r year the researches of
science afford us new proof that the savage, the barbarian,
the idolater, the monk, each and all have arrived, by
different paths, as near to some point of eternal truth as
any thinker of the nineteenth century. We are now learning
also, that the theories of the astrologers and of the
alchemists were but partially, not totally, wrong. We have
reason even to suppose that no dream of the invisible world
has ever been dreamed, that no hypothesis of the unseen has
ever been imagined--which future science will not prove to
have contained some germ of reality."[6]

There are many things which might be added to these lines, notably all
that the most recent of our sciences, metapsychics, is engaged in
discovering with regard to the miraculous faculties of our
subconsciousness.

But, to return more directly to what we were saying, was it not
observed that, after the great battles of the Napoleonic era, the
birth-rate increased in an extraordinary manner, as though the lives
suddenly cut short in their prime were not really dead and were eager
to be back again in our midst and complete their career? If we could
follow with our eyes all that is happening in the spiritual world that
rises above us on every side, we should no doubt see that it is the
same with the moral force that seems to be lost on the field of
slaughter. It knows where to go, it knows its goal, it does not
hesitate. All that our wonderful dead relinquish they bequeath to us;
and when they die for us, they leave us their lives not in any
strained metaphorical sense, but in a very real and direct way. Virtue
goes out of every man who falls while performing a deed of glory; and
that virtue drops down upon us; and nothing of him is lost and nothing
evaporates in the shock of a premature end. He gives us in one
solitary and mighty stroke what he would have given us in a long life
of duty and love. Death does not injure life; it is powerless against
it. Life's aggregate never changes. What death takes from those who
fall enters into those who are left standing. The number of lamps
grows less, but the flame rises higher. Death is in no wise the gainer
so long as there are living men. The more it exercises its ravages,
the more it increases the intensity of that which it cannot touch; the
more it pursues its phantom victories, the better does it prove to us
that man will end by conquering death