concealed in a sheet of paper, continuing to exist and develop
indefinitely there, we must necessarily suppose that an
inconceivable network of nameless forces is perpetually radiating
from this same paper, forces which, cleaving time and space,
detect instantaneously, anywhere and at any distance, the life
that gave them life and place themselves in complete
communication, body and soul, senses and thoughts, past and
future, consciousness and subconsciousness, with an existence
lost amid the innumerous host of men who people this earth. It
is, indeed, exactly what happens in the experiments with mediums
in automatic speech or writing, who believe themselves to be
inspired by the dead. Yet, here it is no longer a discarnate
spirit, but an object of any kind imbued with a living "fluid"
that works the miracle; and this, we may remark in passing, deals
a severe blow to the spiritualistic theory.

Nevertheless, there are two rather curious objections to this
second explanation. Granting that the object really places the
medium in communication with an unknown entity discovered in
space, how comes it that the image or the spectacle created by
that communication hardly ever corresponds with the reality at
the actual moment? On the other hand, it is indisputable that the
psychometer's clairvoyance, his gift of seeing at a distance the
pictures and scenes surrounding an unknown being, is exercised
with the same certainty and the same power when the object that
sets his strange faculty at work has been touched by a person who
has been dead for years. Are we, then, to admit that there is an
actual, living communication with a human being who is no more,
who sometimes--, for instance, in a case of incineration--has
left no trace of himself on earth, in short, with a dead man who