Now the advocate of spiritual reality, who protests most strongly against the injury done to personality by reducing it to something fluid and not fixed, something in process and not in persistent substance, seems mostly to lean to a quasi-spiritualistic hypothesis, or to the--so-called--higher materialism. He is an advocate of what we may describe as the soul-thing, of a permanent, (he would even hold, an absolutely permanent) substance or substratum of psychical reality which, no doubt, exhibits certain properties, but is always more than any one, or any mere series of its phenomena. It has been said, indeed, by one who spoke with authority that he that will save his soul shall lose it, and he that will lose it shall find it. But this has always been a hard saying, which has been as far as possible explained away by exegesis. Yet its moral import is not so very far removed from its philosophical equivalent. The true life is not that of self-seeking pleasure, but the life spent in the service of truth and love, the life dedicated to impersonal interests, and ideal good. So also the reality of the human soul as we first know it lies not in itself, but in its transfiguration, its purification, and liberation to higher forms of being. The Soul, in its first avatar in each of us, is after all of the earth, earthy, unless it continue on that path of growth and development on which it has entered. It is as Aristotle said, and said well, the first actualisation[6]--the proximate ideality of an organic body. In soul organic body carries out its promise: in soul we, the observers, or untrained psychologists, note our first awareness of mental life in its organic environment. But there are other grades, other heights of achievement, yet set before the principle of life, which is more than mere life and mere soul: or soul contains a germ which must bear higher fruit. To be itself, or to become all that it in promise and potency contains, it must dispossess itself of what clings to it and possess itself of what is its own; and so transmute its first phase into one more adequate. The soul is, as Hegel has said, the awakening of mind from the sleep of nature[7]: it is nature gathering itself out of its absorption in its dispersion, the breath of life and feeling striving through the scattered members of the material world, and finding itself at first half-asleep, a pervading, unifying current that flows through and makes continuous the various portions of the universe. It is the earliest real, felt unity in which the logical or synthetic pulse--as yet purely potential in Nature, and only surmised by science--re-appears in the actual concrete world. And as the earliest, it is, like first loves, what one clings to hardest as our prime and fundamental _differentia._ Here at least we are something--a centre of being, and not a mere centreless expanse of extension: something emerging from the world of silence and of night--something in which each feels