A great deal of the muddle comes from
the feminine weariness of logic, and a great deal, too, from the
fact that they never learn how to use words--words are the things
that divide people! But I believe more and more, by experience, in
the SOUL. I do not believe that the soul begins with birth or ends
with death. Now I have no sort of doubt in my own mind that the
soul of your child was a living thing, a spirit which has lived
before, and will live again. Souls, I believe, come to the brink of
life, out of some unknown place, and by choice or impelled by some
need for experience, take shape. I don't know how or why this is--I
only believe that it is so. If your child had lived, you would have
become aware of its soul; you would have found it to have perfectly
distinct qualities and desires and views of its own, not learnt
from you, and which you could not affect or change. All those
qualities are in it from the time of birth--but it takes a soul
some time to learn the use of the body. But the connection between
the soul and the father and mother who give it a body is a real
one; I don't profess to know what it is, or why it is that some
parents have congenial children and some quite uncongenial ones--
that is only one of the many mysteries which beset us. Holding all
this, it does not seem to me on the face of it impossible that the
soul of the child should have been brought into contact with Maud's
soul; though of course the whole affair is quite capable of a
scientific and material explanation.
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