ed, from whatever point of view one regards them. No doubt
this does appear remarkable at first sight but the fact is that the
sensitiveness of the savage or of the coarse and vulgar European
ignoramus is not really at all the same thing as the faculty of his
properly trained brother, nor is it arrived at in the same way.

An exact and detailed explanation of the difference would lead us into
rather recondite technicalities, but perhaps the general idea of the
distinction between the two may be caught from an example taken from
the very lowest plane of clairvoyance, in close contact with the
denser physical. The etheric double in man is in exceedingly close
relation to his nervous system, and any kind of action upon one of
them speedily reacts on the other. Now in the sporadic appearance of
etheric sight in the savage, whether of Central Africa or of Western
Europe, it has been observed that the corresponding nervous
disturbance is almost entirely in the sympathetic system, and that the
whole affair is practically beyond the man's control--is in fact a
sort of massive sensation vaguely belonging to the whole etheric body,
rather than an exact and definite sense-perception communicated
through a specialized organ.

As in later races and amid higher development the strength of the man
is more and more thrown into the evolution of the mental faculties,
this vague sensitiveness usually disappears; but still later, when the
spiritual man begins to unfold, he regains his clairvoyant power. This
time, however, the faculty is a precise and exact one, under the
control of the man's will, and exercised through a definite
sense-organ; and it is noteworthy that any nervous action set up in
sympathy with it is now almost exclusively in the cerebro-spinal
system.

On this subject Mrs. Besant writes:--"The lower forms of psychism are
more frequent in animals and in very unintelligent human beings than
in men and women in whom the intellectual powers are well developed.
They appear to be connected with the sympathetic system, not with the
cerebro-spinal. The large nucleated ganglionic cells in this system
contain a very large proportion of etheric matter, and are hence more
easily affected by the coarser astral vibrations than are the cells in
which the proportion is less. As the cerebro-spinal system develops,
and the brain becomes more highly evolved, the sympathetic system
subsides into a subordinate position, and the sensitivene