"You are talking in your usual strain," answered Lothair, "revelling in your mystic dreams as you always do. I admit at once that Mesmerism, stretching, as it undoubtedly does, into the domain of the ghostly, must always exercise a powerful attraction on poetic temperaments. I myself cannot deny that this mysterious subject has always penetrated to the very depths of my soul. But listen while I make my confession of faith in a few words. Who can penetrate, with foolhardy presumption, into the deepest mysteries of Nature? Who can understand, or even conjecture, with any sort of clearness, the nature of the mysterious bond which unites soul and body, and, in consequence, is the fundamental condition of our existence? Yet it is exactly upon the cognizance of this mystery that Mesmerism is wholly based; and so long as this cognizance is an impossibility, both the theory and the practice of Mesmerism (which are grounded upon isolated experiments, often illusory), are like the gropings of the born-blind. It is certain that there occur states of exaltation in which the spirit, ruling over the body and controlling its activity, acts with much power, and, in so acting, produces phenomena of the most extraordinary description. Dim presciences and fore-anticipations assume distinct shape and form; and we see and understand, with the fullest powers of comprehension, things as yet slumbering deep and motionless in our souls. Dreams (which are undoubtedly the most wonderful phenomena belonging to the human organism, and, as I consider, appear in their most potentiated form in what is called, in general terms, 'somnambulism') belong to this province. But it is also certain that such conditions presuppose the existence of some abnormality in the relation between the psychical and the physical principles. The most distinct and vivid dreams come to us always when some diseased or morbid feeling is affecting the body. The spirit takes advantage of the inactive condition of its co-regent; taken possession of the throne, and turns that co-regent into a servile vassal. So that Mesmerism, also, is a result of some diseased or morbid condition of the body. It may also happen that Nature may frequently establish a psychical dualism, during which the mutual inter-play of the two principles produces highly remarkable phenomena. But I consider that it is Nature only which should produce this dualism, and that every attempt to produce it artificially, without Queen Nature's command, at one's own will and pleasure, is dangerous and rash, if not wicked. I go even further. I cannot deny that it is possible to produce this potentiated condition of the psychical element--of course all experience would be against me if I did. The psychical principle belonging to a given person can, in the process of mesmeric manipulation, become embodied, and can stream out from the mesmerizer in the form of some 'fluid' (or whatever one may choose to term it), and seize upon and govern the psychical principle of another--the person mesmerized--producing a state which is at variance with all the ordinary conditions of human life, and the usual rules of existence, and which, even in its celebrated 'ecstatic forms,' comprehends in itself all the awesomeness of the mysterious spirit realm. All this, I say, I can by no means deny; but I must always look upon this process as the blind exercise of an evil power, whose effects and results, in spite of all theory, cannot be predicted or relied upon. Mesmerism is somewhere defined as a dangerous weapon in the hands of a child; and with that definition I thoroughly agree. If human beings are to set to work to operate at will upon each other's spiritual elements, the doctrine of the Barbarini school of spiritualists, who work purely by faith and will, without any manipulations, seems to me to be much the purest and most innocuous. The fixing of the firm will is a discreet and sober question put to Nature whether the dualism of spirit is to be established or not in any particular case; and it is she alone who decides it and answers it. Similarly, people's magnetising themselves, at the 'Bacquet' (as it was called) without any intervention of a mesmerizer, may be considered less dangerous, inasmuch as no influence of a foreign possibly hostile or hurtful spiritual principle can then be exercised.