here would be a
continual exchange, a never broken circle, an unending 'come and go' of
beamy emissions, which would engender and nourish in the solar world
motion and activity, thought and feeling, and keep burning everywhere
the torch of life.

"See the emanations of souls that dwell in the Sun descending upon the
earth in the shape of solar rays. Light gives life to plants, and
produces vegetable life, to which sensibility belongs. Plants having
received from the Sun the germ of sensibility transmit it to animals,
always with the help of the Sun's heat. See the soul germs enfolded in
animals develop, improve little by little, from one animal to another,
and at last become incarnated in a human body. See, a little later, the
superhuman succeed the man, launch himself into the vast plains of
ether, and begin the long series of transmigrations that will gradually
lead him to the highest round of the ladder of spiritual growth, where
all material substance has been eliminated, and where the time has come
for the soul thus exalted, and with essence purified to the utmost, to
enter the supreme home of bliss and intellectual and moral power; that
is the Sun.

"Such would be the endless circle, the unbroken chain, that would bind
together all the beings of Nature, and extend from the visible to the
invisible world."

From that moment, moved more and more by the strangeness of the fancy,
which evidently fascinated him, he buried himself in the indulgence of
the thought of the possibility of some sort of communication with his
wife. Singularly and fortunately he did not have recourse to the
fruitless idiocy of spiritualism, nor engage in that humiliating
intercourse with illiterate humbugs who personate the minds of men and
women almost too sacred to be even for an instant associated in thought
with themselves.

In 1881 electrical science had well advanced toward those perfected
triumphs which give distinction to this century. Electric lighting was
well understood, the Jablochkoff and Jamin lamps were then in use, the
incandescent and Maxim light, or arc light were employed, and indeed the
panic caused by Edison's premature announcement of the solution of the
incandescent system of lighting had then preceded by two years, the
excellent results of Mr. Swan in England in the same field. Edison's
first carbon light and his original phonograph were exhibited toward the
end of 1880 in the Patent Museum at South Kensington.