All at once A conviction flashes through us that we have been in the same precise circumstances as at the present instant, once or many times before.

O, dear, yes!—­said one of the company,—­everybody has had that feeling.

The landlady didn’t know anything about such notions; it was an idee in folks’ heads, she expected.

The schoolmistress said, in a hesitating sort of way, that she knew the feeling well, and didn’t like to experience it; it made her think she was a ghost, sometimes.

The young fellow whom they call John said he knew all about it; he had just lighted a cheroot the other day, when a tremendous conviction all at once came over him that he had done just that same thing ever so many times before.  I looked severely at him, and his countenance immediately fell—­on the side toward me; I cannot answer for the other, for he can wink and laugh with either half of his face without the other half’s knowing it.

—­I have noticed—­I went on to say—­the following circumstances connected with these sudden impressions.  First, that the condition which seems to be the duplicate of a former one is often very trivial,—­one that might have presented itself a hundred times.  Secondly, that the impression is very evanescent, and that it is rarely, if ever, recalled by any voluntary effort, at least after any time has elapsed.  Thirdly, that there is a disinclination to record the circumstances, and a sense of incapacity to reproduce the state of mind in words.  Fourthly, I have often felt that the duplicate condition had not only occurred once before, but that it was familiar and, as it seemed, habitual.  Lastly, I have had the same convictions in my dreams.

How do I account for it?—­Why, there are several ways that I can mention, and you may take your choice.  The first is that which the young lady hinted at;—­that these flashes are sudden recollections of a previous existence.  I don’t believe that; for I remember a poor student I used to know told me he had such a conviction one day when he was blacking his boots, and I can’t think he had ever lived in another world where they use Day and Martin.

Some think that Dr. Wigan’s doctrine of the brain’s being a double organ, its hemispheres working together like the two eyes, accounts for it.  One of the hemispheres hangs fire, they suppose, and the small interval between the perceptions of the nimble and the sluggish half seems an indefinitely long period, and therefore the second perception appears to be the copy of another, ever so old.  But even allowing the centre of perception to be double, I can see no good reason for supposing this indefinite lengthening of the time, nor any analogy that bears it out.