ENQ. You have given me a bird’s eye view of the seven principles; now how do they account for our complete loss of any recollection of having lived before?
THEO. Very easily. Since those “principles” which we call physical, and none of which is denied by science, though it calls them by other names,[32] are disintegrated after death with their constituent elements, _memory_ along with its brain, this vanished memory of a vanished personality, can neither remember nor record anything in the subsequent re-incarnation of the EGO. Re-incarnation means that this Ego will be furnished with a _new_ body, a _new_ brain, and a _new_ memory. Therefore it would be as absurd to expect this _memory_ to remember that which it has never recorded as it would be idle to examine under a microscope a shirt never worn by a murderer, and seek on it for the stains of blood which are to be found only on the clothes he wore. It is not the clean shirt that we have to question, but the clothes worn during the perpetration of the crime; and if these are burnt and destroyed, how can you get at them?
ENQ. Aye! how can you get at the certainty that the crime was ever committed at all, or that the “man in the clean shirt” ever lived before?
THEO. Not by physical processes, most assuredly; nor by relying on the testimony of that which exists no longer. But there is such a thing as circumstantial evidence, since our wise laws accept it, more, perhaps, even than they should. To get convinced of the fact of re-incarnation and past lives, one must put oneself in _rapport_ with one’s real permanent Ego, not one’s evanescent memory.
ENQ. But how can people believe in that which they _do not know_, nor have ever seen, far less put themselves in _rapport_ with it?
THEO. If people, and the most learned, will believe in the Gravity, Ether, Force, and what not of Science, abstractions “and working hypotheses,” which they have neither seen, touched, smelt, heard, nor tasted—why should not other people believe, on the same principle, in one’s permanent Ego, a far more logical and important “working hypothesis” than any other?
ENQ. What is, finally, this mysterious eternal principle? Can you explain its nature so as to make it comprehensible to all?