In our opinion, if psychometry is one of the grandest proofs of the indestructibility of matter, retaining eternally the impressions of the outward world, the possession of that faculty by our inner sight is a still greater one in favor of the immortality of man’s individual spirit. Capable of discerning events which took place hundreds of thousands of years ago, why would it not apply the same faculty to a future lost in the eternity, in which there can be neither past nor future, but only one boundless present? Notwithstanding the confessions of stupendous ignorance in some things, made by the scientists themselves, they still deny the existence of that mysterious spiritual force, lying beyond the grasp of the ordinary physical laws. They still hope to be able to apply to living beings the same laws which they have found to answer in reference to dead matter. And, having discovered what the kabalists term “the gross purgations” of Ether—light, heat, electricity, and motion—they have rejoiced over their good fortune, counted its vibrations in producing the colors of the spectrum; and, proud of their achievements, refuse to see any further. Several men of science have pondered more or less over its protean essence, and unable to measure it with their photometers, called it “an _hypothetical_ medium of great elasticity and extreme {187} tenuity, _supposed_ to pervade all space, the interior of solid bodies not excepted;” and, “to be the medium of transmission of light and heat” (Dictionary). Others, whom we will name “the will-o’-the-wisps” of science—her pseudo-sons—examined it also, and even went to the trouble of scrutinizing it “through powerful glasses,” they tell us. But perceiving neither spirits nor ghosts in it, and failing equally to discover in its treacherous waves anything of a more scientific character, they turned round and called all believers in immortality in general, and spiritualists in particular, “insane fools” and “visionary lunatics;”[312] the whole, in doleful accents, perfectly appropriate to the circumstance of such a sad failure. Say the authors of the _Unseen Universe_: “We have driven the operation of that mystery called _Life_ out of the objective universe. The mistake made, lies in imagining that by this process they completely get rid of a thing so driven before them, and that it disappears from the universe altogether. It does no such thing. It only disappears from that _small circle_ of light which we may call the universe of _scientific perception_. Call it the trinity of mystery: mystery of matter, the mystery of life and—the mystery of God—and these three are _One_.”[313]