1

IX. HERO WORSHIP AND FOLKLORE 136

X. CORROBORATIVE EVIDENCE 146

XI. CONCEPTIONS AND PORTENTS OF AN AVATAR 151

XII. PORTENTS OF THE PRESENT TIME 164

XIII. THE SEPARABLE SOUL IN FOLKLORE 171

XIV. FROM CONFUSION TO CONSTRUCTION 191

XV. THE SCIENCE OF PSYCHOLOGY AS A KNOWLEDGE OF
THE HUMAN SOUL 208

XVI. THE NEW AVATAR 218

NOTES 223

FOREWORD

The reader who is willing to give the following pages a careful reading,
and a courteous hearing, is entitled to know the basis of study,
observation or experience from which the suggestions, inferences and
conclusions proceed, in order that he may fairly estimate their value.

At the age of seventy-two, my egotism is at least softened by the
discovery of the many things I do not know; and my dogmatism, so far as it
ever existed, is equally relaxed by the realization that it is a bar to
light and knowledge, which rest so largely on demonstration.

For more than forty-five years I have been engaged in the active practice
of medicine with consultations extending over three States.

For an equal length of time I have lectured in Medical Colleges, fifteen
years on the subject of Physiology, an equal number on Therapeutics
(including Pathology and Histology), and for the last fifteen years on
Psychology, Mental and Nervous Diseases, and all this time with a large
College Clinic from the poorer classes.

From first to last, my "Study of Medicine" has been generically and
specifically a "Study of Man," physical, mental, ethical, and psychical.

Outside of Medicine as a "Calling" or a "Profession" my real interest has
been to unravel the nature of man, grasp the problem of human life, and to
apprehend the nature, laws, and destiny of the human soul. My library
covers a rather continuous thread from 1543, and the time of Paracelsus,
to Profs. James, Ladd, Lombroso, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Muensterberg.

My reading dips into the Sacred Books of the East, the records of the
Past, and particularly the psychic phenomena of different ages, finding at
last the Constructive Theorem clearer than anywhere else in the "School of
Natural Science," from