the other is alive, yet there is a certain correspondence between
the two, and between the degrees of the one and the degrees of the
other; and according to this correspondence, relation, or
_rapport_, spirit may act upon matter. Thus your spirit, in all its
degrees and faculties, is in the closest _rapport_ with all the
degrees of matter composing your body, and for this reason alone is
able to move it as it does, which it will no longer be able to do
when that _rapport_ is destroyed by what you call death. Through
your body it is _en rapport_ with and is able to act upon
surrounding matter. If, then, you are in a susceptible condition, a
spirit can not only get into _rapport_ with your spirit, and
through it with your body, and control its motions, or even suspend
your own proper action and external consciousness by entrancement;
but if you are at the same time _en rapport_ with this little board
it can, through contact of your hands, get into _rapport_ with
_that_, and move it without any conscious or volitional agency on
your part. Furthermore, under certain favourable conditions, a
spirit may, through your sphere and body combined, come into
_rapport_ even with the spheres of the ultimate particles of
material bodies near you, and thence with the particles and the
whole bodies themselves--and may thus, even without contact of your
hands, move them or make sounds upon them as has often been
witnessed. Its action, as before said, ceases where the _rapport_
ceases; and if communications from really intelligent spirits have
sometimes been defective as to the quality of the intelligence
manifested, it is because there has been found nothing in the
medium which could be brought into _rapport_ or correspondence with
the more elevated ideas of the spirit. The spirit, too, in frequent
instances, is unable to prevent its energizing influences from
being diverted by the reactive power of the medium into the
channels of the imperfect types of thought and expression that are
established in his mind, and it is for this simple reason that the
communication is as you say often tinctured with the peculiarities
of the medium, and even sometimes is nothing more than a
reproduction of the mental states of the latter--perhaps greatly
intensified."

Such is the