REYNAUD. 361
affair. It is the soul which has received ; it is the soul which
keeps them*
“ Our own experience offers confirmation of the fact. Is there
in the organs, by means of which we are to-day in communica¬
tion with the universe, I will not say simply a single molecule,
but a single form, which belonged to the organs which served us
in infancy? Since that period, how many bodies has not our
vital faculty taken to itself, used, dissipated! And yet, in spite
of all these mutations, does not the soul preserve its memory?
How many things there are on which I had not thought for
years, which I had let fall completely from rify remembrance,
but which, all at once, in association with places or with per¬
sons, or roused by an effort of attention, start up and re-appear
to me ! Is there not here an indication of what may be produced
hereafter in sublime proportions ?
“Notwithstanding those apparent interruptions of such mo¬
ment to us, and which the vulgar in trembling call death, our
life', considered not in its earth-bound span of a day, to which
the prejudices of our education reduce it, but in its infinite line,
is in reality as continuous in all its development as in the short
period laid bare to us between the cradle and the tomb. . , .
“In admitting even what our present experience may lead us
to conclude in regard to the suspension of all remembrance of
anterior existences,—this, namely, that death must produce on
unprepared natures the effect of a heavy blow, and that, in strik¬
ing, it stuns the memory, —yet to stun it, is not to a7tnihilate it.
After a suspension of days, months, or years, the memory may
recover itself. The fact that we may have no reminiscence of
anterior existences 7iow is no reason why we may not have it at
some future time. . . .
“Each one of us carries in his actual form and organism the
secret history of his anterior emotions ; so accurately, that spirit¬
ual eyes, penetrating to the depths of our being, see at a glance
all that we have been in all that we are.
“Our history therefore is not only in that Book of Life which
theologians put in the hands of God ; it is inscribed in our very