My father smiled patiently, half amused, and then standing and looking at the sun’s disk, disappearing behind the Jersey hills, said, “My son, it was a curious thought of a well-known French writer, Figuer, who lost his son, who was very dear to him, that his soul with armies and hosts of other souls, had departed to the sun and that they made the light and heat of this great luminary, and this wise man felt some comfort in the thought that the heat and light of the sun as he felt himself bathed in radiance and warmth were emanations from his boy, and his eyes and body seemed then in a figurative, and yet to him, very real way, communicating with his boy.  You smile.  I know it is with interest.  Let me read to you from Figuer’s singular book what he has written about it.”

He disappeared and left me also standing and looking upward at a faint wreath of cloud, tinged in rosiness, which floated almost in the zenith.  I was then about eleven years old, precocious for my years and gifted with a sympathy for occult and difficult subjects that became only intensified through the peculiar concentrated companionship I had from day to day, and month to month enjoyed with my father.

This narrative may be inadvertently classed with those ephemeral fictions in which the reader is constantly conscious that the dialogue and the incidents are veritable creations.  It may here be asked how could I recall with any literalness the conversations and events of a time so long past.  I do not pretend or wish it to be thought that these interviews with my father are here literally related.  That, of course, is beyond the limits of reasonable probability.  But I do insist that in the following pages the occurrences described are very faithful transcripts of those connected with the peculiar inquiry and experiments my father and myself began, and brought to a startling conclusion.  Although conducted in the form of an imaginative story the reader is importuned to give them his most implicit credence.

My father soon returned with the small volume of Figuer and read, I imagine, that passage which runs as follows in Chapter XIII: 

“Since the sun is the first cause of life on our globe; since it is, as we have shown, the origin of life, of feeling, of thought; since it is the determining cause of all organized life on the earth—­why may we not declare that the rays transmitted by the sun to the earth and the other planets are nothing more or less than the emanations of these souls? that these are the emissions of pure spirits living in the radiant star that come to us, and to dwellers in the other planets, under the visible form of rays?

“If this hypothesis be accepted, what magnificent, what sublime relations may we not catch a glimpse of, between the sun and the globes that roll around him; between the Sun and the planets there would be a continual exchange, a never broken circle, an unending ‘come and go’ of beamy emissions, which would engender and nourish in the solar world motion and activity, thought and feeling, and keep burning everywhere the torch of life.