_P._ By just so much, then, as the production given through a medium is elevated above the medium's normal capacity, is the influence which acts upon him to be credited with the character of that production. Please make a note of this point gained. And now for the question why these communications should be tinctured with the characteristics of the medium at all; and why spirits can not, as a general rule, communicate to mortals their own normal intelligence, freely and without obstruction, as man communicates with man, or spirit with spirit. But that we may be enabled to make this mystery more clear, we had better attend first to another question which I see you have in your mind--the question as to the potential agent used by spirits in making communications. THE MEDIUM--THE DOCTRINE OF SPHERES. _I._ That is what we are anxious to understand; electricity, magnetism, odylic force, or whatever you may know or believe it to be--give us all the light you can on the subject. _P._ Properly speaking, neither of these, or neither without important qualifications. Preparatory to the true explanation, I will lay the foundation of a new thought in your mind by asking, Do you know of any body or organism in nature--unless, indeed, it be a _dead_ body--which has not something answering to an atmosphere? _I._ It has been said by some astronomers that the moon has no atmosphere; though others, again, have expressed the opinion that she has, indeed, an atmosphere, but a very rare one. _P._ Precisely so; and as might have been expected from the rarity of her atmosphere, she has the smallest amount of cosmic life of any planetary body in the solar system--only enough to admit of the smallest development of vegetable and animal forms. Still, every sun, planet, or other cosmic body in space is generally, and every regularly constituted form connected with that body is specifically, surrounded, and also pervaded, by its own peculiar and characteristic atmosphere; and to this universal rule, minerals, plants, animals, man, and in their own degree even the disembodied men whom you call "spirits," form no exception. _I._ Do you mean to say that man and spirits, and also the lower living forms, are surrounded by a sphere of air or wind like the atmosphere of the earth, but yet no part of that atmosphere?