This idea, which permeates literature—that man has a spiritual as well as a material origin—emphasises from another point of view the doctrine of the Fall. For the utilisation of a material body, of animal ancestry, exposes the individual to much trial and temptation, and makes him aware of a contest between the flesh and the spirit, or between a lower and a higher self, which constitutes the element of truth in the otherwise mistaken doctrine of “original,” or inherited, or imputed sin. Vicarious sin is a legal fiction: so is vicarious punishment; vicarious suffering is a reality. The mother of a ne’er-do-well knows it: it is undergone by the children of vicious parents; the highest souls have felt it on behalf of the race of man; but it is not artificial or imputed suffering, it is genuine and real; and experience shows that it can have a redeeming virtue. The double nature of man,—the inherited animal tendencies, and the inspired spiritual aspirations, if they can both be fully admitted, reconcile many difficulties. Our body is an individual collocation of cells, which began to form and grow together at a certain date, and will presently be dispersed; but the constructing and dominating reality, called our “soul,” did not then begin to exist; nor will it cease with bodily decay. Interaction with the material world then began, and will then cease, but we ourselves in essence are persistent and immortal. Even our personality and individuality may be persistent, if our character be sufficiently developed to possess a reality of its own. In our present state, truly, the memory of our past is imperfect or non-existent; but when we waken and shake off the tenement of matter, our memory and consciousness may enlarge too, as we rejoin the larger self of which only a part is now manifested in mortal flesh. The ancient doctrine of a previous state of existence, of which we are now entranced into forgetfulness, is inculcated in the familiar lines— “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life’s star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home,” the idea being that the forgetfulness is not complete, especially during infancy; nor need it be complete in moments of inspiration. Myers’ doctrine of the subliminal self is an expanded and modified form of this idea, and is to a large extent apparently justified by a certain range of psychological inquiry: though Myers lays stress, not on memory of a past, but on a present occasional intercommunication between the part and the whole.