111. Here, then, we have two clear and definite views, - supported, the one by our inmost consciousness, the other by unanswerable observation and inference, - yet apparently incompatible the one with the other. And in fact by most writers they have been felt and acknowledged to be even hopelessly incompatible. The supporters of the view that "The Self is a co-ordination," - and this, I need hardly say, is now the view prevalent among experimental psychologists, - have frankly given up any notion of an underlying unity, - of a life independent of the organism, - in a word, of a human soul. The supporters of the unity of the Ego, on the other hand, if they have not been able to be equally explicit in denying the opposite view, have made up for this by the thorough-going way in which they have ignored it. I know of no source from which valid help has been offered towards the reconcilement of the two opposing systems in a pro-founder synthesis. If I believe - as I do believe - that in the present work some help in this direction is actually given, this certainly does not mean that I suppose myself capable of stitching the threadbare metaphysical arguments into a more stable fabric.

It simply means that certain fresh evidence can now be adduced, which has the effect of showing the case on each side in a novel light; - nay, even of closing the immediate controversy by a judgment more decisively in favour of both parties than either could have expected. On the one side, and in favour of the co-ordinators, - all their analysis of the Self into its constituent elements, all that they urge of positive observation, of objective experiment, must as I shall maintain on the strength of the new facts which I shall adduce be unreservedly conceded. Let them push their analysis as far as they like, - let them get down, if they can, to those ultimate infinitesimal psychical elements from which is upbuilt the complex, the composite, the "colonial" structure and constitution of man. All this may well be valid and important work. It is only on their negative side that the conclusions of this school need a complete overhauling. Deeper, bolder inquiry along their own line shows that they have erred when they asserted that analysis showed no trace of faculty beyond such as the life of earth - as they conceive it - could foster, or the environment of earth employ.

For in reality analysis shows traces of faculty which this material or planetary life could not have called into being, and whose exercise even here and now involves and necessitates the existence of a spiritual world.

On the other side, and in favour of the partisans of the unity of the Ego, the effect of the new evidence is to raise their claim to a far higher ground, and to substantiate it for the first time with the strongest presumptive proof which can be imagined for it; - a proof, namely, that the Ego can and does survive - not only the minor disintegrations which affect it during earth-life - but the crowning disintegration of bodily death.

In view of this unhoped-for ratification of their highest dream, they may be more than content to surrender as untenable the far narrower conception of the unitary Self which was all that "common-sense philosophies" had ventured to claim. The "conscious Self" of each of us, as we call it, - the empirical, the supraliminal Self, as I should prefer to say, - does not comprise the whole of the consciousness or of the faculty within us. There exists a more comprehensive consciousness, a profounder faculty, which for the most part remains potential only so far as regards the life of earth, but from which the consciousness and the faculty of earth-life are mere selections, and which reasserts itself in its plenitude after the liberating change of death.

Towards this conclusion, which assumed for me something like its present shape some fourteen years since,1 a long series of tentative speculations, based on gradually accruing evidence, has slowly conducted me. The conception is one which has hitherto been regarded as purely mystical; and if I endeavour to plant it upon a scientific basis I certainly shall not succeed in stating it in its final terms or in supporting it with the best arguments which longer experience will suggest. Its validity, indeed, will be impressed - if at all - upon the reader only by the successive study of the various kinds of evidence which this book will set forth.