cable direction and
tinge to the thinking of after ages, were furthermore driven to
the supposition of a final absorption, from the

2 Drossbach, Die Harmonie der Ergebnisse der Naturforschung mit
den Forderungen des Menschlichen Gemuthes.

3 Blount, Anima Mundi; or, The Opinions of the Ancients concerning
Man's Soul after this Life.

impossibility, in that initiatory stage of thought, of grasping
any other theory which would apparently meet the case so well or
be more satisfactory. They, of course, had not yet arrived at the
idea that God is a personal Spirit whose nature is revealed in the
constitutive characteristics of the human soul, and who carries on
his works from eternity to eternity without monotonous repetition
or wearisome stagnancy, but with perpetual variety in never
ceasingmotion. Whatever commences must also terminate, they said,
forgetting that number begins with one but has no end. They did
not conceive of the universe of being as an eternal line, making
immortality desirable for its endless novelty, but imaged it to
themselves as a circle, making an everlasting individual
consciousness dreadful for its intolerable sameness, an immense
round of existence, phenomena, and experience, going forth and
returning into itself, over and over, forever and ever. To escape
so repulsive a contemplation, they made death break the fencing
integument of consciousness and empty all weary personalities into
the absolute abyss of being.

Again: the extreme difficulty of apprehending the truth of a
Creator literally infinite, and of a limitless creation, would
lead to the same result in another way. Without doubt, it seemed
to the naive thinkers of antiquity, that if hosts of new beings
were continually coming into life and increasing the number of the
inhabitants of the future state, the fountain from which they
proceeded would some time be exhausted, or the universe grow
plethoric with population. There would be no more substance below
or no more room above. The easiest method of surmounting this
problem would be by the hypothesis that all spirits come out of a
great World Spirit, and, having run their mortal careers, are
absorbed into it again. Many especially the deepest Oriental
dreamers have also been brought to solace themselves with this
conclusion by a course of reasoning based on the exposures, and
assumed inevitable sufferings, of all finite being. They argue
that every existence below the absolute Go