neither begin with it nor end with it. I may have lived many previous lives, I may live many more hereafter. Still through all my potential changes, I am the same soul.’
‘Try this nutty brown sherry, Mr Bristley,’ said the host, passing it to him. ‘It’s old, but not so old as the doctrine of transmigration, in which you seem to be landing us.’
‘Thanks. The doctrine is old enough certainly, if that be a fault,’ he replied, ‘but on what other theory can you account for the diversified lower forms of life? That parrot upstairs, those puppies in the stable, how are we to account for their forms and their nature? It is the part of man not merely to see the world, but to account for it to himself. The transmigration theory does, to my mind, account for the zoological world. ‘The animals are souls like ourselves, all tending upward to or downward from the architype mankind. Some are in process of degradation, others in process of elevation, each according to the use or abuse of his preceding probation in the flesh, has earned his own reward or punishment in kind and degree. This is natural law in the spiritual world, the only kind of supernatural we need trouble ourselves about.’
‘I thought,’ said Mrs Guineabush, ‘that Darwin had sufficiently explained the origin of species by natural selection.’
‘By all means,’ replied Mr Bristley. ‘But who or what, after all, is the selecting nature? Nature, in the abstract, is but a name for Design in the universe, and the laws of nature are the sequences which form essential parts of that design. But we cannot conceive of Design without a Designer, which means a designing soul or mind. Thus we arrive at the great first principle which is the basis of philosophy, that soul or mind is the reality of existence, inert matter or body its image and instrument merely.’
‘Then, uncle,’ said Lesbia, ‘since you make every living being a soul, not a body, you exclude and deny the rule
