I retained, nevertheless, and still retain, something of that subtile instinct which mocks and yet surpasses reason.  My feelings with regard to the persons whom I met were quite independent of their behavior towards me, or the estimation in which they were held by the world.  Things which puzzled my brain in waking hours were made clear to me in sleep, and I frequently felt myself blindly impelled to do or to avoid doing certain things.  The members of my family, who found it impossible to understand my motives of action,—­because, in fact, there were no motives,—­complacently solved the difficulty by calling me “queer.”  I presume there are few persons who are not occasionally visited by the instinct, or impulse, or faculty, or whatever it may be called, to which I refer.  I possessed it in a more than ordinary degree, and was generally able to distinguish between its suggestions and the mere humors of my imagination.  It is scarcely necessary to say that I assume the existence of such a power, at the outset.  I recognize it as a normal faculty of the human mind,—­not therefore universal, any more than the genius which makes a poet, a painter, or a composer.

My education was neither general nor thorough; hence I groped darkly with the psychological questions which were presented to me.  Tormented by those doubts which at some period of life assail the soul of every thinking man, I was ready to grasp at any solution which offered, without very carefully testing its character.  I eagerly accepted the theory of Animal Magnetism, which, so far as it went, was satisfactory; but it only illustrated the powers and relations of the soul in its present state of existence; it threw no light upon that future which I was not willing to take upon faith alone.  Though sensible to mesmeric influences, I was not willing that my spiritual nature should be the instrument of another’s will,—­that a human being, like myself, should become possessed of all my secrets and sanctities, touching the keys of every passion with his unhallowed fingers.  In the phenomena of clairvoyance I saw only other and more subtile manifestations of the power which I knew to exist in my own mind.  Hence, I soon grew weary of prosecuting inquiries which, at best, would fall short of solving my own great and painful doubt,—­Does the human soul continue to exist after death?  That it could take cognizance of things beyond the reach of the five senses, I was already assured.  This, however, might be a sixth sense, no less material and perishable in its character than the others.  My brain, as yet, was too young and immature to follow the thread of that lofty spiritual logic in the light of which such doubts melt away like mists of the night.  Thus, uneasy because undeveloped, erring because I had never known the necessary guidance, seeking, but almost despairing of enlightenment, I was a fit subject for any spiritual epidemic which seemed to offer me a cure for worse maladies.