The second objection, which, as I have said, is closely connected with the first, is that idealism offers us a merely impersonal immortality. But what is personality? The notion of a world of spiritual atoms, '_solida pollentia simplicitate_,' as Lucretius says, seems to be attractive to some minds. There are thinkers of repute who even picture the Deity as the constitutional President of a _collegium_ of souls. This kind of pluralism is of course fundamentally incompatible with the presuppositions of my paper. The idea of the 'self' seems to me to be an arbitrary fixation of our average state of mind, a half-way house which belongs to no order of real existence. The conception of an abstract ego seems to involve three assumptions, none of which is true. The first is that there is a sharp line separating subject from object and from other subjects. The second is that the subject, thus sundered from the object, remains identical through time. The third is that this indiscerptible entity is in some mysterious way both myself and my property. In opposition to the first, I maintain that the foci of consciousness flow freely into each other even on the psychical plane, while in the eternal world there are probably no barriers at all. In opposition to the second, it is certain that the empirical self is by no means identical throughout, and that the spiritual life, in which we may be said to attain real personality for the first time, is only 'ours' potentially. In opposition to the third, I repeat that the question whether it is 'my' soul that will live in the eternal world seems to have no meaning at all. In philosophy as in religion, we had better follow the advice of the Theologia Germanica and banish, as far as possible, the words 'me and mine' from our vocabulary. For personality is not something given to start with. It does not belong to the world of claims and counter-claims in which we chiefly live. We must be willing to lose our soul on this level of experience, before we can find it unto life eternal. Personality is a teleological fact; it is here in the making, elsewhere in fact and power. So in the case of our friends. The man whom we love is not the changing psycho-physical organism; it is the Christ in him that we love, the perfect man who is struggling into existence in his life and growth. If we ask what a man is, the answer may be either, 'He is what he loves,' or 'He is what he is worth.' The two are not very different. Thus I cannot agree with Keyserling, who in criticising this type of thought (with which, none the less, he has great sympathy) says that 'mysticism, whether it likes it or not, ends in an impersonal immortality.' For impersonality is a purely negative conception, like timelessness. What is negated in 'timelessness' is not the reality of the present, but the unreality of the past and future. So the 'impersonality' which is here (not without warrant from the mystics