Extract from the manuscripts of a young Breton medium.

— Our readers will remember having read, in June 1867, the analysis of the Romance of the Future, which Mr. Bonnemère had drawn from the manuscripts of a young Breton medium, whose works he had entrusted to him.

It is still in that voluminous collection of manuscripts that the author found these pages, written in an hour of inspiration, and which he comes to submit to the appreciation of the readers of the Spiritist Review. Needless to say that we leave to the medium, or rather to the Spirit who inspires him, the responsibility for the opinions he expresses, reserving for ourselves the right to appraise them later. Like the Romance of the Future, it is a curious specimen of unconscious mediumship. I.

THE HALLUCINATED.

We have little to say about hallucination, a state provoked by a moral cause, which influences the physical and to which nervous natures, always more ready to be impressed, show themselves more accessible.

Women above all, by their intimate constitution, are led to exaltation, and fever presents itself in them, most often, accompanied by delirium, which takes on the appearances of momentary madness.

Hallucination, it must be acknowledged, touches madness in one small respect, like all cerebral overexcitations; and while delirium manifests itself above all through incoherent words, hallucination represents more particularly action, staging. Yet it is unjustly that they are sometimes confused.

Victim of a kind of inner fever, which is not translated externally by any apparent disturbance of the organs, the hallucinated person lives in the midst of the imaginary world that his disturbed imagination creates for a moment; everything is in disorder, within him as around him; he carries everything to the extreme: sometimes joy, almost always sadness, and tears roll in his eyes, while his lips feign a sickly smile. Those fantastic visions exist for him; he sees them, touches them, and is frightened by them. Nonetheless, he retains the exercise of will; he converses with his interlocutors and conceals from them the object of his terrors or of his somber preoccupations.

We knew one who, for about six months, attended every morning the burial of his body, having full consciousness that his soul survived. Nothing seemed changed in his habits of life and yet that incessant thought, that very vision sometimes followed him everywhere. The word death resounded incessantly in his ear. When the Sun shone, dispelled the night, or pierced the cloud, the horrible vision faded little by little, ending by disappearing. At night he fell asleep, sad and despairing, because he knew what a horrible awakening awaited him the following day. Sometimes, when the excess of physical suffering imposed silence on his will and took from him that power of dissimulation which he ordinarily retained, he would suddenly exclaim: — Ah! there they are!… I see them!… And then he would describe to those who surrounded him most intimately the details of the lugubrious ceremony, would relate the sinister scenes that unfolded before his eyes, or rounds of fantastic figures that filed past him. The hallucinated person will tell you the mad perceptions of his sick brain, but he has nothing to repeat to you of what others might come to reveal to him; because, in order to be inspired, peace and harmony must reign in your soul, and you must be free of all material or petty thought; sometimes the sickly disposition provokes inspiration; it is, then, like a help that friends departed before come to bring you to relieve you. That madman, who yesterday enjoyed the fullness of reason, presents no external disorders perceptible to the eye of the observer; they are, however, numerous, they exist and are real. Often the ill is in the soul, thrown outside itself by the excess of work, of joy, of pain; physical man is no longer in equilibrium with moral man; the moral shock was more violent than the physical could bear: hence the cataclysm. The hallucinated person likewise suffers the consequences of a grave disturbance in his nervous organism. But — what rarely happens in madness — in them these disorders are intermittent and so much the more easily curable as their life is, in a certain way, double, for he thinks with real life and dreams with fantastic life.

The latter is, at times, the awakening of his sick soul and, if one listens to him with intelligence, one will come to discover the cause of the ill, which he often wishes to conceal. Amid the flow of incoherent words that a person in delirium casts forth, and which seem in no way to refer to the probable causes of his illness, one will find one that will return without cease, that he wished to retain and that nonetheless escapes. That is the true cause and the one that must be fought. But the work is long and difficult, because the hallucinated person is a skillful comedian and, if he perceives that he is being observed, his mind launches itself into strange deviations and takes on the appearances of madness to escape that important pressure which you seem determined to exert upon him. It is, therefore, necessary to study him with extreme tact, without ever contradicting him or attempting to rectify the errors of his delirious brain. These are the various phases of cerebral excitations, or rather, of excitations of the whole entire being, for one must not localize the seat of intelligence. The human soul, which gives it, hovers everywhere; it is the breath from on high, which makes the whole entire machine vibrate and act.

The hallucinated person may, in good faith, believe himself inspired and prophesy, whether he is conscious of what he says, or whether those who surround him can, they alone and in spite of him, gather his words. But to give credence to the indications of a hallucinated person would be to prepare strange disappointments for oneself, and it is thus that the errors which were but the fruit of hallucination have often been charged to the debit of inspiration. The physical is a material thing, sensible, exposed to the light, that everyone can see, admire, criticize, tend, or attempt to set right. But who can know moral man? When we are ignorant of ourselves, how shall others judge us? If we deliver to them some of our thoughts, far more numerous still are those we withdraw from their gaze and that we would like to conceal from ourselves. That dissimulation is almost a social crime. Created for progress, our soul, our heart, our intelligence are made to pour themselves out upon all the brothers of the great family, to lavish upon them all that is within us, as well as to enrich ourselves at the same time with all that they can communicate to us.

Reciprocal expansion is, therefore, the great humanitarian law, and concentration, that is, the dissimulation of our actions, of our thoughts, of our aspirations, is a kind of theft that we commit to the detriment of everyone. What progress will be made, if we keep within us all that Nature and education have placed there, and if each one acts in the same way with regard to us? Voluntary exiles, keeping ourselves outside the commerce of our brothers, we concentrate upon a fixed idea; the obsessed imagination seeks to withdraw from this, pursuing all sorts of inconsequential thoughts, and thus one can come even to madness, a just punishment that is inflicted upon us for not having wished to march along our natural paths. Let us live, therefore, in others and they in us, so that all of us may be but one. Great joys, like great sorrows, break us when they are not confided to a friend. All solitude is bad and condemned, and everything contrary to the wish of Nature brings as inevitable consequences immense inner disorders.

II.

THE INSPIRED.

Inspiration is rarer than hallucination, because it is connected not only to the physical state, but, still and above all, to the moral situation of the individual predisposed to receive it.

