of the fact as to whether he is in or
out of his physical body. This present world has its dead people walking
around, it is true: eating, drinking, dressing, travelling, taking part
in the average activities of daily life, but dead, all the same, or, at
most, only partially alive,--the "dead souls," as Gogol well terms them.
The vital truth of immortality is to be immortal now, to-day; to be
spiritually alive, spiritually conscious, and with this achieved,
whether in or out of the body is immaterial. That becomes a mere detail
of no special significance. Given the condition of spiritual vitality,
and the electro-magnetic call would receive its reply from the friend
who had "shed" his body.

Sir William Preece, in a recent address before the Royal Society,
remarked:--

"If any of the planets be populated (say Mars) with beings like
ourselves, having the gift of language and the knowledge to adapt
the great forces of nature to their wants, then if they could
oscillate immense stores of electrical energy to and fro in
electrical order, it would be possible for us to hold
communication, by telephone, with the people of Mars."

It is hardly a bolder or more startling speculation to contemplate the
establishment of intelligent and definite communication with Mars than
it would have been, a half-century ago, to contemplate communication
across three thousand miles of ocean without visible means. An evening's
observation of the heavens, made recently through the great telescope of
the Naval Observatory in Washington, revealed, in one of its phases, a
sunrise in the moon. One gazed at the dark edge of a mountain range to
see it suddenly grow light; to see the illumination increase both in
area and intensity, precisely like a sunrise over a mountain range here
on earth. The spectacle was as suggestive as it was sublime. It brought
the observer into a new relation to the universe. The sun that lights
the earth was then rising on the moon. One realized a new conception of
the unity of the solar system.

Now it is this unity in the universe that scientists are everywhere
affirming. This is the new note in science, and it is only one aspect of
this truth to realize that wireless telegraphy and telepathy are both
manifestations of the same principle,--that of setting up a magnetic
disturbance in the ether, by utilizing the electricity in etheric
currents. Thought is the most potent form of energy, an