and to propagate life. Need we recall, in this connection, the
incessant mission of pictures perceived by the sensitized plate,
the vibrations of sound that accumulate in the disks of the
gramophone, the Hertzian waves that lose none of their strength
in space, the mysteries of reproduction and, in a word, the
incomprehensibility of everything around us?

8

Personally, if I had to choose, I should, in most of these
laboratory cases, frankly adopt the theory that the object
touched serves simply to detect, among the prodigious crowd of
human beings, the one who impregnated it with his "fluid."

"This object," says Dr. Osty, "has no other function than to
allow the medium's sensitiveness to distinguish a definite force
from among the innumerable forces that assail it."

It seem more and more certain that, as the cells of an immense
organism, we are connected with everything that exists by an
inextricable network of vibrations, waves, influences, of
nameless, numberless and uninterrupted fluids. Nearly always, in
nearly all men, everything carried along by these invisible wires
falls into the depths of the unconsciousness and passes
unperceived, which does not mean that it remains inactive. But
sometimes an exceptional circumstance--in the present case, the
marvellous sensibility of a first-class medium--suddenly reveals
to us, by the vibrations and the undeniable action of one of
those wires, the existence of the infinite network. I will not
speak here of trails discovered and followed in an almost