"Then Venus, we may imagine, succeeding Mercury, carries a higher type,
an emotional life, though of course I am not influenced by her
accidental name, in suggesting it. Here in Venus, a period perchance
resembling a mixture of the pagan Grecian life and the troubadour life
of Provence may prevail and again to it have flown the spirits which in
our planet only touch that development, which from Venus flow to us,
those adapted for the religious or intellectual phase we present. This
Venus life might be called the _sense_ period.

"And now our world follows, with its scientific life which probably
represents its normal limit. Beyond this it will not go. As we have
developed through a _brawn_ and _sense_ period to our present stage, so
in Mercury and Venus, ages have prevailed of development which
eventuated in their final fixed stages at brawn and sense. In Venus,
too, the brawn stage preceded the sense period. In us both have preceded
the scientific stage. There has been, may we not think, constant
interchanges between these planets of such lives as survive material
dissolution, and they have found the _nidus_ that fits them in each.
Souls leaving us in a brawn _epoch_ have fled to Mercury, souls leaving
us in a _sense_ epoch have fled to Venus, and all souls in Mercury or
Venus, ready for reincarnation in a _scientific_ epoch, have come to us.

"But there is an important postulate underlying this theory. It is, that
upon each planet the possibilities of development just attain to the
margin of the next higher step in mental evolution. That is, that on
Mercury the period of brawn develops to the possibility of the period of
sense without fully exemplifying it, so in Venus the period of sense
develops to the possibility of the period of science without attaining
it, and in our world the period of science develops to the period of