Athalie

Wonderful school for a girl to learn in!--the gilded halls of which

were eternally vexed and swept by the winds and whirlwinds of every

human passion.

For here, under her still, clear scrutiny, was huddled humanity

itself, unconsciously bent on self-revelation. And Athalie's very

presence amid assemblies ever shifting, ever renewed, was educating

her eyes and ears and intellect to an insight and a comprehension she

had never dreamed of.

In some the supreme necessity for self-ventilation interested her; in

others, secretiveness hermetically sealed fascinated her. Motives

interested or disinterested, sordid or noble; desires, aspirations,

hopes, perplexities,--whatever a glance, a word, an attitude, a

silence, suggested to her, fixed her attention, excited her

intelligence to curiosity, and focussed her interest to a mental

concentration.

Out of which emerged deductions--curious fruits of logic, experience,

instinct, intuitiveness, and of some extraneous perception, outside of

and independent of her own conscious and objective personality.

But in one radical particular Athalie differed from any individual of

either sex ever recorded in the history of hypnotic therapeutics or of

psychic phenomena.

For those two worlds in which we all dwell, the supraliminal or waking

world, the transliminal, or sleeping world, were merged in this young

girl.

The psychological fact that natural or induced sleep is necessary for

extraneous or for auto-suggestion, did not exist for her. Her psychic

qualities were natural and beautiful, as much a part of her objective

as of her subjective life. Neither the trance induced by mesmerism or

hypnotism, nor the less harmful slumber by induction, nor the sleep of

nature itself was necessary for the girl to find herself in rapport

with others or with her own higher personality--her superior spiritual

self. Nor did her clairvoyance require trances; nor was sleep in

others necessary before she ventured suggestion.

A celebrated physician who had been eager to meet her found her

extremely interesting but rather beyond his ability to classify.

How much of her he believed to be fraud might be suspected by what he

said to her that evening in a corner of a very grand house on Fifth

Avenue: "There is no such thing as a 'control'; there is no such thing as a

'medium.' No so-called medium has ever revealed anything that did not

exist either in her own consciousness or in the consciousness of some

other living human being.

"Self-delusion induced by auto-suggestion accounts for the more

respectable victims of Spiritism. For Spiritism is a doctrine accepted

by many people of education, intelligence, refinement, and of

generally excellent judgment.

"And it is a pity, because Spiritism is a bar to all real

intellectual, material, moral, and spiritual progress. It thrives only

because it pretends to satisfy an intense human craving--the desire

to re-establish personal relations with the dead. It never has done

this; it never will, Miss Greensleeve. And if you really believe it

has done this you are sadly and hopelessly mistaken."