The birth and death of souls are inconceivable; the immortality of a vast and varying number of individual souls is equally inconceivable.

Immortality implies unity, not number.
The mind can grasp the possibility of one soul, the manifestation of which is the universe and all it contains.
The hypothesis of individual souls first confined in and then released from individual bodies to preserve their individuality for all time is inconceivable, since it assumes--to coin a word-- an intersoulular space, which must necessarily be filled with a medium that is either material or spiritual in its character; if material, then we have the inconceivable condition of spiritual entities surrounded by a material medium; if the intersoulular space be occupied by a spiritual medium, then we have simply souls surrounded by soul,--or, in the final analysis, one soul, of which the so-called individual souls are but so many manifestations.
To the assumption of an all-pervading ether which is the physical basis of the universe, may we not add the suprasumption** of an all-pervading soul which is the spiritual basis of not only the ether but of life itself?
The seeming duality of mind and matter, of the soul and body, must terminate somewhere, must merge in identity.

Whether that identity be the Creator of theology or the soul of speculation does not much matter, since the final result is the same, namely, the immortality of that suprasumption, the soul.
But the individual, what becomes of the individual in this assumption of an all-pervading, immortal soul, of which all things animate and inanimate are but so many activities?
The body, which for a time being is a part of the local manifestation of the pervading soul, dies and is resolved into its constituent elements; it is inconceivable that those elements should ever gather themselves together again and appear in visible, tangible form.

No one could possibly desire they ever should; those who die maimed, or from sickness and disease, or in the decrepitude and senility of age, could not possibly wish that their disordered bodies should appear again; nor could any person name the exact period of his life when he was so satisfied with his physical condition that he would choose to have his body as it then was.

No; the body, like the trunk of a fallen tree, decays and disappears; like ripe fruit, it drops to the earth and enriches the soil, but nevermore resumes its form and semblance.
The pervading soul, of which the body was but the physical manifestation, remains; it does not return to heaven or any hypothetical point in either space or speculation.