the wave of modern psychism. He hardly knew the meaning of such words as
"clairvoyance" and "clairaudience." He had never felt the least desire
to join the Theosophical Society and to speculate in theories of
astral-plane life, or elementals. He attended no meetings of the
Psychical Research Society, and knew no anxiety as to whether his "aura"
was black or blue; nor was he conscious of the slightest wish to mix in
with the revival of cheap occultism which proves so attractive to weak
minds of mystical tendencies and unleashed imaginations.

There were certain things he _knew_, but none he cared to argue about;
and he shrank instinctively from attempting to put names to the contents
of this other region, knowing well that such names could only limit and
define things that, according to any standards in use in the ordinary
world, were simply undefinable and illusive.

So that, although this was the way his mind worked, there was clearly a
very strong leaven of common sense in Jones. In a word, the man the
world and the office knew as Jones _was_ Jones. The name summed him up
and labelled him correctly--John Enderby Jones.

Among the things that he _knew_, and therefore never cared to speak or
speculate about, one was that he plainly saw himself as the inheritor
of a long series of past lives, the net result of painful evolution,
always as himself, of course, but in numerous different bodies each
determined by the behaviour of the preceding one. The present John Jones
was the last result to date of all the previous thinking, feeling,
and doing of John Jones in earlier bodies and in other centuries. He
pretended to no details, nor claimed distinguished ancestry, for he
realised his past must have been utterly commonplace and insignificant
to have produced his present; but he was just as sure he had been at