s realities surround him on every hand, penetrate
to his brain. He marvels that an extraordinary accident should have
closed almost hermetically to the future that brain which plunges
into it entirely, even as a sealed vessel plunges, without mixing
with it, into the depths of a monstrous sea that overwhelms it,
entreats it, teases it, and caresses it with a thousand billows."

Time and space are the two dimensions which differentiate the physical
and the spiritual worlds; the higher the degree of spiritual development
and advancement, the less is the individual limited and hampered and
fettered by these two conditions. One may get a certain analogy on it by
realizing to how much greater extent the infant or the child is bound by
the conditions of Space and Time than is the man or the woman. To the
child the idea of the next year is, practically, an eternity; while the
man calmly and confidently makes his plans for the next year, or for
five years or ten years later; with a matter-of-course assurance. The
next year to the man is not so remote as the next day is to the child.
So by this analogy it is not difficult to realize that when one is
released from the physical world and advances into the realm of the
subtle and potent forces of the ethereal world, with his faculties
responsive to the larger environment,--it is not difficult to realize
that he is increasingly free from these conditions that are so strong in
their power of limitation over the mortal life.

"It is," continues Maurice Maeterlinck, "quite incomprehensible that we
should not know the future. Probably a mere nothing, the displacement of
a cerebral lobe, the resetting of Broca's convolution in a different
manner, the addition of a slender network of nerves to those which form
our consciousness,--any one of these would be enough to make the future
unfold itself before us with the same clearness, the same majestic
amplitude as that with which the past is displayed on the horizon, not
only of our individual life? but also of the life of the species to
which we belong. A singular infirmity, a curious limitation of our
intellect, causes us not to know what is going to happen to us, when we
are fully aware of what has befallen us. From the absolute point of view
to which our imagination succeeds in rising, although it cannot live
there, there is no reason why we should not see that which does not yet
exist, considering that that which