4IO IMMORTALITY. 



the Ego as a reality different from the self. It has 

 already been remarked, and must here be em- 

 phasized again, that the Ego is not a second and 

 alien consciousness concurrent with and distinct 

 from the selves (9^. ch. ix. § 22). The self or selves 

 (ch. ix. § 23) are simply the actually conscious part of 

 the Ego, which represents the potentialities of their 

 development on the one hand and their primary and 

 pre-cosmic condition on the other. The Ego is 

 both the basis of the development and its end, but 

 within the process the selves alone are real. For 

 as will be shown in the next chapter, both the pre- 

 cosmic basis and the post-cosmic end, though neces- 

 sarily implied in and inferred from the cosmic 

 process,, belong to a radically different order of 

 things from our present world of Becoming, and the 

 Ego does not as such enter into the cosmos. Even 

 if, therefore, we adopted a supposition which may per- 

 haps commend itself from a moral point of view, that 

 after death, in the intervals, as it were, of its incarn- 

 ations, the Ego recovered a fuller consciousness and 

 the memory of all- its past lives, these lucid intervals, 

 though they might produce great moral effects, would 

 not in themselves form part of the phenomenal de- 

 velopment, and the latter would appear to be continu- 

 ous from phase to phase of phenomenal consciousness. 

 § 1 7. Secondly, we must consider some of the 

 objections likely to be made to a doctrine involving 

 xh^ pre-existenee of the soul, although no apology 

 should really be needed. For no rational argument 

 in favour of immortality can be devised that will not 

 tell as strongly in favour of the pre- existence as of 

 the post-existence of the soul, and this has been 

 fully recognized by all rational defenders of im- 

 mortality from the time of Plato downwards. It 



