B1215 <=> B1217 [BTG XLVIII From the Author, p. 1216]

A man whose world view is founded on the dogmas of religion would say that the world is everything existing, visible and invisible, created by God and depending on His Will. Our life in the visible world is brief, but in the invisible world, where a man receives reward or punishment for all his acts during his sojourn in the visible world, life is eternal.

One bitten with spiritualism would say that, side by side with the visible world, there exists also another, a world of the “Beyond,” and that communication has already been established with the beings populating this world of the “Beyond.”

A fanatic of theosophy would go still further and say that seven worlds exist interpenetrating each other and composed of more and more rarefied matter, and so on.

In short, not a single contemporary man would be able to offer a single definite notion, exact for all acceptances, of the real meaning of the word “world.”

The whole psychic inner life of the average man is nothing but an “automatized contact” of two or three series of associations previously perceived by him of impressions fixed under the action of some impulse then arisen in him in all the three heterogeneous localizations or “brains” contained in him. When the associations begin to act anew, that is to say, when the repetition of corresponding impressions appears, they begin to constate, under the influence of some inner or outer accidental shock, that in another localization, the homogeneous impressions evoked by them begin to be repeated.

All the particularities of the world view of the ordinary man and the characteristic features of his individuality ensue, and depend on the sequence of the impulse proceeding in him at the moment of the perception of new impressions and also on the automatism established for the arising of the process of the repetition of those impressions.