(B) Ectoplasy Or Materialisation; Temporary Extradition Or Concentration Of Vital Energy

But, leaving such speculations to derive elsewhere from cases of precognition what support they may, we must pass on to a spiritual influence on incarnation to which some records have actually testified, an influence which in a sense combines the supraliminal and subliminal types. For it implies a command of the central authority so complete as to admit with safety of extreme, though transitory, decentralisations; - of a manipulation of component parts of complex organisms freer than any with which we ourselves have influenced the attractions, the division, the rejuvenescence, of a simple and independent cell.

But first let us consider the different ways in which the material organisms of our planet may be regarded according as they are seen from a material or from a metetherial standpoint.

To our ordinary view each of the higher organisms appears a definitely coherent mass of matter, from which no important part can be separated or withdrawn without injury. There is nothing to prove to us that the life which animates each organism can exist separately from the organism. One organism can communicate with another only through certain definite channels; and each organism must run its separate course from birth to decay.

When, however, some glimpse of the subliminal working of these organisms has been attained, our relative conception of organism and informing spirit rapidly changes. We have now to recognise an informing life which, even if not yet proved capable of permanent existence apart from the body, does nevertheless act within the body as though with a separate initiative, controlling and modifying the organism in other than purely physiological ways. We find, moreover, that each individual organism is not so completely a closed system as at first appeared. Telepathic influences pass from one to another; and sometimes the spirit seems in some sense to leave the body, on some clairvoyant excursion, or when death is imminent, and to return to it again as though to a tabernacle from which it is itself detachable and distinct.

And now imagine the disembodied spirit as he regards this solid planet and the organisms which inhabit it. To him the metetherial world is clear and real; the material world is unstable, shadowy, chaotic. Definite and permanent he sees the spirits that are lodged therein; arresting each some transitory group out of the hurricane of molecules by a cogency that is all its own. The organism for him is the mere cloud of matter through which the spirit works; its apparent periphery is no real boundary-wall. He sees one incarnate spirit telergically affecting another incarnate spirit's brain; and to him that extra-peripheral, ultra-organic influence is the natural, the inevitable mode of communion.

He finds himself able to influence some of these organisms; to rule them as their own indwelling spirit rules them, only with more knowledge of the possibilities of such control. He knows, let us say, the very way in which unbegotten life descended into generation; he can see beyond the narrow portal of the omne vivum ex ovo; behind the first quiver of the first slime-speck - the princeps limus - which entangled in carbon-compounds the Promethean fire. And thus he can push the vital force through and past the illusory integument; he can act - with more or less of apparent likeness to fleshly, to organic action - upon external matter which the medium's ignorantly-guided body could not, without such training, have contrived to reach.

This is the phenomenon which (using a term adapted for the purpose by Professor Ochorowicz) I shall here call ectoplasy - the power of forming, outside some special organism, a collection or reservoir of vital force or of vitalised matter, which may or may not be visible, may or may not be tangible, but which operates in like fashion as the visible and tangible body from whence it is drawn.

Nay, more. To the disembodied spirit the organisms which he sees accreted about his incarnate fellows are no isolated, encapsuled things. The identity, the unbridgeable separation is for him - if it is anywhere - in the spirit-world. These protoplasmic clouds can mix, in his view, as easily as the tails of comets; or say as though from the tidal afflux of half-colliding vaporous suns some glowing prominence shot forth, to fall back presently, again divided, and a part attracted into each parent mass. Only by some such metaphor, perhaps, can we picture the spirit's next achievement, and the fusion of portions of the vital force of several persons into an agency which he wields in independence of them all; "drawing power," as the phrase goes, from the circle as well as from the medium, and accomplishing mechanical work by the aid of their bodies, but at a distance from each.

All the energy that he exerts, then, is vital energy; it is drawn from the organisms of the persons present, even when the effect achieved (as the production of a cold wind) is unlike the effects to which living organisms commonly give rise. But, for the most part, the effects which he produces do resemble the organism's natural action; and hence, indeed, the vol. II. 2 M objections of triviality and uselessness largely arise. The "telekinetic movements" (to use Mr. Aksakoff's term) which it is easiest to produce seem to differ from movements which the medium himself could have made only by starting from a point in space at some little distance outside his apparent periphery. The movements are interesting, not as spectacles in themselves, but as indications that life can act at some distance from a living organism; just as the movement of a half-drowned man's finger is interesting to the friend who knows not whether there still be life in that organism at all.

The condition of the medium from whom this vital force is being drawn seems to vary from complete tranquillity to extreme agitation, according to the ease or difficulty of the process. With Mr. Moses there were sometimes agitated movements during some difficult manifestation (as the giving of minute direct writing); but generally he was tranquilly entranced, with his arms resting on the table in front of him.

Let us now survey the various grades of these ectoplastic phenomena.

We will begin with the phenomena which keep closest to the medium's person, and in that sense prepare the way for the production of visible hands, etc, acting at a distance of some feet.

(α) And first I may mention a mode of dealing with the medium's body which involves no actual extradition of any part of its substance, but which, nevertheless, seems to imply a molecular manipulation (so to say) of its soft tissues. I refer to the elongations noticed with Mr. D. D. Home. In these cases - if, provisionally, they can be contemplated as actual objective occurrences - the intercostal regions seemed to be the especial seat of the extension, which is described as rapid and painless, although sometimes followed by vomiting.

(β) Another and apparently more developed form of prolongation has been observed with Mr. Moses. These are phantom arms and hands, reproducing the arms of the medium, coat-sleeves, shirt-cuffs, and all; and extended generally from the shoulder, straight out, and above the true arms. These supplemetnary or "counterpartal" arms (suspicious objects enough, until observed under good conditions) seem never to have been actually touched, but are swiftly retracted into the medium, or simply vanish, if an attempt is made to grasp them. Nevertheless, the hands in which they terminate do appear to move objects.

Odd and unexpected as these phantasmal arms are, they are instructive in more than one respect. In the first place they supply in a certain way a missing link between mere phantasms and ectoplastic phenomena. We know that as a rule phantasmal appearances exert no objective effect upon the material world; - and we know also that to this rule there seem to be some few exceptions. It is through these shadowy, yet materially active, prolongations, - collective hallucinations which yet can affect the solid world, - that the line of continuity, if such there be, between purely subjective phantasm and firmly materialised hand or body may have to be drawn.

In the second place, these reproduced coat-sleeves stand apparently midway between two phenomena not obviously allied; - viz., the appearance of dying persons as though draped in their habitual clothing, - and the greater facility (attested by Mr. Moses' guides) of manufacturing a duplicate of some object already existing on earth, rather than a new and original object of their own devising.

Perhaps we may link the two by saying that everything which is not a purely earthy phenomenon must be for us mortals to some extent symbolical; and that the simplest form of symbolism depends on mere reminiscence; that thus the line of least resistance for the psychic force or telergic impulse leads to the upbuilding of the ectoplastic fabric upon the basis of thoughts and images which are already fashioned and stored in the human spirit.