The Kabalists in their wisdom were on their guard against the dreams of imagination and hallucinations of the waking state. Therefore they avoided in particular all unhealthy evocations which disturb the nervous system and intoxicate reason. Makers of curious experiments in phenomena of extra-atural vision are no better than the eaters of opium and hasheesh. They are children who injure themselves recklessly. It may happen that one is overtaken by intoxication; we may even so far forget ourselves voluntarily as to seek the experience of drunkenness, but for the man who respects himself, a single instance suffices. Count Joseph de Maistre says that one of these days we shall deride our present stupidity, much as we deride the barbarity of the middle ages. What would he think, did he see our table-turners or listen to makers of hypotheses concerning the world of spirits? Poor creatures that we are, we escape from one absurdity by rushing over to its opposite. The eighteenth century thought that it protested against superstition by denying religion and we in return testify to the impiety of that period by believing in old wives’ fables. Is it impossible to be a better Christian than Voltaire and still not believe in ghosts? The dead can no more revisit this earth which they have quitted than a child can return into the womb of its mother.[72] That which we call death is birth into a new life. Nature does not repeat what it has once done in the order of necessary progression through the scale of existence, and she cannot bely her own fundamental laws. Limited by its organs and served by these, the human soul can enter into communication with things of the visible world only by the intermediation of these organs. The body is an envelope adjusted to the physical environments in which the soul abides here. By confining the action of the soul it makes her activity possible. In the absence of body the soul would be everywhere, and yet in so attenuated a sense that it could act nowhere, but, lost in the infinite, would be swallowed up and annihilated in God.[73] Imagine a drop of fresh water shut up in a globule and cast in the sea; as long as that sheath is preserved intact, the drop of water will subsist in its separate form, but let the globule be broken and where shall we look for the drop in the vast sea?