condition restrictive thereof, and, although essential to our sensuous and animal consciousness, it may be regarded as an impeder of our pure spiritual life.[8] And in a recent book of great suggestiveness and power, less well-known as yet than it deserves,—I mean 'Riddles of the Sphinx,' by Mr. F. C. S. Schiller of Oxford, late of Cornell University,—the transmission-theory is defended at some length.[9]
But still, you will ask, in what positive way does this theory help us to realize our immortality in imagination? What we all wish to keep is just these individual restrictions, these selfsame tendencies and peculiarities that define us to ourselves and others, and constitute our identity, so called. Our finitenesses and limitations seem to be our personal essence; and when the finiting organ drops away, and our several spirits revert to their original source and resume their unrestricted condition, will they then be anything like those sweet streams of feeling which we know, and which even now
