The predominance of particular faculties in certain children is not to be explained according to the common philosophy which discerns the creation of a new soul in the birth of every infant. They are, on the contrary, easily explicable according to the doctrine of re-incarnations, indeed they are no more than a corollary of that doctrine. Everything is comprehensible if a life, anterior to the present, be admitted. The individual brings to his life here, the intuition which is the result of the knowledge he has acquired during his first existence. Men are of more or less advanced intelligence and morality, according to the life which they have led before they come into this world to play the parts which we can see. This is self-evident in the case of a man who recommences his life. This man had acquired certain faculties during his first, which are profitable to him in his second existence. Perhaps he does not possess all the faculties with which his first life was endowed, in their full and perfect integrity, but he has what mathematicians call the _resultant_ of those faculties, and this resultant is a special aptitude, it is _vocation_. He is a calculator, a painter, or a musician by vocation, because, in his former human career he has had the faculty of calculation, drawing, or music. We believe that it is impossible to find any other explanation of our natural aptitudes. It will be objected to this, that it is strange that aptitude and faculties should be the resultant of a prior existence, of which we have, nevertheless, no recollection. We reply to this objection that it is quite possible to lose all remembrance of events which have happened, and yet to preserve certain faculties of the soul which are independent of particular and concrete facts, especially when those faculties are powerful. We constantly see old men who have lost all recollection of the events of their life, who no longer know anything of the history of their time, nor indeed, of their own history, but who, nevertheless, have not lost their faculties, or aptitudes. Linnæus, in his old age, took pleasure in reading his own works, but forgot that he was their author, and frequently exclaimed: "How interesting! How beautiful! I wish I had written that!" There is no reason to doubt that a child, after its re-incarnation, may preserve the aptitudes of its previous existence, though it has entirely lost the remembrance of the facts which took place and which it witnessed during that period. These faculties reappear and become active in the child, just as the half-extinguished flame of a fire is rekindled by the breath of the wind. The breath which fans the smouldering flame of human faculties is that of a second existence.