man is ... not nourished from meats and drinks from the belly, but by a
clear luminous substance that redounds by separation from the blood."
These animal spirits fill up all parts of the body and make up the body of
air, as certain writers of the seventeenth century have called it. The
soul has a plastic power, and can after death, or during life, should the
vehicle leave the body for a while, mould it to any shape it will by an
act of imagination, though the more unlike to the habitual that shape is,
the greater the effort. To living and dead alike, the purity and
abundance of the animal spirits are a chief power. The soul can mould from
these an apparition clothed as if in life, and make it visible by showing
it to our mind's eye, or by building into its substance certain particles
drawn from the body of a medium till it is as visible and tangible as any
other object. To help that building the ancients offered fragrant gum, the
odour of flowers, and it may be pieces of virgin wax. The half
materialised vehicle slowly exudes from the skin in dull luminous drops or
condenses from a luminous cloud, the light fading as weight and density
increase. The witch, going beyond the medium, offered to the slowly
animating phantom certain drops of her blood. The vehicle once separate
from the living man or woman may be moulded by the souls of others as
readily as by its own soul, and even it seems by the souls of the living.
It becomes a part for a while of that stream of images which I have
compared to reflections upon water. But how does it follow that souls who
never have handled the modelling tool or the brush, make perfect images?
Those materialisations who imprint their powerful faces upon paraffin wax,
leave there sculpture that would have taken a good artist, making and
imagining, many hours. How did it follow that an ignorant woman could, as
Henry More believed, project her vehicle in so good a likeness of a hare,
that horse and hound and huntsman followed with the bugle blowing? Is not
the problem the same as of those finely articulated scenes and patterns
that come out of the dark, seemingly completed in the winking of an eye,
as we are lying half asleep, and of all those elaborate images that drift
in moments of inspiration or evocation before the mind's eye? Our animal
spirits or vehicles are but as it were a condensation of the vehicle of
_Anima Mundi_, and give substance to its images in the faint
materialisation of o