“So the soul and the brain are independent of one another.
“Consequently, souls can be exchanged with one another without the brains being exchanged....
“Experiments in Transmission.
“Thought is the electricity of which our brains are the batteries or the accumulators—I do not know yet; but what is certain, is that the transmission of the mental fluid takes place in a manner analogous to that of the electric fluid.
“The experiment of the 4th proves that thought is transmitted by conductors. That of the 10th, that it is transmitted without conductors, on the ether waves.
“Subsequent experiments have shown a weak spot which I now set down.
“A soul which is projected into an organism unknown to this latter, compresses, so to speak, a soul which is there, without being able to expel it; the projected soul—the soul which has broken loose from the body—is itself kept bound to its organism by a sort of inexplicable mental ‘attachment,’ which nothing up till now has been able to cut.
“If the two beings are consenting, the reciprocal transmission fails for the same reason. The major part of each soul re-installs itself perfectly well in the organism of its partner, but the troublesome mental ‘attachment’ prevents each of them from completely quitting the body from which it is striving to detach itself.
“The simpler the recipient organism is relatively to the transmitting organism, the more soul can this latter project into a receptacle, which contains so little of it in the beginning, and the thinner, so to speak, becomes the ‘attachment’ which keeps fast the mind in the transmitting body, but it always exists.
“On the 20th I projected myself, mentally, inside Johann—on the 22nd I invaded a cat, on the 24th an ash tree.