Indeed, it cannot in any proper sense be said ever to have left that storehouse, though it has been made to interact with the world for a time; and, if we might so express it, it may be thought of as carrying back with it, into the general reservoir, any individuality, and any experience and training or development, which it can be thought of as having acquired here. Such a statement as this last cannot be made of magnetism, to which no known law of evolution and progress can be supposed to apply; but of life, of anything subject to continuous evolution or linear progress embodied in the race, of any condition not cyclically determinate and returning into itself, but progressing and advancing—acquiring fresh potentialities, fresh powers, fresh beauties, new characteristics such as perhaps may never in the whole universe have been displayed before—of everything which possesses such powers as these, a statement akin to the above may certainly be made. To all such things, when they reach a high enough stage, the ideas of continued personality, of memory, of persistent individual existence, not only may, but I think must, apply; notwithstanding the admitted return of the individual after each incarnation to the central store from which it was differentiated and individualised. Even so a villager, picked out as a recruit and sent to the seat of war, may serve his country, may gain experience, acquire a soul and a width of horizon such as he had not dreamt of; and when he returns, after the war is over, may be merged as before in his native village. But the village is the richer for his presence, and his individuality or personality is not really lost; though to the eye of the world, which has no further need for it, it has practically ceased to be. CHAPTER IX WILL AND GUIDANCE (_Partially read to the Synthetic Society in February 1903._)