Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1906).djvu/98

82 evident, and it is as easy to read distant thoughts as near. We think of an absent friend as easily as we do of one

present. It is no more difficult to read the absent mind than it is to read the present. Chaucer wrote centuries ago, yet we still read his thought in his verse. What is classic study, but discernment of the minds of Homer and Virgil, of whose personal existence we may be in doubt?

If spiritual life has been won by the departed, they cannot return to material existence, because different

states of consciousness are involved, and one person cannot exist in two different states of consciousness at the same time. In sleep we do not communicate with the dreamer by our side despite his physical proximity, because both of us are either unconscious or are wandering in our dreams through different mazes of consciousness.

In like manner it would follow, even if our departed friends were near us and were in as conscious a state of existence as before the change we call death, that their state of consciousness must be different from ours. We are not in their state, nor are they in the mental realm in which we dwell. Communion between them and ourselves would be prevented by this difference. The mental states are so unlike, that intercommunion is as impossible as it would be between a mole and a human being. Different dreams and different awakenings betoken a differing consciousness. When wandering in Australia, do we look for help to the Esquimaux in their snow huts?

In a world of sin and sensuality hastening to a greater development of power, it is wise earnestly to