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252 departed friends, and to describe them personally; thereby showing that it is mortal mind, acting on this earth-plane, that produces the effect, and that the communications come from the living rather than from the dead.

That somebody, somewhere, must have known the deceased communicator is evident, and it is as easy to read distant thoughts as near. We think of an absent friend as easily as we do of one present. It is no more difficult to read the absent mind. Chaucer wrote centuries ago, yet we read his thought in his verse. What are classic studies, but so much discernment of the minds of Homer and Virgil, of whose very existence we may be in doubt?

The demand for intercourse with the dead proceeds from the minds of the living, who believe in this process. Yearning for this communion, they mentally call for it. This call reaches the mind of the medium, and brings on the mood called mediumship, expressed in trance, by impression, or by motion.

In sleep we do not communicate with the dreamer at our side, despite this proximity, — nor because both are dreamers, wandering through the different mazes of belief. If spiritual Life is won by the departed, they cannot return to the material.

Even if our departed friends are beside us, and they are in as conscious a state of existence as before the change, still their state is different from ours. We are not in their state, nor are they in the realm wherein we dwell. Communion between them and us is prevented by this difference. The mental planes are so unlike, that intercommunion is as difficult as it would be between a mole and a human being.