Browning's expectation of
'other tasks in other lives, God willing,' will be fulfilled.

'And I shall thereupon
Take rest, ere I be gone
Once more on my adventure brave and new.'

The question here raised is whether there is such a thing as
reincarnation. This belief, so widely held at all times by eminent
thinkers, and sanctioned by some of the higher religions, cannot be
dismissed as obsolete or impossible. But if it is put in the form, 'Will
the same self live again on earth under different conditions?' it may be
that no answer can be given, not only because we do not know, but
because the question itself is meaningless. The psycho-physical organism
which was born at a certain date and which will die on another date is
compacted of idiosyncrasies, inherited and acquired, which seem to be
inseparable from its history as born of certain parents and living under
certain conditions. It is not easy to say what part of such an organism
could be said to maintain its identity, if it were housed in another
body and set down in another time and place, when all recollection of a
previous state has been (as we must admit) cut off. The only continuity,
it seems to me, would be that of the racial self, if there is such a
thing, or of the directing intelligence and will of the higher Power
which sends human beings into the world to perform their allotted tasks.

The second objection, which, as I have said, is closely connected with
the first, is that idealism offers us a merely impersonal immortality.
But what is personality? The notion of a world of spiritual atoms,
'_solida pollentia simplicitate_,' as Lucretius says, seems to be
attractive to some minds. There are thinkers of repute who even picture
the Deity as the constitutional President of a _collegium_ of souls.
This kind of pluralism is of course fundamentally incompatible with the
presuppositions of my paper. The idea of the 'self' seems to me to be an
arbitrary fixation of our average state of mind, a half-way house which
belongs to no order of real existence. The conception of an abstract ego
seems to involve three assumptions, none of which is true. The first is
that there is a sharp line separating subject from object and from other
subjects. The second is that the subject, thus sundered from the object,
remains identical through time. The third is that this indiscerptible
entity is in some mysterious way both myself and my property. In
oppo