1875. 
has the power of directing certain in- 
ternal forces of the body, yet it never 
acts upon matter but by the use of 
natural force. The expenditure of a 
certain amount of heat is the equiva- 
lent of the muscular action by which 
I sustain the falling body; nor have 
we any experience of this force of 
will acting upon matter directly, with- 
out the agency of known and mea- 
surable forces. 
Our spiritual theory, therefore,— 
though, as we have used the word, it 
makes no assumption of the agency 
of disembodied spirits,—will not aid 
us much here, because we have already 
agreed that it would require an almost 
inconceivable amount of evidence to 
make us believe in the existence of a 
force which could make a bell pass 
through a door without permanently 
altering the condition of either. If, 
therefore, we are to accept the spi- 
ritual explanation of such phenomena 
as these, it must be as instances of 
this mental force acting directly on 
matter in a way of which we have at 
present no experience whatever. So 
that should by any chance this ‘* spi- 
ritual” theory be the true one—and I 
do not say positively it is not—it 
would seem that Science is very un- 
likely to gain much by these investi- 
gations. For she has never yet, I 
venture to think, gained anything by 
the study of Psychology: I mean 
that, for all practical purposes, the 
laws of Mind are as distiné from the 
laws of Matter as ever they were. 
Before, however, Science abandons 
the field of these phenomena as quite 
beyond her sphere, she is sure to rest 
for a long time upon a different ex- 
planation of these facts, which, though 
it does not bring them within the do- 
main of Science, takes away their 
importance by robbing them of their 
external reality. 
The series of phenomena called 
Electro-Biology seem to be chiefly 
connected together by the effe& which 
can be produced upon the brain of the 
patient or patients by some unknown 
force generally believed to be at the 
command of some person. This 
effect includes the produdtion of all 
sorts of curious delusions, and though 
these delusions have in no respec&i— 
as far as has been ascertained—been 
confounded, aiter the event, with the 
experience of common life, yet, as 
Correspondence. 
269 
we know so very little of our own 
mental constitution, there is no reason 
to feel sure that no force is capable of 
producing delusions which would be 
so confounded. ‘Lhe real difference 
between our ordinary thoughts and 
those of dreams, trances, mesmerism, 
&c., is, it is to be noticed, the break 
in their continuity. In dreams these 
breaks occur not only at the moment 
of waking, but constantly throughout 
the whole succession of ideas. ‘hus, 
in dreams we never walk upstairs, or 
from one place to another,—I think I 
am speaking advisedly when I say 
never,—but we suddenly find ourselves 
arrived at the fresh place; and the 
same breaks may be noticed all 
through the dream. On the other 
hand, illusions produced by illness 
occur to perfectly sane people, with- 
out break of continuity ; though in 
these cases they are generally but of 
short duration. The Electro-Biolo- 
gical explanation of Spiritualism 
would suppose these delusions to be 
as long as those produced in mes- 
merism, but also to occur without 
break in the continuity of ideas. the 
fact of permanent witnesses remaining 
to testify to the occurrence will not 
in this case serve, because a perfe@ly 
natural occurrence may happen, and 
the extraordinary explanation of it 
may be the result of delusion. Thus 
it would, I believe, be quite possible to 
mesmerise a person, then to jump 
upon a chair and write upon the 
ceiling, making the person believe all 
the time that you were floating in the 
air.* Nor can we in this case apply 
the tests which would have served if 
we adopted either the Psychic Force 
Theory or the Spiritual Theory,—in 
the larger sense in which I have used 
this latter word,—the test, namely, of 
knowledge being ccmmunicated to 
one person in the room, such as could 
have been known to him alone; be- 
cause all this, the whole idea of this 
knowledge or of any communication, 
may have been part of the delusion. 
Take, for instance, the case in which 
you received communications by 
means of the Morse alphabet. The 
whole idea, from beginning to end, 
* The same explanation would, I think, 
apply—mutatis mutandis—to the sp'rit phc- 
tographs. I only suppose cheating on the 
part of some person, to make the argument 
cleaver—it docs not make it any stronger, 
