“As soon as I lost consciousness of the world without, my soul, I thought, which seemed at first to be diffused throughout my body, began to draw itself upward, beginning at the feet.  It passed through the veins of the legs and belly to the heart, which was beating like a thousand drums, and thence by the aorta and the carotids to the brain, whence it emerged by the fissures of the skull into the outer air.  No sooner was it free (though still attached, as I felt with some uneasiness, by a thin elastic cord to the pia mater) than it gathered itself together (into what form I could not say), and with incredible speed shot upwards, till it reached what seemed to be the floor of heaven.  Through this it passed, I know not how, and found itself all at once in a new world.

“What this world was like I must now endeavour to explain, difficult though it be to find suitable language; for the things here, of which our words are symbols, are themselves only symbols of the things there.  The feeling I had, however, (for I was now identified with my soul, and had forgotten all about my body)—­the feeling I had was that of sitting alone beside a river.  What kind of country it was I can hardly describe, for there was nowhere any definite colour or form, only a suggestion, such as I have seen in drawings, of vast infinite tracts of empty space.  I could not even say there was light or darkness, for my organ of perception did not seem to be the eye; only I was aware of an emotional effect similar to that of twilight, cold, grey, and formless as night itself.  The silence was absolute, if indeed silence it were, for it was not by the ear that I perceived either sound or its absence; but something there was, analogous to silence in its effect And in the midst of the silence and the twilight (since so I must call them) flowed the river, or what seemed such, distinguishable, as I thought at first, rather by the fact that it flowed, than by any peculiarity of substance, colour, or form, from the stretches of empty space that formed its banks.  But presently, as I looked more closely, I saw, rising from its surface, dipping, rising, and dipping again, in a regular rhythm, without change or pause, what I can only compare to a shoal of flying fish.  Not that they looked like fish, or indeed like anything I had ever seen, but that was the image suggested by their motion.  As soon as I saw them I knew what they were:  they were souls; and the river down which they passed was the river of Time; and their dipping in and out again was the sequence of their lives and deaths.

“All this did not surprise me at all.  Rather, I felt it was something I had always known, yet something inexpressibly flat and disillusioning.  ‘Of course!’ I said to myself, or thought, or whatever may have been my mode of cognition—­’Of course!  That is it, and that is all!  Souls are indeed immortal—­why should we ever have imagined otherwise?  They are immortal, and what of it?  I see the death-side now as I saw the