Now, if this case stood alone we should, perhaps, be right to explain it all as a dream. But it does not stand alone for there are numerous other cases to be found in the Proceedings of the S.P.R. and in Meyer's "Human Personality." In my opinion, therefore, it merits the most careful consideration and contains many points of the greatest interest and significance. I think it will be found to work in remarkably well with the whole idea of the detachable quasi-physical replica, towards which hypothesis the whole of the observations in this chapter have been tending. The narrator of the experience seems to think that the vehicle which he observed to become detached from the body and in which he was apparently functioning throughout the period in question, was actually the "Soul" itself, the permanent and immortal post-mortem embodiment of consciousness. On the whole this seems to be the view taken by Mr. Carrington, who quotes the case, and to be that commonly held in France on the authority of MM. Leon Denis, Delanne and other writers. These latter refer to the organism in question as the "perisprit" and it is represented as being the vehicle by virtue of which the Consciousness persists after Death. With this view I cannot agree. I suggest rather, provisionally of course, that the Consciousness persists embodied in a four-dimensional vehicle to which the word "physical" as commonly understood cannot be applied at all. The replica, perisprit or "Etheric Double" as the Theosophists call it, is only the connecting link between the three and four-dimensional vehicles which, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, must be supposed to exist if the four-dimensional hypothesis is to hold good at all. It seems likely that it is no more permanent than the physical body, and that it disintegrates after death in the same way that the bodily tissues do. It is interesting to compare and contrast this case with the somewhat similar one of which a brief resumé was given on page 58. In each case the consciousness of the narrator was separated from the physical body but the conditions after separation seem to have been notably different. In the first case the patient seems to have been independent of space in that he was able to pay a visit to a friend at a distance of about a thousand miles and to return in the space of a few minutes; while in the second he seems to have been tethered to his physical body by the "cord" to which he refers. This is perhaps the most important point, but others are easy to find--notably in the apparent constitution of the temporary vehicle of consciousness. It seems probable that in the first case the vehicle was four-dimensional while in the second it was the "quasi-physical replica" which we have been discussing. It is with this supposition in mind that I shall examine the second case.