Experimental investigation of the spirit manifestations, [electronic ...

162 OF MEDIUMSIIIP.The reply was, Not without undergoing a transformation. This would beequivalent to annihilating them first, and recreating them afterward, whenthe process of creating alone would be sufficient. But manifestly it is ofno importance, whether their adaptation to the spirit world be the resultof creation or of transformation.822. Concerned in the processes of mcdiumsliip, it is manifest thatthere is none of that kind of electricity or magnetism of which the lawsand phenomena have been the subject of Faraday's researches, and whichare treated of in books, under the heads of frictional or mechanical electricity,galvanism, or electro-magnetism.823. Frictional electricity, such as produced usually by the friction ofglass in an electrical machine, or of aqueous globules generated by steamescaping from a boiler, is always to be detected by electrometers, or thespark given to a conducting body when in communication with the earththe human knuckle, for instance. When not sufficiently accumulated toproduce these evidences of its presence, it must be in a very feeble stateof excitement. But even in the highest accumulation by human means,as in the discharge of a powerfully charged Lcyden battery, it only acts fora time inconceivably brief, and does not move ponderable masses as theyarc moved in the instance of spiritual manifestation. It is only in transitUjthat frictional electricity displays much power, and then its path is extremelynarrow, and the duration of its influence inconceivably minute.According to Whcatstone's experiments and calculations, it would go roundthe earth in the tenth part of a second.824. How infinitely small, then, the period required to go from one sideof a room to another ! Besides, there are neither means of generating suchelectricity, nor of securing that insulation which must be an indispensableprecursor of accumulation.825. Galvanic or voltaic electricity does not act at a distance so as toproduce any recognised effiscts, except in the case of magnetic metals, orin the state of transition produced by an electric discharge. In these phenomathe potent effiicts are attainable only by means of perfect insulatedconductors, as we see in the telegraphic apparatus. No reaction with imperfectconducting bodies competent to toss them to and fro, or up anddown, can be accomplished. The decomposing influence, called electrolytic,isonly exhibited at insensible distances, within a filament of the matteraffected.826. It has appeared to me a great error on the part of spirits, as wellas mortals, that they should make efibrts to explain the phenomena of thespirit world by the ponderable or imponderable agents of the temporalworld. The fact that the rays of our sun do not aff'cct the spirit world,and that there is for that region an appropriate luminary whose rays wedo not perceive, (415) must demonstrate that the imponderable element towhich they owe their peculiar light diS'crs from the ethereal fluid which,