328 NATURE AND LIFE. 
unities more especially? It is that of having, moreover, 
the consciousness of such perception, the feeling also of 
the relations that bind the whole together, and those facul- 
ties, more or less developed, which that consciousness and 
that perception imply. But why should these unities be 
any more perishable than the others? Why, if all these 
forces, all these activities, are eternal, should those alone 
not possess eternity which have this high privilege, that 
of knowing the infinite relations which the others sustain 
without knowing that they do so? 
To form a conception of the immortality of the soul, 
then, we must place ourselves at that point of view to 
which men rarely and hardly rise, of the simplicity and 
the indefectibility of all those principles of force that fill 
the universe. We must train ourselves to understand that 
what we see is nothing in comparison with what we do not 
see. The whole force, the whole spring, of the most com- 
plex movements, the most magnificent phenomena of Na- 
ture and the most subtile operations of life, thought in- 
cluded, proceed from the infinite commingling of an infinity 
of series of invisible and unextended principles, whose ac- 
tivities ascend in the scale of perfection from simple power 
of movement up to supreme reason. Human personality, 
such as we see and know it, is only a coarse and complex 
result from those of these primitive activities which are 
‘the best and deepest thing in us, It is not that person- 
ality which is immortal—that is no more immortal than 
the motive force of a steam-engine is, or the electricity of 
a voltaic battery, although movement and electricity are 
of themselves indestructible. It is not that personality 
which can aspire to a home in the bosom of God. Our 
true personality, our real J, that which may without illu- 
sion count on a future life, is unity released from every 
material bond, and all concrete alloy ; it is that force, neces- 
sarily pure, which has a more or less clear consciousness 
