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Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1809-1894

"The Professor at the Breakfast-Table"

Think, one moment. The earth is a
great factory-wheel, which, at every revolution on its axis, receives
fifty thousand raw souls and turns off nearly the same number worked up
more or less completely. There must be somewhere a population of two
hundred thousand million, perhaps ten or a hundred times as many,
earth-born intelligences. Life, as we call it, is nothing but the edge
of the boundless ocean of existence where it comes on soundings. In this
view, I do not see anything so fit to talk about, or half so interesting,
as that which relates to the innumerable majority of our
fellow-creatures, the dead-living, who are hundreds of thousands to one
of the live-living, and with whom we all potentially belong, though we
have got tangled for the present in some parcels of fibrine, albumen, and
phosphates, that keep us on the minority side of the house. In point of
fact, it is one of the many results of Spiritualism to make the permanent
destiny of the race a matter of common reflection and discourse, and a
vehicle for the prevailing disbelief of the Middle-Age doctrines on the
subject.


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