XVI
THE NEW LAW OF PARALLELS

 

MY subconscious mind was not, of course, the author of Stephen's philosophic discourse; this subsequently was made clear by our discovery that Joan, not I, was the psychic. At the time, though, it did seem that, if the phenomenon of Stephen's philosophy was to be explained on a basis of subconsciousness, my subliminal, not Joan's, was implicated Joan had never read a line of metaphysics; I had. Certainly I had neither read nor independently contrived the thoughts the ouija-board gave expression to. Nonetheless, I detected in Stephen's words an evolutionary viewpoint that, in a way, seemed to crystallize certain vague ideas of my own.

 

Joan and I have been of the Sunday-morning-go-to-church type. Her attendance was sincere; the church answered satisfactorily enough such questions concerning life as she cared to ask. I attended because Joan did and because, in truth, the church answered many of my own questions. But occasionally the sermons offended me greatly, especially when they carried reference to man as a "fallen creature."

 

It seemed to me inconceivable that religion could so lag behind laboratory truths. When would the church forget its ancient tradition? Could it not perceive that man is a risen creature, that throughout the ages he has struggled always upward, that, instead of having origin in a state of perfection from which in the perverseness of his heart he fell, he was formed in a state of undevelopment out of which he is evolving perfection? Man, I knew, has climbed well, considering that when he started the ascent he was not man at all, but an immeasurably low form of life. He would, I believed, continue to climb.

 

But this belief of mine was not wholly cheering. After all, evolution promised a glorious future only to mankind. Death, so far as I could see, cut short the individual man's progress summarily enough.

 

Indeed, there was really no great resemblance between my thought and Stephen's. He, like the church, was victor over death; I had ceased to hope for individual immortality. How could my subconsciousness differ so radically from my conscious conclusions?

 

Subconscious mind or no, with Stephen relating

 

God up to what he termed the supreme degree of consciousness, with his postulating the germ of supreme consciousness in all animate things, and inanimate, it seemed quite the most natural thing in the world that I should ask, when next we talked with him., "Stephen, is the theory of evolution a glimpse?"

 

"There are two great glimpses," the ouija-board answered. "Evolution is one of these. In his social development man had courted differentiation. Out of the simplicity of tribal life he has evolved the complexities of civilization. The race has unconsciously followed the law which your modern scientist has consciously checked up: Out of the simple, the complex; out of the lower degree, the higher."

 

"True," I said, "but what help is that to the individual Joan and the individual me? Through evolution the race may become perfect. But Joan and I, we die."

 

"Wait!" the tripod replied. "Your science knows but half of evolution. I hope to be able to explain to you, before long, the other half.

 

"Successful in the explanation of biological development, the theory of evolution gains wider and wider application in interpreting the special activities of life—politics, industry, the arts, religion. And in the so-called material sciences, in physics and chemistry, it is being more and more recognized as equally operative. In inorganic matter evolution finds one expression; in the reproductive processes of life, another; in the intellectual and moral phases of human endeavor, still another. Always it is the same law; its varying manifestations parallel each other. Now, here where I am there are laws, just as natural as yours— though you may prefer to term them supernatural—which parallel the laws, evolution included, of the earth-plane."

"Do you mean," I asked, "that spiritual law is simply a more complex expression of material law, and that the law of your plane is but a parallel of the natural or earth-plane law?"

"Parallelism, so defined," Stephen replied, is the second of the two great glimpses, the greatest really of all glimpses. If earth scientists will free their minds of emotional hypotheses and interpret psychological laws on the basis of so-called material laws, they will lift assurance of the existence of my plane out of the field of mystic belief into that of reasonable fact."

 

I tossed the ouija-board aside.

 

"Food for thought, Joan!" I said. "You wouldn't care if I took a walk and tried to digest this Stephen thing's words?"

I put on my overcoat and stepped out into the snow. "'Now, here where I am,'" I quoted as I tramped along, "'there are laws, just as natural as yours, which parallel the laws, evolution included, of the earth­plane.'"