to consider whether his individual experience or feeling is, or is likely to become, typical. One thing we must plainly realize, and that is that, for the purposes of his present argument, Mr. Wells conceives death to be a real extinction of the individual consciousness. He does not formally commit himself to a denial of personal immortality, but it is a contingency which he declines to take into account. Oddly enough, in trying to acclimatize our minds to the idea of such an absolutely incorporeal and immaterial, yet really existent, being as his Invisible King, he comes near to clearing away the one great obstacle to belief in survival after death. "From the earliest ages," he says, "man's mind has found little or no difficulty in the idea of something essential to the personality, a soul or a spirit or both, existing apart from the body and continuing after the destruction of the body, and being still a person and an individual" (p. 59). He does not actually say that there _is_ no difficulty about this conception: he only says that, as a matter of history, the great mass of men have found it easy and natural to believe in ghosts. But it is hard to see any force in his argument at this point unless he means to imply that he himself finds "little or no difficulty" in conceiving the continued existence of a spiritual consciousness and individuality after the dissolution of the body to which it has been attached; and if he does mean this, it is hard to see why he does not take his stand beside Sir Oliver Lodge on the spiritist platform. To many of us, the extreme difficulty of such a conception is the one great barrier to the acceptance of the spiritist theory, for which remarkable evidence can certainly be adduced. This, however, is a digression. So far as _God the Invisible King_ is concerned, Mr. Wells must be taken as ignoring, if not rejecting, the idea of personal immortality.