This force, which, to please Mr. Cox and Mr. Crookes we may just as well call _psychic_ as anything else, proceeds _through_ not _from_ the individual medium. In the latter case this force would be generated in the medium and we are ready to show that it cannot be so; neither in the instances of levitation of human bodies, the moving of furniture and other objects without contact, nor in such cases in which the force shows reason and intelligence. It is a well-known fact to both mediums and spiritualists, that the more the former is passive, the better the manifestations; and every one of the above-mentioned phenomena requires a _conscious_ predetermined _will_. In cases of levitation, we should have to believe that this self-generated force would raise the inert mass off the ground, direct it through the air, and lower it down again, avoiding obstacles and thereby showing intelligence, and still act automatically, the medium remaining all the while _passive_. If such were the fact, the medium would be a conscious magician, and all pretence for being a passive instrument in the hands of invisible intelligences would become useless. As well plead that a quantity of {197} steam sufficient to fill, without bursting, a boiler, will raise the boiler; or a Leyden jar, full of electricity, overcome the inertia of the jar, as such a mechanical absurdity. All analogy would seem to indicate that the force which operates in the presence of a medium upon external objects comes from a source back of the medium himself. We may rather compare it with the hydrogen which overcomes the inertia of the balloon. The gas, under the control of an intelligence, is accumulated in the receiver in sufficient volume to overcome the attraction of its combined mass. On the same principle this force moves articles of furniture, and performs other manifestations; and though identical in its essence with the astral spirit of the medium, it cannot be his spirit only, for the latter remains all the while in a kind of cataleptic torpor, when the mediumship is genuine. Mr. Cox’s first point seems, therefore, not well taken; it is based upon an hypothesis mechanically untenable. Of course our argument proceeds upon the supposition that levitation is an observed fact. The theory of psychic force, to be perfect, must account for all “visible motions ... in solid substances,” and among these is levitation. As to his second point, we deny that “the proof is insufficient” that the force which produces the phenomena is sometimes directed by other intelligences than the mind of the “psychic.” On the contrary there is such an abundance of testimony to show that the mind of the medium, in a majority of cases, has nothing to do with the phenomena, that we cannot be content to let Mr. Cox’s bold assertion go unchallenged.