The one-idea'd man will surely be there, if his one idea was not
a spiritual one. Nor is it necessary that he should be an evil
man, if dear old brother John of Glastonbury, who loved the great
Abbey so that he could never detach himself from it, is to be
classed among earth-bound spirits. In the most material and
pronounced classes of these are the ghosts who impinge very
closely upon matter and have been seen so often by those who
have no strong psychic sense. It is probable, from what we
know of the material laws which govern such matters, that a ghost
could never manifest itself if it were alone, that the substance
for the manifestation is drawn from the spectator, and that the
coldness, raising of hair, and other symptoms of which he
complains are caused largely by the sudden drain upon his own
vitality. This, however, is to wander into speculation, and far
from that correlation of psychic knowledge with religion, which
has been the aim of these chapters.
By one of those strange coincidences, which seem to me
sometimes to be more than coincidences, I had reached this point
in my explanation of the difficult question of the intermediate
state, and was myself desiring further enlightenment, when an old
book reached me through the post, sent by someone whom I have
never met, and in it is the following passage, written by an
automatic writer, and in existence since 1880. It makes the
matter plain, endorsing what has been said and adding new points.
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