Every man has at his disposal only a certain quota of intelligence, which it is given to him to develop through his work. Having reached the culminating point that is granted him to attain, he pauses for a moment, then returns to the primitive state, to the state of infancy, less that same intelligence, which in one grows day by day, and in the old man diminishes, is extinguished, and disappears. Then, having given everything, and being able to add nothing more to the baggage of his century, he departs, but to go and continue elsewhere his work interrupted in this world; he departs, but leaving the place rejuvenated for another who, reaching the virile age, will have the power, in his turn, to accomplish a greater and more useful mission. What we call death is but devotion to progress and to Humanity. But nothing dies, everything survives and is found again through the transmission of the thought of beings departed before, who still have, through the most ethereal part of themselves, in the homeland left behind but not forgotten, which they always love, for it is inhabited by the continuers of their life, by the heirs of their ideas, into whom they take pleasure in instilling at times those they did not have time to sow around them, or that they could not see progress according to their hopes. Having no more organs at the service of their intelligence, they come to ask men of good will, whom they appreciate, to yield them the place for a moment. Sublime hidden benefactors, they impregnate their brothers with the quintessence of their thought, so that their sketched-out work may continue and be concluded, passing through the brain of those who can make it make its way in the world. Between the friends who have disappeared and ourselves, love continues, and love is life. They speak to us with the voice of our conscience set on the watch. Purified and better, they bring us only pure things, free as they are of all material part, as of all the pettinesses of our poor existence. They inspire us with the sentiment they had in this world, but with that sentiment detached from all admixture. There remains to them still a part of themselves to give: they bring it to us, letting us believe that we obtained it only by our personal work. Hence those unexpected revelations, which confound Science. The Spirit of God breathes where it will… Unknown persons make great discoveries, and the official world of the academies is there to bar their passage. We do not claim to say that, in order to be inspired, it is indispensable to keep oneself incessantly on the narrow paths of good and of virtue; nevertheless, ordinarily they are moral beings to whom one comes, often as compensation for the ills they suffer because of others, to grant manifestations that allow them to avenge themselves in their own way, bringing the tribute of some benefits to Humanity, which fails to recognize them, mocks and slanders them. One finds as many categories of inspirations and, consequently, of the inspired, as there are faculties in the human brain to assimilate different kinds of knowledge.

Struggle frightens the purified Spirits, departed for more advanced worlds, and who desire to be listened to with docility. That is why the inspired are generally pure beings, ingenuous and simple, serious and reflective, full of abnegation and devotion, without marked personality, of deep and durable impressions, accessible to external influences, without preconceived ideas about the things they are ignorant of, intelligent enough to assimilate the thoughts of others, but not morally strong enough to discuss them. If the inspired person clings to his own convictions, he in good faith takes their echo for the warning of the voices that speak within him and, also in good faith, deceives, instead of enlightening. Goodness presides over those revelations, which never occur except with an aim at once useful and moral.

When one of those sympathetic organizations is suffering, owing to a cruel disappointment or to a physical ill, a friend takes an interest in it and comes, giving other nourishment to its thought, to bring relief for itself, but, above all, for those who are dear to it.

It is not rare that the inspired person began by being a hallucinated one. It is like a novitiate, a preparation of his brain to concentrate his mind and to be able to accept what will be told to him.

Because an inspired person can formulate nothing conclusive at a given moment, it does not mean that he cannot do so at others. Manifestations remain free, spontaneous; they come when he has need of them. That is why the inspired, even the best, are not so on fixed day and hour, and the sessions announced in advance often prepare inevitable disappointments. By making evocations too frequent, one runs the risk of arriving only at a state of overexcitation, closer to hallucination than to inspiration. Then they are but games of our delirious imagination, instead of those lights from the other world, destined to illuminate the steps of Humanity on its providential road.

This explains those errors, of which incredulity has made a weapon, to deny, in an absolute manner, the intervention of the superior Spirits.

The inspired are so by all those who, departed before the hour, have something to teach us.

It may happen that the simplest woman, the least instructed, has medical revelations. We saw one who, even without knowing how to read and write, found within herself various names of plants that could cure. Popular credulity had almost forced her to exploit that faculty. But she was not always equally well enlightened, even by taking the pulse of the sick person who put herself in relation with her; because she was also one of those fluidic persons, of whom we shall speak shortly. Although weak and delicate, she could, by her contact, restore the equilibrium in whoever needed it and put back into circulation the interrupted vital principles. Without realizing it, she often did, by the simple touch, in certain persons whose fluid was identical to hers, better than the remedies she prescribed, sometimes merely from habit, and with insignificant variants, whatever the ill for which she was consulted. Providence has placed beside each man a remedy for each illness. Only there are as many different natures as individuals. Remedies also act differently upon each organism, which influences the characters of the ill; and it is this that makes it almost impossible for the physician to prescribe the effective remedy. He knows their general effects, but he is absolutely ignorant of in what direction they will act upon the particular patient presented to him. It is here that the superiority of the fluidic persons and of the somnambulists shines, because, when they find themselves in certain conditions of sympathy with those who come to consult them, the superior beings guide them with an almost certain infallibility.

Often that inspiration is unconscious of itself; sometimes a physician, but only with certain patients, suddenly finds the remedy that can cure them. It was not Science that guided him, it was inspiration. Science put at his disposal several modes of treatment, but an inner voice cried out a name to him; he was forced to say it, and that name was that of the remedy that was to act, to the exclusion of any other. What we say of Medicine exists, in the same way, in all the other branches of human work. At certain hours, the fire of inspiration devours us; one must yield. And if we claim to concentrate within ourselves what must come out of us, a true suffering becomes the punishment of our revolt.

All those to whom God has granted the sublime gift of creation, the poets, the learned, the artists, the inventors, all have those unexpected illuminations, at times in an order of facts very different from their ordinary studies, in case one had wished to do violence to their vocation. But the Spirits know what we ought to and can do, and come incessantly to awaken within us our smothered attractions. It is known how Molière explained those inequalities that disfigure the most beautiful plays of Corneille. “That devil of a man,” he said, “has a familiar genius, who comes at times to whisper sublime things in his ear; then, suddenly, leaves him there, saying to him: “Get out of this as best you can!” And then he does nothing more that is worth anything.” Molière was right. The proud genius of Corneille did not have the docile passivity necessary to bear all the inspiration from on high. The Spirits abandoned him, and then he would fall asleep, as Homer himself sometimes did. There are those who hear inner voices, which speak within them; Socrates and Joan of Arc were of these. Others hear nothing, but are constrained to obey a victorious force, which dominates them.

