Page:The Diothas, or, A far look ahead (IA diothasorfarlook01macn).pdf/280

 designated what, among us, is referred to as the metempsychosis.

"I do," she replied, beginning to see whither my argument tended.

"According to that doctrine, as I understand it, of the many millions of souls inhabiting human bodies at the period of which I have recollection, are not the immense majority still undergoing probation on this earth?"

"Except the comparatively few, that, having attained the ordained standard of moral perfection, have passed to a higher sphere of existence," was the reply, gravely, almost reluctantly, given. The problem of human existence was to these people a real and serious, though not a terrible, question, one to be discussed, if at all, in a spirit of earnest reverence. The off-hand flippancy with which some among us will attack and settle the most important of questions would have seemed to Reva and her contemporaries perhaps more shocking than the grotesque antics of the fetich-worshipper, to the same extent that shallow pretension is more displeasing than earnest ignorance.

"Does it, then, seem at all improbable," said I, "that a spirit endowed, for some exceptional reason, with the power of recalling a former state of existence, should also have the power of recognizing others with whom it had then been brought into contact?"

"I feel the force of your argument," replied Reva, "the more so because we believe, that, as the soul possesses a strong informing power upon the body with which it is clothed, it is natural to suppose that the bodies successively inhabited by the same soul should have a certain similitude. But here a difficulty presents itself."