g earth-life the recipient of and the
respondent to all stimuli from without, and it also continually
receives and responds to stimuli from the lower Manas. In it are set
up habits, tendencies to repeat automatically familiar vibrations,
vibrations of love and desire, vibrations imaging past experiences of
all kinds. Just as the hand may repeat a familiar gesture, so may the
desire body repeat a familiar feeling or thought. And when the Triad
has left it, this automatism remains, and the Shell may thus simulate
feelings and thoughts which are empty of all true intelligence and
will. Many of the responses to eager enquiries at _seances_ come from
such Shells, drawn to the neighbourhood of friends and relatives by
the magnetic attractions so long familiar and dear, and automatically
responding to the waves of emotion and remembrance, to the impulse of
which they had so often answered during the lately closed earth-life.
Phrases of affection, moral platitudes, memories of past events, will
be all the communications such Shells can make, but these may be
literally poured out under favourable conditions under the magnetic
stimuli freely applied by the embodied friends and relatives.

In cases where the lower Manas during earth-life has been strongly
attached to material objects and to intellectual pursuits directed by
a self-seeking motive, the desire body may have acquired a very
considerable automatism of an intellectual character, and may give
forth responses of considerable intellectual merit. But still the mark
of non-originality will be present: the apparent intellectuality will
only give out reproductions, and there will be no sign of the new and
independent thought which would be the inevitable outcome of a strong
intelligence working with originality amid new surroundings.
Intellectual sterility brands the great majority of communications
from the "spirit world"; reflections of earthly scenes, earthly
conditions, earthly arrangements, are plentiful, but we usually seek
in vain for strong, new thought, worthy of Intelligences freed from
the prison of the flesh. The communications of a loftier kind
occasionally granted are, for the most part, from non-human
Intelligences, attracted by the pure atmosphere of the medium or
sitters.

And there is an ever-present danger in this commerce with the Shells.
Just because they are Shells, and nothing more, they answer to the
impulses that strike on them from without, and easi