some hidden law of our mysterious being. Plato says that everything in
this world is merely the material form of some model previously existing
in a higher world of ethereal spiritual forms; and Swedenborg's
beautiful doctrine of Correspondences is a reappearance of the same
idea. If their theory be true, may not the antecedent type of that
strange force which in the material world we call electricity be a
_spiritual_ magnetism. As yet, we know extremely little of the laws of
electricity, and we know nothing of those laws of _spiritual_ attraction
and repulsion which are perhaps the _cause_ of electricity. There may be
subtile and as yet unexplained causes, connected with the state of the
nervous system, the state of the mind, the accord of two souls under
peculiar circumstances, etc., which may sometimes enable a person who is
in a material body to see another who is in a spiritual body. That such
visions are not of daily occurrence may be owing to the fact that it
requires an unusual combination of many favorable circumstances to
produce them; and when they do occur, they seem to us miraculous
simply because we are ignorant of the laws of which they are transient
manifestations.

Lord Bacon says,--"The relations touching the force of imagination and
the secret instincts of Nature are so uncertain, as they require a great
deal of examination ere we conclude upon them. I would have it first
thoroughly inquired whether there be any secret passages of sympathy
between persons of near blood,--as parents, children, brothers, sisters,
nurse-children, husbands, wives, etc. There be many reports in history,
that, upon the death of persons of such nearness, men have had an inward
feeling of it. I myself remember, that, being in Paris, and my father
dying in London, two or three days before my father's death I had a
dream, which I told to divers English gentlemen, that my father's house
in the country was plastered all over with black mortar. Next to those