Kingston drove on unregarding. The road was clear and uneventful; his mind, released from the motorist’s incessant agony as to hens, inexperienced dogs, defiant children, and deaf old women who abruptly cross at corners, was left free to occupy itself with the wonder suggested by his visit of the night before to shadowland. What, after all, was this reality that all men think of? He himself, at once solid and evanescent, of what was he built? Of what were all his neighbours built? Where was the permanent element in them? Flesh and body and bones must go; following the logical sequence, he saw that resemblances must go, recognitions, and the consequent reintegration of bygone personal passions. So far that mysterious old man from the East had been right. These superficial passions belong to the superficial Self, and must pass away when the superficial Self resolves itself once more into the elements of which it had originally been composed; but behind all this, above all this, there must needs be some immortal part, some real Self that could recognise the eternal reality in the creations of an old maid’s vanished brain, and understand that the invisible has a very solid and a very vital existence. As he thought the matter through, the sense of physical personality began to melt away. Gradually he grew into comprehension of the fact that the He of everyday life, the He that has wants, angers, hungers, thirst--the He, in fact, that everyone imagines to be the enduring, everlasting entity, that all men crave and agonize to believe immortal, has really, in the everlasting truth of things, no genuine existence whatever. The only He that could pass on into immortality was the mysterious something behind, the indestructible Thought that could call the body and all its manifestations into being, and then, when tired, dismiss the body again into corruption and go forward on its road. Unable, of course, fully to dissever his consciousness from the consciousness of physical existence, his mind, in the absorbed immobility of his limbs, found itself more and more nearly able to face the fact that its personality had nothing to do with the earthly Kingston Darnley. The earthly Kingston Darnley, the thing that wore clothes, and ate, and drank, and was cold if naked, and cross if hungry, and angry if denied its wishes--that was a mere accident, built of earthly accidents like itself, no more capable of immortality than the food it wanted or the clothes that made so large a part of what it called its existence. As they, in an hour or a year, must dissolve and pass back into their constituent elements so must that phantasmal Self of his resolve itself, in the course of a few seasons more, into its constituent elements again, and die for ever with the death of its own desires. Only the inner, secret Self must go for ever forward upon the upward way, untouched by all the shifting changes which that earthly, ghostly Self might suffer.