“We begin believing in God because we are taught to do so; but the belief in the continuity of life originates altogether spontaneously.  The child, having been alive as far back as he can remember, takes the continuity of life for granted.  It is the fact of death that has to be taught . . . . Hence, the explicit idea of a future life comes to him as the most natural thing in the world.

Wert thou that just maid who once before
Forsook the hated earth, O tell me sooth,
And cam’st again to visit us once more?
Or wert thou that sweet smiling Youth . . .
Or any other of that heavenly brood
Let down in cloudy throne to do the world some good?
Or wert thou of the golden-winged host,
Who, having clad thyself in human weed,
To earth from thy prefixed seat didst post,
And after short abode fly back with speed
As if to show what creatures Heaven doth breed;
Thereby to set the hearts of men on fire,
To scorn the sordid world, and unto Heaven aspire?

. . . . He perceived that the child possessed an old soul.  It was not to be put in words, this meaning of an old soul.  Yul-han, observing the child, saw in his behavior, a reasonableness, a patience, a comprehension, that was totally unchildlike.  He did not scream when his food was delayed, as other infants do.  Instead, his eyes calm and contemplative, he seemed to understand and was able to wait.  Those eyes, quietly active, moved from Yul-han’s face to Induk’s when they talked, as though he knew what his parents said . . .

A Hindu boy in a school essay on his favorite animal, the cat, said: “The cat has four legs, one in each corner.  He also has nine lives, which he does not use in Europe because of Christianity.”

It is again a strong proof of men knowing most things before birth, that when mere children they grasp innumerable facts with such speed as to show that they are not then taking them in for the first time, but remembering and recalling . . . .

Have you not observed that children will sometimes, all of a sudden, give utterance to ideas which makes us wonder how they got possession of them, which presupposes a long series of other ideas and secret self-communings, which break forth like a full stream out of the earth, and infallible sign that the stream was not produced in a moment from a few raindrops, but had been flowing concealed beneath the ground?

Always employ a language some years in advance of the child (men of genius in their books speak to us from the vantage-ground of centuries) . . . Let the teacher, especially he who is too much in the habit of attributing all learning to teaching, consider that the child already carries half his world, that of the mind –the object, for instance of moral and metaphysical contemplation—ready formed within him; and hence language, being provided only with physical images, cannot give, but merely illumine, his mental conceptions.

. . . . O My sweet baby! When I reached my door,
If heavy looks should tell me thou art dead,
(As sometimes, through excess of hope, I fear)
I thing that I should struggle to believe
 

Thou wert a spirit, to this nether sphere
Sentenc’d for some more venial crime to grieve;
Didst scream, then spring to meet Heaven’s quick reprieve
While we wept idly o’er thy little bier!

. . . Some expressed the idea that the soul shaped and made the body; others that the body was made, and the soul put into it.  Which is right? Said one boy.  That is more than I can tell, but I incline to the first opinion . . . .

To the child’s imagination everything is alive –stones, trees, plants, even household object.  For him everything has a soul . . . . Nor is this the only reason for the superiority of the child’s powers of observation.  His instinctive knowledge, the knowledge inherited from millions of past lives, is still fresh, not dulled by the weight of the myriad impressions of education and personal experience.

The permanent soul which stores the wisdom, goodness, artistic sensitivity, interest  and skills of the past, surely influences in some degree the new personality which is sending forth into the world.

. . . it has been proven that small children have dreams in which the Ego is clearly defined, just as in mature people . . . . In these dreams, the child has a clear sense of the persona, [but if] from a physiological point of view, the child has no Ego, what is it in the child which produces these dreams, dreams which, I may add, affect him for the rest of his life?

. . . an Indian woman. . . told Bradfield that "since time immemorial," her people had believed that a babe taken by death would return, and that if the body were buried beneath the ancestral home, the soul would more easily find the family who cherished it before.

If there be nothing new, but that which is,
Hath been before, how our brains beguiled,
Which labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burthen of a former child? . .

. . . in cases of abortion, of infants dying before a certain age, and of congenital and incurable idiocy, Nature's original design to produce a perfect human being, has been interrupted.  Therefore . . . the immortal spirit and astral monad of the individual . . . must try a second time to carry out the purpose of the creative intelligence.