The body sleeps? Volition, sensation, and thought, become suspended for a time, while the animal powers live on; capillary arteries working, heart beating, lungs playing, all without an effort--voluntarily and spontaneously. The shadow of some recent thought agitates the brain, and the sleeper dreams. Or, his volition may awake, while sensation is still profoundly asleep, and then we have the somnambule, walking in his sleep. Or, volition may be profoundly asleep, while the senses are preternaturally excited, as in the abnormal mesmeric state. Here we have a new class of phenomena, more wonderful because less usual, but not a whit more mysterious than the most ordinary manifestations of life. We are astonished to hear men refusing to credit the evidence of their senses as to mesmeric phenomena, on the ground that they can not "understand" them. When they can not understand the commonest manifestations of life--the causation of volition, sensation, or thought--why should they refuse belief on such a ground? Are the facts real? Are these things so? This should be the chief consideration with us. Mysteries they may be; but all life, all matter, all that is, are mysteries too. Do we refuse to believe in the electric telegraph, because the instantaneous transmission of intelligence between points a thousand miles apart seems at first sight fabulous, and, to the uninitiated, profoundly mysterious? Why should not thought--the most wonderful and subtle of known agencies--manifest itself in equally extraordinary ways? We do not know that what the mesmerists call _clairvoyance_ is yet to be held as established by sufficient evidence. Numerous strongly authenticated cases have certainly been adduced by persons whose evidence is above suspicion--as, for instance, by Swedenborg (attested by many impartial witnesses), by Goethe, by Zschokke, by Townshend, by Martineau, and others; but the evidence seems still to want confirmation. Only, we say, let us not prejudge the case--let us wait patiently for all sorts of evidence. We can not argue _à priori_ that _clairvoyance_ is not true, any more than the Professor at Padua could argue, with justice, that the worlds which Galileo's telescope revealed in the depths of space, were all a sham. That truth was established by extended observation. Let us wait and see whether this may not yet be established, too, by similar means. Some of the things which the mesmerists, who go the length of _clairvoyance_, tell us, certainly have a very mysterious look; and were not sensation, thought, and all the manifestations of Life (not yet half investigated) all alike mysterious, we might be disposed to shut our eyes with the rest, and say we refused to believe, because we "did not understand."