having been en rapport with the person acting on us? No. What is
commonly called mesmerism could not do this; but there may be a
power akin to mesmerism, 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 re-collect them. But you can, by chemistry, out of
the burned 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 the 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