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 burnt 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 so 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. They come for little or no
object--they seldom speak, if they do come; they utter no ideas above
that of an ordinary person on earth. These 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 and education; they
are wondrously inferior to what Bacon, Shakespeare, and Plato said and