value to all who think—that I was as a perfectly disembodied soul during the experience now recounted, and could and did behold, at one and the same time, both the external and the essential part of whatever my glance fell upon. The reader will perhaps arrive at a clearer understanding of what is here meant to be conveyed if this double power be thus illustrated: A person may look through one glass vase at several others, many colored, within it, the last of which contains the image of a man, in still finer glass,—his eye resting upon the surface of each particular vase, yet at the same time penetrating and grasping the whole. Thus it was in the present case: I saw,—and what obtained of that student in the room obtains of all immortal beings,—the clothes; beneath the clothing his body; and interfilling that, as water does a sponge, I beheld the spiritual man.
Here let me define a few terms: Body is that which is purely material, corporeal, dense, weighable, atomical or particled; spirit is a thing of triplicity: in the most external sense, that which interpenetrates, flows through, from, and constitutes the life of material existences is spirit; second, the great menstruum in which the universe floats and has its being is spirit, but vastly different from the foregoing; and third, the mental operations, as well as their results, are spiritual—a man's thought, for instance. Great care must be taken to distinguish these last two from the first, which is the effluvium from, or surrounding aura of all material forms and things. Soul is that more stately principle and thing which thinks, feels, tastes, sees, knows, aspires, suffers, hates, loves, fears, calculates and enjoys.
Hoping that these definitions will be retained, and
