We may best be helped to a comprehension of clairvoyance as related topast events, by considering in the first instance the phenomena ofmemory. The theory of memory which relates it to an imaginaryrearrangement of physical molecules of brain matter, going on at everyinstant of our lives, is one that presents itself as plausible to noone who can ascend one degree above the thinking level of theuncompromising atheistical materialist. To every one who accepts, aseven a reasonable hypothesis, the idea that a man is something morethan a carcase in a state of animation, it must be a reasonablehypothesis that memory has to do with that principle in man which issuper-physical. His memory in short, is a function of some other thanthe physical plane. The pictures of memory are imprinted, it is clear,on some non-physical medium, and are accessible to the embodiedthinker in ordinary cases by virtue of some effort he makes in asmuch unconsciousness as to its precise character, as he is unconsciousof the brain impulse which actuates the muscles of his heart. Theevents with which he has had to do in the past are photographed byNature on some imperishable page of super-physical matter, and bymaking an appropriate interior effort, he is capable of bringing themagain, when he requires them, within the area of some interior sensewhich reflects its perception on the physical brain. We are not all ofus able to make this effort equally well, so that memory is sometimesdim, but even in the experience of mesmeric research, the occasionalsuper-excitation of memory under mesmerism is a familiar fact. Thecircumstances plainly show that the record of Nature is accessible ifwe know how to recover it, or even if our own capacity to make aneffort for its recovery is somehow improved without our having animproved knowledge of the method employed. And from this thought wemay arrive by an easy transition at the idea, that in truth therecords of Nature are not separate collections of individual property,but constitute the all-embracing memory of Nature herself, on whichdifferent people are in a position to make drafts according to theirseveral capacities.