There were certain things he _knew_, but none he cared to argue about;
and he shrank instinctively from attempting to put names to the contents
of this other region, knowing well that such names could only limit and
define things that, according to any standards in use in the ordinary
world, were simply undefinable and illusive.

So that, although this was the way his mind worked, there was clearly a
very strong leaven of common sense in Jones. In a word, the man the
world and the office knew as Jones _was_ Jones. The name summed him up
and labelled him correctly--John Enderby Jones.

Among the things that he _knew_, and therefore never cared to speak or
speculate about, one was that he plainly saw himself as the inheritor
of a long series of past lives, the net result of painful evolution,
always as himself, of course, but in numerous different bodies each
determined by the behaviour of the preceding one. The present John Jones
was the last result to date of all the previous thinking, feeling,
and doing of John Jones in earlier bodies and in other centuries. He
pretended to no details, nor claimed distinguished ancestry, for he
realised his past must have been utterly commonplace and insignificant
to have produced his present; but he was just as sure he had been at
this weary game for ages as that he breathed, and it never occurred to
him to argue, to doubt, or to ask questions. And one result of this
belief was that his thoughts dwelt upon the past rather than upon the
future; that he read much history, and felt specially drawn to certain
periods whose spirit he understood instinctively as though he had lived
in them; and that he found all religions uninteresting because, almost
without exception, they start from the present and speculate ahead as to
what men shall become, instead of looking back and speculating why men
have got here as they are.

In the insurance office he did his work exceedingly well, but without
much personal ambition. Men and women he regarded as the impersonal
instruments for inflicting upon him the pain or pleasure he had earned
by his past workings, for chance had no place in his scheme of things at
all; and while he recognised that the practical world could not get
along unless every man did his work thoroughly and conscientiously, he
took no interest in the accumulation of fame or money for himself, and
simply, therefore, did his plain duty, with indifference as to results.

In common w