_I._ I thank you for this profoundly suggestive thought, even should it prove to be no more than a thought. But please now show us what bearing all this has upon the question more particularly before us--the question as to the medium and process through which this little board is moved, the tables are tipped, people are entranced and made to speak and write, and all these modern wonders are produced--also how and why it is that the alleged spirit-communications are commonly tinctured, more or less, with the peculiar characteristics of the human agents through whom they are given?
_P._ You now have some idea of the doctrine of spheres; you will, however, understand that the spheres of created beings, owing to a unity of origin, are universally co-related, and, under proper conditions, can act and react upon each other. You have before had some true notion of the laws of _rapport_, which means relation or correspondence. You will understand, further, that there can be no action between any two things or beings in any department of creation except as they are in _rapport_ or correspondence with each other, and that the action can go no farther than the _rapport_ or correspondence extends. Now, two spirits can always, when it is in divine order, readily communicate with each other, because they can always bring themselves into direct _rapport_ at some one or more points. Though matter is widely discreted from spirit, in that the one is dead and the other is alive, yet there is a certain correspondence between the two, and between the degrees of one and the degrees of the other; and according to this correspondence, relation, or _rapport_, spirit may act upon matter. Thus your spirit, in all its degrees and faculties, is in the closest _rapport_ with all the degrees of matter composing your body, and for this reason alone it is able to move it as it does, which it will no longer be able to do when that _rapport_ is destroyed by what you call death. Through your body it is _en rapport_ with, and is able to act upon, surrounding matter. If, then, you are in a susceptible condition, a spirit can not only get into _rapport_ with your spirit, and through it with your body, and control its motions, or even suspend your own proper action and external consciousness by entrancement, but if you are at the same time _en rapport_ with this little board, it can, through contact of your hands, get into _rapport_ with _that_, and move it without any conscious or volitional agency on your part. Furthermore, under certain favorable conditions, a spirit may, through your sphere and body combined, come into _rapport_ even with the spheres of the ultimate particles of material bodies near you, and thence with the particles and the whole bodies themselves, and may thus, even without contact of your hands, move them or make sounds upon them, as has often been witnessed. Its action, however, as before said, ceases where the _rapport_ ceases; and if communications from really intelligent spirits have sometimes been defective as to the quality of the intelligence manifested, it is because there has been found nothing in the medium which could be brought into _rapport_ or correspondence with the more elevated ideas of the spirit. The spirit, too, in frequent instances, is unable to prevent its energizing influences from being diverted by the reactive power of the medium, into the channels of the imperfect types of thought and expression that are established in his mind, and it is for this simple reason that the communication is, as you say, often tinctured with the peculiarities of the medium, and even sometimes is nothing more than a reproduction of the mental states of the latter, perhaps greatly intensified.