eive a powerful shock and continue
to vibrate for centuries. Those who have developed their inner senses
can thus witness the scene which is continually repeating itself, or
rather, is happening all the time.[252] Thus, psychometrists,[253] in
presence of a portion of a fossil, are enabled to bring back scenes
that this fragment has witnessed millions of years ago.[254]

In these cases, the memory of the facts is connected with that of the
atoms which register it; this memory can only be recalled by coming
into contact with these atoms.[255]

There is also another memory, midway between the unconscious memory of
atoms and the conscious memory of the human soul; that of the forms of
the various sub-human kingdoms. It is only slightly conscious, for it
is not individualised; all the same, it is precise in its nature. It
dwells in the vital essence of the form, an essence taken from a
collective "block" which supplies a portion of its substance to the
individuals of the same species; this incarnate portion of essence,
when the form disintegrates at death, returns to the parent "block,"
to which it communicates the result of its experiences, and when the
latter sends out a portion of itself, into a new form, this tentacle,
which is, so to speak, the soul of the form, is in possession of the
whole of the experiences of the "block."[256] This explains how it is
that the individual members of certain hostile species know one
another from birth--the chicken, for instance, which, immediately it
has left the egg, trembles before the hawk hovering above in the air;
such is also the reason why a duckling plunges into water as soon as
it comes to a pond, and the same instinct impels a bird to leave its
nest and trust itself to the air when fully fledged.

In these collective souls, belonging to the mineral, vegetable, and
animal kingdoms, there can be recovered the past to which they bore
witness, when the atoms of their bodies have been dispersed and
entered into new combinations.

When the elemental Essence[257] has definitely split up, and the
"blocks" have become separate, individualised, human fragments,[258]
each of these fragments is a causal body, a definite, immortal
_centre_ in the total Centre. Consequently there are in man three
kinds of memory: atomic memory, that of the atoms of his bodies;
instinctive memory of the special elemental essences which are the
collective souls of his various vehicles; and finally, the