Note 3 — II. WESTERN EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION.

We purposely use the term Personal in preference to spiritual, for the word should be rescued from its confusion of meanings to the old classical one, in connection with the soul. As Hermann Lotze beautifully unfolds, “Personality is the key to existence,” using the word in its first sense from persona, a mask, parallel to the Hebrew analogy which calls man the image of Jehovah. Mulford also presents the thought grandly in The Republic of God and The Nation, drawing his suggestion from the Germans Stahl and Froschammer. In this sense humanity is the shadow of Deity, the veil through which the Absolute tries to reveal Himself, casting about in the multiplicity of natural forms after an expression through physical means of His own nature. In this sublime conception God is the life of the universe, who, in Schelling’s phrase, “sleeps in the stone, breathes in the plant, moves in the animal, and wakes up to consciousness in man.” It is this thought which makes Novalis so reverent to a human being as a Microdeus, and elevates the dignity of the soul above all else. For as the purpose of nature is to personify the Invisible, human souls are the Persons (or masks) by which the leading parts are here acted with many changes of scenery.