826. It has appeared to me a great error on the part of spirits, as well as mortals, that they should make efforts to explain the phenomena of the spirit world by the ponderable or imponderable agents of the temporal world. The fact that the rays of our sun do not affect the spirit world, and that there is for that region an appropriate luminary whose rays we do not perceive, (415) must demonstrate that the imponderable element to which they owe their peculiar light differs from the ethereal fluid which, according to the undulatory theory, is the means of producing light in the terrestrial creation. 827. In one of the replies made by the convocation, (571,) the idea was sanctioned of the effulgence of the spirit being due to an appropriate ethereal fluid, analogous to that above alluded to. But it has, I think, been shown by me, that as light is due to the _undulations_ of _our_ ether, so electricity is due to _waves_ of _polarization_. But if undulations produce light in the ether of the spiritual universe as well as in ours, why may not polarization produce in the ether of the spirit world an electricity analagous to ours? Thus, although in spiritual manifestations our electricity takes no part, their electricity may be the means by which their will is transmitted effectually in the phenomena which it controls. 828. The words _magnetism_ and _magnetic_ are used in this world in two different senses. In one, it signifies the magnetism of magnets or electromagnets; in the other, the animal magnetism of which the existence was suggested by Mesmer, and which is commonly called Mesmerism. 829. This mesmerical magnetism seems to be dependent rather on properties which we have as immortals, encased in a corporeal clothing, than as mortals owing our mental faculties to that frame. If it be the spiritual portion of our organization which is operative in clairvoyancy, spiritual electricity may be the intermedium both of that faculty and of mesmeric influence. 830. All spirits are clairvoyant more or less, and where this faculty is exercised, it seems to be due to an unusual ascendancy of the spiritual powers over the corporeal, so that clairvoyants possess some of the faculties which every spirit, after _shuffling off the mortal coil_, must possess to a greater or less extent.