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 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