[Sidenote:  Living Past Experiences Over Again]

Dr. Carpenter relates the following incident in his “Mental Physiology”:  “Several years ago, the Rev. S. Mansard, now rector of Bethnal Green, was doing clerical duty for a time at Hurstmonceaux, in Sussex; and while there he one day went over with a party of friends to Pevensey Castle, which he did not remember to have ever previously visited.  As he approached the gateway he became conscious of a very vivid impression of having seen it before; and he ‘seemed to himself to see’ not only the gateway itself, but donkeys beneath the arch and people on top of it.  His conviction that he must have visited the castle on some former occasion—­although he had neither the slightest remembrance of such a visit nor any knowledge of having ever been in the neighborhood previously to his residence at Hurstmonceaux—­made him inquire from his mother if she could throw any light on the matter.  She at once informed him that being in that part of the country, when he was but eighteen months old, she had gone over with a large party and had taken him in the pannier of a donkey; that the elders of the party, having brought lunch with them, had eaten it on the roof of the gateway, where they would have been seen from below, whilst he had been left on the ground with the attendants and donkeys.”

“An Italian gentleman,” says Dr. Rush, of Philadelphia, “who died of yellow fever in New York, in the beginning of his illness spoke English, in the middle of it French, but on the day of his death only Italian.”

Striking as these instances are, they are not unusual.  Everyone on reflection can supply similar instances.  Who among us has not at one time or another been impressed with a mysterious feeling of having at some time in the past gone through the identical experience which he is living now?

[Sidenote:  The “Flash of Inspiration"]

On such occasions the sense of familiarity is sometimes so persistent as to fill one with a strange feeling of the supernatural and to incline our minds to the belief in a reincarnation.

The “flash of inspiration” which, for the lawyer, solves a novel legal issue arising in the trial of a case, or, for the surgeon, sees him successfully through the emergencies of a delicate operation, has its origin in the forgotten learning of past experience and study.

[Sidenote:  The Totality of Retention]

Succeeding books in this Course will bring to light numerous other facts less commonly observed, drawn indeed from the study of abnormal mental states, indicating that we retain a great volume of sense-impressions of whose very recording we are at the time unaware.  In other words, all the evidences point to the absolute totality of our retention of all sensory experiences.  They indicate that every sense-impression you ever received, whether you actually perceived and were conscious of it or not, has been retained and preserved in your memory, and can be “brought to mind” when you understand the proper method of calling it into service.