Let us try to understand first how our individual self conducts itself within us, considered as the force capable of moving our organs. How shall we explain the relation of soul and body.

This may be explained very simply by supposing that our organs themselves are provided with a certain independent animic power, of which the reserve is fed by the same substantial currents which traverse our organism.

We know that our body is merely the sum of small organisms which are called cells.

The cells are agglomerated, specialized, and organized according to the functions they are called upon to fulfill. One association will form, for example, the eyelid, the iris, and cornea, which are organs. A grouping of different organs constitutes a mechanism, such as the visual or respiratory mechanism. The construction of the organic edifice resembles very much the work of the compositor in a printing shop. First, he looks for the characters, which represent the cells: and then he assembles them to form the words. Each phrase is an organ, many organs concur in the development of a complex argument, the whole forming the thesis, or body of the book, which represents physiological unity. Finally, the human body reduces itself, in the last analysis, to the cell which constitutes at the same time the tiniest living body and the feeblest degree of the thinking and acting substance of the marrow and of the brain. It is a being, already evolved, which has not been able to realize its materialization except in a surrounding already prepared to receive it. It is clothed in a medullary tube, whose formation preceded that of the brain. Even to-day a human being, when it is forming in the womb of its mother, begins by constructing itself on a medullary axis, without a skull, without a brain.

The brain, temple of mystery, is the final unfolding of the materialization of the nervous system and the apparent seat of the activities perceived by our consciousness and interpreted by it. Beneath the brain is the spinal cord, which, as everyone knows, is protected by the vertebral column. Throughout its length, nerves go out, emanating everywhere, extending the voluntary action which comes from the brain to all the periphery (and beyond, let us not forget). On the other hand, the cutaneous surface is the ending of a multitude of nervous fibers which are the recipients of feeling. This constitutes the double function of the motory and sensory nerves, which in the vertebrae are represented by a double column, descending and ascending, or again centrifugal and centripetal, according to the direction of the telepathic current which transmits the activities or sensations. The direction of a current does not exist by virtue of a specific property inherent to matter, but by a suggestion which has been long imposed and which may be modified. Aside from these clusters of the vertebral column, we have nerves which correspond to the senses of sight, hearing, smell, etc. These are grafted more directly on the brain cavity and communicate with the organic mechanism of far higher functions. They are our informers. The auditive and the visual mechanisms have already acquired an aptitude to retain sensations of sound and light. These our superior consciousness interprets in its turn, according to the internal representation which we have created for ourselves during the course of centuries.

Thus cells, organs, and mechanisms represent to a certain degree an incorporation of the thinking and acting substance. At every step of the organic scale the soul is manifest in a matter which renews itself endlessly and whose integral renewals no more harm the phenomenon of consciousness than they harm the superior physiological unity.

Matter vanishes, but the sphere of animic force remains. In whatever part of the living body an anatomist may place his scalpel, he arouses a consciousness, touches a sensibility. What he calls reactions are willed determinations: and, on our side, we term subconscious this independent action of an organ acting spontaneously.

In short, the nervous system appears as a vast network of telepathic transmissions, through which we send messages reaching all points of our territory. They bring back to us all the information of interest on condition that we lend our attention.

Such is the human being. At birth, he has an already organized net-work of nerves: and if the child really came into the world for the first time, it would be as miraculous as the apparition of a book issuing from the printer's shop without the intervention of any intelligence. Let us now examine the process of materialization observed under its most rudimentary form, the only form available for scientific study.

Most scientific men who have followed the seances of Eusapia Paladino, and have verified regretfully the reality of the plastic formations, have consoled themselves by affirming that nothing issued from her except by her own desire. If that were really attained, the will would then be capable of moving organic molecules and of drawing them outside the organism in order to model the meditated forms. It would thus create images or organs whose psychic exteriorization would furnish the material.

We ask no more, for with the help of survival, the survivor may in his turn manifest himself under the forms and appearances which he judges best. This would lead us to admit, at least, a material element in thought, and a creative power of the mind. Through this we should arrive at a new conception of all the movements of life.

It is very certain that there is no death in organic matter. There is nothing, however inert, which is not to a certain degree sensitive and conscious. There are no organic molecules that do not depend, in some more or less distant manner, upon will.

We come back to the old adage, Mens agitat molem. And, since Nature is simple in her laws, we must search for the origin of the creation of beings, nebulae and simple atoms in an immaterial force, in a thinking power of the same nature as that which we feel within ourselves.