Of the nature of dreams are the cases of partial drowning, where the whole life of the individual passes in review, to its most minute detail, during the brief interval in which the higher consciousness is permitted to function through the suppression of the lower by the physical asphyxiation and psychic exaltation which accompany the act. In the same category are the well-authenticated facts of the entire suppression of pain during the burning of both witches and martyrs. Through the tremendous psychic exaltation upon such occasions, the consciousness is transferred to higher states and the body burns without giving the soul any concern - it feeling, in the supreme arousing of its faculties, that its existence is not dependent upon its body in any degree.

The power of the center of consciousness, or soul, to use differing vehicles for its manifestation is the key to all hypnotic and supersensuous states. It is,their only rational explanation. For if the threshold of consciousness is displaced to any marked extent, or, in other words, if the center of consciousness which constitutes the human soul uses an inner vehicle, the new stimuli relate it to such unfamiliar phenomena that it often seems even to itself to be another consciousness - to belong to some other person. This has been well shown by the experiments of Binet and Frere, in France. In these, the permitting of the inner Ego to function through the suppression of the limiting sense organs by hypnosis caused an ignorant peasant woman, for example, to so widen her conscious area as to refuse to believe that she was identical with the stupid "Janet" of her ordinary unhypnotized experience.

This non - recognition of the functions and powers of the soul accounts for most, if not all, the cases of "spirit guides" and "controls" in mediums and hypnotics; for the ordinary medium- istic or trance "control," or "guide," is only a case of self- hypnosis, where a dramatization of the inner consciousness takes on the part of such guide, adviser, or prevaricator, according as the medium or hypnotic rises to a higher or lower plane of his or her being.

It may be objected, in this relation, that these particular manifestations of the powers of the soul are morbid, because connected with morbid conditions. But this does not follow. As well hold the light which passes through a lens to be abnormal, and not really light, because the process of polishing and shaping the lens which permits of its being focused is unusual, or because the capacity to focus light is not a property of the stone in its natural condition.

All such phenomena must be carefully studied, analyzed, and classified by science before it can impose its dictum upon the results of investigations in regions which it proudly refuses to enter. Nor can it be expected to lead investigation or thought. It has always been the unrelenting opposer of new ideas, as the new ideas in their turn have always been the deadliest foes of the old. It was scientific authority, as expressed in a little body of men, who, having mastered the externals of existing thought, and thus filled the measure of their own capacity, railed when Harvey asserted that the blood circulated through the human body; when Stevenson foretold the speed and usefulness of steam vehicles; and so on, through a long list of similar counts; and which to-day looks on with solemn discontent as birds float through the air in direct violation of its conceptions of the laws of physics, dynamics, and gravitation. For the same force, applied in the same manner, and attached to the same proportion of weight, when put into a "scientific" machine refuses to fly.

And yet no field is so full of proofs of the existence and functioning of a divine soul as that found in the marvelous collection of facts, and deductions of design and intelligence therefrom, which are the result of scientific inquiry.

But whether or not man has a soul, it is evident that he exhibits mental and spiritual powers which can not be connected with nor explained by his material organism. All the conscious aspects of his being are sui generis, and not derivable in any manner from his material aspects. Yet under the philosophic axiom that any law must necessarily be universal in its action to exist at all, this conscious energy which he exhibits must fall under the same law of conservation which obtains under material conditions. And this conservation of mental energy requires a mental vehicle, and one capable of passing from body to body upon the death of these; else the mental energy of one life is not conserved and carried over to the next, as its true conservation demands. Thus a reincarnating soul is directly pointed out and connected with the body by the two greatest generalizations of modern science - the conservation of force and the law of evolution. For either subjective energy, intellect, emotion, will, etc., are stored up in and transmitted under the law of force conservation by a soul, or this law, as well as that of evolution, is violated.

Intelligence can only be conserved by intelligence, and its evolution thus lies necessarily along its own, or subjective, lines In other words, the cause must be equal to the effect; and intelligence can only be the creation of and transmitted by intelligence. One sees at once how immense must be the waste of energy manifesting as intellect or intuition if the process of its evolution has to be begun anew with each new babe born on earth, to be again cut short by death when perhaps at its very highest evolutionary activity, unless that energy is carried forward from personality to personality by means of the repeated reincarnation of the soul. If, then, the energies of the soul obey, as they must, the law of force conservation, reincarnation becomes an absolute necessity.

There is another point overlooked by science. For intelligence to supervene upon unintelligent matter, under the play of blind force, demands as great an effort of the imagination and faith as the exploded theological theory of creation out of nothing. In the face of this, science has ever sought to find the source of intelligence in some nook or by-way of matter, forgetting that matter shows only the evidence of the presence of intelligence, not its underlying source. The key to the confusion lies in the fact of subconscious thought, which is none the less thought because acting below the plane of self-consciousness. Thought is of every plane in the Cosmos; the very stones have their manasic principle. Thought and organization go on side by side unconsciously until the plane of self-consciousness is reached, when man suddenly becomes aware of both a thinking and a conscious principle within him. This does not imply that either or both were absent on the planes below. Remember that thought, as we have pointed out, comes into the mind ready made, and is the ideation of the Higher Ego, the rationale of which will be explained in the chapter which deals directly with that subject.