trollable causes, and is unpredictable except as to
aggregates."

"That's a fairly good generalized summary," Dr. Harnosh of Hosh
grudged, unwilling to give a mere layman too much credit. He dipped a
spoon into a tobacco humidor, dusted the tobacco lightly with dried
_zerfa_, and rammed it into his pipe. "You must understand that our
modern Statisticalists are the intellectual heirs of those ancient
materialistic thinkers who denied the possibility of any discarnate
existence, or of any extraphysical mind, or even of extrasensory
perception. Since all these things have been demonstrated to be facts,
the materialistic dogma has been broadened to include them, but always
strictly within the frame of materialism.

"We have proven, for instance, that the human individuality can exist
in a discarnate state, and that it reincarnates into the body of an
infant, shortly after birth. But the Statisticalists cannot accept the
idea of discarnate consciousness, since they conceive of consciousness
purely as a function of the physical brain. So they postulate an
unconscious discarnate personality, or, as you put it, one in a
somnambulistic state. They have to concede memory to this discarnate
personality, since it was by recovery of memories of previous
reincarnations that discarnate existence and reincarnation were proven
to be facts. So they picture the discarnate individuality as a
material object, or physical event, of negligible but actual mass, in
which an indefinite number of memories can be stored as electronic
charges. And they picture it as being drawn irresistibly to the body
of the nearest non-incarnated infant. Curiously enough, the
reincarnation vehicle chosen is almost always of the same sex as the
vehicle of the previous reincarnation, the exceptions being cases of
persons who had a previous history of psychological sex-inversion."

Dr. Harnosh remembered the unlighted pipe in his hand, thrust it into
his mouth, and lit it. For a moment, he sat with it jutting out of his
black beard, until it was drawing to his satisfaction. "This belief in
immediate reincarnation leads the Statisticalists, when they fight
duels or perform voluntary discarnation, to do so in the neighborhood
of maternity hospitals," he added. "I know, personally, of one
reincarnation memory-recall, in which the subject, a Statisticalist,
voluntarily discarnated by lethal-gas inhaler in a private room at one
of our local maternity hospitals, and re