At other times, a name comes to strike the ear of the inspired person: it is that of a friend, of an individual whom he does not even know, of whom he has only heard tell. The personality of that unknown friend penetrates him, infuses itself into him; little by little strange thoughts come to replace his own. For a moment he has the spirit of that one; he obeys, writes, without knowing, in spite of himself, if necessary, things that he does not know. And as that passive obedience, to which he was condemned, is difficult for him to bear in the waking state, he flees those things written under an oppressive inspiration, and does not want to read them. Those thoughts may be in formal disagreement with his beliefs, with his sentiments, or rather, with those that education imposed upon him, because, in order for certain Spirits to come to him, some relation must exist between them. They give him the thought, leaving him the care of finding the form. It is necessary, therefore, that they know that his intelligence can understand them and momentarily assimilate their ideas, in order to translate them. It is rare that circumstances have allowed us to develop in the direction of our innate aptitudes. The more advanced Spirits know which string must be touched, in order for it to enter into vibration. It had remained mute, because others had been struck, that one being disregarded. For a moment they give it life. It is a germ long smothered, which they fecundate. Then the inspired person, returning to his habitual state, no longer remembers, for he lives a double existence, each of which is independent of the other. Nevertheless, it also happens that he retains a greater facility of understanding, and conquers a greater intellectual development. It is the reward for the effort he made, to give a comprehensible form to the thoughts that others came to reveal to him.

We do not believe that every inspired person can know everything. Each one, according to his natural predispositions, often maintained unbeknownst to himself and to others, is inspired by this or that thing, but is not so equally by all.

Indeed, there exist natures so antipathetic to certain kinds of knowledge, that the Spirits will never come to knock at a door that they know they cannot open.

Only to a certain measure is the future known by the inspired. Thus, it is not correct to say that an inspired person predicted to which world such a person will go after death, and what judgment God will pronounce against her. This is a game of hallucinated imagination. However high man may have risen on the scale of worlds, he does not know what the destiny of his brother will be. It is the part reserved to God: never will the creature be able to usurp His rights. Yes, there are manifestations, but they are not continuous, and our impatience regarding them is often blameworthy.

Yes, everything holds together and nothing is broken in the immense Universe. Yes, there exists between this existence and the others a sympathetic and indissoluble bond, which links and unites to one another all the members of the human family, and which allows the best to come and give us the knowledge of what we do not know. It is through that work that progress is accomplished; whether it be called the work of intelligence or of inspiration, it is the same thing. Inspiration is the superior progress, it is the foundation: personal work places the form upon it, adding still the quintessence of the knowledge previously acquired. No invention belongs to us in particular, because others cast before the seed that we gather. We apply to the work that we wish to pursue the forces and the labor of Nature, which belongs to all, and without whose aid nothing is done, then the forces and the labor accumulated by those who prepared for us the means to triumph.

To tell the truth, everything is common and collective work, to confirm yet again that great principle of solidarity and of association, which is the basis of societies and of the law of all creation.

The work of man will never be rendered useless by inspiration. The Spirit who comes to bring it to us will always respect that part reserved to the individual; he will respect it as a noble and holy thing, for work puts man in possession of the faculties that God deposited as a germ in his soul, so that the aim of his life might be to fecundate them. It is through their development that he has well learned to know himself, and that he has merited drawing near to him. Inspiration comes indifferently by day, by night, in waking and during sleep. It only requires recollection. It must find natures that can abstract themselves from all preoccupation of the real world, in order to give free and vacant place to the being who comes to envelop him entirely and to infuse his thoughts into him.

In the hours of inspiration, man becomes much more accessible to all external noises, and everything that comes from the real world disturbs him. He is no longer in this world, he is in a transitory medium, between this one and the other, since he is, in a certain way, impregnated with the moral and intellectual person of a being elevated to another sphere and whose body, nonetheless, is bound to this one. Although it addresses itself to all, inspiration will descend more especially upon sickly natures or those consumed by a succession of sufferings, material or moral. Since it is a benefit, is it not just that those who suffer should be more easily apt to receive it?

Hallucination is a sickly state, which magnetism can modify in a salutary manner. Inspiration is a moral assimilation that one should avoid provoking by magnetic passes. The hallucinated person willingly gives himself over to raptures and to ridiculous contortions. The inspired person is calm.

The inspired are melancholic. They need to be reflective; in order to be cheerful one must not reflect much; one must enjoy, in one's health, an equilibrium that they do not always possess. But let us not think that they are difficult and capricious. On the contrary, they show themselves docile and accessible with those whom they love.

There are inspired of various degrees. Some come to tell you palpable things, facts of second sight, so that the reality of the initiation may be ascertained. Others, more clairvoyant and little preoccupied with the material procedures, whose secrets they are not called to divulge, repeat, as they come to them, the thoughts brought by Spirits of progress. The first cure the body, the second are the physicians of the soul. The mission of the most modest is limited to revealing how those things come to them. It is an established fact that forces advanced by many degrees come upon us, to dominate and inspire us. Why repeat it? Let him believe who will. But the verifications being well established, one should take of the inspired only the useful and serious side. It matters little, if the ideas are good, from what source they come. Eug. Bonnemère.

[Review of June 1869.]

EXTRACT FROM THE MANUSCRIPTS OF A YOUNG BRETON MEDIUM.

(Second article. — See the Review of February 1868.)

Surely our readers will remember having read, in the number of the Review of February 1868, the first part of this study, interesting from more than one point of view. Today we publish its continuation, leaving to the Spirit who inspired it the whole responsibility for its opinions and reserving for ourselves the right to analyze them a little later. We deliver these documents to the examination of all serious Spiritists and we shall be grateful to those who may see fit to transmit to us their appreciation, or the instructions of which they may be the object, on the part of the Spirits. The Spiritist Review is, above all, a journal of study and, in that capacity, hastens to welcome all the elements capable of clarifying the march of our works, leaving to universal control, supported by the knowledge acquired, the care of judging in the last instance. III.

THE FLUIDIC.

Fluid is the name given to that nothing and that all not analyzable, by means of which the spiritual world puts itself in communication with the material world, and which keeps our physical being in harmony, whether with itself, or with what is outside it.

Although it envelops and surrounds us, and we live in it and by it, it is in the soul that it unites and condenses itself. It is not only that portion of our soul which sets us in action, directs and guides us, but also, so to speak, the general soul that hovers over all of us; it is the mysterious and indispensable bond that establishes unity within ourselves and outside ourselves; and if it should come to break momentarily, it is then that there manifests itself that immense modification which we call death. Fluid is, therefore, life itself: it is movement, energy, courage, progress; it is good and evil. It is that force which, in turn, seems to animate, by the breath of its will, whether the beneficent plough that fertilizes the earth and makes of us the nourishers of the human race, or the accursed musket that depopulates it and transforms us into murderers of our brothers. Fluid facilitates, between the Spirit of the inspirer and the inspired, relations that, without it, would be impossible.

