past events. That last
is the kind of which it is necessary to say something here, in order
that the true character of the present treatise on Atlantis may be
understood, but I allude to the others merely that the explanation I
have to give may not be mistaken for a complete theory of clairvoyance
in all its varieties.

We may best be helped to a comprehension of clairvoyance as related to
past events, by considering in the first instance the phenomena of
memory. The theory of memory which relates it to an imaginary
rearrangement of physical molecules of brain matter, going on at every
instant of our lives, is one that presents itself as plausible to no
one who can ascend one degree above the thinking level of the
uncompromising atheistical materialist. To every one who accepts, as
even a reasonable hypothesis, the idea that a man is something more
than a carcase in a state of animation, it must be a reasonable
hypothesis that memory has to do with that principle in man which is
super-physical. His memory in short, is a function of some other than
the physical plane. The pictures of memory are imprinted, it is clear,
on some non-physical medium, and are accessible to the embodied
thinker in ordinary cases by virtue of some effort he makes in as
much unconsciousness as to its precise character, as he is unconscious
of the brain impulse which actuates the muscles of his heart. The
events with which he has had to do in the past are photographed by
Nature on some imperishable page of super-physical matter, and by
making an appropriate interior effort, he is capable of bringing them
again, when he requires them, within the area of some interior sense
which reflects its perception on the physical brain. We are not all of
us able to make this effort equally well, so that memory is sometimes
dim, but even in the experience of mesmeric research, the occasional
super-excitation of memory under mesmerism is a familiar fact. The
circumstances plainly show that the record of Nature is accessible if
we know how to recover it, or even if our own capacity to make an
effort for its recovery is somehow improved without our having an
improved knowledge of the method employed. And from this thought we
may arrive by an easy transition at the idea, that in truth the
records of Nature are not separate collections of individual property,
but constitute the all-embracing memory of Nature herself, on which
different people are in a position to