Now there can be no sort of doubt that this rigid and vigorous scientific temper is in the main eminently wholesome and commendable. In the interests of intellectual honesty there is nothing which we need more than to be put on our guard against allowing our reasoning processes to be warped by our feelings. Nevertheless in steering clear of Scylla it would be a pity to tumble straight into the maw of Charybdis, and it behooves us to ask just how far the canons of scientific method are competent to guide us in dealing with ultimate questions. Science has given us so many surprises that our capacity for being shocked or astounded is well-nigh exhausted, and our old unregenerate human nature has been bullied and badgered into something like humility; so that now, at the end of the greatest and most bewildering of centuries, we may fitly pause for a moment and ask how fares it, in these exacting days, with that Unseen World which man brought with him when he was first making his appearance on our planet? And what has science to say about that time-honoured belief that the human soul survives the death of the human body? The position that science irrevocably condemns such a belief seems at first sight a very strong one and has unquestionably had a good deal of weight with many minds of the present generation. Throughout the animal kingdom we never see sensation, perception, instinct, volition, reasoning, or any of the phenomena which we distinguish as mental, manifested except in connection with nerve-matter arranged in systems of various degrees of complexity. We can trace sundry relations of general correspondence between the increasing manifestations of intelligence and the increasing complications of the nervous system. Injuries to the nervous structure entail failures of function, either in the mental operations themselves or in the control which they exercise over the actions of the body; there is either psychical aberration, or loss of consciousness, or muscular paralysis. At the moment of death, as soon as the current of arterial blood ceases to flow through the cerebral vessels, all signs of consciousness cease for the looker-on; and after the nervous system has been resolved into its elements, what reason have we to suppose that consciousness survives, any more than that the wetness of water should survive its separation into oxygen and hydrogen?