The hallucinated are nervous, but not fluidic, in the sense that nothing is released from them. It is that lack of release, that excess or that lack of fluid, that violent rupture of their equilibrium, which exalts them even to madness, or, at least, even to momentary divagation, and makes imaginary phantoms file past before them, or ones that are more or less connected to the dominant thought, which, exciting the cerebral fibers, throws into revolt the quintessence of the circulating fluid, too full of that impressionable notion which incessantly tends to release itself. If a madman or a hallucinated person dies, and if we perform the autopsy of his corpse, everything will seem healthy in his physical nature; nothing particular will be discovered in his brain. Nevertheless, it will be possible to observe more commonly a slight lesion of the heart, for the moral part that is affected exerts a powerful material influence upon this organ. Well then! those disorders that the scalpel does not discover, that the finger does not touch, that the eye does not see, exist in the fluid, which Science, always too materialistic, denies in order not to have to study it.

In order to be a force, steam did not need Salomon de Caus or Papin to divine its use, just as, in order to exist, electricity had not waited for Galvani to come and grant it the freedom of the city in the midst of the official learned men. Fluid does not show itself more ceremonious toward their learned verdicts. Electricity and steam, which are but of yesterday, have already revolutionized the material world. By affirming the reality of fluid, Spiritism will modify the intellectual and moral world still far more profoundly. Not only does fluid exist, but it is double; it presents itself under two diverse aspects, or, at least, its manifestations are of two very different orders.

There is the latent fluid, which everyone possesses and which, in spite of us, sets the whole machine in motion. It is within us, without our having consciousness of it, because we do not feel it, and lymphatic natures live without suspecting that it exists.

Then, there are the circulating fluids which are in perpetual action and in constant ebullition in nervous and impressionable organizations. When they serve only to put us in intense activity, we let them act at random, and they only excite our concern when, for lack of equilibrium or for some cause, their action is translated by attacks of nerves or other apparent disorders, whose cause we must seek. It happens very frequently that, when the nervous crisis is calmed, and after the dejection that follows, a fluid is released from certain sensitive persons and allows them to exert a curative action upon other weaker beings struck by an ill contrary to their own. A simple touch on the suffering part suffices to relieve them. It is a kind of circulating magnetism, momentary, unconscious, because the fluidic action is produced immediately or is not produced at all. When the inspired are fluidic from birth, they enjoy in the highest degree this curative faculty. But it is a rare exception.

Ordinarily the fluidic state develops during puberty, in that transitory moment in which one is not yet strong, but in which one will be so to bear the struggle of life.

Certain beings have been seen to become fluidic for some years, even some months, and to cease being so when they resumed their normal and regular situation.

Sometimes even, and notably in women, that state manifests itself in the critical hour in which weakness begins to make itself felt.

Sometimes it happens that children are endowed with that state at a still very tender age. A secret instinct attracts us toward them. One would say that an aureole of purity radiates around those blond heads of cherubim. Still so close to God, they are healthy in body, in heart, and in soul; they radiate health and their sight, their presence, their contact entirely calm our body. You feel good kissing them and you are happy cradling them in your arms. There is in them something more than the charm that attaches to the sweet caresses of the child, there is an effluvium that calms your agitations, rejuvenates you, and restores to you the harmony momentarily compromised. You feel attracted toward this one and not toward that one. You do not know why: it is that the first procures for you a well-being that you would not feel beside any other. Which of us has not sought, often for a long time and without finding it, alas! the being who must relieve us! Nevertheless it exists, just as does the remedy that must cure us.

Let us seek without becoming discouraged and we shall discover it. Let us knock and it will be opened to us. However sick we may be, there is, nonetheless, somewhere, a soul that will respond to our soul. Weak, it will raise up our strength; strong, it will soften our asperities. With it we shall complete ourselves, and both await it in order to do good. Strongly constituted natures exert a magnetic action upon weaker characters. In order to magnetize profitably a great effort of concentrated will is necessary, consequently a release of ourselves; and that release cannot have a curative action so long as it does not add a powerful force to the weakness that we combat, and that makes the one whom we magnetize suffer. Only rarely can magnetizers be magnetized by others. It seems that that effort of the will which they have to make hollows out a kind of reservoir, in which the fluid accumulates, in a latent state, which pours its excess upon the others; but there is no more room left to receive anything from others.

Intuition is the radiation of the fluid which, releasing itself from the one upon whom we wish to act, comes to awaken our own and makes it pour itself out upon the being whom we wish to relieve. From that shock of two contrary agents a spark issues; it enlightens our Spirit and shows us what it is fitting to do in order to reach the aim. It is charity put into action. That fluid, in acting, always ready to awaken at the first call of suffering, is found above all in sensitive and tender souls, more preoccupied with the good of others than with their own good. There exist certain physicians in whom that fluidic release operates even without their perceiving it, and who have received from God the gift of curing those who suffer with more certainty.

Finally, there are truly fluidic natures, whose excess requires a continual release, under penalty of reacting against themselves. The action they exert upon those who are sympathetic to them is always salutary, but it can become disastrous for those who are antipathetic to them.

It is among these that one finds the sensitives who, in obscurity, perceive odic gleams that are released from certain bodies, while others see nothing.

The fluidic and the sensitives are the most subject to the instinctive sentiments of sympathy or of antipathy, in the presence of those whose contact or mere sight makes them experience good or evil.

Certain children exert a physical or moral pressure upon their brothers or their comrades. It is the fluid in release that envelops the latter and dominates them.

Each of us exerts upon another an attractive or repulsive power, but in diverse degrees, because Nature is multiple and infinite in its combinations.

Who has not felt the effect of a simple handshake, which restores the equilibrium of the being or destroys that equilibrium in it? which unites us to the person who greets us or distances us from him? which gives us a sensation of well-being or of suffering?

Who has not felt the cold or the warmth of a kiss?

Who has not felt that inner shudder that shakes our whole being, at the moment when we are put in contact with another, and that leads us to say: It is a friend!… or else: It is an enemy?

Persons whose hands are cold and moist are of weak complexion; of little developed sensibility, they give no fluid and need it to be lavished upon them.

Habitually the inspired enjoy the privilege of being able to succor, by a fluid that is released from them, those who have need. But they rarely enjoy good health and in them equilibrium and harmony rarely reign.

They have too much fluid or do not have enough of it, and almost only at the moment of inspiration do they find themselves in complete harmony. But then, they do not feel the benefits, because another individuality is united to theirs and abandons them momentarily, after they have given what they had in reserve.

The healers of the countryside, the sorcerers, those who make sprains disappear, are generally fluidic. Their power is real; they exert it without knowing how. But it would be a mistake to believe that they can act equally upon everyone. The fluid that is released from them must be in harmony with that of the person who is to absorb it, otherwise a contrary effect is produced. Hence comes the very real ill that one sometimes feels after a visit to one of those supposed sorcerers. There are neither remedies nor fluids whose action is universal. All action is modified by the nature of the one who receives it. The spark must strike with precision, without which there will be a shock and an aggravation of the ill that one intends to relieve.

