"You attribute the whole thing to bodily causes?"
"I am inclined to attribute it to the action and reaction of mind and body, undoubtedly. If you had sat in the light, for instance, I don't think Addison would have felt that hand. The hand is indeed the least of the circumstances you have related, in my opinion. The incidents of the dog and of the curtain are far more mysterious. You are positive the door was securely shut?"
"Quite positive."
"Could you, after having drawn the curtain, have allowed your hand to slip slightly back, pulling the curtain with it?"
"I don't think so. I feel sure not."
"You know we all constantly make involuntary motions—motions that our minds are quite unaware of."
"I do feel sure, nevertheless. And the dog? What do you say to that?"
"I don't know what to say. But dogs are extraordinarily sensitive. I do not think it beyond the bounds of possibility that the tumult of your nerves—for there was tumult; you confess it—communicated itself to him."
"And was the cause of his conduct?"
"Yes. In the course of my career I have been consulted by a great many patients whose nervous systems have been disastrously upset by the practices you describe, by so-called spiritualism, table-turning, and so forth. One man I knew, trying to cultivate himself onto what he called 'a higher plane,' cultivated himself into a lunatic asylum, where he still remains."