Often repeated suggestions become living ideas, incorporated in the animic sphere as well as in matter. Each parcel of idea or feeling which passes under the fire of the will undergoes a process of digestion which assimilates or rejects it. Because aptitudes survive the destructions of the organic cells, the psychic sphere always progresses in quality and in quantity.

There are in our organism millions of animalcules which are the result of distant existences. We reign in this domain, which is but the sum of small living souls which we have engendered in the course of the centuries. It is in this element that we normally communicate by telepathy.

The spiritual being had no immediate empire over matter: it was necessary that the spirit of man should be grafted on the soul of the beasts. That is why animal evolution preceded the appearance of man on the earth.

This conception of the evolution and constitution of the soul explains that each image recalls itself to the memory by a simple appeal, that of telepathy. All our knowledge is incorporated in an animic sphere obeying our suggestion.

The history of the formation of beings such of it as we have been able to reconstruct from observation, confirms us in the idea that creation is presented as a progressive materialization, realized around an animic substance, which subsists outside the present life and begins again with the additional experience so acquired. Our organism contains the synthesis of all that has preceded us. Thus is explained the fact that preformed man does not exist in the semen: the mothers' wombs contains only the elementary soul now taking up again the function to which it has grown accustomed throughout thousands of centuries. The road traveled by the primitive cell, a road which only the unfailing patience of the centuries has allowed it to travel, to-day is covered, in this new environment, the womb of the mother, with a rapidity which would savor of the miraculous if it were a question of a new being. But the identical passage takes place to-day in a short time because we are on a worn road, far away from the gropings of primitive evolution. The embryo finds, in an eminently favorable environment, all the elements for its new incorporation. A being repeats its journey without hesitation, and this is why remate-rialization is infinitely more rapid.

This interpretation agrees with the observed facts of ontogenesis and with the facts of experimental psychology. It permits us to have recourse to a single process in order to explain both the appearance of life upon our globe and of the child in an evolved world, while it classes under the same biogenetic law the two forms of evolution which seem so unlike.

All birth is a rematerialization, and the doctrine of successive lives gives us a satisfactory solution to all the problems. The organism of a child, when he comes into the world, is a mechanism so complicated that it could not be the product of a spontaneous creation. As we have shown in the preceding pages, he is the crowning of innumerable efforts and of frequent gropings. It is an already organized psychic force which presides at the refection of the organs: a multitude of tactile, motive, visual, and auditory cells, trained in their functions for centuries, are organized in the foetus before the presence of any intelligence is revealed.

Even the first incarnation cannot be the moment of birth. The child, when he appears for the first time in his terrestial envelope, is visibly in possession of organs with which he has been familiar for a long time. It must be supposed that an evolution, parallel to that which was taking place in matter, was preparing the psychic organs for future incarnations. The human animal was already old when the living soul was breathed into him, the induction of psychic force into matter.

The first truly human incarnation must have borrowed the materials for the new edifice from the astral plane, and constituted, perhaps, a new body from old organs. The visual mechanism and auditory organs realized by the animal species are not unworthy of humanity and do not differ from ours. For my part, I should like to possess the sight of a bird, the sense of smell of a dog, and the hearing of a cat. These steps of physiological progress were already realized, and the soul of these organs was already skilled in the use of its functions by the practice of millions of years, when the intelligent Being gained control and grafted itself on these organic forms.

It is thus that humanity must first have appeared, not in a state of innocence, but in a state of ignorance which could not place it much above the animal. With time, spiritual light pierced the darkness: moral ideas entered at the same time that laws, families, and tribes began to be instituted, and cities organized: and all this combined to form countries.

Now, men are born in unequal conditions of evolution and not one, perhaps, comes to this world for the first time. It is necessary that man be born again and reincarnate himself until his moral evolution be attained.

Consider the child who is newly born. The animal in him is sufficiently developed, so that he has nothing more to learn of material life. He can see, can hear, he knows how to suckle the breast of his mother - all functions belonging to the animal kingdom, from which he came, and, by consequence, already known to him. But he has painfully to acquire language, writing, and all the intellectual functions which are novelties to him. On this side, however, aptitudes are unequal and the differences are enormous, which, from a moral and intellectual point of view, separate the individuals of our species. Between the mollusk and the vertebra the physiological difference is great, but it is scarcely as great as the disproportion which may appear between two human beings. If we could see on the mental plane, we should be surprised at the great differences existing in hearts and intelligences which we are wont to class by families and species: the intellectual and moral scale would then appear in all its varieties. There is only one evolutionary action which may give a reason for such disparity. As there has existed an uninterrupted chain in organic progress still visible in the animal kingdom, there must exist mentalities of different value in the mental kingdom to which man has attained. The progress, on this plane, can be made only by means of reincarnations. We see that the multitude of little children who are born, are only, from the physical point of view, little animals equally endowed: how then shall we explain that their intellectual endowment is so different. Education is powerless to change it: we see gentle and intelligent children, by the side of little rascals whose faces already bear the stamp of vice and bestiality. These latter show the retarded development of inferior mentality, while the intelligent child has already a certain experience of moral life, has already lived. This is the only explanation which satisfies reason and sentiment at the same time.