“Producible in every human being! Pardon me if I say that I will give any enchanter his own terms who will produce that effect upon me.” “Will you? You consent to have the experiment tried on yourself?” “Consent most readily.” “I will remember that promise. But to return to the subject. By the word ‘trance’ I do not mean exclusively the spiritual trance of the Alexandrian Platonists. There is one kind of trance,--that to which all human beings are susceptible,--in which the soul has no share: for of this kind of trance, and it was of this I spoke, some of the inferior animals are susceptible; and, therefore, trance is no more a proof of soul than is the clairvoyance of the mesmerists, or the dream of our ordinary sleep, which last has been called a proof of soul, though any man who has kept a dog must have observed that dogs dream as vividly as we do. But in this trance there is an extraordinary cerebral activity, a projectile force given to the mind, distinct from the soul, by which it sends forth its own emanations to a distance in spite of material obstacles, just as a flower, in an altered condition of atmosphere, sends forth the particles of its aroma. This should not surprise you. Your thought travels over land and sea in your waking state; thought, too, can travel in trance, and in trance may acquire an intensified force. There is, however, another kind of trance which is truly called spiritual, a trance much more rare, and in which the soul entirely supersedes the mere action of the mind.” “Stay!” said I; “you speak of the soul as something distinct from the mind. What the soul may be, I cannot pretend to conjecture; but I cannot separate it from the intelligence!” “Can you not? A blow on the brain can destroy the intelligence! Do you think it can destroy the soul? ‘From Marlbro’s eyes the tears of dotage flow, And Swift expires, a driveller and a show.’ “Towards the close of his life even Kant’s giant intellect left him. Do you suppose that in these various archetypes of intellectual man the soul was worn out by the years that loosened the strings, or made tuneless the keys, of the perishing instrument on which the mind must rely for all notes of its music? If you cannot distinguish the operations of the mind from the essence of the soul, I know not by what rational inductions you arrive at the conclusion that the soul is imperishable.” I remained silent. Sir Philip fixed on me his dark eyes quietly and searchingly, and, after a short pause, said,--