I am inclined to believe that, to most people, to-day, the soul means no more than the personality, and the conviction that this cannot be reduced to the body. It stands for consciousness and character as somehow rooted in something permanent. Plato's idea of the {146} soul as a simple, indestructible substance awakens hardly an echo in their minds--and why should it? Something which guarantees and makes possible the continued existence of their conscious self after the death of the body is the association which is uppermost. Educated people, at least, have outgrown the ghost-soul of primitive times and have put their hope in the inability of the philosophic scientist to explain life and consciousness without appeal to agencies which are inexplicable on naturalistic terms. But it is obvious that such a basis is overhung by an ever-threatening danger. If the mind-body problem were solved in a concrete, empirical way, what then? It has been customary to examine the question of immortality from three angles which may be called, respectively, the empirical, the ethical and the philosophical. The more recent drift of philosophy toward realism has tended to bring the first and the third methods of approach closer together. It has increasingly been felt that philosophy cooperates with the special sciences and is inseparable from them. The ethical argument in favor of immortality is oftener found in poetry than in serious books on ethics. It cannot be said to have sufficient force to swing the balance established by science and a realistic philosophy in touch with science.