By comparing man with the classes of individuals below him, we may see the respects in which he rises infinitely above them. And we may see, too, by this comparison, that immortality is not something to which man is to come beyond death, but something that he has already in the very constitution of the personal spirit. The same may be said of man’s body, that is said of the bodies of trees and birds, its other is the original elements which compose it. The life in a tree cannot other itself, because it is not conscious. The life in a bird cannot other itself because its consciousness is not self-consciousness. But in man’s body there resides a spirit that can other itself. Man, as a personal spirit, can project himself out of himself, and reason with himself and commune with himself. The self he projects out of himself is another self, but not a different self. The other of man’s spirit, then, is not something else, but it is the same spirit. Man is subject and object, active and passive, determiner and determined. Man, as subject, may externalize himself, and thus make of himself his own object, and by this self-separation enrich himself and advance within himself. Beethoven, as a thinking subject, objectified his thought in the symphonies, and thus regaled and thrilled his own spirit. By putting his own thought into the form of sound waves, it came back to him in the rain, and storm, and thunder, and sigh, and murmur of music. As a thinking subject Raphael objectified his own thought in the transfiguration, and thus had it come back to him in a vision as immortal as the spirit that created it. Michael Angelo objectified his own thought in the Last Judgment, and by this self-separation of his spirit, advertised its indestructibility. Homer, as a thinking subject, objectified his thought into the Iliad. This great epic poem has already lived, even on this side of the grave, where the order is change and decay, nearly three thousand years. Are we to conclude that a personal spirit that could deposit itself in numbers never to die, was itself subject to dissolution? This would be to have an effect greater than the cause. The sunbeam may deposit itself in a tree, and thus secure to itself life in embodied form for hundreds of years. But in order that this may be, the sun must send his beams to warm and nourish the tree all the days of its life. The Iliad has lived, however, nearly three thousand years, without the daily ministrations of Homer’s spirit. For a bubble on the sea of life to lift itself into imperishable form and then fall back to mingle with the waves and the waters, is to contradict the principle of the correlation of forces, which declares that action and reaction must always be equal. The expression a spirit makes of itself cannot be more enduring than the spirit itself.