We look at the trolley car passing our door and wonder at the power that propels it. Little by little we are opening our souls to the reception of beliefs in the invisible powers of nature.
How far is it to the end? What new and marvelous revelations shall each succeeding year bring to us?
A reception is being held in the parlors of the hotel where the scene of our first chapter was laid. Forest City has become a town of metropolitan proportions and its citizens are among the most progressive people of these twentieth century days.
Among the guests filling the parlors are several whose names are household words throughout our land.
“A strange case,� says one, “that reported of double identity. A Welshman half of the time and an Englishman the other half, and the two wholly unacquainted with each other.�
“Did you hear,� inquires another, “of the psychic experience of Dr. Seba?�
“No, what was it?�
“Why, as I heard it, the Doctor was out one day at the farther end of Grande Avenue, and on his way home, when he felt an impelling force direct him to go to a certain house. It was a place which he had never before visited, and he could not account for the power which moved him. However, he yielded to the influence, and arrived just in time to save the life of a lady taken with hemorrhage from the lungs. He prescribed for her, wondering that no one expressed any surprise at seeing him there, and did not know until he reached his down-town office that a telephone message directing him to that same place awaited him, having been received by his clerk after he had left the office.�
“How do you account for it?�
“Telepathy. The message was taken to him by a mental current, no more mysterious nor wonderful than that which propels that electric fan there. All the mechanism of the world is governed by unchanging law. Thought transference, hypnotism, clairaudience and clairvoyance are undoubtedly governed by laws which, when understood, may appear simple. Science is a divine revelation, and some genius will be given the key by which its mysteries shall be deciphered. Tesla’s discoveries are opening the door to a before-closed world of knowledge. The Roentgen ray has proven supposed opaque bodies transparent. Who among us would not have denied a few years ago the possibility of such a thing? And then think of wireless telegraphy, another wonderful discovery.