not
pretend to when awake--tell you what money you had in your pocket--nay,
describe your very thoughts--it is not necessarily an imposture, any
more than it is necessarily supernatural. I should be, unconsciously to
myself, under a mesmeric influence, conveyed to me from a distance by a
human being who had acquired power over me by previous _rapport_."

"But if a mesmerizer could so affect another living being, can you
suppose that a mesmerizer could also affect inanimate objects; move
chairs--open and shut doors?"

"Or impress our senses with the belief in such effects--we never having
been _en rapport_ with the person acting on us? No. What is commonly
called mesmerism could not do this; but there may be a power akin to
mesmerism and superior to it--the power that in the old days was called
Magic. That such a power may extend to all inanimate objects of matter,
I do not say; but if so, it would not be against nature--it would only
be a rare power in nature which might be given to constitutions with
certain peculiarities, and cultivated by practice to an extraordinary
degree.

"That such a power might extend over the dead--that is, over certain
thoughts and memories that the dead may still retain--and compel, not
that which ought properly to be called the Soul, and which is far beyond
human reach, but rather a phantom of what has been most earth-stained on
earth to make itself apparent to our senses--is a very ancient though
obsolete theory, upon which I will hazard no opinion. But I do not
conceive the power to be supernatural. Let me illustrate what I mean
from an experiment which Paracelsus describes as not difficult, and
which the author of the 'Curiosities of Literature' cites as credible: A
flower perishes; you burn it. Whatever were the elements of that flower
while it lived are gone, dispersed, you know not whither; you can never
discover nor re-collect them. But you can, by chemistry, out of the
burned dust of that flower, raise a spectrum of the flower, just as it
seemed in life. It may be the same with the human being. The soul has as
much escaped you as the essence or elements of the flower. Still you may
make a spectrum of it. And this phantom, though in the popular
superstition it is held to be the soul of the departed, must not be
confounded with the true soul; it is but the _eidolon_ of the dead form.
Hence, like the best attested stories of ghosts or spirits, the thing
that most strikes us is the a