In justice to our authors, however, it should be remembered that
this assumption is put forth not as something scientifically
probable, but as something which for aught we know to the
contrary may possibly be true. This, to be sure, we need not
deny; nor if we once allow this prodigious leap of inference,
shall we find much difficulty in reaching the famous conclusion
that "thought conceived to affect the matter of another universe
simultaneously with this may explain a future state." This
proposition, quaintly couched in an anagram, like the discoveries
of old astronomers, was published last year in "Nature," as
containing the gist of the forthcoming book. On the
negative-image hypothesis it is not hard to see how thought is
conceived to affect the seen and the unseen worlds
simultaneously. Every act of consciousness is accompanied by
molecular displacements in the brain, and these are of course
responded to by movements in the ethereal world. Thus as a series
of conscious states build up a continuous memory in strict
accordance with physical laws of motion,[7] so a correlative
memory is simultaneously built up in the ethereal world out of
the ethereal correlatives of the molecular displacements which go
on in our brains. And as there is a continual transfer of energy
from the visible world to the ether, the extinction of vital
energy which we call death must coincide in some way with the
awakening of vital energy in the correlative world; so that the
darkening of consciousness here is coincident with its dawning
there. In this way death is for the individual but a transfer
from one physical state of existence to another; and so, on the
largest scale, the death or final loss of energy by the whole
visible universe has its counterpart in the acquirement of a