composing our bodies, and
actuates all our members to fulfil their tasks. Like all forces,
psychical force can transform itself, can become electricity, heat,
light, motion; for these are all modes of motion. Psychical force is
itself in motion.

It can act outside the limits of the human organism, and can
temporarily animate a table. I place my hands on a round table, with a
firm desire to see it obey my will. I communicate to it a certain
heat, a certain electricity, a certain polarization, or a certain
other something we have not yet discovered. The stand becomes, so to
speak, an extension of my body, and submits to the influence of my
will. I look at a person. I take his hand. I thus act upon him.

More than this. If the brain of another person vibrates in unison with
mine, or has at one in harmony with the keynote of my own brain, I can
act upon him, even from a distance.

If I emit a sound a few yards from a piano, those piano-strings which
are in harmony with my utterance will vibrate, and themselves send
forth a kindred sound, easily distinguishable.

A telegraph wire transmits a despatch: A neighboring wire is
influenced by induction; and it has been possible, by the aid of this
second and separate wire, to read messages sent over the first.

There is still more to be said. The principle of the transformation of
force to-day opens to us new views which might well be called
marvellous. We every day make use of the telephone, without thinking
that it is, in itself, more astonishing than all the occult facts
considered in this paper.

You speak. Your voice is transmitted ten or twenty thousand
kilometers, from Paris to Marseilles, and even farther away. You think
it is your own voice which is heard and recognized at the other end of
the wire; but it is not; your voice has not made the journey. Sound of
itself, in its ordinary state, is not transmitted with anything like
the rapidity attending this flight over the copper wire. If it were
otherwise, we should have to wait seven hours and twenty-four seconds
for a response, whereas there is no appreciable delay in the
telephonic passage of sound. The usual vocal velocity becomes electric
velocity, and the interval between the terminal stations of the wire
is traversed instantaneously. On reaching its destination, the current
again transforms itself into sound through its encounter with a
medial, an environment like that at its starting-point.

Is the conduc