to others.  He reasoned very calmly about it, but arrived at no solution more satisfactory than the old one of “optical illusion,” which is certainly a very inadequate explanation.  Instances are recorded, and some of them apparently well authenticated, of persons still living in this world, and unconscious of disease, who have seen themselves in a distinct visible form, without the aid of a mirror.  It would seem as if such experiences had not been confined to any particular part of the world; for they have given birth to a general superstition that such apparitions are a forerunner of death,—­or, in other words, of the complete separation of the spiritual body from the natural body.  A friend related to me the particulars of a fainting-fit, during which her body remained senseless an unusually long time.  When she was restored to consciousness, she told her attendant friends that she had been standing near the sofa all the time, watching her own lifeless body, and seeing what they did to resuscitate it.  In proof thereof she correctly repeated to them all they had said and done while her body remained insensible.  Those present at the time corroborated her statement, so far as her accurate knowledge of all their words, looks, and proceedings was concerned.

The most numerous class of phenomena concerning the “spiritual body” relate to its visible appearance to others at the moment of dissolution.  There is so much testimony on this subject, from widely separated witnesses, that an unprejudiced mind, equally removed from superstition and skepticism, inclines to believe that they must be manifestations of some hidden law of our mysterious being.  Plato says that everything in this world is merely the material form of some model previously existing in a higher world of ethereal spiritual forms; and Swedenborg’s beautiful doctrine of Correspondences is a reappearance of the same idea.  If their theory be true, may not the antecedent type of that strange force which in the material world we call electricity be a spiritual magnetism.  As yet, we know extremely little of the laws of electricity, and we know nothing of those laws of spiritual attraction and repulsion which are perhaps the cause of electricity.  There may be subtile and as yet unexplained causes, connected with the state of the nervous system, the state of the mind, the accord of two souls under peculiar circumstances, etc., which may sometimes enable a person who is in a material body to see another who is in a spiritual body.  That such visions are not of daily occurrence may be owing to the fact that it requires an unusual combination of many favorable circumstances to produce them; and when they do occur, they seem to us miraculous simply because we are ignorant of the laws of which they are transient manifestations.