In every living germ there is a creative idea which develops and manifests itself by organization.

Claude Bernard.

About 1895 Aksakoff arrived at this conclusion:

"We see a prodigious fact rise before us, one that no one has dared examine, a fact which is destined to become one of the most brilliant acquisitions of anthropological science and which we shall owe to Spiritism - namely: that the physical and psychic action of man is not confined to the periphery of his body"1

In truth, as we have stated, the possibility of effecting an action on matter without contact is destined to modify all our ideas upon the existence of the nervous current which physiologists agree in considering as a product of the organism of man and animals.

Though the power of moving a heavy body without contact necessitates the intervention of a material agent, no one any longer attributes this effect to a nervous current which could make itself felt outside of the ways of conduction. At once, the existence of a psychic element becomes a necessary hypothesis, and another fact - the mental suggestion passing from one brain to another - proves the presence of an unknown element, material or immaterial, we cannot tell which.

1Animisme et spiritisme,by Alexander Aksakoff, 1896,p. 523.

Here we have firmly established, on a secure basis, the problem of existence of an active agent independent of our organs. Let us call this agent psychic force: in it we have the cause, the true motive power, of our organs. It is without contact, is it not, that Nature proceeds to operate on matter? Does not the force of gravitation suffice to prove action from a distance? And attraction, does it not act by means of the nervous current? A planet does not come out of nothingness, it comes from the invisible and is constituted as an opaque body. That is to say, it materializes itself. On the planet which was in the beginning but a lifeless desert all organized beings appeared. These were nothing but materializations. The germination of plants is a materialization which takes place under our eyes, and which is not caused by chemical action. Two similar grains, of different kinds, may be planted in a soil, chemically identical and make themselves into different chemical bodies. That is to say, their psychic faculty permits them to make a selection among the elements which are offered them, exactly as selection takes place within our stomachs and our intestines. That it is incontestably a psychic action will become still more apparent with further examination. The ivy, arrived at the top of the wall which sustains it, changes its form of materialization. From the simple climber that it was, it will develop branches and even modify the form of its leaves, which will no longer be starshaped. A climbing plant directs itself to the right or to the left, according as I incline the point of support, towards which it tends. Still further, the plant determines its own organs and the direction of the so-called nervous current. If, in the beginning of summer, I cut a twig of privet or of elder just opening into leaf, and if I plant it upside down in the ground, it will put forth roots, and strong ones, thus modifying the chemical composition of its bud, and the sap, changing its course, will go up instead of down. Let us pass to the living animal. We can, by means of skillful grafting, reverse a rat's tail: and surely here the so-called nervous current would be able in this new position, to divert its direction. These are some of the reflections that present themselves in simple support of the fact that an object may be moved without contact.

We may well state that the agent which shakes the table comes from an organic action: but it is the action of a psychic organ, to which we can attribute all active power, outside of the nervous current. Experience proves to us that this psychic element, exteriorized by a group of persons placed around a table, is sensitive and active. More than that, it is, like the human soul, accessible to the most unconscious and most distant suggestions. Something like a field of magnetic force is created by the fluidic exteriorization of all the persons present. This field of force is sensitive to suggestions, or creates an echo of all the present or extraneous thoughts, and is translated by movement. There is here a veritable animistic field, an element which is the vehicle of telepathic action. Here we are in the presence of a colossal fact, of which many have failed to grasp the importance. It is that thought is capable of stirring matter without the help of the nervous current! But, in order not to offend the physiologists, I will agree with them that the nervous current incontestably exists: only, I should define it thus:

All life in nature is sustained and nourished by a telepathic current extending everywhere and of an unknown essence. The portion of the current which traverses an organic unity is called nervous current.

We shall develop this conception, and we hope to show how the presence in the human body of a fluidic invisible element, endowed with the double power of acting and of feeling, extending its action beyond the organs which enclose it, gives us the key to all organic movements. It even permits us to understand, in a certain measure, the first appearance of beings upon earth, which is only a phenomenon of slow materialization under that form of evolution which science calls phylogenic. And we shall also explain the evolution of the individual - that is to say, ontogenesis.