Magnetism undergoes the same law and cannot be more effective in all cases.

The sensitives and the fluidic are the most generous natures, those who best feel all those thousand trifles that compose the human being in his moral, physical, and intellectual part. But they are also the most unhappy, because they give more to others than they receive.

The greatest fluidic persons generally have more distaste for their personality. They think of others and never of themselves. This is also due, perhaps, to a kind of secret intuition; they feel that without that liberation of their excess, which they pour upon others, they could not have repose.

Let us pity the fluidic and the sensitives. Life for them has more sorrows than joys; it is but a continual suffering.

But, at the same time, let us admire them, because they are good, generous, and endowed with humanitarian charity. From them is released a force to relieve their brothers, and it is by being more completely all to all, that they are so little to themselves.

And perhaps their advancement is more rapid and greater in another world, because they passed through this one applying themselves only to doing good to others.

Sometimes, after a great release, the fluidic person suffers and reaches an extreme degree of weakness, until the moment in which he enters anew into possession of his force. When a person suffers, he does not calculate and goes to her. The heart drags him along victoriously, let him divine who can! He is no longer a man held back by cold proprieties; he is a soul that awakens at the first cry of suffering, and that remembers itself only after relief has arrived! IV.

THE SOMNAMBULISTS.

[Beginning.]

Somnambulism, which can be divided into three categories, does not refer directly to any of the three phases that we have just described.

1st The natural somnambulist will very rarely be a good magnetizer. He may not be accessible to inspiration, nor to the fluid forced and concentrated upon a single point by his will. At other times his state announces a predisposition favorable to the reception of an impulse.

Natural somnambulism is the dream put into action. Thought follows its course during the sleep of the organs. This is yet another proof that something lives in us beyond matter, that we think and live during sleep the active life of the Spirit, although we have for some time all the appearances of annihilation.

Active life continues, therefore, in the somnambulist; it only changes form, taking on that of a dream. The spirit stirs matter, for the physical organs are set in action by an energetic force, whose memory the individual has lost upon awakening.

The true inspired person being impregnated with a powerful and unknown force, has something of the natural somnambulist, in the sense of obeying an impulse that is foreign to him, ceasing to feel it as soon as he returns to his natural state.

The somnambulist acts under the simple inspiration that emanates from him; he is concentrated upon a single object, which is why, in all the acts that he then performs, he seems far superior to himself. If he is awakened, he is disturbed, cries out as in a nightmare, and that abrupt transition is not free of danger for him.

That bizarre state neither affects nor fatigues the organs. Those beings fare very well, because, while they act, the physical being sleeps, reposes, and only the imagination works.

2nd In the inspired person, it may be said that there is always a great sum of physical repose. Marked by another individuality, his body does not participate in the action that he performs and his own Spirit, in a certain way, slumbers, since they forced him to assimilate the thoughts of another, of which afterward he loses even the slightest traces, as he awakens to ordinary life. In docile natures (and not all somnambulists are so), that work of concentration, of possession of the being, is done without struggle, which is why those thoughts are given to them in a more particular manner, precisely because they do not interrupt the repose in those to whom they are brought.

Sometimes the somnambulists are confused with the inspired, because there is a resemblance in the results.

The ones and the others prescribe remedies. But only the inspired person is a revealer; it is in himself that progress resides, for he alone is the echo, the passive instrument of a Spirit different from his own, and more advanced.

Magnetism awakens in the somnambulist, overexcites and develops the instinct that nature gave to all beings for their cure, and that the incomplete civilization in which we struggle has smothered within us in order to replace it with the false gleams of Science.

The inspired absolutely do not need the succor of the magnetic fluid. They live peaceful, thinking of nothing. Suddenly a word, at first obscure and indistinct, is murmured in their ear; that word penetrates them; it takes on meaning, grows, broadens, becomes a thought; others group themselves around it; then, the inner elaboration having reached maturity, an irresistible force dominates them and, whether by speech or by writing, they must expel the truth that obsesses them. They are so impregnated by their object, so possessed that, during those hours of elaboration or of diversion, they are no longer accessible to the sufferings of the body, for they no longer feel it and no longer have consciousness of themselves, and because, finally, in them lives another being in their place.

Little by little, as the inspiring breath abandons them, the pain returns; they come back into possession of themselves, live by their own will, subordinated to their personal perceptions, and of the extinguished apparition there remains only a kind of void in the brain, according to the consecrated expression, but a void that, in reality, exists in the entire organism. Often the inspired person finds himself unconsciously impregnated, for a long time, by the Spirit of another. In spite of himself, he has instants of forced recollection; he knows and is able to concentrate his ideas better, seeming to live the common life and to exchange with others ordinary thoughts. But his distractions are more frequent, even if his Spirit is not yet concentrated upon one thing rather than another. He floats in the void; he lets himself be cradled by a kind of numbness, which is the beginning of the infusion of communications, still in the first work of transmission. By itself, magnetism does not give inspiration: at most it provokes it and makes it easier. Fluid is like a magnet, which attracts the well-beloved dead toward those who remain. It is released abundantly from the inspired and goes to awaken the attention of the beings who have already departed and who are similar to them. These, for their part, purified and enlightened by a more complete and better life, judge better and better know those who can serve them as intermediaries, in an order of facts that they judge useful to reveal to us. It is thus that those more advanced beings often discover, in the one whom they have chosen, dispositions that he himself was unaware of. They develop him in this direction, despite the obstacles opposed by the prejudices of the social milieu or by the preventions of the family, knowing that Nature has prepared the ground to receive the seed that they wish to scatter. Here is a physician who remained mediocre because considerations stronger than his will imposed upon him a factitious vocation: inspiration will never make of him a revealer in Medicine. Never will the Spirit come to communicate to him the things connected to the profession that they constrained him to exercise, but those related to the natural faculties that, upon his arrival on Earth, were attributed to him so that he might develop them through work, and that remained in a latent state. There was the work that he was to accomplish. The Spirit put him on the path and made him understand his true mission. Magnetism, as inspiration, can do nothing in favor of this fatally deviated creature. Only, as there is disagreement between the tendencies that his fluids impress upon him and the functions that circumstances condemned him to exercise, he is discontented, unhappy; he suffers and, from this point of view, magnetism can, for a moment, come to calm the regrets that he experiences in the presence of his shattered future. It is, therefore, erroneously that it is generally believed, in the world, that in order to be inspired one must be magnetized. Once again, magnetism does not give inspiration; it makes the fluid circulate and puts us in equilibrium, that is all. Moreover, it is incontestable that it develops the power of concentration.

