the manifestation of the
daimon.

One who has arrived at this knowledge looks beyond himself, backwards
and forwards. The daimonic experiences through which he has passed are
enough to prove to him his own immortality. And he can no longer limit
his daimon to the one function of occupying his personality, for the
latter can only be one of the forms in which the daimon is manifested.
The daimon cannot be shut up within one personality, he has power to
animate many. He is able to transform himself from one personality
into another. The great thought of reincarnation springs as a matter
of course from the Heraclitean premises, and not only the thought but
the experience of the fact. The thought only paves the way for the
experience. One who becomes conscious of the daimonic element within
him does not recognise it as innocent and in its first stage. He finds
that it has qualities. Whence do they come? Why have I certain natural
aptitudes? Because others have already worked upon my daimon. And what
becomes of the work which I accomplish in the daimon if I am not to
assume that its task ends with my personality? I am working for a
future personality. Between me and the Spirit of the Universe,
something interposes which reaches beyond me, but is not yet the same
as divinity. This something is my daimon. My to-day is only the
product of yesterday, my to-morrow will be the product of to-day; in
the same way my life is the result of a former and will be the
foundation of a future one. Just as mortal man looks back to
innumerable yesterdays and forward to many to-morrows, so does the
soul of the sage look upon many lives in his past and many in the
future. The thoughts and aptitudes I acquired yesterday I am using
to-day. Is it not the same with life? Do not people enter upon the
horizon of existence with the most diverse capacities? Whence this
difference? Does it proceed from nothing?

Our natural sciences take much credit to themselves for having
banished miracle from our views of organic life. David Frederick
Strauss, in his _Alter und Neuer Glaube_, considers it a great
achievement of our day that we no longer think that a perfect organic
being is a miracle issuing from nothing. We understand its perfection
when we are able to explain it as a development from imperfection. The
structure of an ape is no longer a miracle if we assume its ancestors
to have been primitive fishes which have been gradually transformed.
Let us