irth,
it is not even conscious of the whole of the intervening period, often
playing us false in the course of a lifetime. It retains absolutely
nothing of the period immediately preceding birth, and scarcely any
trace of our education as children; we might even be altogether
ignorant of the fact that we were children once, were there not around
us witnesses of that time. On every hand we are wrapped in a veil of
ignorance, as with a pall of darkness, we no more distinguish the
light beyond the cradle than that beyond the tomb. So far as memory is
concerned, it would seem that we might be compared with a rocket such
as we sometimes see flashing through the sky in the night-time,
leaving behind it a line of light, this light never shows anything
more than a limited portion of the way. Of like nature is memory, a
trail of light left behind on our journey; we die, and everything is
dark around us; we are born again, and the light begins to appear,
like a star through the mist; we live, and it develops and grows,
suddenly disappears again and reappears once more; from one eclipse to
another we continue our way, and this way, interrupted by periods of
darkness, is a continuous one, whose elements, only apparently
separated, are linked to each other by the closest of bonds; we always
bear within ourselves the principle of what we shall be later on, we
are always rising higher. Question us on our past, and, like the
rocket, we reply that we are going forward, but that our path is
illumined only in our immediate neighbourhood, and that the rest of
the road is lost in the blackness of night; we no more know from where
we came than we know our destination, but we do know that we came from
below and are rising higher, and that is all that is necessary to
interest us in ourselves and make us conscious of what we are. And who
knows but what our soul, in the unknown secret of its essence, has
power some day to throw light on its successive journeyings, like
those streaks of flame to which we are comparing it? There are strong
reasons for thinking that such is the case, since the entire
restoration of memory appears, with good reason, to be one of the main
conditions of our future happiness....

"In like manner the soul, passing from one abode to another, and
leaving its first body for a new one, ever changing its appearance and
its dwelling, guided by the Creator's beams, from transmigration to
transmigration, from metamorphosis to