REICHENBACH ON SPIRITUALISM.
241
and I give it in the baron’s own words. He says, ‘ The answers
were rapped by the foot of the table in a brightly lighted room.
I wished to ascertain whether the rapping could not be pre¬
vented, and for this purpose I leaned with my breast against one
of the feet of the table, taking hold of two others with both
hands, and pressing them down. The rapping of the feet
çeased ; but the rapping continued above me, on the top of the
table. All at once, by a sudden jerk, the table dragged me for¬
ward, with the carpet on which it stood ; and I lay prostrate in
the middle of the room.’
“This experiment convinced the baron that, besides the
emanation of the odic element, higher spiritual powers can
manifest themselves *, and these he now no longer ignores, but
recognizes them as facts of experience, for which, however, he as
yet knows no explanation.” He regards “the great influences
Of od upon the human spirit ” as the mere “ physical side of the
matter,”— “ the roots by which it adheres firmly to the ground ; ”
§nd he is thankful to see the day when all his former discoveries
show themselves as the portal through which it is possible for
|im “ to go forward into the spiritual department”
A writer in “Human Nature,” under the signature of “ Ho*
$£stas,” is of opinion that the transition brought about by death,
|hough carrying with it a vast change, does not so completely
fljlter our nature as to render mundane intercommunication im¬
possible. The laws governing the physical conditions of the
pext sphere must be in harmony with those that rule this, to us,
j|#tural world ; these laws being only an outgrowth from those
ff our present condition, and correlatives of them.
u, Why then is the intercommunication restricted to the limited
bounds of a medium’s presence? The waiter aphoristically
Implies, Within our coarser earth-body dwells an ether-body,
$hich derives its elementary sustenance from the ether or odic
fjement, from out which this visible, ponderable world has
grown forth, with its plastic, centralizing tendency. Our ether-
|pdy manifests its presence in the nerve aura, or odic element
(first noticed by Reichenbach), in the streaming forth of a
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