they declared so solidly that we should be content to know these presences
that seemed friendly and near but as "the phantom" in Coleridge's poem,
and to think of them perhaps, as having, as St. Thomas says, entered upon
the eternal possession of themselves in one single moment?

"All look and likeness caught from earth,
All accident of kin and birth,
Had passed away. There was no trace
Of ought on that illumined face,
Upraised beneath the rifted stone,
But of one spirit all her own;
She, she herself and only she,
Shone through her body visibly."

V

One night I heard a voice that said: "The love of God for every human soul
is infinite, for every human soul is unique; no other can satisfy the same
need in God." Our masters had not denied that personality outlives the
body or even that its rougher shape may cling to us a while after death,
but only that we should seek it in those who are dead. Yet when I went
among the country people, I found that they sought and found the old
fragilities, infirmities, physiognomies that living stirred affection. The
Spiddal knowledgeable man, who had his knowledge from his sister's ghost,
noticed every hallowe'en, when he met her at the end of the garden, that
her hair was greyer. Had she perhaps to exhaust her allotted years in the
neighbourhood of her home, having died before her time? Because no
authority seemed greater than that of this knowledge running backward to
the beginning of the world, I began that study of spiritism so despised by
Stanislas de Gaeta, the one eloquent learned scholar who has written of
magic in our generation.

VI

I know much that I could never have known had I not learnt to consider in
the after life what, there as here, is rough and disjointed; nor have I
found that the mediums in Connaught and Soho have anything I cannot find
some light on in Henry More, who was called during his life the holiest
man now walking upon the earth.

All souls have a vehicle or body, and when one has said that, with More
and the Platonists one has escaped from the abstract schools who seek
always the power of some church or institution, and found oneself with
great poetry, and superstition which is but popular poetry, in a pleasant
dangerous world. Beauty is indeed but bodily life in some ideal condition.
The vehicle of the human soul is what used to be called the animal
spirits, and Henry More quotes from Hippocrates this sentence: "The mind
of