thought, or in faint accents heard in the quiet
of the mind, can the thought of the spirit come to us but little changed;
for a mind, that grasps objects simultaneously according to the degree of
its liberation, does not think the same thought with the mind that sees
objects one after another. The purpose of most religious teaching, of the
insistence upon the submission to God's will above all, is to make certain
of the passivity of the vehicle where it is most pure and most tenuous.
When we are passive where the vehicle is coarse, we become mediumistic,
and the spirits who mould themselves in that coarse vehicle can only
rarely and with great difficulty speak their own thoughts and keep their
own memory. They are subject to a kind of drunkenness and are stupefied,
old writers said, as if with honey, and readily mistake our memory for
their own, and believe themselves whom and what we please. We bewilder and
overmaster them, for once they are among the perceptions of successive
objects, our reason, being but an instrument created and sharpened by
those objects, is stronger than their intellect, and they can but repeat
with brief glimpses from another state, our knowledge and our words.

XIX

A friend once dreamed that she saw many dragons climbing upon the steep
side of a cliff and continually falling. Henry More thought that those
who, after centuries of life, failed to find the rhythmic body and to pass
into the Condition of Fire, were born again. Edmund Spenser, who was among
More's masters, affirmed that nativity without giving it a cause:

"After that they againe retourned beene,
They in that garden planted be agayne,
And grow afresh, as they had never seene
Fleshy corruption, nor mortal payne.
Some thousand years so doen they ther remayne,
And then of him are clad with other hew,
Or sent into the chaungeful world agayne,
Till thither they retourn where first they grew:
So like a wheele, around they roam from old to new."

The dead who speak to us deny metempsychosis, perhaps because they but
know a little better what they knew alive; while the dead in Asia, for
perhaps no better reason, affirm it, and so we are left amid
plausibilities and uncertainties.

XX

But certainly it is always to the Condition of Fire, where emotion is not
brought to any sudden stop, where there is neither wall nor gate, that we
would rise; and the mask plucked from the oak-tree is but my imagination
of rhyt