find a living human agency."

"What! you believe it is all an imposture? For what object?"

"Not an imposture in the ordinary sense of the word. If suddenly I were
to sink into a deep sleep, from which you could not awake me, but in
that sleep could answer questions with an accuracy which I could 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_."

"Granting mesmerism, so far carried, to be a fact, you are right. And
you would infer from this that a mesmeriser might produce the
extraordinary effects you and others have witnessed over inanimate
objects--fill the air with sights and sounds?"

"Or impress our senses with the belief in them--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, only 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 would 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 burnt 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 so much esca