Furthermore it is found that although bodily marks, scars and wounds, are clearly not of soul-compelling and permanent character, yet for purposes of identification, and when re-entering the physical atmosphere for the purpose of communication with friends, these temporary marks are re-assumed; just as the general appearance at the remembered age, and details connected with clothes and little unessential tricks of manner, may--in some unknown sense--be assumed too. And it is to this category that I would attribute the curious interest still felt in old personal possessions. They are attended to and recalled, not for what by a shopman is called their 'value,' but because they furnish useful and welcome evidence of identity; they are like the _pièces de conviction_ brought up at a trial, they bear silent witness to remembered fact. And in so far as the disposal or treatment of them by survivors is evidence of the regard in which their late owner was held, it is unlikely that they should have suddenly become matters of complete indifference. Nothing human, in the sense of affecting the human spirit, can be considered foreign to a friendly and sympathetic soul, even though his new preoccupations and industries and main activities are of a different order. It appears as if, for the few moments of renewed earthly intercourse, the newer surroundings shrink for a time into the background. They are remembered, but not vividly. Indeed it seems difficult to live in both worlds at once, especially after the life-long practice here of living almost exclusively in one. Those whose existence here was coloured or ennobled by wider knowledge and higher aims seem likely to have the best chance of conveying instructive information across the boundary; though their developed powers may be of such still higher value, that only from a sense of duty or in a missionary spirit can they be expected to absent them from felicity while in order to help the brethren. Quotation of a passage from Plotinus seems here permissible:-- "Souls which once were in men, when they leave the body, need not cease from benefiting mankind. Some indeed, in addition to other services, give occult messages (oracular replies), thus proving by their own case that other souls also survive" (_Enn._ IV. vii. 15). * * * * *