The most impressive somnambulists, those who scatter new lights around them, are, at the same time, inspired; yet one should not believe that they are so equally at all hours.

3rd Somnambulists are generally more fluidic than inspired. One conceives, then, the opportuneness of the magnetic action. The touch, whether of the magnetizer, or of a thing that belonged to him, can give him that power of concentration provoked and previously increased by the magnetic passes. Joined to the somnambulistic predisposition, magnetism develops second sight and produces extraordinary results, above all from the point of view of medical consultations. The somnambulist is so concentrated by the desire to cure the person whose fluid is in relation with his own, that he reads in her inner being.

If he allies to this disposition that of being inspired, an extremely rare thing, it is then that he becomes complete. He sees the ill; the remedy is indicated to him!

The Spirits who come to impregnate the inspired person are not supernatural beings. They lived in our world; they live in another, that is all. The physical form they assume matters little; their soul, their breath is identical to ours, because the law that governs the Universe is one and immutable.

Fluid being the principle of life, the animation, and our soul having, thanks to different fluids, attractions and, consequently, multiple and diverse destinies; if, by magnetic action, the power of concentration upon the thought that is to be transmitted to us is diverted from its spontaneity, the Spirit can no longer exert his action, retain over us his same force, his will intact to make us write or read aloud, for the world that has need, that which he came to bring us. Therefore the physicians who direct the somnambulists must avoid, as much as possible, magnetizing them, under penalty of substituting for true inspiration a simple transmission of their own thought.

The somnambulists, as much as the inspired or the fluidic, cannot act upon all their incarnate brothers. Each one has power only over a small number. But all, in sum, will there find their part, when one no longer has horror of those generous forces that are released from us in degrees more or less intense.

For the fluidic somnambulists, the employment of magnetism is useful because it exerts upon them its influence of concentration. Only there is in that state, even more than in any other, a force of attraction or of repulsion, against which one should never struggle.

The most richly endowed are accessible to antipathies too extreme for them to be able to smother them. They experience them, just as they inspire them. Their prescriptions, in those cases, are rarely good. But, ordinarily endowed with a great moral force, at the same time as with excessive benevolence, they acquire a great power of moderation over themselves, and, if it is not always permitted to them to do good, at least they will never do evil. Eugène Bonnemère.

[Review of July 1869].

EXTRACT FROM THE MANUSCRIPTS OF A YOUNG BRETON MEDIUM.

(Third article. — See the Review of June 1869.)

IV.

— THE SOMNAMBULISTS.

(Continuation and end.)

There exist, therefore, in somnambulism, three well-distinct degrees.

First there presents itself the natural somnambulist, who may remain without any action upon others, although predisposed to it by the nature of his fluids.

Then comes the inspired somnambulist, who has nothing of himself, but who, in a certain way, is the receptacle through which the thoughts of others pass. Magnetism — understand well — does not give him the inspiration. But if, after having felt its effect, he falls into a state of prostration that does not allow him to emit it, magnetism can, nevertheless, by restoring the fluidic circulation, restore his equilibrium and return him to possession of himself. Finally, we have fluidic somnambulism, from which the curative power is released spontaneously, and which can, as we said, be led to inspiration by the employment of magnetism. Then, we have the being arrived at the complete development of his faculties.

The usefulness of magnetism is, therefore, immense. To begin with, it is a powerful curative agent, principally for nervous affections, which it alone can cure. Then, in the cases in which man seeks to disentangle, through the chaos of his thoughts, a form, a revelation, that he does not know or is incapable of discovering, it gives him a power of concentration that only men of genius possess and that allows them to create great works, to make great discoveries. We squander our intelligence upon the most diverse subjects, which is why so rarely can we produce something durable. Magnetism gives us artificially and for some moments this faculty that we lack; but one should not abuse it, because, then, instead of that power of concentration that we owe to it, it would produce disorder in the play of the fluids and could exert a disastrous action upon the organism. If there really exists attraction between the somnambulist and the one who consults him, then it is almost certain that the prescriptions of the former will be good and salutary. In the contrary cases, we should accept them only with much reserve.

Often the somnambulist and the consultant feel good in their reciprocal contact, because one benefits from the excess of the fluids of the other and the two are returned to the normal situation. That is why the fluidic willingly attach themselves to those who are sympathetic to them. The moral action merges with the physical action and they act in common. At other times, finally, the magnetizer may acquire the illness that he intended to cure. It is necessary then to expel, by a magnetic release, the fluid that is not in harmony with our own.

The magnetizer does not always succeed in curing, because, by taking possession of a fluid that does not belong to him and that makes him suffer, he may transmit to the patient a portion of his own, which is in disagreement with the other. But those phenomena are rarely produced and magnetism, wisely administered, will almost always lead to excellent results. Fluid is the electric battery that releases the sparks destined for the reconstitution of a healthy and regular state.

It happens often that the individuals predisposed to receive inspiration by the fluids that are released from themselves, are somnambulists at some moments, when the magnetic action dominates them, and inspired at others.

If we impose our will upon a somnambulist, in order to obtain the cure of persons whom he knows only through objects that belonged to them, it is necessary, in order for there to be a result, that the fluids conjugate and act upon one another.

The richest harmony comes from contrasts and from dissonances. Two similar fluids neutralize each other: in order for them to act one upon the other there must be only one point of contact, and they must be of opposite natures.

When someone is inspired, it is almost always by many persons at the same time and on different subjects. Each one brings his contingent to the common elaboration. If some revelations are immediate and complete, others are produced more slowly and in a continuous manner, that is, each day, each hour brings its atom of truth that slowly infuses itself, before maturing and being able to manifest itself. The progress of the globe is accomplished through the succession of the generations, which inherit the knowledge that the past leaves and brings them, and which, by their labor in the present, prepare the advent of the future.

When the Spirits wish to act, it may happen that they are subject to some preoccupation, which absorbs and renders less docile the reception of the thoughts that they transmit. Often, then, inspiration proceeds from the desired object, before other Spirits take possession of the subject in order to dictate to him things unknown and little edifying. It is thus that, by a moving precaution for the future, remedies are indicated to beloved persons when they do not yet have need of them.

