The Professor smiled.
“Suppose we imitate Thomas Hardy, and say by the President of the Immortals, who makes sport with more humans than Tess,” he answered. “Mistakes may be deliberate, just as their reverse may be accidental. Even a mighty power may condescend sometimes to a very practical joke. To a thinker the world is full of apple-pie beds, and cold wet sponges fall on us from at least half the doors we push open. The soul-juggleries of the before-mentioned President are very curious, but people will not realize that soul transference from body to body is as much a plain fact as the daily rising of the sun on one half of the world and its nightly setting on the other.”
“Do you mean that souls pass on into the world again on the death of the particular body in which they have been for the moment confined?” I asked.
“Precisely: I have no doubt of it. Sometimes a woman’s soul goes into a man’s body; then the man acts woman, and people cry against him for effeminacy. The soul colours the body with actions, the body does not colour the soul, or not in the same degree.”
“But we are not irresponsible. We can command ourselves.”
The Professor smiled dryly.
“You think so?” he said. “I sometimes doubt it.”
“And I doubt your theory of soul transference.”
“That shows me—pardon the apparent impertinence—that you have never really examined the soul question with any close attention. Do you suppose that D——— really likes being so noticeably different from other men? Depend upon it,’ he has noticed in himself what we have noticed in him. Depend upon it, he has tried to be ordinary, and found it impossible. His soul manages him as a strong nature manages a weak one, and his soul is a female, not a male. For souls have sexes, otherwise what would be the sense of talking about wedded souls? I have no doubt whatever of the truth of reincarnation on earth. Souls go on and on following out their object of development.”
“You believe that every soul is reincarnated?”