on the mind.

All present were profoundly moved; a feeling of dismay crept over
them, defacing their festivity. Tears were shed. Only from one pair of
damp eyes did any gleam of hope or comfort radiate.

A distinguished foreigner, well known in the uttermost spirit-circles,
wiped from his brow drops of perspiration which some dream had
loosened from his brain. He felt the tide of psychic force beating
upon the high shores of his heart. He was conscious of a
constitutional change sweeping like a tempest over his protoplastic
tissue. He felt that the secret fountains of his being were troubled
by the angel of spirit-rapping, and that his gross, unbelieving
nature stepped down, bathed, and was healed. The Moses of the
spirit-wilderness struck the rock of his material life, and occult
dynamics came welling forth from the undiscovered springs of
consciousness. His mortal statics lost their equilibrium in a general
flux of soul. A cyclone raged round his mesmeric aura. He began to
apprehend an epiphany of electro-biological potentiality. The fierce
light that never was in kerosine or tallow dawned round him; matter
melted like mist; souls were carousing about him; the great soul of
nature brooded like an aurora of clairvoyance above all; his awful
mediumhood held him fiercely in her mystic domination; and things grew
to a point. From the focus of the clairvoyant aurora clouds of
creative impulse gathered, and sweeping soulward were condensed in
immaterial atoms upon the cold peaks of Purpose. Thus a spiritual
gingham impressed upon his soul of souls a matrix, out of which, by a
fine progenitive effort, he now begets and ejects a materialized
gingham into a potato-plot of the garden without.

The thing is patent to all who live above the dead-level of vulgar
imbecility. No head of a department could fail to understand it.
Indeed, to such as live on the uplands of speculation, not only is the
process lucid in itself, but it is luciferous, illuminating all the
obscure hiding-places of Nature. It is the magic-lantern of creation;
it is the key to all mysticism, to the three-card trick, and to the
basket-trick; it sheds a glory upon thimble-rigging, a halo upon
legerdemain; it even radiates vagabond beams of splendour upon
pocket-picking and the cognate arts. It explains how the apples get
into the dumpling; how the milk comes out of the cocoanut; how the
deficit issues from the surplus; how matter evolves itself from
nothing.