4o6 



The Review of Reviews. 



perpetuating the race without the help of Man. Mr. 

 Carpenter rejects this as heresy. He says : — 



The product of fusion is a new being ; and as far as can at 

 present apparently be observed, the parts played by the two 

 sexes in the process are quite e(|ual. There may be diffcratcc 

 of function, but there is no inequality. 



As in the production of the new life of the human 

 unit each sex is equally indispensable to the other, so 

 in the evolution of the new social Slate it may fairly 

 be argued the two cells must combine or coalesce in 

 order to mutually supply some want or deficiency. 



Mr. Carpenter's plea for the study of the Art of Love, 

 his interesting demonstration, on scientific grounds, 

 why the course of true love never ought to run smooth 

 if the true union and interfusion of lovers should take 

 place, and his brilliant comparison between Love and 

 Death, give his book a high place among works dealing 

 with the all-important question of the relations and 

 inter-relations of men and women. He needlessly 

 offends many readers by his insistence upon the 

 antagonism between Pagan and Christian ideas of 

 love. Monastic asceticism is not Christianity, and 

 all that he claims as best in the Pagan conception 

 of love can find a place in modern Christian thought. 

 But much can be pardoned in a thinker who so idealises 

 and glorifies the se.x relation, which, he justlycomplains, 

 is too often considered as consisting solely of the 

 complete consummation from which new life springs. 

 He says : — 



It is quite probable that the abiding romance between the 

 sexes — so miicli greater as a rule than that between two of like 

 sex^s due to the fact that the man and the woman never really 

 understand each other ; each to the other is a figure in cloud- 

 land, sometimes truly divine, sometimes, alas ! quite the reverse ; 

 but never clear and obvious in outline, as a simple mortal may 

 be expected to be. 



Mr. Carpenter maintains that few things endear 

 partners to each other so much as to enable them to tell 

 each other their respective love affairs. When they 

 reach that point the union is permanent and assured. 

 Not that he is an advocate for promiscuity. He recog- 

 nises that it is rare, if not impossible, to find anyone 

 who sympathises with all one's interests. In that " a 

 certain portion of the personality is left out in the cold, 

 and it seems natural to seek a mate or lover on that 

 side, too." The more interests a man or a woman has 

 in life, the more capacity they have for being simul- 

 taneously in love with a number of congenial souls. 

 He thinks you can only be " in love " with one person 

 at a time, but you can love a multitude. Conjugal love 

 has a certain ph\sic;il polarity which, like electric 

 polarity, tends to equate itself by contact. Love, 

 especially married love, is a difTicult art, for it is 

 nothing less than the complete regeneration of the 

 two in one : — 



Two individuals drawn together interchange some elements 

 of ihcir being, ami grow thereby into a larger and grander life ; 

 or may even in cases fuse completely into one individual person. 

 As .Swedenborg says somewhere; — "Those who arc truly 

 married on earth are in heaven one angel." 



Love, like death, liberates the higher sotil. Death, 

 like love, is a realisation of the world soul and the 



identity of the individual with the universal. Wise 

 and suggestive are Mr. Carpenter's remarks on the 

 Art of Dying, which is too little studied amongst us. 

 His travels in the East have taught him much, among 

 other things the possibility of attaining by concentra- 

 tion and meditation a knowledge of the existence of 

 your own soul. He says : — 



This heart and kernel of a great and iinmortal self, this 

 consciousness of a powerful and continuing life within, is there 

 — however deeply it may lie buried — within each person ; and 

 its discovery is open to everyone who will truly and persis- 

 tently seek for it. And I say that- 1 regard the discovery of this 

 experience — with its accompanying sense of rest, content, expan- 

 sion, power, joy, and even omniscience and immensity— -as the 

 most fundamental and important fact hitherto of human know- 

 ledge and scientific inquiry, and one verified and corroborated 

 by thousands and even millions of humankind. 



This notable passage indicates the line of thought 

 which leads him to affirm that at death the human 

 being passes on to realise under some other form the 

 divine life which he has already partially entered into 

 here. 



I could fill the whole Review with quotations and 

 commentaries upon this remarkable book, with nine- 

 tenths of which I wholly agree, having verified it in 

 my own experience, but I pass on to notice " The 

 Coping Stone," by Miss Katharine Bates (Greening 

 and Co. 3s. 6d. net.), which should be read by all who 

 are interested in the suggestive speculations of Mr. 

 Carpenter. Miss Bates has, by the road of her own 

 experience, arrived at very much the same conclusions 

 as Mr. Carpenter. She is best known as the author 

 of the remarkable book, " Seen and Unseen," now 

 in its fourth edition, and several other works of 

 a similar nature which are all marked by her 

 strong originality and keen psychic sense. In 

 " The Coping Stone " she confirms what Mr. 

 Carpenter says of the possibility of realising the exis- 

 tence of the inner soul, which links you on to the soul 

 of the universe, and enables you to comprehend some- 

 thing of immortality before death. " The Coping 

 Stone " is the discovery of the twin soul — which again 

 bears a curious resemblance to Mr. Carpenter's theories, 

 although she follows it into regions which he has not 

 e.xplored. The Theosophical Publishing Co. issued 

 last month a very interesting and startling booklet 

 from Miss Bates's pen, which also pieces in with Mr. 

 Carpenter's theories as to the persistence of the 

 personality after death, the truth of reincarnation, 

 and the splitting-up of personality in the next world. 

 It seems there is a lady living amongst us who is assured 

 that she is the reincarnation of a part of Queen Kliza- 

 bet-A's personality, who is attracted to the reincarna- 

 tion of a part of the Earl of Leicester's soul, and who 

 is occasionally consumed by a fiendish hatred of a lady 

 who is the reincarnation of the Countess of Notting- 

 ham, who failed to deliver Leicester's ring to his royal 

 mistress. Yet the other part of IClizabeUi, like the soul 

 of Hercules, who was among the immortals while his 

 phantom conversed with Odysseus in Hades, is still an 

 independent entity in the other world profiting by the 



