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ABINDRANATH TAGORE, poet and story-writer, philosopher, and the seer of modern India, sat leisurely before a paperstrewn desk in his room in a New York hotel. His loose flowing garment of light lilac hue and his long white beard combined to give him the appearance of one of the patriarchs of old-or at least, the appearance that one would expect of a patriarch. For he has not only the venerable aspect of age, but a singular expression of wisdom combined And there was something unusually warm and kindly in his manner as he rose to greet me on my appearance for an interview for THE NEW SUCCESS.

with benignity.

From the first, it was manifest that Mr. Tagore is a poet. His very features are an indication of that fact; his conversation is proof of it. He spoke more in poetry than in prose; his words have an unconscious dignity and beauty; at his poorest, he talked in good free verse. As I listened to him, it was apparent to me that here was, indeed, a rare soul, a nature essentially fervent and religious tempered by a mind of unusual depth and understanding. Had not Mr. Tagore's writings been sufficient proof of his intellectual and spiritual qualities, I should have known the minute I heard him speak that in him were the elements not only of success but of greatness, for he gave evidence of those supreme attributes; greatness of mind and of soul.

The subject of our conversation was the modern trend to spiritism. Mr. Tagore smiled and

eyed me attentively as I delivered my first question.

"What is your attitude toward the wave of spiritistic enthusiasm that is sweeping the world?" I asked. “Do you or do you not believe it possible to communicate with the dead?"

"I

withhold judgment," he replied, "until the evidence is conclusive. At the present time it is not conclusive; there seems to be no certainty about the the investigations; I cannot accept spiritism as a fact until it is registered scientifically as a fact should be. There may be a great truth underlying the movement; but if so, that truth has not been made manifest; perhaps some day it will be brought to light in such a clear and undeniable form that the whole world will recognize it with one accord; but that day has not arrived, and the spiritistic results thus far seem to me to have been trivial and unsatisfactory."

Mr. Tagore was speaking fluently, rapidly, with an ease and earnestness bred of perfect knowledge of his subject matter. But he paused for an instant, and I took advantage of the interruption to ask:

"What is there that you personally find unsatisfactory in the alleged demonstrations of the spiritists?"

S before, he was ready with a reply. "I have no doubt that it is possible to reconcile the two. For the purpose of argument, let us admit that the results of spiritistic investigations are precisely what the investigators claim. Let us admit that they have entered into communication with departed souls-does it follow, therefore, that those souls had reached their final state of existence? Perhaps there is an intermediate plane of being, a sort of spirit twilight zone, in which the metamorphized soul lingers for a while. poised between the earthly and the Paradisal, preparing to plunge into the free, magnificent realm beyond, where it shall have escaped wholly from the trammels of this world. For some time after death the soul may linger about the body like the glow about a dying fire; for some time the soul may give evidence of the body it left behind, just as for a while after death the limbs of an animal may be convulsed as though with life. But at length, freeing itself of the last vestige of this world, the soul may pass from the transitional into the final stage of its career, and emerge free and complete into that majestic Beyond whither we cannot follow it and whence no echo can filter to us here."

A glittering light was in the poet's eyes, a light which seemed to be that of the seer, the prophet, the seeker after truth, the visionary, and the inspired man. There was a note of exaltation in his words, and he spoke with a dignity that impressed his thoughts deeply upon me. As I listened, there flashed into my mind dazzling visions of an endless series of future lives.

"Is

it then your idea that we may have existence after existence, from each of which we die, to be reborn into a better and higher?" I could not refrain from asking.

young in the next existence that they cannot properly describe or understand their new lives. We could not expect a child to give an accurate description of this world, or to comprehend even approximately the forces that govern it; in the same way, we are not to suppose that a soul newly initiated into a higher plane of being can immediately grasp its meaning or convey to those who have not seen it an idea of its appearance. And if we are to imagine that the life after this is only a transitional existence in preparation for that which is to follow, we may well postulate that by the time the soul leaves that transitional state it becomes incapable of communication with those left here on the earth two lives behind."

