Page:Hoffmann's Strange Stories - Hoffman - 1855.djvu/441

 absolutely nothing; but I must confess that the moment I looked I felt an involuntary shudder. Have full confidence in me, then. If there is a charm, it must be broken. Have the kindness to try it again."

I breathed again on the mirror, whilst the doctor placed his hand on my back bone. The figure appeared again, and the doctor grew pale on observing the effect that this phenomenon produced upon my organization. He took the mirror away from me, shut it up in a box, and dismissed me, after repeating the advice that he had given me, adding that we should see by and by what was to be done.

From that day, I gave myself up to a multitude of distractions, and I led a noisy life, fit to relieve my mind by physical fatigue. Sometime after this, I found myself one evening in very jovial company; a conversation turned upon the occult sciences, magnetic experiments, and there was related on this subject the most surprising anecdotes. All the gathered experiences in relation to dreams, hallucinations, extacies [sic], were passed in review, and it was finally seriously asked if it might not be that a will existed beyond our life, endowed in certain conditions with a real power over our faculties, a power which would have full exercise without any material contact.

"But," said one of the company, "to admit such a thesis would conduct as directly towards recognizing as truths the sorceries of the middle ages, and all the superstitions which an enlightened philosophy, improved by the progress of science, has long since consigned to oblivion."

"But," said a young physician, taking up the conversation, "must we, under pretence of wisdom and enlightened philosophy, deny the existence of established facts? Has not nature mysteries which our feeble organs fail to fathom and comprehend? And even as a blind man recognizes, by the rustling of leaves, by the murmur of the running waters, the neighborhood of a forest or a brook, can we not foresee certain things in existence, by the invisible communication, that certain minds have the gift of establishing with our own?"

At these words I entered the lists.—"You admit, then," said I to the young doctor, "the existence of an immaterial principle, endowed with a power which, under certain conditions, our will cannot repulse?"

"Yes," answered he, "it is a fact that is proved by experiments of serious men on persons subjected to magnetism."

"In that case," replied I, "you must also recognize as 37*