Our brains are inherited from our ancestors. Why, then, may it not be that the human brain is a palimpsest, containing more or less faded, yet recoverable records, not only of our entire past life, but of the lives of our ancestors to the remotest periods? Pythagoras profest a distinct recollection of his former lives; the writer of this knows two educated men who have lived before in the persons of rather more famous individuals than their present representatives; Lumen, in Flammarion’s “Stories,” finds that his soul had passed through many previous conditions. Indeed, the idea of transmigration, which is a poetic forecast of the more scientific doctrine here enunciated, is a very familiar one. Coleridge, in his boyhood one day was proceeding through the Strand, stretching out his arms as if swimming, when a passer-by, feeling a hand at his coat-tail, turned rudely round and seized him as a pickpocket. Coleridge denied the charge, and confest that he had forgotten his whereabouts in the impression that he was Leander swimming across the Hellespont—a wretched streetlamp being transformed by his imagination into the signal-light of the beautiful priestess of Sestos.—American Notes and Queries.
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Forms—See [Spirit and Form].
Forms, Value of—See [Experience a Hard Teacher].
Fortitude—See [Endurance of Pain].
FORWARD
At dawn it called, “Go forward without fear!
All paths are open; choose ye, glad and free.”
Through morning’s toilsome climb it urged the plea,
“Nay, halt not, tho the path ye chose grow dear.”