es
quoted, look and act like the original twin body.

Yet while the cosmic soul idea seems very illuminating, and even
stimulating, as far as it goes, it soon lands us in the swamp of paradox
surrounding all our knowledge. How reconcile it with our
individuality--the individuality as dear as life itself--virtually
identical with life itself? Well, we can't reconcile them, at least just
yet. But we can pull our feet up from the swamp, and make a step that may
be towards a reconciliation. Each of our brains is a network of channels
through which the cosmic soul flows; and there are no two brains
alike--hence our individuality.

But those brains perish. Must individuality be conceded at the cost of our
mental continuity? Perhaps not. Grant even the original mind-atom to be a
constituent, or inseparable companion, of an original matter-atom
(wouldn't it be more up to date to say vibration in each case?), mind, as
we have already tried to demonstrate, is not limited, as matter seems to
be, to those primitive atoms.

* * * * *

The vague but almost unescapable notion of the cosmic soul also opens up
some hint of an explanation of hypnotism, including, of course, thought
transference. These vague hints or gleams on the borderland of our
knowledge are of course something like what must be such hints of what we
know as color, as go through the pigment spots on the surface of one of
the lower creatures. Such as our limits are, we can express them only in
metaphors. But for that matter all of our language beyond a few material
conceptions, is metaphor from them. Well, on the hypothesis (or facing the
fact, if you prefer) of the cosmic soul, telepathy, hypnotism and all that
sort of thing at once affiliates itself with all our easy conceptions of
interflow--in fluids, gases, sounds, colors, magnetism, electricity, etc.
It's all a vague groping, but there seems something there which, as we
evolve farther, we may get clearer impressions of.

Well, to return to our sheep. Foster didn't get the clearness and
intensity of his visions from the comparatively indistinct and placid
impressions in his sitters' minds. There must be something more than
hypnotism from the sitter.

* * * * *

Now here is a tougher case which opens a new element of the problem. It is
from _The Autobiography of a Journalist_, by W.J. Stillman, Boston, 1901,
Vol. I, pp. 192-4: Not many of our old