We may conceive matter, then, as being constantly fanned up into the heat of life, _i.e._ as elaborating forms into which consciousness can enter and through which it can act. And we observe that consciousness, when it has found a suitable form, can act on it and improve it. Two questions now arise. The first is: Why should consciousness have need of these forms at all? And the second is: If it has this need, what becomes of the individual consciousness when the form has grown finally cold in death and is resolved into its inorganic elements?
To the first question I cannot suggest any answer, except the obvious one that an individual consciousness must have some forms through which it can have relations with things not itself. In the world, as we have it, it is _generally_ true—it would be unwise to venture any absolute statement on the subject—that consciousness only enters into relation with another consciousness, or with matter, by means of the peculiarly organized form of matter which we call a brain. I must leave the question there. Thought and research, and the advance in physical organization which I have referred to, may, in the near or distant future, throw further light upon it. It is not a difficulty, but it is certainly a mystery.
As regards the second question, that of personal immortality, all we are justified in concluding on the negative side is that when a certain body and brain have perished, consciousness can express itself through _that_ form no more. But consciousness itself cannot be less indestructible than everything else that exists. We may, so far as I can see, either conceive an individual consciousness at death as being resolved into the general consciousness from which it sprang, even as the matter composing any organic being is resolved into inorganic matter, or we may suppose that, having won and consolidated its selfhood by what it has done and what it has endured in the flesh, the selfhood is thenceforth capable of an independent existence under forms at present beyond our ken.
Either of these conceptions implies what we call the ‘immortality’ of the soul, the real and permanent significance of the experiences of the soul. Here a little further elucidation may be desirable. I have spoken of the possibility of the soul or self being resolved into something which one can only describe as a general spiritual substance related to individual souls as matter in general is related to particular material organisms. But the parallel with matter must not be pushed too far. A material organism, being composed of different substances, can be disintegrated. But consciousness cannot, strictly speaking, suffer disintegration, for it has no different substances into which to disintegrate. It can, however, as we see, appear in the form of a number of different personalities; and this, the normal existing condition, is the psychical analogue to physical disintegration. If these personalities are again to merge into one impersonal consciousness, the process would not be comparable to disintegration; it would be the very reverse; it would be reintegration; and the process, therefore, implies nothing resembling the loss or dissipation of any form of psychic being.