ht
is imperishable--as it leaves its stamp behind it in the natural world
even when the thinker has passed out of this world--so the thought of
the living may have power to rouse up and revive the thoughts of the
dead--such as those thoughts _were in life_--though the thought of the
living cannot reach the thoughts which the dead _now_ may entertain. Is
it not so?"

"I decline to answer, if, in my judgment, thought has the limit you
would fix to it; but proceed. You have a special question you wish to
put."

"Intense malignity in an intense will, engendered in a peculiar
temperament, and aided by natural means within the reach of science, may
produce effects like those ascribed of old to evil magic. It might thus
haunt the walls of a human habitation with spectral revivals of all
guilty thoughts and guilty deeds once conceived and done within those
walls; all, in short, with which the evil will claims _rapport_ and
affinity--imperfect, incoherent, fragmentary snatches at the old dramas
acted therein years ago. Thoughts thus crossing each other haphazard, as
in the nightmare of a vision, growing up into phantom sights and sounds,
and all serving to create horror, not because those sights and sounds
are really visitations from a world without, but that they are ghastly
monstrous renewals of what have been in this world itself, set into
malignant play by a malignant mortal.

"And it is through the material agency of that human brain that these
things would acquire even a human power--would strike as with the shock
of electricity, and might kill, if the thought of the person assailed
did not rise superior to the dignity of the original assailer--might
kill the most powerful animal if unnerved by fear, but not injure the
feeblest man, if, while his flesh crept, his mind stood out fearless.
Thus, when in old stories we read of a magician rent to pieces by the
fiends he had evoked--or still more, in Eastern legends, that one
magician succeeds by arts in destroying another--there may be so far
truth, that a material being has clothed, from its own evil propensities
certain elements and fluids, usually quiescent or harmless, with awful
shape and terrific force--just as the lightning that had lain hidden and
innocent in the cloud becomes by natural law suddenly visible, takes a
distinct shape to the eye, and can strike destruction on the object to
which it is attracted."

"You are not without glimpses of a very mighty secret