At other times, when danger presses, a word arises, not to impress your ear, but to penetrate you and in some way invade you. That word is the name of the remedy, it is the necessary release of your spirit which, gripped by the ardent preoccupation of doing good, would not let itself be easily invaded by another order of ideas. They are the friends who hasten to your aid, bringing relief for you or for those in whom you take an interest. We find in the spiritist or somnambulistic state as many different phases as in the ordinary state. As we told you, everything follows a single, immutable law, and God does not permit the supernatural and the miraculous ever to come and disturb it. Who can discern all the nuances, all the thoughts that, in a day, cross the brain of man? The Spirits live like us; their tendencies, their aspirations are ours; but, although they are quite far from perfection, they are more advanced and march more rapidly, free as they are of all the pettinesses of our sad existence. There are, therefore, mediums who are more frequently and more completely inspired than others. Let us wait, let us receive with gratitude the revelations that it is permitted to them to give us, but let us not do violence to those indiscretions from beyond the tomb. If those who inspire us need to come, they will come; otherwise, they will keep silent. Let us never abdicate the force of our reason. There are charlatans who deceive; there are enthusiasts who deceive themselves.

Charlatanism flourishes in despotic epochs and countries, when to speak a new truth is a temerity and is equivalent to a crime. The free land of America was more favorable than any other to the experimenters, always impelled in the search for the unknown. That is why the Americans were the first to understand the relations of this world with the other and to ascertain the existence of that chain, more fluidic than mysterious, which links those who depart to those who remain. Spiritism is the law that governs the relations of souls among themselves.

In the accursed days of the Middle Ages, and even in times closer to us, when the Church distributed parsimoniously to men the light of which it claimed the monopoly, punishing with a horrible death the one whom it considered to be in error, it was necessary to hide oneself in order to study the secrets of Nature. It was the time of the sorcerers, of the alchemists, poor hallucinated persons very little dangerous, or skillful men who exploited popular credulity; but, sometimes too they were inspired beings, fluidic or somnambulists, great luminaries of Humanity, popularizers of the knowledge revealed by the evolved Spirits, relieving their brothers as best they could, bringing their grain of sand to the slow and laborious edifice of progress, and sometimes paying with their life for the providential work that they accomplished. The pythonesses were somnambulists; the fortune-tellers are frequently ecstatics more or less lucid who, in order to strike the vulgar imaginations, make use of crude means that facilitate their task. But men like to be deceived, even when they seek the truth.

Mesmer resorted to a tub, others make the future be seen in a bottle of water, others still in a magic mirror. Science advances, the uselessness of the stagings is recognized, the vacuity of the material processes. The existence of fluid was discovered, the action that man can exert upon his fellow. One came to the adoption of a simpler process. Magnetic passes are sufficient. A powerful magnetizer can even act solely by the force of his will, with arms crossed, for the liberation of his fluid, which will go to reach this or that person in fluidic relation with him. For magnetism does not act upon all indistinctly, nor in the same manner upon all. In a numerous gathering, it will happen that, in attempting to make one person fall asleep, it will be another, in the opposite angle of the apartment, who will take possession of the fluid.

Others are inspired or fall into lucid somnambulism, spontaneously, or when they wish, or even when they wished to resist the influence that subjugates them.

In his instinctive horror of materialism and of nothingness, man thirsts for the marvelous, for the supernatural, for apparitions and for evocations. Hence the success of magic in the world.

From India, its cradle, magic passed in antiquity to Egypt, where we see it sustain struggles against Moses, whom inspiration animated with a breath so powerful, but still with some intermittences. Israel did not cross in vain the land of the pharaohs. It was in that vivifying focus of Egypt that the genius of the learned men of Greece often went to revive itself. The Crusades went to seek among the Arabs the secret of the occult sciences, whose use they propagated in Italy, in France, in Spain. The Moors and the Jews were the first physicians; they were consulted in secret and burned in public. And the doctors of today think they are defending Science, mocking in their cenacles and persecuting in the tribunals those last lost children of their common ancestors. But, are not many among them, in a certain way, somewhat charlatans? There is no reason to repudiate magnetism in such an absolute manner. Others practice it clandestinely, but do not dare to confess it, fearful of frightening away the alarmed clientele. In any case, very few of those who deny it have come to study it in good faith, with no other motive than the desire to enlighten themselves. They will be the last to admit it. It will be difficult for them to help with their own hands the overthrow of the scientific foundations that cost them so much to build.

What a terrible revolution when, beside those who, incontestably, possess an enormous sum of scientific knowledge, and who are ignorant of only one — that of curing their fellows — simple beings, the first to arrive, were able to read, as in an open book, in human bodies, without having studied Anatomy, penetrating them with their eyes as if they were of glass and, instead of those general remedies that always act in diverse and unforeseen manners, indicate the precise agent that is to be employed, according to the nature of each one? How many compromised positions, on the day when Spiritism and magnetism combined have replaced, for the greater happiness of all, the so fallible and so ruinous Medicine of the faculties, by that familiar medicine, which will be at the disposal of almost all those who wish to practice it. Chiromancy is a science of observation, to the aid of which come Phrenology and Physiognomy, assisted by intuition, a particular and special fluidic disposition. Everyone can observe the protuberances that exist on the head, the infinite variety of the features, the multiple lines traced on the hands, but not everyone can deduce, with more or less exactness, their meanings and their effects on the organism. But the fluid that is released from the consultant, reaching the one who examines him, allows the latter to discover in a more or less accurate manner the facts of the past of the other and even to predict what, according to the probabilities, must happen to him in the future. The simple pressure of the hands or the touch of the head puts the fluidic person into vibration, in consequence of the tension and the concentration of the mind to which he has accustomed himself. Thus are explained the cases of revelation, of prediction, which, on being verified, cause admiration, enchantment, and dread at the same time.

But, there is nothing marvelous, nor supernatural in all this. The veins of our hands can be compared to those of the leaves of plants. The whole, the aspect, the general form, everything resembles and yet nothing is alike. Study the leaves: perhaps you will discover, in their configuration, whether the tree to which they belong is more or less conformed to live a long time. Our hands are like the leaves attached to the extremity of the branches. They are our extremities; they move, act, put us in relation with others, and it is by them that we can know the general state of health. In the same way that through the small branches a more delicate sap arrives, so also through the hands of man, which are a marvel among all the marvels of the body. It is the tip of the branch which, flexible and as if animated and directed by a particular intelligence, coils itself around the boughs that sustain its fragility. Thus, the climbing plants, the clematis, the wisteria, and the vine… It is therefore at the extremity, both of vegetables and of man, which it is given to touch, that the most delicate, most perfect part presents itself. The trunk has the force; the sap and the blood give the impulse; the stems and the hands are the docile instruments.

If the tree has slender leaves, speckled with white or yellow, falling at the first winds of autumn, it is because it is chlorotic and we can prognosticate with certainty that it will not live a long time. The man whose hands are small, cold, white, bloodless, will not figure among the athletes, nor among the centenarians.

