"'Now that,' said Severin, 'is just one of the regular, stereotyped ways in which we go wilfully mystifying ourselves. We admit that an extraneous Spiritual Principle can affect us (apparently, at all events), by acting on our bodily senses, but we insist on giving said spiritual principle a certain amount of education, and on teaching it what it is proper, and what it is improper that it should do. According to your theory, my dear Marzell, a spirit may go about in slippers and sigh and sob, but it mustn't take the cork out of a bottle, or swallow any of its contents. Here it is to be observed that our own spirit, in dreams, often hangs commonplace matters out of our own imprisoned state of life on to that higher condition of being which only indicates itself dimly, even in dreams; and that it employs a great deal of irony in so doing. May not this irony, which lies so very deep in our nature (so conscious of its state of decadence from what it originally was) still exist in the soul after it has burst from the chrysalis of the body, and out of this life of dreams, when it is allowed a glance back at its discarded envelope? On this theory, the essential factor in every case of spirit-seeing is the Will of the Spiritual Entity, and the influence exerted by it. This influence is what sends the person affected by it, though in the waking state, into the world of dreams--(though the person seeing relieves that he does so by means of his natural senses)--and it would be absurd enough were we to insist on establishing, for appearances of this sort, any particular "Norm," corresponding to our ideas of what ought, or ought not to be. It's worthy of remark that people who walk in their sleep, active dreamers, are often employed about the most trivial functions of life: for instance, the fellow who, on the night of full moon, always used to saddle his horse, take it out of the stable, and then lead it back, unsaddle it, and go to his bed again. However, all these matters are mere _disjecta membra_. What I really am driving at is, briefly----'
"'You believe in the old aunt then, do you?' asked Alexander, turning rather pale.
"'What is there that he doesn't believe?' said Marzell. 'And I am a true believer, too, though not such a confirmed one, perhaps. But now I'm going to tell you that I have been haunted too; and that by a much worse apparation, in the house where I'm lodging at present. I assure you it nearly frightened me to death.'