406 aMMORTALITY. 



ment. The future lives of the spirit are the result- 

 ant of its past. But the individual impress of a 

 single life persists only in so far as it has coincided 

 with the course of spiritual development. So, too, 

 the impressions produced by single blows upon a 

 coin persist only in so far as their shape coincided 

 with that to be ultimately (produced ; the individual 

 divergences and eccentricities of a single impress 

 are obliterated by their multiplication. Thus in a 

 way, the good, i.e., the action in the line of upward 

 development, would be immartal, however humble 

 the sphere in which it was enacted : the good char- 

 acter would persist even when it was absorbed and 

 included in a higher stage of development, for such 

 development would only be the natural and neces- 

 sary development of the highest aspirations of the 

 lower life. 



And this mode of spiritual progression Is not an 

 arbitrary conjecture of our ifancy concerning a tran- 

 scendent sphere of which we know nothing ; it is the 

 law of all life even now. It is the law whereby all 

 organisms take up and assimilate what they can 

 utilize, i.e., what serves their purposes, and reject 

 what they cannot ; it is the law whereby the world- 

 process preserves what promotes its purpose, viz., 

 the good, and dissolves the rest away. And this 

 law may be traced throughout all individual and 

 social progress. To be impressed by any experi- 

 ence requires the previous attainment of a certain 

 correspondence between the agent and the patient ; 

 to be persistent, the impression must be not only 

 congenial to the nature impressed, but consonant 

 with the line of its development. A lasting impres- 

 sion, in other words, is one which is important to us, 

 not only for a moment but for the course of our 



