oul in an
endless futurity, but gave themselves no concern about the eternity
which is past. But Plato considered the soul as having already eternally
existed, the present life being only a moment in our career; he looked
forward with an undoubting faith to the changes through which we must
hereafter pass. As sparks issue forth from a flame, so doubtless to his
imagination did the soul of man issue forth from the soul of the world.
Innate ideas and the sentiment of pre-existence indicate our past life.
By the latter is meant that on some occasion perhaps of trivial concern,
or perhaps in some momentous event, it suddenly occurs to us that we
have been in like circumstances, and surrounded by the things at that
instant present on some other occasion before; but the recollection,
though forcibly impressing us with surprise, is misty and confused. With
Plato shall we say it was in one of our prior states of existence, and
the long-forgotten transactions are now suddenly flashing upon us?

[Sidenote: But this arises from the anatomical construction of the
brain.]

But Plato did not know the double structure and the double action of the
brain of man; he did not remember that the mind may lose all recognition
of the lapse of time, and, with equal facility, compress into the
twinkling of an eye events so numerous that for their occurrence days
and even years would seem to be required; or, conversely, that it can
take a single, a simple idea, which one would suppose might be disposed
of in a moment, and dwell upon it, dilating or swelling it out, until
all the hours of a long night are consumed. Of the truth of these
singular effects we have not only such testimony as that offered by
those who have been restored from death by drowning, who describe the
flood of memory rushing upon them in the last moment of their mortal
agony, the long train of all the affairs in which they have borne a part
seen in an instant, as we see the landscape, with all its various
objects, by a flash of lightning at night, and that with appalling
distinctness, but also from our own experience in our dreams. It is
shown in my Physiology how the phenomena of the sentiment of
pre-existence may, upon these principles, be explained, each hemisphere
of the brain thinking for itself, and the mind deluded as respects the
lapse of time, mistaking these simultaneous actions for successive ones,
and referring one of the two impressions to an indistinct and misty