IV Life, the springtime of youth, of passion, and of aspiration; life, full of pleasure; life, in the eternal sunlight, plunges man in dreams which he would never surrender-dreams with enchanting visions and indescribable joy. But these dreams must be broken by sorrow, anxiety, and disenchantment, the loss of happiness and of justice. The sun must vanish- the night, with all its terrors, draw near. But in the midst of this night, in the firmament appear to the troubled soul, in all their mysterious beauty, the heavenly stars which it saw not while the sunlight shone. Mystery embraces and calms the troubled soul; the stars of childhood and youth appear the simplicity of early sensations, the counsel and caresses of disinterested parental love, the lessons of reverence of God and of duty-all that eternity has made innate in man, all that has nourished, taught, and enlightened him at the beginning of life. It was necessary that the soul should be plunged into the darkness of night for the heavenly stars to be revealed out of the depths of the past. V In his celebrated work Psyche, Carus says that the key to comprehension of the conscious life lies in the sphere of the unconscious. He traces the correlation of the conscious and unconscious in human life, with many profound reflections. The divine in us—what we call the soul-he says, is not something intermittent or immovable, but incessantly changes form in a steady process of development, destruction, and reformation. Each phenomenon is an extension or development of the past, and contains the promise of future development. The conscious life of man is decomposed into separate moments of time; it has but an indistinct apprehension of its existence in the past and its prospects in the future; while the present escapes it, for hardly is it born before it mingles with the past. The reduction of all these moments to unity, the consciousness of the presentthat is, the determining of a distinct limit between the past and the future, is feasible only in the domain of unconsciousness, where there is no time, but eternity. The famous myths of Epimetheus and Prometheus have a profound meaning, and it was not without reason that the Greek wisdom embodied therein its conception of the higher development of humanity. All organic life recalls to us these conflicting sides of the creative idea in the domain of unconsciousness. Even in the vegetable and animal worlds each impulse or form reminds us of something related to the past, and foretells to us something to be formed, and to appear in the future. The more we think on the nature of this phenomenon, the more are we persuaded that all that in the conscious life we denominate memory, foresight, or foreknowledge, serves but as a pale reflection of the exactitude with which they exist in the unconscious life. Carus examines certain cases where the conscious life has been suddenly interrupted, and absorbed in the domain of the unconscious. Nothing is more remarkable, he says, than the sudden and involuntary apparition in our souls of images which have long disappeared, yet which are preserved in the depths of the unconscious soul. Ideas of men, of objects, of places, even our peculiar feelings and sensations, which in the course of long years seem to have vanished, suddenly awaken into life, and prove that in reality they were not lost at all. There have been some remarkable instances in which consciousness, in a moment, embraced a whole life with all its events. A case is known of a certain Englishman who was subjected to the strong action of opium: once, in the fierce agitation which precedes the complete prostration of the senses, he suddenly saw a picture of his former life with all its events and sensations. A similar experience was that of a girl who had fallen into the water, the moment before complete loss of consciousness. Carus gives no details, or references to evidence of the cases cited; but all have heard such cases in more or less confused forms. The following, however, is the unique, curious, and fully authenticated account of such an occurrence given by the person chiefly concerned. This happened with the English Admiral Beaufort, who, when a young man, fell out of a boat at Portsmouth, and, not knowing how to swim, sank to the bottom. He was taken from the water, and afterwards, at the request of the well-known Dr Wollaston, recounted the strange history of his experiences. After describing the circumstances of the accident he continues to the following effect : "What I have told you so far is based on confused memories of my own, and on the testimony of eye-witnesses; for a drowning man is, of course, entirely absorbed in the consciousness of his own peril and the struggle between hope and despair. For all which happened immediately afterwards, however, I can vouch with a good conscience, for there took place in my mind a revolution so sudden, and so extraordinary, that all the details have remained deeply impressed upon my memory with a freshness and distinctness as complete as if all had happened yesterday. From the moment I ceased to move (which occurred, I suppose, after complete suffocation), the violent sensations were superseded by a feeling of perfect calm and tranquillity, a state which one might perhaps describe as one of apathy, but yet not an attitude of submission to fate. I felt no pain of any kind, nor did I think any longer of either peril or rescue; on the contrary, the sensation was rather agreeable, resembling the languor which precedes sleep after some fatiguing physical exertion. My senses were paralysed. The opposite, however, was the case as regards my mind, the activity of which increased to an extent which entirely defies description, thought following thought with such rapidity that not only would it be impossible for me to describe what happened, but nobody, unless he should have passed through a similar experience, could form an idea of what I felt. "I still recall with the greatest distinctness the course of these thoughts, beginning with the accident which had just happened, the awkwardness to which it had been due, the panic that followed (I had seen men jumping into the water immediately after me), the effect which the event would produce upon the mind of my tender father, the announcement of the terrible news to my family, and a thousand other circumstances of my private life. Such was the first sequence of my thoughts. After this the circle of my ideas began to grow wider: first, our last voyage came back to my memory; then the first of our campaigns, with the shipwreck that occurred on that occasion; then my school-life, its successes, all its blunders, the follies, the boyish tricks, the little adventures of the time, and so on, always receding further. In this way all the experiences of my life unfolded themselves in my memory in an order opposite to that in which they had occurred, not, however, merely in general outline, as I have given them here, but like living pictures, with their most circumstantial features and details. In one word, the whole history of my life unrolled itself before me as in a panorama, and in recognising each event, I was able even to discern its character, to think of its cause and effect. But what is most remarkable is that almost all the most trivial facts, which I had long forgotten, were revived in my mind with such precision and accuracy, that it seemed as if they had just happened. Does not this prove the infinite power of the memory? Does it not prove, that one day we will awaken in another world in possession of a complete recollection of all that we have passed through in this, and that we shall have to contemplate our former life from beginning to end? And, on the other hand, does not all this justify also the belief that death is merely a modification of our being which continues to exist without any real interruption or break in its continuity? However that may be, what is extremely notewothy is the fact that all the thoughts passing before my soul in such great number were turned toward the past. I had been educated in the principles of religion; my ideas regarding our future life and the fears and hopes inseparably connected with those ideas had undergone no modification, and at any other time, therefore, the probability of an imminent peril would have sufficed to produce in me the most terrible emotion; but in that indescribable moment, although fully convinced that I had passed the line separating me from eternity, I had not a single thought for the future: I was entirely absorbed in the past. I am not able at present to estimate exactly the time occupied by the passing of this torrent of ideas before my mind, or, rather, during what fraction of time these recollections occurred, but this much is certain, that less than two minutes intervened between the moment in which suffocation began and the moment in which I was taken from the water. "When I began to revive, my sensations were of a totally different nature from those that I had experienced before. Instead of the multitude of clear and precise ideas which had passed before my soul, there was now but one confused thought weighing heavily upon it—namely, the danger and the risk which I had N |