There is a good deal of talk indulged in, on the subject of Reincarnation—talk of a rather cheap character. One does not quite see what is the use of saying that the _ego_ will be reincarnated again some day, unless one has some sort of idea what one means by the _ego_, and unless one has some understanding of the sense in which the word “reincarnation” is used. If it is meant that your local and external self, approximately as you and your friends know it to-day—including dress, facial outline, professional skill, accomplishments, habits of mind and body, interests and enthusiasms—is going to repeat itself again in five or five hundred years, or has already appeared in this form in the past; one can only say “impossible!” and “I trust not!” For all these things depend on date, locality, heredity, surrounding institutions, social habits, current morality, and so forth, which—though they have certainly played their part in the spirit’s growth—must infallibly be different at any other period (short of the whole universe repeating itself). And anyhow to have them repeated again _da capo_ at some future time would be terribly dull. But if you say “Of course I don’t mean anything so silly as _that_,” it becomes incumbent on you to say what you do mean. Supposing, for instance, you had been planked down a baby in the Arabian desert, and grown up to maturity or middle age there, instead of where you are, would any of your present-day friends recognize you? Where would be your charming piano-playing, your excellent cricket, your rather sloppy water-color painting, your up-to-dateness in the theatrical world? Where your morality (with three wives of course) or your religion (something about “Christian dogs”), or where your British _sang froid_ and impeccability? And if it is obvious that in such a case as this you would, owing to the changed conditions, be changed out of all recognition, much more—one might say—would this be the case if you had been born five hundred years ago, or were to be born again five hundred years hence. Your whole outlook on life, and its whole impress on you, would be different.