To say the truth, that which from our first interview has most taxed and surpassed the bounds of my imagination, was to think that the duration of the voyage of the spirit can be not only _nil_--negative--but also _retrograde_! [Sidenote: Time retrogressive.] "Time retrogressive!" These two words involve a contradiction in terms. Dare one believe it? You start to-day for a star, and you arrive yesterday! What do I say--yesterday? You will arrive there seventy-two years ago, even a hundred years ago! The farther you go, the sooner you will arrive! Terms in grammar must be remade for such extraordinary reckoning. LUMEN. This is undeniable. Speaking according to terrestrial style, there is not any error in this mode of expression, since the Earth was only in 1793, &c., for the world in which we arrived, or for the world which we reached. [Sidenote: Apparent paradoxes anent time.] You have, however, on your little globe certain apparent paradoxes, which give an idea of this one. For example, a telegram sent from Paris at noon arrives at Brest twenty minutes before noon. But these curious aspects of particular application are not of sufficient significance for you to dwell upon, but rather the _revelation_ of which they are the metaphysical form and the outward expression. Know that time is not an absolute reality, but only a transitory measure caused by the movements of the Earth in the Solar System. Regarded with the eyes of the soul, and not with those of the body, this picture of human life, not imaginary but real, such as it was, dissimulation being impossible, touches on one side the domain of theology, inasmuch as it explains physically a mystery hitherto inexplicable: I mean "individual judgment" of ourselves after death. From the point of view of the whole question, the present of a world is no longer a momentary actuality, which disappears as soon as it has appeared, it is no longer a phase without consistency, a gate through which the past is precipitated unceasingly towards the future, a mathematical plan in space. It is, on the contrary, an effective reality, which flies away from this world with the swiftness of light, sinking for ever in the infinite, and remaining thus an _eternal present_. [Sidenote: Events live for ever.] The metaphysical reality of this vast problem is such, that one can now conceive the omnipresence of the world throughout all its duration. Events vanish from the place in which they were born, but they exist in space. This successive and endless projection of all the facts enacted upon every world takes place in the bosom of the _Infinite Being_, whose ubiquity holds everything in an eternal permanence. [Sidenote: Scientific explanation of ubiquity.]