The certainty thus arising that great numbers of spirits do not leave the earth when they become separated from the human bodies they have inhabited suggests a doubt as to whether any spirits at all go to some other sphere. The evidence available does not remove the doubt. It is true that discarnate spirits sometimes volunteer statements with regard to another world, and sometimes in reply to questions give particulars as to their residence in such a region. But this information is of the unverifiable kind, is often “nonsense,” as Sir Oliver Lodge has said, and is frequently demonstrably false; while it is always discredited by the fact that the spirit who claims to be a resident in a far-distant sphere of being is nevertheless self-admittedly present in a London room or wherever else the sitting may take place. The contradiction is never explained away in any reasonable manner. It may be said, therefore, to be highly probable that death merely opens the way to a further term of existence in this world, and that the spirits of the departed remain for the period of such term in the more or less near neighbourhood of the relatives and friends they have left behind them. The idea of such post-mortem existence being also limited in time arises naturally, and is to be reasonably inferred, from the evidence now being considered. Although discarnate spirits are very numerous, their number, so far as they manifest themselves, is altogether insignificant when compared with that of the deaths that occur from day to day; while if we take into account the consideration that the entire soul-population of the earth becomes discarnate from generation to generation, that is to say, every thirty years or so, we are faced by the fact that living persons are but as a drop in the ocean of possible individual existences. We have also to bear in mind that each of these existences is separate from the rest, and does not originate either from nothing or from inanimate matter or from inanimate energy, as may possibly be the case with Life. If, then, souls when disembodied remain perpetually in this world, it follows, first, that there must be a continual supply of fresh souls coming in from some other region of the universe; and, secondly, that of all these millions of millions of active intelligences only one, here and there, is able or willing to make its presence known to mankind. These conclusions are of so extravagant a character as to be unacceptable; and if it be possible to frame an hypothesis that avoids the difficulties they involve, it would be a reasonable proceeding to adopt such an alternative view.