"My dear professor," exclaimed Villebois, charmed at his friend's words, "you have certainly given us an entirely new view of the universe. But tell me, are these psychic forces part of the same system?"
"Psychic phenomena," answered Delapine, "and psychic forces are every whit as real as chemical and physical phenomena, and are subject to just the same unalterable laws. To quote a great American poet:—
"The Spirit World around this world of Sense
Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere
Wafts through these earthly mists and vapours dense
A vital breath of more ethereal air."
"But how are we to be sure that the mediums do not cheat?" asked Riche.
"They all do," replied Delapine, "not always of course, but very frequently. The reasons are two-fold. In the case of paid mediums they naturally are anxious to show something for their money, and if the phenomena do not come off, there is a great inducement for them to cheat if they can do so without being detected, as it is so much less fatiguing than the real thing. Again there is also a great tendency to cheat unconsciously when in the hypnotic condition (as they usually are), and in such cases no blame can be attached to them. Still, many mediums do all they can to help the observers, and many of the phenomena are perfectly genuine, and all good experimenters take care that the mediums are under conditions in which trickery is impossible."
"To me," said Riche, "what you say is perfectly reasonable, but I would like to ask you one question. What is life? When a man dies, will he live again? Is his soul destroyed outright or does it escape unaltered and manifest itself in other surroundings? Is the soul too subtle for the senses to perceive, or is it only seen when it acts through our bodies?"
"I will endeavour to answer your question," said Delapine, "but my knowledge is too limited to give you really satisfactory answers. All attempts to explain life by experiments in the laboratory, by chemistry, or by physics are equally futile. Bastian, Tyndall, Büchner, Stokes, Haeckel, Kelvin, Butler-Burke, Schaefer, and a host of others have essayed to explain life, and all have failed utterly. The hypothesis of Arrhenius that life in the first instance was brought to this planet from some other world by the pressure of radiation, or the theory of Lord Kelvin that the primeval germ travelled here on the back of a meteorite can only be received with an incredulous smile as being more suited for a romance of the Jules Verne type than a topic for serious consideration.
"The relation between life and energy, or between life and electricity or magnetism has never been established. I will even go further, I maintain that no such relation ever will be established. Nor will it ever be possible for the chemist to manufacture life out of any substance be it simple or compound. Life, I contend, is eternal, and consequently uncreated, for what has an end must of necessity have had a beginning. Life seems to be independent of energy, and consequently it will never be manufactured in the laboratory by any process, nor can Nature produce it 'de novo.' All efforts to describe it are futile. We only know that it is a mysterious 'something' which, acting through protoplasm, enables an organised substance or 'body' to overcome inertia and resist decay. The proof that life is akin to mind lies in the fact that as soon as the organized substance is endowed with life, it not only transforms other substances outside its body into its own substance, but it does more—it even exercises a power of selection or choice. It refuses one substance which may be unsuitable to its well being, and accepts another which it prefers for private reasons. In a word it endows the speck of protoplasm which constitutes the organism with a will of its own. It is as if it would say to the organism 'Eritis sicut Deus scientes bonum et malum.' Is not that a proof of mind, eh? One thing is certain, wherever and whenever the conditions are such as to render life possible, life will immediately begin to assert itself, not by any ultra-scientific process, but through the eternal and unchangeable laws by and through which Nature has ever worked."
"Is there any purpose in our being born in a frail body like this?" asked Riche. "In fact why should we have a body at all?"
"According to my view," replied Delapine after a moment's reflection, "the object is to enable a minute particle of the infinite Spirit or Mind, which we call a soul, to be detached from our parent, and become a separate unit. The moment self-consciousness, or the 'ego,' as it is sometimes called, is established during the course of the development of the body, it becomes a thinking soul, and is then endowed with its own individuality modified by countless ancestral traits which it has inherited through an infinitely long series of transformations extending throughout the entire animal kingdom. Only in this way can a fraction of the Eternal Spirit which is passed on from generation to generation become isolated and individualized as a self-conscious immortal entity. And the only conceivable use of the body is to allow of its faculties becoming formed and developed in its 'ego' or 'self.' It is the growth of the body that permits of the soul acquiring the experience, knowledge, and attributes which together contribute to mould and create our human personality, and which form an essential step in the progress of the soul to higher planes of existence.