How could a poor land deprived of nutritive juices lavish an abundant sap, capable of launching itself even to the extremity of the branches to make it grow and lengthen incessantly?

The plant, like the animal, like man, takes proportionally to its vital energies its fluidic part, which circulates everywhere. Only the plant and the animal, having to expend their force and their will only in an order of facts more restricted, are endowed with a less powerful fluid. They do their part of progress, but they do not do it without being provoked to it. On the contrary, man has the responsibility of direction. God accepts him as a collaborator in the sublime work of creation. God creates the types and reserves to His auxiliary the care of discovering the infinite varieties, of multiplying them, of perfecting them without limits. He needs, therefore, a more abundant, richer fluid, in order to satisfy his nobler task and to fulfill the providential mission that has been reserved to him. Those differences between the lines of the hands, the veins of the leaves, are also found in the paws of the animals, and everywhere, finally. Only in man and in the most advanced creatures, those nuances are more numerous and more accentuated. But, descending even to the most insignificant, an attentive observation will allow one to discover, in the different branches that terminate each of them, symptoms, prognostics of character and of health, that the active direction of man can modify for better or worse. It is his right, it is his duty to work to improve all inferior things. Nature puts at his disposal the curative means, and he will be foolish and even culpable if he does not employ them to prolong and ennoble his own and the life of the other creatures, or at least to give it the necessary equilibrium, during the course that it must follow. There is action and reaction of men upon one another, as well as upon the animals, the vegetables, the minerals, and all that surrounds us. That is why man, the animal, and the plant do not live indifferent beside the other beings.

A creation never occurs except when all the indispensable conditions come to favor it. But, neglecting those essential details, we claim to acclimatize the animals without the suitable vegetables, without preparing for these the ground that they require, without studying their attractions and their repulsions, and without observing whether we give them neighbors with which they will be in perpetual struggle. Our peasants sometimes place a goat in the midst of the oxen and calves. They say it is to purify the air. For us, this would only infect it. But, since the animals of the stable let the goat walk freely around them, it is that a secret instinct warns them, perhaps, that its acrid smell is composed of gases that would be harmful to them and whose properties the goat modifies. The milieu in which each creature lives and develops influences enormously its character, its health, and the portion of intelligence that is transferred to it to fulfill its destiny.

The intelligence of the vegetable, like that of the animal, manifests itself above all in the work of reproduction. Often man does violence to it. Let us study the conditions in which each being is to fulfill its more or less important destiny, and the sketched-out creations that the great cataclysms of the past spared will give place to superior creations, and many of the ills that they engender will disappear with them. Everything is affected, therefore, by the touch, sometimes even by the simple approach, by electric and fluidic commotions, which exert a salutary or disastrous influence upon the general attitude of the individual.

Magnetism was not invented by anyone; it has existed since all eternity! Its use was not known, as in the case of steam and electricity, at first denied, and which nevertheless revolutionized the world after some years of existence. The same will occur with that fluid which, more subtle than all the others, will go to reach freely, and in appearance somewhat at random, the contrary sexes, the extreme ages, the castes hitherto hostile, in order to merge them all in the bosom of an immense solidarity Indeed, fluid is attraction, the single law of the Universe. It is the source of the moral, material, and intellectual movements, the source of progress. Charity commands that we relieve one another mutually, since we dispose of the power and the will. That common fluid, which links us all, in order to establish among us universal fraternity, not only enables us to cure one another, but also, associating us with our friends who have disappeared who, in spite of us, bequeathed to us the inheritance of their labors, gives us the means to invent great things, which will contribute powerfully to the progress of all and to universal well-being. We no longer hide ourselves behind the walls of our personal egoism in order to feel happy in our isolation. We want everyone to be satisfied around us and the suffering of others provokes somber clouds in the blue of our beautiful firmament.

Enthusiasm flees solitude in order to make its irresistible potency shine only among the electrified multitudes. It is that the fluid that is released from each of us, added, merged, multiplied, rubbing against and colliding in case of need, by its own discrepancies makes harmony arise.

Work, even pleasure, everything wearies when we are alone. But, it suffices for a friend to arrive and others afterward, and behold, enthusiasm, which carries away, little by little develops itself. Let rival groups then arise, and the jubilation will produce marvels.

Fluidic communication, that quintessence of our being, produces harmony as it is released from us to envelop the one who feels the lack of it. The strong drag along the weak, raise them up for a moment to themselves and equality reigns; it governs the men fascinated by its domination.

To tell the truth, everyone is fluidic, for each one feels impressions, experiences attractions. Only the manifestations are more or less intense and their influence shows itself with more or less force. Some use the fluids for themselves, for their own consumption, we might say, and act only feebly upon their fellows. Others, on the contrary, radiate at a distance and exert around them an energetic pressure, for good or for evil. There are still those who, having no power over other men, possess a powerful faculty of domination over the animals and over the vegetables, which modify and perfect themselves more easily under their intelligent action.

Magnetism being the circulating fluid that each creature assimilates in its own way and in different degrees, one can see in it that immense linking and that immense attraction which unites and disunites, attracts and repels all created beings, making of each of them a little unit that goes, obeying the same law, to merge in the majestic unity of the Universe. Magnetism which, moreover, is but the process of which we make use for the concentration and the liberation of the fluid, is that magnificent association of all the created forces. Fluid is the circulating one that puts beings into vibration with one another.

In certain cases of momentary delirium, the touch of a sympathetic person, his kiss, his word suffice to calm the sick one. The sick one has been seen to be relieved merely by someone entering his room, just as it is possible to see the excitation produce itself when another person approaches.

It is the result of the attractions or of the repulsions, explained by the play of the fluids among themselves.

It is frequently said of persons who marry, but who do not love each other: — They will love each other later!

On the contrary, this is quite improbable, because attraction is free and does not let itself be done violence to. Without doubt there are little fluidic natures, for which esteem can supply love; but the great and generous natures could not content themselves with those lukewarm sentiments. Indifference then takes the place of the love that is lacking, and it is rare that, despite all the most beautiful reasonings that they may make, one or the other of those spouses in disharmony does not let himself be charmed by another person. Perhaps he will have the force to resist that carrying-away, but he will be incurably unhappy. Let us therefore close our ears to those false teachings, and let families never make of marriage a business, a question of illegal trafficking. God willed that love should preside over the perpetuity of creation; let us respect His designs and let us not do violence to the fluids. Man and woman obey the charm, it is the natural law, and when one tries to resist it, one pays for the disobedience with the unhappiness of one's whole existence. Eug. Bonnemère.