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to become nothing, or for nothing to become soinething. Such a miracle can neither be conceived by reason nor justified by experience. We may, indeed, state such a proposition verbally; but so soon as we passed from words to things, from vagueness to Precision from the imaginary to the real, we cannot form an idea of any such annihilation in the objective or the subjective world.
Nor are the considerations in favour of the indestructibility of our perceptions, ideas, and other phenomena of consciousness merely of a theoretical nature ; there are also facts which, however strange they may appear at first sight, are very simple, if we bear in mind that in the mental world, as elsewhere, nothing perishes. Medical and psychological works cite numerous cases where languages apparently altogether forgotten or memories apparently effaced, are suddenly brought back to consciousness by a nervous disorder, by fever, opium, basheesh, or simply by intoxication. Coleridge tells a story of a servant-maid, who, in a fever, spoke Greek, Hebrew and Latin. It was found that this girl had lived with an old Protestant pastor ; that it had been the old man's custom for years to walk up and down a passage in his house into which the kitchen door opened and to read to himself with a loud voice out of his favourite books, passages
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