"I," said Cyprian, "must beg you to allow me rather to believe that the doubts respecting Mesmerism which you have expressed to-night are only the results of some passing mental mood of the moment. What is Mesmerism, considered as to its curative effects, but the concentrated, increased, potentiated power of man's psychical element, empowered, by being thus concentrated and augmented, thoroughly to control the physical element; to know it, see it, and understand it through and through; to detect the minutest abnormal condition in it, and, by the very knowledge and perception of any such abnormal condition, to remove it? It is not possible that you can deny this power of our psychical element, or close your ears to the marvellous chords which come toning into us, and pass toning out from us--mysterious 'music of the spheres,'--the grand, unchangeable principle of Nature herself." "You are talking in your usual strain," answered Lothair, "revelling in your mystic dreams as you always do. I admit at once that Mesmerism, stretching, as it undoubtedly does, into the domain of the ghostly, must always exercise a powerful attraction on poetic temperaments. I myself cannot deny that this mysterious subject has always penetrated to the very depths of my soul. But listen while I make my confession of faith in a few words. Who can penetrate, with foolhardy presumption, into the deepest mysteries of Nature? Who can understand, or even conjecture, with any sort of clearness, the nature of the mysterious bond which unites soul and body, and, in consequence, is the fundamental condition of our existence? Yet it is exactly upon the cognizance of this mystery that Mesmerism is wholly based; and so long as this cognizance is an impossibility, both the theory and the practice of Mesmerism (which are grounded upon isolated experiments, often illusory), are like the gropings of the born-blind. It is certain that there occur states of exaltation in which the spirit, ruling over the body and controlling its activity, acts with much power, and, in so acting, produces phenomena of the most extraordinary description. Dim presciences and fore-anticipations assume distinct shape and form; and we see and understand, with the fullest powers of comprehension, things as yet slumbering deep and motionless in our souls. Dreams (which are undoubtedly the most wonderful phenomena belonging to the human organism, and, as I consider, appear in their most potentiated form in what is called, in general terms, 'somnambulism') belong to this province. But it is also certain that such conditions presuppose the existence of some abnormality in the relation between the psychical and the physical principles. The most distinct and vivid dreams come to us always when some diseased or morbid feeling is affecting the body. The spirit takes advantage of the inactive condition of its co-regent; taken possession of the throne, and turns that co-regent into a servile vassal.