Page:Doughty--Mirrikh or A woman from Mars.djvu/77

 I have seen myself; hundreds of others have seen it. When I said I have never seen levitation I meant what I said, for I never did see a living man taken up by invisible force and carried from one place to another, nor do I ever expect to see it: but I have seen forms of persons both living and dead, persons whom I knew and had known in life, produced before me by more than one adept, and that brings me to my ghost theory again.”

“Which I am more than anxious to hear,” said I. “Though your statements thus far are strong and your reasoning subtile, you have proved nothing. If there is no such thing as a disembodied spirit, how can you reason out the existence of ghosts?”

“In this way. Mesmerism, hypnotism, or whatever you are pleased to call it, is, of course, an admitted fact. There is a power existing in certain mental organizations enabling them to control weaker ones, and to deprive them for the time being of their individuality; to make them believe that black is white; that they are not themselves, but other people—living people, or dead people, it matters not which. Given such a mind, or such a mental state—for I believe that under certain favoring conditions a weak mind may possess this  power quite as much as a strong one—and we have a force  which can summon to our presence not only apparitions of  living people but of dead ones. For instance, A possessed of this power desires to see B who is dead. The force leaves him just as the electric current leaves a battery. It cannot reach B because there is no B, but it does strike upon the mental receiver of C’s organization, because C is of a receptive nature. Then C appears to A, but instead of appearing as C he appears as B, because A, by his intensity of thought, has transformed him into B. Thus while the  shade of B is apparently raised, while it looks, acts and even  speaks like B, it is, after all, nothing but a transfer of individuality. That, gentlemen, is my theory of ghosts. I fear it is not very clearly expressed.”

“As clear as mud,” I replied, sneeringly. “Frankly I got so befogged before you were half through that I could not follow you. How such a theory could possibly account for the strange disappearances of Mr. Mirrikh, I fail to see.”

“Oh, I don’t claim that it does,” protested Philpot. “Of course it can’t, unless, to go a step further, Mirrikh possesses the power I speak of to such an extent as to be able to