understood it. The ground was cut from under the feet
of the materialist, and my old position had been
destroyed. I had said that the flame could not exist
when the candle was gone. But here was the flame a
long way off the candle, acting upon its own. The
analogy was clearly a false analogy. If the mind, the
spirit, the intelligence of man could operate at a
distance from the body, then it was a thing to that
extent separate from the body. Why then should it not
exist on its own when the body was destroyed? Not only
did impressions come from a distance in the case of
those who were just dead, but the same evidence proved
that actual appearances of the dead person came with
them, showing that the impressions were carried by
something which was exactly like the body, and yet
acted independently and survived the death of the body.
The chain of evidence between the simplest cases of
thought-reading at one end, and the actual
manifestation of the spirit independently of the body
at the other, was one unbroken chain, each phase
leading to the other, and this fact seemed to me to
bring the first signs of systematic science and order
into what had been a mere collection of bewildering and
more or less unrelated facts.

About this time I had an interesting experience,
for I was one of three delegates sent by the Psychical
Society to sit up in a haunted house. It was one of
these poltergeist cases, where noises and foolish
tricks had gone on for some years, very much like the