'I don't, personally, believe in reincarnation here on earth, but I feel that we must go on to another existence, somewhere. Not, of course, to a Heaven, all harps and clouds and long flowing robes, nor, indeed, to a Hell of smoke and eternal fires. If I have a conviction at all it is that the whole of life here, or on any other planet, is part of an experiment in some vast Laboratory and that we each possess a small spark, an infinitesimal subdivision, of the intellect of some Great Experimenter.

'After death we will coalesce and fuse together once more into that one Being. I believe, too, that that Being is what we speak of as God but that, beyond Him, there are other Gods ad infinitum. In other words the Experimenter I speak of is, in turn, part of some even greater, even more incomprehensible Experiment. There is no Supreme Being since we are speaking of Infinity and the Infinite has no beginning and no end, no top and no bottom.'

'You have put it well, Charles, and you seem to have given the matter much thought, as I was sure you had. I am not sure that I agree with your conception of the Infinite: any mathematician could define for you a series that is infinite yet has both definite beginning and end. But that is by the way and, in general terms, I go along with your ideas. You say that, eventually, we shall all be joined in some super-Intellect. This means that, four-dimensionally, we are one now but, living in a three-dimensional world, can only perceive ourselves as discrete entities. The prongs of a three-dimensional fork thrust into a two-dimensional surface show up only as separate points. Therefore, in a sense, I am you and every other living thing, or will be.

'Personally I believe in reincarnation or, if you prefer the technical term, metempsychosis. Such belief is as old as the hills and can be found in the religions of every race. Now how on earth did they all come to the same conclusion, long before they could communicate with each other?'