176 Human Personality. 



At the present stage of. popular credulity concerning 

 disembodied spirit-life, the ground is taken by many, many 

 even who lay pretention to scientific attainments, that as 

 ion and electron appear to possess a pyschic property they 

 may be aggregated in a "spiritual body" which is liber- 

 ated at the death of the organism, to fly, or float away, still 

 continent, with personal faculties intact; that this sub- 

 liminal self coheres and remains individual; that it still 

 sees without eyes, hears without ears, smells without ol- 

 factory tracts and tastes without gustatory follicles ; that 

 it still reasons without the interlaced pyramidals and 

 moves without sensory ganglia and motor nerve fibers. 



According to this loose conception, indeed, the physical 

 apparatus is really not at all necessary, being a kind of 

 superimposed clog on "soul life" which sojourns in the 

 animal organism rather than forms an essential inseparable 

 component of it, the point being that at death, it. some- 

 how frees itself, gets away, and preserves the much de- 

 siderated self-consciousness. 



The argument is never very clear as to ways and means 

 but takes such jumps as are necessary to gain the object 

 sought. And grave professors of psychology announce 

 with dignified aplomb, that they " see nothing inconsistent 

 in this view." 



What volumes do such naive admissions speak for 

 the present dense ignorance of this same self-exalted 

 psychology ! What utter lack of comprehension of the 



