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questioning of many people, they found some old peasants who had been told by their parents the history of a
young beautiful woman who had thrown her husband into the sea. All the poor beggar woman had related was
exactly verified. The Prince went to Hamburg and made inquiries of the Chief of Police regarding the beggar,
and was told that she was uneducated, spoke only a dialect, and lived the life of a common mendicant.
We have said that forgetfulness of past existences is one of the consequences of incarnation. However,
this forgetfulness is not always absolute. With many people the past returns under the form of impressions
without precise memories. These impressions often influence our actions, and they do not come from
education, environment, or heredity. Among the number, we can class our own sudden antipathies and
sympathies, our rapid intimacies and our innate ideas. We have only to look inward to study ourselves with
attention to find in our tastes, tendencies, and traits of character numerous vestiges of the past, but
unfortunately few of us give this personal examination with method and attention.
There are always in every epoch of history a certain number of men who, thanks to exceptional
dispositions and psychic organizations, conserve memories of their past lives. For them the plurality of
existence is not a theory, it is a fact divinely perceived. The testimony of these men assumes considerable
importance, because they usually occupy in the history of their time a high station, and almost all such men
have superior minds, and exercise a great influence on their epochs. The rare faculty they enjoy is the result of
an immense evolution. The value of a testimony being in exact rapport with the intelligence and integrity of
the witness, we cannot pass in silence the affirmation of these men, some of whom have worn the crown of
genius.
Pythagoras recalled at least three of his existences and the names he bore in them. Empedocles
declared that he recalled having been successively a boy and a girl. Lamartine in his Voyage in the Orient
speaks of his distinct reminiscences of a far past. He says, ‘I had in Judea, no bible or chart at hand. There was
none to give me the antique name of the valleys and mountains. Nevertheless, I at once recognized the Valley
and the Battlefield of Saul! When we reached the convent, the Fathers confirmed with exactitude my
previsions. My companions could not believe it, and it was the same at Sephora. I had designed with the finger
and named a hill whereon the ruin of a château stood, as the probable birthplace of the Virgin. The next day, at
the foot of an arid mountain, I recognised the tomb of the Maccabees. With the exception of the Valley of
Lebanon, I saw scarcely any spot which was not for me like a memory. Have we then lived two lives, or a
thousand? Is nor our memory but a tarnished image that the breath of God revives?’
In the Literary Journal of November 1864, a writer on Joseph Mèry said: ‘He had singular theories
which to him were convictions. He firmly believed he had lived several times and recalled the small incidents
of anterior existences. He said Virgil and Horace had been friends of his, and he had known Augustus and
Germanicus, and had fought in Gaul and Germany. He was a general, and commanded German troops. When
they crossed the Rhine, he recognized places in the mountains where his name was then Minius, and he gives
an incident to substantiate his idea. One day Mèry was visiting the Library of the Vatican in Rome; he was met
by two young men in long brown robes, who spoke to him in pure Latin. Mèry was a Latin scholar, but he had
never attempted to converse in the language of Juvenal. But as he listened to these young men, and admired
their magnificent idiom, a veil seemed to fall from his eyes, and it seemed to him that it was thus he had
conversed of old with his friends. Irreproachable phrases fell from his lips! Immediately he found elegant and
correct expressions. He spoke in Latin as he spoke in French. This he could not have done without
apprenticeship. He must have journeyed through a century of splendor to have acquired such language, which
could not have been attained in an hour. Victor Hugo believed in a succession of lives; he believed he had
been Juvenal in one incarnation. Amiel said, “It seems to me I have lived dozens or hundreds of lives. I have
been a mathematician, a musician, a monk, a mother; I have been an animal, and a plant.”’
To these reminiscences of illustrious men we must add that of a number of children. Here the
phenomenon is easily explained. The adaptation of the psychic sense to the material organs at birth takes place
slowly and gradually. It is complete at the seventh year usually: later sometimes. Up to this period the spirit of
the child floats out of its envelope, and to a certain extent, sees its life in space. In this way we often gather
from the lips of children allusions to anterior lives and descriptions of scenes and personages having no
rapport with their actual young lives. These visions generally vanish at adult age, when the soul of the child
enters into full possession of earthly organs. All the astral vibrations cease, the inner consciousness becomes
mute. All the attention which these childish revelations merit is rarely accorded. On the contrary, parents are
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