Thus, ancient as well as modern wisdom, vaticination and science, agree in corroborating the claims of the kabalists. It is on the indestructible tablets of the astral light that is stamped the impression of every thought we think, and every act we perform; and that future events—effects of long-forgotten causes—are already delineated as a vivid picture for the eye of the seer and prophet to follow. Memory—the despair of the materialist, the enigma of the psychologist, the sphinx of science—is to the student of old philosophies merely a name to express that power which man {179} unconsciously exerts, and shares with many of the inferior animals—to look with inner sight into the astral light, and there behold the images of past sensations and incidents. Instead of searching the cerebral ganglia for “micrographs of the living and the dead, of scenes that we have visited, of incidents in which we have borne a part,”[305] they went to the vast repository where the records of every man’s life as well as every pulsation of the visible cosmos are stored up for all Eternity! That flash of memory which is traditionally supposed to show a drowning man every long-forgotten scene of his mortal life—as the landscape is revealed to the traveller by intermittent flashes of lightning—is simply the sudden glimpse which the struggling soul gets into the silent galleries where his history is depicted in imperishable colors. The well-known fact—one corroborated by the personal experience of nine persons out of ten—that we often recognize as familiar to us, scenes, and landscapes, and conversations, which we see or hear for the first time, and sometimes in countries never visited before, is a result of the same causes. Believers in reïncarnation adduce this as an additional proof of our antecedent existence in other bodies. This recognition of men, countries, and things that we have never seen, is attributed by them to flashes of soul-memory of anterior experiences. But the men of old, in common with mediæval philosophers, firmly held to a contrary opinion.