SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM

compose myself. An hour afterwards I lay down again, but could get no rest.

At 11:00 a.m., I arrived at the dining hall original: "refectory," a room used for communal meals, especially in educational or religious institutions in a state of profound dejection. Questioned by my fellow students, I told them exactly what I had experienced. They teased original: "chaffed" me about it. At 2:00 p.m., I went to the Faculty Referring to the university building where the medical or pharmaceutical department was located, hoping to pull myself together over some work.

Coming out of the lecture, I saw a woman in deep mourning coming towards me. She raised her veil and I recognized my eldest sister. Feeling anxious about me, she had come, in spite of her own distress, to find out what had become of me. She told me of the tragic original: "fatal" event which nothing could have led me to expect, since I had had the best news of my family on the morning of the 22nd.

I assure you on my honor that this story is absolutely true. I express no opinion, but only state facts.

Twenty years have passed, but the impression is still vivid, especially now, and even if the features of my Hélène do not appear with the same clearness, I still hear her plaintive, oft-repeated, and despairing cry: “What are you doing, my Louis? Oh, come now, oh, come now!” original French: “Que fais-tu donc, mon Louis? Mais viens donc, mais viens donc.”

There is the narrative of the psychic phenomenon. If you, my dear friend, do not feel that the body of the dead girl—twenty-three hours after her death—cannot have caused the impression; that there was something apart from the material organism; that, whether M. Noell’s spirit was carried original: "wafted" in his sleep to his dead sister, or that some telepathic action originated from her, we are face to face with an action of the soul and not of the body; that we are driven to think of the soul as personally existing, and not as an effect, a function, or a secretion of the brain: if you do not feel that, it is because you, the artist and thinker whom I know, have not given yourself time to weigh the problem.

What do you suppose the girl’s brain did after