The whole central fancy of reincarnation affected me deeply. But I
modified the idea as displayed by Blavatsky and Theosophists generally.
From a long familiarity with the stars, in conjunction with the
inevitable creative and anthropomorphic sensibility of youth, I began to
think that this reincarnation did not occur on the earth, but had its
stages of transmutation placed elsewhere. In short, I amused myself
incessantly with placing the poets in one star, the novelists in
another, the scientists in a third, the mechanicians in a fourth, and in
each I imagined a Utopia. A very little mature thought and the most
ordinary observation of plain men, men who at 20 have far more practical
sense than I possess to-day, would have demonstrated the hopelessness of
this arrangement, and the deplorable social chaos it would have led to.
I think, however, that along this line of feeling I grew more and more
in sympathy with my father's dimly expressed hopes to achieve something
tangible in the way of interstellar or planetary communication. So that
gradually he, by reason of a desire that slowly invaded every emotional
recess of his being, and I, through the vagaries of an imaginative mind
reached successively an intense conviction that we should work in this
direction.
There was much in our scientific work also that encouraged a certain
high mindedness and liberty of speculation, a careless audacity before
the most difficult tasks.
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