“I have already said that you are under the impression of having gone through certain adventures or episodes, which have more or less distressed and perplexed you.  These things have had no existence except in your mind!  When I took you up to your room in the turret, I placed you under my influence and under the influence of four other brains acting in conjunction with myself.  We took entire possession of your mentality, and made it as far as possible like a blank slate, on which we wrote what we chose.  The test was to see whether your Soul, which is the actual You, could withstand and overcome our suggestions.  At first hearing, this sounds as if we had played a trick upon you for our own entertainment—­but it is not so,—­it is merely an application of the most powerful lesson in life—­namely, the resistance and conquest of the influences of others, which are the most disturbing and weakening forces we have to contend with.”

I began to see clearly what he meant me to understand, and I hung upon his words with eager attention.

“You have only to look about you in the world,” he continued—­“to realise the truth of what I say.  Every day you may meet some soul whose powers of accomplishment might be superb if it were not for the restricting influences to which it allows itself to succumb.  How often do you not come upon a man or woman of brilliant genius, who is nevertheless rendered incompetent by opposing influences, and who therefore lives the life of a bird in a cage!  Take the thousands of men wrongly mated, whose very wives and children drag them down and kill every spark of ambition and accomplishment within them!  Take the thousands of women persuaded or forced into unions with men whose low estimate of woman’s intellect coarsens and degrades her to a level from which it is almost impossible to rise!  This is the curse of ’influences’—­the magnetic currents of other brains which set our own awry, and make half the trouble and mischief in the world.  Not one soul in a hundred thousand has force or courage to resist them!  The man accustomed to live with a wife who without doing any other harm, simply kills his genius by the mere fact of her daily contact, moods, and methods, makes no effort to shake himself free from the apathy her influence causes, but simply sinks passively into inaction.  The woman, bound to a man who insists on considering her lower than himself, and often pulled this way and that by the selfish desires or aims of her children or other family belongings, becomes a mere domestic drudge or machine, with no higher aims than are contained in the general ordering of household business.  Love,—­the miraculous touchstone which turns everything to gold,—­is driven out of the circle of Life with the result that Life itself grows weary of its present phase, and makes haste to seek another more congenial.  Hence proceeds what we call age and death.”