For that matter, no one can tell us that this is not so now and that all our spiritual victories, all that seems, at certain moments, to be leading us towards a future less hideous than the past, all the mysterious currents of good that sometimes flow through our world, all that awaits us after death, no one, I say, can tell us that all this is not due to the intervention of one of those worlds. It is true that we cannot perceive the act of intervention, that we are hardly sensible of it; but it is also true that these creatures of a higher world, being of necessity less encumbered with matter and more spiritual than we, must necessarily remain invisible to us. In the infinity of the firmament we discover myriads of worlds that are material worlds like our own; and we are able to discover only these, because all that does not more or less closely resemble our own world must needs escape us. But the space lying between the stars, which to us appears void, is infinitely wider than the space which they themselves occupy; and it would be strange indeed if it were not filled with worlds which we cannot perceive at all, or rather if it were not itself one vast world which our eyes are incapable of taking in. It is, moreover, thinkable that, if we do not see these other worlds, they, not being material worlds, do not perceive matter and are consequently as unaware of us as we are unaware of them; for we are doubtless mistaken in believing that, because we are visible to one another, we are necessarily visible to all other beings. On the contrary, there is reason to presume that these spiritual beings pass through us without suspecting our presence and that, as they are conscious and sensible only of that which emanates from the spirit, they do not suspect or discover our existence except in so far as we approach the conditions in which they exist. 5