Now, suppose this is to be accepted as the rational and scientific explanation of all the phenomena of this order which have been observed since the human race began to conserve records of its own experience. To what conclusion should we be logically forced? The believe in the objective reality of apparitions under such conditions would have to make way for a new conception, but the point which is really at issue between the materialist and the spiritualist would remain untouched. That issue relates to the permanence of the human personality after death. The spiritualist will point you to his own experiences as affording evidence of the permanence of personality. The materialist is certain that all the experiences of which the spiritualist is conscious result from the operation of natural law. But the eternal question of the soul – “Am I an immortal thing?” – is not to be decided either by the proof of the existence of whole armies of ghosts, or by the rational explanation of all apparitional phenomena whatsoever. The spiritualist falls into an easy error in the supposition that a continuance of personality on a new plane implies a permanence of continuity. What guarantee has a ghost of being immortal? Me not he also perish out of his appointed sphere? And why might we not fancy a whole procession of lives in phantom state – each more ghostly, more attenuated than its forerunner – the ghost of a man, the ghost of a man’s ghost, the ghost of a “ghost’s” ghost, until the thin thing fades into nonentity and slips back into the universal element? The materialist falls into an error parallel with that of the spiritualist when he conceives that a rational explanation of all ghostly phenomena has disposed of a belief in immortality. The concept is as independent of evidence, and as unsupportable by evidence as it is indestructible by evidence. We can neither prove nor disprove, but the balance of reason is still upon the side of the believer and it favours strongly the hope of a continued existence and a continued growth. We can but argue from things known. In all nature we find the clearest evidence of law of progress.
– the Occult Review, January 1905

Falling into nonentity and slipping back into the universal element: pallid oakmoss and earthy patchouli tumbling into a void of misty lavender, cistus, and white agarwood.