At this point we were interrupted by Mr. Tagore's secretary, who entered to secure some papers from the drawer of a desk. I secretly resented the intrusion, for I had become really interested. After the secretary had left, I asked:

“Do you not believe that spirits in another existence may be able to see and feel things imperceptible to us?"

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Y all means. We know that our senses are limited; that we can perceive only in a partial way. This book which I am holding,"here Mr. Tagore held up a book to the light,"appears to you and me to be solid, yet we know that actually it is not solid; that it is composed of an almost infinite number of inconceivably small particles, separated by relatively large spaces, so that certain forms of light-the X-ray, for example-can pierce it from cover to cover. Had we eyes like the X-ray, we could see through the book.

"The world to us would then be quite a different thing from what it is to-day; we should be on a higher plane of sense perception. Or, were we able to see what is represented by the ultraviolet and infra-red rays of the spectrum, which at present are invisible to our eyes, we should observe a very different world.

“Again, had we eyes like the bees, with innumerable little facets, it is almost certain that things would look far different to us. In our ignorance of what insects actually perceive, we are inclined to suppose that the world appears to them as it does to us. As a matter of fact, their eyes are constructed so differently that it is almost certain that they behold a different world, a world of which we could not conceive by the furthest stretch of the imagination, because it is different in kind from everything we know. Imagine, then, that a bee should try to convey to a man an idea of the insect world. It would necessarily fail to make itself comprehensible, because there would be no contact, nothing in the world of insects so closely related to anything in the world of men that one could be described in terms of the other. And if such differences are possible between beings living on the same plane, is it not conceivable, even probable, that there should be still greater differences between beings on different planes?”

“That seems reasonable to me,” I said, converted to Mr. Tagore's point of view. "Then you think that communications with the dead may be impossible because their perceptions are different from ours?"

PRE

RECISELY. If they have not the use of physical organs of sense such as ours, they must perceive things differently; whether more perfectly or imperfectly, we cannot say. But assuming that their perceptions are different in kind, they must be incapable of conveying to us any idea of their new experiences. If they try to communicate with us, we simply cannot understand, any more than a man born blind can understand color; or a man born deaf, the qualities of sound. It may be that their perception is of a superior sort; whole broad vistas unimagined by us may be opened to them; they may have a cosmic view of things, a cosmic vision and insight; but if so, they are all the further removed from us, and mutual understanding becomes all the more difficult."

“But do you not think that the lack of understanding may be only on our part? If they are on

a higher plane, may it not be that they can perceive all things, while it is we who are partially blind?” OSSIBLY. Unknown to us, they may even be helping us, though no sign of that has ever reached us. Personally, however, I see no reason to suppose so; now, if ever in the world's history, we are in need of their aid, and not the faintest evidence of that aid is apparent. Of course, as I have said, it may be that we cannot perceive that aid; we are always too much inclined to assume that their perceptions and ours are the same."

At this point I could not refrain from diverging a little from the subject. "Is not that on the same principle as that by which we form an anthropomorphic conception of God?" I asked.

"The anthropomorphic conception of God," he said, with exceeding gravity, "is the only possible definite conception; we cannot help making God in our own image, for we have only human tools with which to work. Yet that which is human must be a reflection of that which is divine; we are what we are because something far greater than us is what it is, and that something is the divine. And the smallest fragment of the divine must contain the elements of the whole; therefore the divine must find a mansion in the human soul. True, we do not know all of the divine; it is as if we were in a vast palace of which we saw but a small part; but from that small part we might gain an idea of the magnificence of the whole, and the fact that we had not learned the truth about the great halls we had not entered would not prevent us from knowing those smaller rooms we had personally surveyed."

Mr. Tagore was discoursing with great earnestness, and clenched his fist vigorously upon the table as he spoke. We might have continued the discussion indefinitely, had not the secretary at that moment appeared to announce another caller.

As I rose to leave, Mr. Tagore again shook my hand warmly; and the last glimpse that I caught of him, a white-bearded man in a long flowing robe, confirmed my impression that here was indeed a patriarch out of Biblical times.