"I see,—they are the same souls, same colors."
"What do you mean by the 'same colors'?"
"Yes, the souls are suffused with light."
A few instants afterwards he added, "And yet there is a difference."
Then he was silent, his forehead frowning in his effort to find out. But his face regained all its calmness and serenity as he added,—
"He has become she, the woman; she is now the man,—and they love each other more than ever."
As if he did not quite understand what he had said himself, he seemed to be seeking for some explanation,—made painful efforts, judging from the contraction of the muscles in his face, and fell into a sort of cataleptic fit, from which Dr. B. speedily relieved him; but the lucid interval had fled, not to return.
In ending, I leave this last fact with the reader just as it happened, without comment. Had the subject, according to the hypothesis now admitted by many hypnotists, been under the influence of my own thought when the professor ordered him to answer me? Or, being independent, had he really "freed" himself, and had he seen beyond our sphere? I cannot undertake to decide. Perhaps it will appear in the course of this story.
And yet I will acknowledge in all sincerity that the resurrection of my friend and his adored companion on the world of Mars,—a neighboring abode to ours, and so remarkably like this one we inhabit, only older, doubtless more advanced on the road of progress,—may appear to a thinker's eyes the logical and natural continuation of their earthly existence, so quickly broken off.
Doubtless Spero was right in declaring that matter is not what it seems to be, and that appearances are deceitful; that the real is the invisible; that animate force is indestructible; that in the absolute, the infinitely great is identical with the infinitely small; that celestial space is not impassable; and that souls are the seeds of planetary humanities. Who knows but that the philosophy of dynamism may one day reveal the religion of the future to the apostles of astronomy? Does not Urania bear the torch without which every problem is insoluble, without which all Nature would remain to us in impenetrable obscurity? Heaven must explain the earth, the infinite must explain the soul and its immaterial faculties.