esmerism, 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--it would be 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 recollect 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 as much escaped you as the essence or elements of the flower.
Still you may make a spectrum of it.

"And this phantom, though in the popular superstition it is held to be
the soul of the departed, must not be confounded with the true soul; it
is but eidolon of the dead form. Hence, like the best attested stories
of ghosts or spirits, the thing that most strikes us is the absence of
what we hold to be soul; that is, of superior emancipated intelligence.
These apparitions come for little or no object--they seldom speak when
they do come; if they speak, they utter no ideas above those of an
ordinary person on earth. American spirit-seers have published volumes
of communications in prose and verse, which they assert to be given in
the names of the most illustrious dead--Shakespeare, Bacon--heaven knows
whom. Those communications, taking the best, are certainly not a whit of
higher order than would be communications from living persons of fair
talent and education; they are wondrously inferior to what Bacon,
Shakespeare, and Plato said and wrote when on earth. Nor, what is more
noticeable, do they ever c