enchanter his own terms who will produce that effect upon me."

"Will you? You consent to have the experiment tried on yourself?"

"Consent most readily."

"I will remember that promise. But to return to the subject. By the word
'trance' I do not mean exclusively the spiritual trance of the
Alexandrian Platonists. There is one kind of trance,--that to which all
human beings are susceptible,--in which the soul has no share: for of this
kind of trance, and it was of this I spoke, some of the inferior animals
are susceptible; and, therefore, trance is no more a proof of soul than is
the clairvoyance of the mesmerists, or the dream of our ordinary sleep,
which last has been called a proof of soul, though any man who has kept a
dog must have observed that dogs dream as vividly as we do. But in this
trance there is an extraordinary cerebral activity, a projectile force
given to the mind, distinct from the soul, by which it sends forth its own
emanations to a distance in spite of material obstacles, just as a flower,
in an altered condition of atmosphere, sends forth the particles of its
aroma. This should not surprise you. Your thought travels over land and
sea in your waking state; thought, too, can travel in trance, and in
trance may acquire an intensified force. There is, however, another kind
of trance which is truly called spiritual, a trance much more rare, and
in which the soul entirely supersedes the mere action of the mind."

"Stay!" said I; "you speak of the soul as something distinct from the
mind. What the soul may be, I cannot pretend to conjecture; but I cannot
separate it from the intelligence!"

"Can you not? A blow on the brain can destroy the intelligence! Do you