Should any misfortune touch one, the other becomes immediately conscious of it; and such separations have been known to end in death. How many facts have been stated by trustworthy witnesses of the sudden apparition of a person to an intimate friend, of a wife to a husband, of a mother to a son, and _vice versâ_, just at the moment of death, even though many leagues might separate them! The most captious critic cannot in these days deny facts thus circumstantially proved. Twin children living ten leagues apart, and under very different conditions, are stricken at the same time with the same malady, or if one is excessively fatigued, the other feels the same without apparently any assignable cause. And so on. These facts prove that ties of sympathy exist between souls and even between bodies, and give room for the repeated reflection, that we are far from knowing all the forces operating in nature. If I communicate these views to you, my friend, it is chiefly to show that you can not only have a foretaste of truth before death, but also that earthly existence is not so entirely deprived of light, as to prevent one's reason recognising the chief characteristics of the moral world. Besides, all these truths will be emphasised by my further narration, when you learn that it is not only the previous existence before my last one that I have seen again, thanks to the slowness of light, but also my ante-penultimate planetary life, inclusive of more than ten existences preceding that one in which we came to know each other upon this Earth. II [Sidenote: Plurality of lives.] QUÆRENS. Reflection and study had already inclined me, Lumen, to believe in the plurality of the existences of the soul. Yet this doctrine lacks proofs, logical, moral, and even physical, as numerous and as weighty as are those in favour of the plurality of the inhabited worlds. I own that until now I had grave doubts on the subject. Modern optics and marvellous calculations, which enable us to touch, as it were, the other worlds, show us their years, their seasons, their days, and make us acquainted with the varieties of nature living on their surface. All these elements have enabled contemporaneous astronomy to establish the fact of human existence in the other worlds on a strong and imperishable foundation. But I repeat that it is not so with palingenesis, though I am strongly inclined towards the doctrine of the transmigration of souls in the actual heaven, since this is the only way by which we can gain an idea of eternal life. My desires, however, need to be sustained by the help of a light, and inspired by a confidence I do not yet possess. LUMEN. It is precisely this light which we have under consideration, and will be brought out by this interview.