"Be patient," he answered, "you will see it before very long."
My companion was in more than usually good spirits. He was in one of his bright, amusing, and kindly satirical moods, and for some time he kept me in a state of nearly continual laughter by recounting his early experiences with the sixth sense before he properly understood how to regulate this new power.
"During the next two hundred years," he said, "the earth will be a lively place for those who are fond of observation. If I am not much mistaken there will be great progress in the growth of spiritual science, and as its professors will probably possess a very imperfect knowledge there may be some little confusion. Fancy how unpleasant it will be to many people when their thoughts become common property, and their actions can no longer be done in secret. When a cad, however polished, will appear as a cad; and children will be sent to school to undergo heart-training and not to learn deportment; when the future members of Parliament will have to study the art, not of elocution and subterfuge, but of caring more for their constituents than for their own interests; when the wife will no longer ask her husband why he returned so late, because she will know as well as he does; when the detective will be banished into the region of history, and the judge require neither witness nor jury; when curiosity, the cause of so much vice, shall be exercised only in spiritual things, and men and women walk naked yet unashamed both in body and spirit.
"Of course all this will come gradually, and future generations will find no more inconvenience than would young children if the change took place to-morrow. All our so-called modesty and our deceit are unknown to them, being merely the outcome of training. The child is open enough until by mental or physical smacks he learns to cover his body with garments, and his thoughts with words most suitable to concealing them. When such clothing is transparent the man will become in this respect as a little child.
"This will be the time of which Emerson speaks, when he says--'Every man takes care that his neighbour shall not cheat him, but a day comes when he begins to care that he do not cheat his neighbour. Then all goes well; he has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun. What a day dawns when we have taken to heart the doctrine of faith! To prefer as a better investment being to doing, being to seeming, logic to rhythm and to display; the year to the day, the life to the year, character to performance.'
"The desire to perform is the one great hindrance to progress. So many wish to do, so few to be. If we are great we cannot help doing great things, and if we are small-minded no effort shall magnify our output. It is for this reason that I give a limit of two hundred years for even this partial development of a sense which is already latent in many. In the present rush of action growth is retarded, discovery thrown into the melting-pot for gain, whereby its most valuable component parts escape in the form of invisible gases. But come with me, and I will show you the secret which is hidden behind that third door."
We passed as usual into the laboratory.
"Sit down, and while we smoke I will tell you a few things which it is as well you should know before we go further.
"I think," he continued, when we had settled ourselves comfortably, "I have already explained to you that, contrary to the general belief, Wordsworth was quite right when he said--
'Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.'