dependent either on our life. While we are still breathing on
this earth it is already surmounting most of the great obstacles
that limit and paralyse our existence. It acts at a distance and
so to speak without organs. It passes through matter,
disaggregates it and reconstitutes it. It seems to possess, the
gift of ubiquity. It is not subject to the laws of gravity and
lifts weights out of all proportion with the real and measurable
strength of the body whence it is believed to emanate. It
releases and removes itself from that body; it comes and goes
freely and takes to itself substances and shapes which it borrows
all around it; and therefore it is no longer so strange to see it
surviving for a time that body to which it does not appear to be
as indissolubly bound as is our conscious existence. Is it
necessary to add that this survival of a part of ourselves which
we hardly know and which besides seems incomplete, incoherent and
ephemeral is wholly without prejudice to nor fate in the eternity
of the worlds? But this is a question which we are not called
upon to study here.

I shall perhaps be asked:

"If it is becoming increasingly difficult for all these
facts--and there are more of them accumulating every day--to be
embraced in the telepathic or psychometric theory, why not
frankly accept the spiritualistic explanation, which is the
simplest, which has an answer for everything and which is
gradually encroaching on all the others?"

That is true: it is the simplest theory, perhaps too simple; and,
like the religious theory, it dispenses as from all effort or