As capable of holding automatic thought, processes, or their embryons, such a spirit might lend itself as a vehicle of direct intellectual influence between soul and soul, as also, of course, between souls and spirits of another sort. But it must be remembered that, if this might in some measure account for the intercommunication of thought, it in no way tends to explain the genesis of information of which all concerned are ignorant. That some such brute intelligence acts as intermediary would seem to be borne out by the frequent spaces of hopeless incoherency, like nothing so much as the shaking up of loose type, which prelude and interrupt spiritual communications when the intelligent will that would fain direct matters has not yet seized the reins, or has dropped them from its grasp. Whatever may be thought of the theory, the following passage from the first edition of Glanvil's _Vanity of Dogmatizing_ is worth quoting. The story in it was suppressed in subsequent editions, as too romantic for the taste of the day:[58] "That one man should be able to bind the thoughts of another, and determine them to their particular objects, will be reckoned in the first rank of impossibles; yet, by the power of advanced imagination, it may very probably be effected; and history abounds with instances. I'll trouble the reader but with one, and the hands from which I had it makes me secure of the truth on't. "There was very lately a lad in the University of Oxford, who, being of very pregnant and ready parts, and yet wanting the encouragement of preferment, was by his poverty forced to leave his studies there, and to cast himself upon the wide world for a livelihood. Now, his necessities growing daily on him, and wanting the help of friends to relieve him, he was at last forced to join himself to a company of vagabond gypsies, whom occasionally he met with, and to follow their trade for a maintenance. Among these extravagant people, by the insinuating subtility of his carriage, he quickly got so much of their love and esteem as that they discovered to him their mystery; in the practice of which, by the pregnancy of his wit and parts, he soon grew so good a proficient as to be able to outdo his instructors. After he had been a pretty while exercised in the trade, there chanced to ride by a couple of scholars who had formerly been of his acquaintance. The scholars had quickly spied out their old friend among the gypsies, and their amazement to see him among such society had well-nigh discovered him; but by a sign he prevented their owning him before that crew, and, taking one of them aside privately, desired him with his friend to go to an inn not far distant thence, promising there to come to them. They accordingly went thither, and he follows; after their first salutations, his friends inquire how he came to lead so odd a life as that was, and to join himself with such a cheating, beggarly company.