"All that does not really militate against the ideoplastic theory," I retorted. "It is as easy to produce a phantom with hair plaited as it is to produce one with hair in curls. If it is a case of the modelling of the etheric vapor by the mind of the psychic, these differences would be produced naturally enough. The forcible handling of the medium by the invisible ones is a much more difficult thing for me to explain, for to imagine the psychic emitting a form of force which afterward proceeds to raise the psychic herself against her will--as Mrs. Smiley testifies happened again and again in her youth--is to do violence to all that we know of natural law. And yet it may be that the etheric double is able to take on part of the forces resident in the circle of sitters, and so become immensely more potent than the psychic himself, as in the case of the 'Man from Mars'--the Hercules I have just been telling you about. Then, as to the content of these messages, they may be impulses, hints, fragments of sentences caught from the air as one wireless operator intercepts communications meant for other stations than his own. So that my interview with 'E. A.' may have been a compounding of the psychic, Blake, and myself, and fugitive natures afloat in the ether. In fact, I am not as near a belief in the return of the dead as I was when I began this last series of experiments. These Italian scientific observers, I confess, have profoundly affected my thought." "Your idea is, then," said Miller, "that these apparitions are emanations of the medium's physical substance, moulded by his will and colored by the minds of his sitters?" "That is the up-to-date theory, and everything that I have experienced seems capable of a biologic interpretation against it." Fowler hastened to weaken the force of this statement. "Spiritists all admit that the forms of spirits are made up--partly, at least--of the psychic's material self, but that does not prove that the mind of the ghost is not a separate entity from that of the psychic. I grant that the only difference between the psycho-dynamic theory and the spiritualistic theory lies in the question of the origin of the intelligences that direct the manifestation. Foa would say they spring from the subconscious self of the psychic. We say they come from the spirit world, and there we stand." Miller's words were keen and without emotion. "Until all phenomena are explained there will be obscure happenings and things to be explained by some one who can, but it is no final explanation to say 'a man did it' or 'an intelligence did it.' I have often been told that things cannot move in certain ways or certain things cannot be done except by intelligent action or guidance, but it may be remembered that Kepler thought guiding spirits were needful for making the planets move in their elliptical orbits."