is a purer and nobler word than the
word "spirit."

The historic fact must, however, be recognized that in the
evolution of human thought and in the evolution of philosophical
systems the word "spirit" has in large measure usurped the
position that ought to belong to the word "soul" as the highest and
purest expression of what is most essential and important in life.

The history of this usurpation is itself a curious psychological
document. But I cannot help feeling that the moment has arrived
for reinstating the word "soul" in its rightful place and altering this
false valuation.

The word "soul" is the name given by the common consent of
language to that original "monad" or concrete unity or living "self"
which exists, according to universal experience, "within" the
physical body and is the indescribable "substratum" of
self-consciousness and the unutterable "something" which gives a
real concrete permanence to what we call "personality."

Here also we are confronted by the metaphorical danger, which is
a danger springing from the necessity of thought itself; the
necessity under which thought labours of being compelled to use
sense-impressions if it is to function at all. But though thought
cannot exist as thought without the use of sense-impressions it can
at least concentrate its attention upon this primal necessity and be
aware of it and cautious of it and hypercritical in its use. It can do
more than this. It can throw back, so to speak, the whole weight of
the mystery and drive it so rigorously to the ultimate wall, that the
materialistic and metaphorical element is reduced to a mere gap or
space or lacuna in the mind that only a material element can fill
and yet that we cannot imagine being filled by any material
element which we are able to define.

This is precisely what we have to do with regard to that
"vanishing-point of sensation" which is the substratum of the soul.
The situation resolves itself into this. The highest, deepest, most
precious thing we know or can imagine is _personality_.
Personality is and must be our ultimate synthesis, our final ideal,
and the origin of all our ideals. Nothing can be conceived more
true, more real, more spiritual than personality.

All conceptions, qualities, principles, forces, elements, thoughts,
ideas, are things which we abstract from personality, and project
into the space which surrounds us, as if they could be independent
of the personal unity from whi