It is an historic and scientific fact, and absolutely incontestable, that in all ages, among all peoples, and under the most diverse religious manifestations, the idea of immortality rests invulnerable at the base of human consciousness. Education has given it a thousand forms, but did not invent it. It exists of itself. Every human being coming into the world brings with him, under a form more or less vague, this inner feeling, this desire, this hope.
[II.]
ITER EXTATICUM CŒLESTE.
THE hours and days that I devoted to the study of these psychological and telepathical questions did not prevent my observing Mars through the telescope, and taking geographical drawings of it, every time that our atmosphere, so often cloudy, would permit. Besides, it may be realized that while in the study of Nature and in science all questions are related to each other, yet that astronomy and psychology are most closely united to each other, since the psychic universe has the material world for its habitat, while astronomy has for its object the study of the regions of eternal life, and we could form no idea of these regions if we did not know them astronomically. In fact, whether we know it or not, we are living now, at this moment, in heavenly regions, and all beings, whatever they may be, are eternally citizens of heaven. It was not without a secret divination of things that antiquity made Urania the Muse of all the sciences.
My mind had been occupied with the planet Mars for a long time, when one day, in a solitary ramble on the edge of a wood, after several hours of July heat, I seated myself at the foot of a clump of oak-trees, and was not long in dropping off to sleep.
The heat was overpowering, the landscape silent, the Seine seemed quiet as a canal at the bottom of the valley. I was strangely surprised on waking up after a few minutes' nap at no longer recognizing the landscape nor the trees, nor the river flowing at the foot of the hill, nor the undulating meadows which stretched far away to the distant horizon. The setting sun was smaller than we are accustomed to see it, the air thrilled with harmonious sounds unknown to Earth, and insects as large as birds were fluttering about on the leafless trees, which were covered with gigantic red flowers. Astonishment made me spring up with so energetic a bound that I found myself on my feet feeling singularly light and buoyant. I had taken but a few steps before it seemed to me that more than half the weight of my body had evaporated during my sleep. This inner sensation struck me even more forcibly than the metamorphosis of Nature spread out before me.
I could hardly believe my eyes or senses. Besides, my eyes were not at all the same. I did not hear in the same way, and I realized at once that my organization had developed several new senses quite different from those of our terrestrial body, especially a magnetic sense, by which one being can communicate with another without the necessity of translating thoughts audibly by words. This sense reminds one of the magnetic needle, which, from a cellar in the Paris Observatory, starts and shivers when an aurora borealis appears in Siberia, or when an electric explosion breaks out in the Sun.
The orb of day had just sunk in a distant lake, and the rosy gleams of twilight were hovering far down the sky, like a last dream of light. Two moons were beginning to shed their rays at different heights: the first, a crescent, hung over the lake in whose bosom the Sun had disappeared; the second, in its first quarter, was much higher, and towards the east. They were very small, and but distantly resembled the immense torch of our earthly nights. It seemed as if they shed their bright but feeble rays regretfully. I looked from one to the other in utter bewilderment. Perhaps the strangest thing in all this strange spectacle was that the western moon, which was about three times as large as its companion in the east, although five times smaller than our terrestrial moon, travelled through the sky with a motion very easy to follow with the eye, and seemed to speed quickly from right to left to join its celestial sister in the west.