It is well at times to contemplate invisible things as though we saw them with our eyes. This was the aim of all the great religions, when they but represented under forms appropriate to the manners of their day the latent deep, instinctive truths, the general and essential truths which are the guiding principles of mankind. All have felt and recognized that loftiest of all truths, the communion of the living and the dead, and have given it various names designating the same mysterious verity: the Christians know it as revival of merit, the Buddhists as reincarnation, or transmigration of souls, and the Japanese as Shintoism, or ancestor-worship. The last are more fully convinced than any other nation that the dead do not cease to live and that they direct our actions, are exalted by our virtues and become gods. Lafcadio Hearn, the writer who has most closely studied and understood that wonderful ancestor-worship, says: “One of the surprises of our future will certainly be a return to beliefs and ideas long ago abandoned upon the mere assumption that they contained no truth—beliefs still called barbarous, pagan, mediæval, by those who condemn them out of traditional habit. Year after year the researches of science afford us new proof that the savage, the barbarian, the idolater, the monk, each and all have arrived, by different paths, as near to some one point of eternal truth as any thinker of the nineteenth century. We are now learning, also, that the theories of the astrologers and of the alchemists were but partially, not totally, wrong. We have reason even to suppose that no dream of the invisible world has ever been dreamed,—that no hypothesis of the unseen has ever been imagined,—which future science will not prove to have contained some germ of reality.”[28] There are many things which might be added to these lines, notably all that the most recent of our sciences, metaphysics, is engaged in discovering with regard to the miraculous faculties of our subconsciousness. 4