[82] The initiated know that according to this doctrine the terrestrial human being is composed of five entities: the physical body; the ethereal double, a little less gross, surviving the first for some time; the astral body, still more subtile; the mental body, or intelligence, surviving the three preceding; and finally the Ego, or indestructible soul.
[83] These observations may be compared with a little social diversion which is rather popular, and is particularly described in one of the first works of Sir David Brewster (Letters to Walter Scott upon Natural Magic) in the following terms:
"The heaviest person of the company lies down on two chairs, the shoulders resting on one and the legs on the other. Four persons, one at each shoulder and one at each foot, try to lift him, and at first find the thing difficult to do. Then the subject of the experiments gives two signals by clapping his hands twice. At the first signal, he and the four others inhale deeply. When the five persons are full of air he gives the second signal, which is for the lifting. This takes place without the least difficulty, as if the person lifted were as light as a feather."
I have frequently performed the same experiment upon a man in a sitting posture by placing two fingers under his legs and two under his arm-pits, the operators inhaling all together uniformly.
This is undoubtedly a case of biological action. But what is the essential nature of gravitation? Faraday regarded it as an "electro-magnetic" force. Weber explains the movement of the planets around the sun by "electro-dynamism." The tails of comets, always turned away from the sun, indicate a solar repulsion coincident with the attraction. We know no more to-day than in the time of Newton what gravitation really is.
[84] It is not indispensable, even in certain cases in which it seems to be so. Let us take an example. At a séance in Genoa (1906), with Eusapia, M. Youriévich, general secretary of the Psychological Institute of Paris, besought the spirit of his father, who asserted that he was present before him in ghostly form, to give him a proof of identity by producing in the clay an impression of his hand, and above all of a finger the nail of which was long and pointed. The request was made in Russian, which the medium did not understand. Now this impression was sure enough obtained several months after, with the mark of the nail referred to. Does this fact prove that the soul of the father of the experimenter actually performed the act with his hand? No. The medium received the mental suggestion for producing the phenomenon, and did in fact produce it. The Russian language did not make any difference. The suggestion was received. Besides, the hand was much smaller than that of the man whose spirit was evoked.
The experimenter next asks his deceased father to give him his blessing, and he perceives a hand which makes the sign of the cross before him (in the Russian style, the three fingers together) upon the forehead, the breast, and the two sides. The same explanation is applicable here.
It was a mistake to say that this ghost and his son conversed together in the Russian tongue, as the published account said. M. Youriévich only heard some unintelligible sounds. People always exaggerate, and these exaggerations work the greatest possible harm to the truth. Why amplify? Is there not enough of the unknown in these mysterious phenomena?
[85] In certain countries (Canada, Colorado), a gas-jet can be lighted by holding out the finger toward it.
[86] See what I formerly wrote on this subject in Lumen, in Uranie, in Stella, and in my Discours sur l'unité de force et l'unité de substance, published in l'Annuaire du Cosmos, for 1865.