rapport with the dying person: and the influence is generally received during sleep, when the internal senses are freed from the ordinary senses, and qualified to receive direct influences from without. Any change occurring in the condition of those with whom they were held more immediately in relation, (magnetic relation I will call it,) would be felt, and awake attention, just as any change upon our ordinary senses, either when awake or sleeping, arouses attention,—such as a candle going out when one is asleep, or a strange noise occurring, or a familiar one ceasing.

cause.

Again, a person dying is often more or less falling into the trance condition - the bodily condition weakening; and the senses either become more acute, or the spirit-condition of the brain has a freer communication, or inter-relation with the universal medium without the dying person. Thinking of the individual impressed may be sometimes a condition of the effect; but this is far from being an universal Persons are held in relation, as it were, by threads, the slightest alteration or loosening of which arrests attention and gives the impression. A somnambule or mesmerized person has much more influence in mesmerizing than a person in the normal state; and many a dying person partakes of this condition. I have known a dying child mesmerize astrong man by a few waves of the hand, the man having previously resisted the influence of powerful mesmerism. Any change in the nervous condition affects others. I have told you how distinctly I felt

the commencement of the mesmeric condition in my patient, as of a slight electric shock; and I have been sensible of each change during the sleep, and of the flowing away of disease. When diseases are dying out they influence others. It is even so with a common cold, which passes away to another. And so, likewise, the state of the dying person influences :— flies off, as it were; disturbs or influences the universal medium, and thus reaches those in whom there was rapport, if they be in a fit condition to receive.

Generally, the time most fitted to receive impressions of this nature is in a second sleep. Some persons die in an insensible heavy sleep. I should not think that such a death would be felt like those in which a more trance-like state occurs, or where there is a blazing up and going out at once. In such a case as this last I have no doubt that a sensitive person would see light emitted. Experiments might be made with the sensitive upon dying animals. A trance or fainting fit sometimes impresses persons at a distance in the same way as a death, and it is believed that death has occurred.

The presentiment of death is the intuitive faculty influenced by the changing condition, and by the intuitive condition, perhaps, of the dying person. The intuitive sense seems to act often unconsciously: but the same state may become consciousness to another. The foreseeing events, or prophecy, seems to be the least comprehensible form of these singularly interesting phenomena.

To estimate properly the effects of persons dying,

we require more correct data as to time and circumstance; and it is difficult to attain this. But of the existence of the fact I have evidence in the form of many good instances; and so have you: and most persons have some case of the kind to relate. When the dying person appears to another in a form, such as of a black cat, or a shadow, or as a person, it is merely an induced condition, or subjective embodiment of an impression made. How any one can conclude otherwise seems marvellous. When a man is dead, he is dead-as a magnet is dead when the magnetic force is removed. A diamond is dead when it becomes charcoal. A certain constrained force, so to speak, is released, and this it is which influences. In every change force is released, and a disturbance caused.

We have yet to learn the relations we bear to each other: how we may influence each other by our good or ill condition. We have yet to learn that we may not do as we will with our own; for our own is others'. The knowledge which mesmerism gives of the influence of body on body,* and consequently of mind on mind, will bring about a morality we have not yet dreamed of. And who shall disguise his nature and his acts when we cannot be sure at any moment that we are free from the clairvoyant eye of some one who is observing our actions and most secret thoughts, and our whole character and history may be read off at any moment! Few have the faintest idea of the influence these great truths will have upon * Appendix AA.

may

the morals of men, and upon our notions generally. Yes, there are indeed " more truths in heaven and earth than are" told "of in our philosophy." Men smile no doubt. But so they did at the railway and the electric telegraph, and gas-lights, and phrenology, and the circulation of the blood; and at the news that there were men standing with their feet towards ours; that the stars are worlds; that the earth moves round the sun. Men have smiled, and ridiculed, and blasphemed against every truth as it has been revealed. When will the world learn wisdom by the past, and hope for the future, and be ashamed and humble when it wants knowledge? Only, I think, when the philosophy of Man and Mind, raised from its true basis of material fact, is developed, and admitted as a Science by the world. That men cannot imagine beyond their knowledge, is clear from every new truth being at first considered impossible and unnatural.

Of one thing I am sure,—that we are as yet but on the very threshold of knowledge, and that our social condition is depravity through and through, and from end to end. But the true philosopher will be all patience for the present, and confidence for the future, and never in haste to form institutions in advance of knowledge and the condition of society.

XXIII.

H. M. TO H. G. A.

I do not like to say anything after your last letter. I do not like to touch it, or the state of mind it produces in me. Yet it is right to tell you that it does so work upon any one mind as it does upon mine.What an emancipation it is,-to have escaped from the little enclosure of dogma, and to stand,-far indeed from being wise, but free to learn! How I wonder at myself now for having held (and very confidently held forth upon it, I am ashamed to say) that at all events it was safe to believe dogma: that for instance, whether there was a future state or not, it was safe and comfortable to believe it :-that if, even, there was no God, serving as a model to Man, -the original of the image, it was safe and tranquillizing to take for granted that there was. The enormity of this mistake was not fully apparent to me till last year, when a young man destined for the church, but not satisfied about all its doctrines, and in a state of fluctuation about his duty altogether, laid down as the one certain thing in his own and every other case, that at all events it was safe to take for granted what the Church prescribed. The very first step he took from this position was to conclude that his difficulties about a leading doctrine arose from personal sinfulness, and must be resolutely put down.

I