After all, what is 'this body of death' from which every man must part? It is, we declare, his medium of transmission and the motor and sensory instrument and condition by means of which he had both inherited a foundation upon which to build his own life, and entered into relations with an outside world of things and persons. Chemically and physically it is a stream of particles always passing away, always being renewed, at one rate or another. The few particles unchanged during his life are not actively sharing his life; they are only its physical supports. Whatever shares his life changes. This stream that his food and the air and the water make, he takes up, transforms, uses and dismisses. All his life long he is dying bodily, and is growing, or should be growing, spiritually. Death is for him the finishing of a process in his body that has always gone on, the final casting away of material elements he has always cast away when he had done with them. And meanwhile, in the spiritual duration of his life, its minister the body has consolidated his self-conscious unity, so that he dies, or should die, a true owner of his real and true and valuable self. For this end earthly life seems to the eye of reason ever to have been striving. Is its striving to be finally in vain? Everything that we have considered in these pages declares the unlikeliness of that. Is a man then to pass from this world bodiless, as some of the ancients thought? To be able to offer a tentative answer to this question we must go back to one of our earlier chapters and remind ourselves of the ether which, the physicist says, interpenetrates all the molecules of our body now, and is the medium of communication everywhere through the systems of the worlds. May I think of the ether, then, as being in my body the medium of communication between me, as spiritual life and consciousness, and the material elements and structures of my body? If the comparatively coarse granular matter of the chemist's colloids and the protoplasmic speck shows such a congruity with my life as makes it fit to live in me and be the bearer to me of ancestral habits, may I not think that a still closer congruity exists between this ether and my life? And, again, is it not possible, or even likely, that it is through the ether of my body that I influence its matter and its matter influences me? If these things are so, then my ether-body is more fully mine and more closely bound to me than is my matter-body. I think of myself passing at death into, or discovering myself in, an ethereal country where my ethereal body shall serve me even better than my matter-body serves me in this matter-country. And if this thought seems the plain man's plain thought about the physicist's hypothesis and is condemned for that, I retort that the plain man through his rejection of constraint by specialism, and by ideal or abstract schemes which flout the wholeness of experience, is coming now into his own in science, in