On the other side, and in favour of the partisans of the unity of the Ego, the effect of the new evidence is to raise their claim to a far higher ground, and to substantiate it for the first time with the strongest presumptive proof which can be imagined for it;--a proof, namely, that the Ego can and does survive--not only the minor disintegrations which affect it during earth-life--but the crowning disintegration of bodily death. In view of this unhoped-for ratification of their highest dream, they may be more than content to surrender as untenable the far narrower conception of the unitary Self which was all that "common-sense philosophies" had ventured to claim. The "conscious Self" of each of us, as we call it,--the empirical, the supraliminal Self, as I should prefer to say,--does not comprise the whole of the consciousness or of the faculty within us. There exists a more comprehensive consciousness, a profounder faculty, which for the most part remains potential only so far as regards the life of earth, but from which the consciousness and the faculty of earth-life are mere selections, and which reasserts itself in its plenitude after the liberating change of death. Towards this conclusion, which assumed for me something like its present shape some fourteen years since,[5] a long series of tentative speculations, based on gradually accruing evidence, has slowly conducted me. The conception is one which has hitherto been regarded as purely mystical; and if I endeavour to plant it upon a scientific basis I certainly shall not succeed in stating it in its final terms or in supporting it with the best arguments which longer experience will suggest. Its validity, indeed, will be impressed--if at all--upon the reader only by the successive study of the various kinds of evidence to which this book will refer him. Yet so far as the initial possibility or plausibility of such a widened conception of human consciousness is concerned;--and this is all which can be dealt with at this moment of its first introduction;--I have not seen in such criticism as has hitherto been bestowed upon my theory any very weighty demurrer.[6]