The residents of these planets visit earth as elder brothers who take by the hand the little faltering infants.  But intercourse with the earth is more difficult for them than for your own native spirits, from the fact that the magnetic atmosphere does not assimilate with them.  From the earth’s spirit world, scientific minds of rare development only have been able to visit the spirit homes of those planetary inhabitants.

What I have said can give but a faint idea of the population of the unseen worlds.  As a drop of water which is clear and unoccupied to the eye, when viewed through the microscope is found to be peopled with living creations, so the worlds that overspread the heavens are peopled in every part that the eye can cover.

Man is indeed nothing; and yet he is the whole—­a mere speck, a point, and yet God himself in the aggregate.

DR. JOHN W. FRANCIS.

THE INFLUENCE OF MIND UPON MATTER, AND THE CAUSES OF INSANITY AND THE VARIOUS DISEASES WHICH AFFLICT HUMANITY AT THE PRESENT DAY.

The rude nations of the earth believed that disease was the result of evil spiritual agencies, and the untutored savage, without the aid of books or any of the advantages which the learned physician possesses of studying the human system, arrived at the conclusion that disease was inflicted by living, unseen individualities.

Science has discarded that idea.  It has dissected the human body, and, finding the result of the diseases, has assumed to have found the cause; assumed that it is mere bodily disarrangement.  Yet any intelligent physician will tell you that in his own experience he has witnessed the effect of mind upon the body; that he can give a bread pill to a patient, informing him that it is a purgative, and it will act in that manner; that a certain powder will create nausea or a burning sensation, and it will produce those results when the powder itself is harmless.

As the body, if permitted to decay, comes to be infested with vermin, so the spirit, if allowed to remain idle and inactive, will become infested by spiritual vermin which will taint and destroy it; and the savage idea that disease is caused by spiritual agency is correct.

If an individual permit any one idea to obtain predominance, and he dwell upon that idea to the exclusion of other thoughts, he will attract spirits who fill the air—­not organized spiritual beings who inhabit the spirit world, but half-organized beings (polypus) who live in this atmosphere and were originated from the brains and the physical organisms of the inhabitants of the earth; these beings, finding his mind concentrated or magnetized to a point, will effect an entrance.  Suppose, for instance the person centres his mind upon the loss of a friend or of money:  this concentration becomes a magnet, which, like the rays of sunlight acting upon a portion of vegetation, produces decomposition upon which spirit vermin may feed.  So by dwelling too continuously upon one thought, certain faculties of the mind become excited by constant action, while others become paralyzed and the result is insanity.